Solus embarks on a new path by changing the foundation of the system
The news recently broke that Solus, will go on to change the base of your system, this as part of the ongoing reorganization of the distribution, in addition to moving to a more transparent management model, concentrated in the hands of the community and independent of a single person.
It was announced that the decision to use the technologies of the SerpentOS project, Developed by the former Solus distribution development team that includes Aiki Doherty, it will be in development for Solus 5 (Ikey Doherty, creator of Solus) and Joshua Strobl (key developer of the Budgie desktop).
To return Solus to a position where it is once again at the forefront of innovation and user experiences within the Linux ecosystem, it may help to understand how Solus 4.x compares to the current state of the art in the Linux landscape.
In particular, innovation in the Linux ecosystem is currently focused on the use of application sandboxing, containers, and the development of immutable operating systems with a well-understood software BOM. Each of these concepts allows for a degree of separation and stability when developing, testing, and certifying software and products.
For those who are still unaware of Solus, you should know that previously this distribution was called "Evolve OS", and it is an independent GNU/Linux distribution created and developed by Ikey Doherty. The distribution is known for the “Budgie” desktop environment.
The distribution of SerpentOS is not a fork of other projects and is based on its own package manager, moss , which borrows many of the modern features developed by package managers such as eopkg/pisi, rpm, swupd, and nix/guix, while retaining the traditional view of package management and using the default build in stateless mode.
The package manager uses the atomic system update model, which fixes the state of the root partition, and after updating the state, changes to the new one.
Shared cache and hard link based deduplication is used to save disk space when storing multiple versions of packages. The content of installed packages is located in the /os/store/installation/N directory, where N is the version number.
The project also develops the moss-container system, the moss-deps dependency management system, the boulder build system, the avalanche service encapsulation system, the vessel repository manager, the summit control panel, the moss-db database, and the bootstrapper ( bootstrap) bill.
Solus5 is expected to replace the build system (ypkg3 and solbuild) with boulder and avalanche, use moss package manager instead of sol (eopkg), use the summit and GitHub development platforms instead of solhub, use vessel to manage repositories instead of ferryd. The distribution will continue to use the rolling model of package updates, following the principle of "install once, then always updated via update installation".
Solus' new organizational structure is based on the philosophy that the sum of the whole is greater than its parts. This structure, by virtue of being flatter and less strictly bounded, is deliberately designed to provide more opportunities for community involvement in various areas.
This will allow people to showcase their incredible skills and talents in a context that fosters personal and professional growth through more areas/pathways of collaboration and learning. We intend that community members can evolve in new and exciting ways by treating their experience using and contributing to Solus as an adventure where the journey is as important as the destination.
SerpentOS developers have already helped create the new infrastructure for Solus and package updates are promised. It is planned to create a developer bootable image with a GNOME-based environment.
Once the moss-deps specific issues are resolved, GTK3 packaging will begin. In addition to the x86_64 architecture, it is planned to start generating assemblies for AArch64 and RISC-V in the future.
For now, the SerpentOS toolkit will be developed independently of the Solus development team. There is still no talk of merging the Solus5 and SerpentOS projects; SerpentOS will most likely be developed as a separate distribution kit from Solus.
Finally, if you are interested in being able to know more about it, you can consult the details in the following link.