Solus Linux Returns From The Distro Afterlife

Key Takeaways

while I can't say I'm familiar running Solace or Solas whatever you want to call it as just like a daily driver I've always been aware of it in my periphery and that's for one very good reason it is one of the very very few truly independent distros like Debian like Arch like Gen 2 where it has its own independent packaging system and its own package manager in this case being EO package and while the community is nowhere near the size of those other distros I do think that this makes it something special and something that should really stick around but there's been some issues and we're not even just talking about recent issues going all the way back to July of 2021 when the 4.3 release came out because this was the last time that anything was posted on the official blog now this wasn't a big deal for a couple of months but when it got to the point when 4.4 would normally have been released nothing was being said some users got a little bit worried but as updates were still coming out for 4.3 packages were still being updated no one really cared that much and kind of just went about their day that's until January of this year when the servers just stopped working the website was down the Forum was down the repos were down and the same like the project just suddenly died now it didn't and there was still communication going on over on the Solace Twitter as many have noticed the Solace servers are down I have confirmed that the data is intact this appears to be a libvert dnesque mask issue I will be Consulting with it Folks at work this afternoon to see if we can't figure this one out thank you for your patience Beatrice note This only affects the dev tracker forums and website our package mirror is unaffected that did disappear at one point as well so this outage will not affect your solos installs and then later in February when most of the stuff got sorted out in case anyone is worried we are still very much alive the main site is up and I've updated it with all of the work I'd been doing to bring it up to date this includes a brand new style for the team page to accommodate our growing ranks locally we were hit by a fairly bad snowstorm at the end of last week despite feeling better it just wasn't worth the risk to travel to the data center before the weekend hit I'll be heading in again in the next few days to try and get the build infrastructure up again alongside that I'm finishing up the new help center other team members have done a lot of work there as well and I'm really looking forward to everyone's reactions this has been a long time coming and will make it easier to get updates pushed out when PR's are merged when service is fully restored I'll write a series of blog posts to get Folks up to speed on the last year or so a postmortem on the surface outage a summary of website and help center upgrades and an introduction to our new org infrastructure but even till today a things are not fully back online but during The Saga of outages it reinvigorated interest in wondering where the next version is where is 4.4 what is the ETA on 4.4 should I go and wait for an up-to-date ISO or can I just go and use it now now as I said packages were still being updated but it's been two years at this point so a lot of people were starting to get really confused if you go back to the updates prior to 4.3 usually you'd see a new ISO every four or so months so two years seems like a pretty big gap but during these extended outages something else started to happen not only is there no new ISO now now users are not getting updates not getting solar system updates since two months configuration issue are we planning on getting updates this week updates please users were getting very very worried now but luckily during all of this one member of the packaging team has been doing damage control and basically the only person doing it story is an absolute Legend no this isn't an issue with your configuration the developer portal and build server are still unfortunately offline and until they can be brought back up nobody can push updates but it's pretty easy to miss a one-off comment on a Reddit thread so a lot of people assume that nothing was being said and the project was being completely silent this wasn't helped by the fact that buddies of budgie which is basically budgie's list of recommended distros to use budgie with decided to demote Solace it is currently cautioned against installation on solos it may not work out of the box on Modern Hardware as no new release has been made since mid 2021. additionally Solace infrastructure has not been operational for over two months resulting in numerous packages remaining out of date with security vulnerabilities going unpatched over on Boiling steam there was an article titled time to stop using and recommending Solace and then over on distro watch it decided to finally Mark the project as dormant this is an automated process not something done by like an individual user but when something's marked as dormant people just assume that means dead and then finally you had the video by distro tube is solos dead if you have to ask the answers probably yes so simple as that then Solace is dead clearly it's time to move on to something else or how about we go and Fork Solace this is not the only person who suggested it anytime a project is on the verge of dying people always talk about it if I'm being honest if someone tried to Fork Solas what would probably happen is they'd keep it going for like a couple of days a week maybe a month and then the project would be abandoned anyway these didn't seem like they had that much traction behind them it didn't seem like they could just make a new team and as I said story has been doing an incredible job trying to reinsure people that things are okay the project is not dead just give it a bit more time and you find out what's going on into the future and then seemingly out of nowhere Joshua stroll came back and made this post over on the Reddit writing the ship along with cross-posting it over onto Twitter as well so far it's a fairly surface level plan with more news to come in a couple of days many of you have raised concerns on the current state of communications leadership and a lack of Direction slash Vision in Solus and those concerns are fully understood now he says that it has nothing to do with DT's video oh look we'll believe him but you know without getting into too much detail yet we believe it is important for our community to understand that the following actions are in our immediate future or currently ongoing we have been in the process of spinning up alternative infrastructure for solos this infrastructure is currently being sponsored by former solos contributors and will be supported by the open Collective contributions going forward if you didn't know the open collectives actually still been going strong throughout all of this maybe some people dropped off and that would make sense but they have still been getting monthly funding by quite a lot of people and quite a lot of money a new binary package repository server that has been validated to handle incoming packages and updates the indexes for the new unstable and Shannon repos I don't know why they're called Shannon refers but this is their term for the a stable repos a new server has been brought up that will handle package building as well we expect that the build to ferryd repo pipeline will be restored over the next few days as we work on setting up all the build bits again ferryd as it says on the GitHub is a fast and safe reliable transit for the delivery of software updates to users a new server has been provisioned for a flareum and is currently being brought up to the latest Flareon version there may be a fair few feature changes and hiccups as we're moving from a Beta release from 2019 to the latest release flareum is basically just a bit of forum software I've not personally seen many sites using this and I've not used it myself but that's what they're using a new server to be provisioned for fabricator setup of that will happen in the next few days and fabricator is basically a project for doing repo auditing there are organizational structure changes on the horizon with shared access to accounts and assets pending there is some additional work that needs to happen after this but we will keep you all posted and put out a more comprehensive plan on Tuesday this is why I'm not convinced that people like DT had nothing to do with this he was working on something absolutely if you go back through stories messages he does say ah something's been worked on here something's been worked on here but why would you put out an announcement for an announcement just make the announcement I feel like it was pushed a little bit ahead because everyone just thought the project was over and finally we'll be sharing a plan that involves familiar faces rejoining the project or collaborating in some form new organizational structure improves transparency which is definitely something that needs to happen over the past couple of years elimination of bus Factor across the board solos 4.x and even early plans for Solace 5 it is important to note that this plan has been approved by all concerned Solace team members and those team members will be staying aboard the ship working in a more cohesive and transparent manner for all all the best the new Solace team now at this stage the only other bit of concrete information we have is this right here will I have to wait for the website slash forums to be back up to find documentation on contributing or is there something I can start reading now while we wait for updates on Tuesday I still need to dig the changes that were done around the website and help center after I left but the general plan is to patch the old one for the immediate future and once everything else that is more important is sorted updates getting out new ISO Etc oh nuke the old site and docs and build one out using docosaurus docusaurus is what buddies a budgie document is built with it's what the serpent OS docs will use and so it makes sense for solos to use it as well honestly I wish the best for Josh for story for everybody else in the Solace team and hopefully you can actually bring things back together and make the project keep running a lot of people now have sort of had their trust burned with Solace and it's gonna take some time to rebuild that and get people excited about the project again but if all things go well it seems like Solace is still going to be around a long time into the future now I could be completely wrong so if you clip that and then a month from now the pro deck is dead well you know it is what it is but hopefully everything goes well and we see Solace long into the future so let me know your thoughts in the comment section down below do you use Solace did you even know this was happening did you see DT's video or are you involved in the solo team I would love to know so if you like this video go and like the video and if you really liked the video and you want to become one of these amazing people over here check out the patreon scrubs that liberope link in the description down below that's gonna be it for me and I'm out [Applause] [Music]