Trying out Solus
My search for an alternative to macOS slowed down but a few days ago I discovered Solus. It’s an independent distribution that doesn’t lean on mainstream ones.
The most interesting component is Budgie, a very well done desktop environment. It doesn’t try to emulate the UI of macOS and still is a pleasure to use.
Today I spent half of my day doing real web development on Solus installed in a virtual machine. Installing the tools I needed was easy and I was up and running in ten minutes. Good sign.
One drawback of the distribution is the policy of eopkg, the package manager. It doesn’t ship multiple versions of applications. So if you need to install an older version of Postgres, like I do, you have to do it manually, instead of using the handy manager.
As an alternative there’s a version of Ubuntu that ships with the Budgie desktop. The benefits of a mainstream distribution with an easy to use desktop. Sounds like a good combination.