Holy SHIT, you guys, it works! IT FUCKING WORKS! HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
I could just end it there. Those three sentences perfectly describe my state of mind right now. Buuut, we’ll go ahead and do an actual write-up.
So in case you haven’t been following my Linux exploits lately, last time I posted about them, I was posting about how I had switched to Mint from Ubuntu. It’s a rather long story, which you can read here, but suffice to say, I was having some trouble with Ubuntu. However, I was having even more problems with Mint, which I’m currently attributing to the Cinnamon desktop. Lots of slowdown, some lockups, loads of tiny, niggling issues. The monitor worked fine mostly. I still had the issue, but it only happened twice in the several weeks I’d been running it. Previously, I had tried to see if the KDE edition worked better, but alas, the screen wasn’t working with the KDE edition, which is a shame, because I’d love to be able to use KDE on a regular basis for a while.
So what, ultimately, made me make the switch? Well, I just got sick of all the little issues I was having. Constant slowdowns were a major one, Seriously, you opened up Spotify, and the whole system would just slow to a crawl. And God forbid if you opened up YouTube and Gmail at the same time! Not to mention, there was this weird issue that cropped up like, a week ago where the system would revert to the default wallpaper, and if I can’t have my Puella Magi Madoka Magica wallpaper, then fuck your shit! >:(
So this morning, I flashed a Solus live CD and booted it up, looking around rather timidly; Mint still did work, even if it didn’t work well. Played a video, no screen tearing. Looked in the software center, a lot of the software I wanted was in it. Chrome and Spotify were right there. So was Steam. Steam didn’t work in the past three distros I kept; would it work here? The biggest obstacle was Budgie, the desktop environment. At first, I couldn’t find most of the things I needed, customization seemed impossible. Yet, to its credit, every time I thought, “Where the fuck is X?,” the answer came less than five seconds later in the form of, “Oh, here it is!”
So I decided to nuke and pave one more time, booting back into Mint to back up what I wanted to save. Then back to the live CD, to install. Everything installed just fine, no issues there. Booted it up, and the next issue was whether or not my USB headphone jack would work (I broke my laptop’s headphone jack some time ago and needed to get an external one to replace it, and since it covers up both USB ports on the left side of the computer and the port on the right is occupied by the mouse, I couldn’t exactly unplug the USB stick while the live CD was in to test it); plugged it in, showed up in the Raven menu instantly, just switched to it and it works fine. Tried installing Steam, with my fingers crossed, of course. It fucking worked. For the first time since July 21 of this year, I was able to use Steam. Holy. Fucking. Shit.
So, are there any problems? Yeah, some small things. For one, Solus is a small distro, so unfortunately, I’ll most likely be grappling with software library issues in the future. However, what’s here works, and works just fine, as compared to Ubuntu/Mint, where Steam refused to work. I tried installing Scrivener with Wine, but that may take more finagling than it did on the other distros. That’s fine, I’ll just look it up later. Aside from that, no issues here! Long live Solus!