Hello everyone! Today I will be talking about an operating system named Solus. Solus is based on Linux. When most people think of Linux, they immediately think of hackers and programmers. However, this is flawed. Linux can be used for many purposes, including a normal alternative to OSX or Windows. In fact, if you use a Chromebook, or even visit websites, you are most likely interacting with Linux, though you may not realize it.
So, why should one install Solus? Well, if you are like me, you probably have an old laptop. I have one from 2009. These laptops are usually pretty bad nowadays, and even selling it won’t get you that much money. Since electronics age quickly, you might think it is practically worthless. However, many of the issues you may be having with the laptop can be fixed by using a lightweight Linux Operating System. In this case, I chose to install Solus on my laptop.
My laptop is an Acer Extensa. It is 7 years old now, and it only has 2 GB of ram, along with a 2.0 GHz processor. In other words, my phone had better specs than it does. It takes about a minute to boot into Windows, crashes a lot, takes ages to open up a word processor or chrome, and tends to lag out when on YouTube. For this reason, it had been lying under my bed for a while.
I installed Solus on it about two weeks ago. Now it is actually usable, and faster at booting than my other laptop, which has an i3 processor with 6 GB of ram. Both laptops have a normal HDD, which is much slower than an SSD, but even then, the old laptop manages to perform quite well. I can watch YouTube, do homework, browse the internet, and play music. I can technically play Minecraft, but it runs at about 20 fps, which is borderline unplayable.
Here is some more info about Solus. First off, it is a 64-bit operating system. That means that some very old computers will not be able to run it. The OS is designed for desktops, however it runs just fine on laptops. Some wifi cards are not supported, but I recommend you try it out before assuming it will not work. The minimum specs on their website is 1 GB of ram, which most older laptops will have. They recently released a new version, 1.1, which has many updated packages. Here is a link to their website if you want more info. https://solus-project.com/
Now on to the exciting part. Benchmarks. Boot time is quite fast for an older laptop. I have attached a video at the bottom of this post showcasing the laptop booting, but the actual time was about 20 seconds on my stopwatch.