Solus

I thought that I might give the latest Solus MATE a try while I was looking at writing a few words about terminal run file managers. I used it a while back with the Budgie desktop and liked it a lot. It was a great OS for my laptop, but I was spending most of my time using Windows 10, Manjaro, and Ubuntu for some work I was doing and I think I just got distracted and forgot about it. No complaints, just sometimes circumstances send you in odd directions that you hadn’t planned on and some things get left behind.

Anyhow, I was listening to the Late Night Linux podcast  https://latenightlinux.com/  the other day and remembered that I kind of liked that Solus “OS”. I probably shouldn’t refer Solus as a spin or Distro since I believe it’s built as an Independent development. (not directly based on Debian, Fedora, or Arch)  I think it’s very much an “Original” Linux Desktop. I’m sure there would be some disagreement on that, and that’s fine. I hadn’t intended to actually write a post about Solus, but somehow it’s starting to sound like I might be.

So the reason I installed Solus Mate was to install a few terminal based file managers that I have used over the years on other Linux systems. As I recall, Solus seems to allow me to get to work right away without any distractions. That still holds true in this latest installment. Since I usually use “Apt” on Ubuntu and “Pacman” on Manjaro to install packages from their respective repositories, I almost forgot that for Solus I had to use: “eopkg install ranger” to install the very handy Ranger terminal based file manager.  That is also true for “eopkg install mc” to install Midnight Commander.

If you prefer not to install packages from the command line, then Solus Software Center works well also.

I like the workflow Solus supports. I can get right to work in a terminal, easily install the packages I want to use – a simple file manager I can run from the terminal. Ranger works nicely, I prefer it to Midnight Commander. Midnight Commander also works well, and I can see how some would prefer it to Ranger. It kind of reminds me of Dosshell from the old DOS days. I’ll use “Glances” to compliment the file manager.

I was going to write a little about terminal file managers, but I think I’m getting distracted again….by how nice Solus works for me. I installed it, I used it, I like it.

 

Solus Software Center:

SoftwareCenter

Update your system from the Software Center

software center update

 

MC (Midnight Commander)

MidnightCommander

Quick color scheme change (darkfar)

darkfar

Ranger 1.8.1

Simple yet elegant design (very Vim – like)

Ranger

Glances. (command line utility)

Nice compliment to any terminal based file manager.

Solus

Helpful Hints

Glances

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *