Solus Linux Plans New Direction Built Off Serpent OS

Joshua Strobl and original Solus project founder Ikey Doherty are both becoming re-involved with the Solus Linux distribution and moving ahead will be built off the SerpentOS project that Ikey has been independently working on the past few years.

Ikey Doherty quietly stepped away from Solus Linux in 2018 and ultimately went on to start SerpentOS more recently, which has achieved milestones of new build infrastructure and early ISOs.

Separately, at the start of 2022, Joshua Strobl stepped down from Solus.

Since mid-January Solus had been suffering from an infrastructure outage that yielded nearly three months of downtime. During that debacle, Ikey Doherty reached out to offer hosting services and shared a proposal for moving the project forward.

Moving forward, there are leadership and organizational structure changes and a variety of other alterations to try to make this Linux distribution more robust. For Solus 5 is likely the point at which it will find itself based on SerpentOS.

What we are proposing is that, alongside its day-to-day operations, we will begin exploring the option of re-basing our distribution onto a Serpent OS base with Serpent OS tooling and processes.

This would elegantly address several longstanding concerns in how to evolve Solus and bring it into the brave new future. Adopting the the Serpent OS tools and processes would enable Solus to:

1. Shed technical debt in terms of tools and development processes
2. Offer seamlessly integrated from-source user repositories, finally making the much asked for Solus User Repository a reality, as well enabling users to self-host personal from-source repositories
3. Become an atomic and immutable operating system with the benefits that this entails in terms of reliability and security
4. Be ported to other architectures than x86_64, such as AArch64 and RISC-V, in the future

This would be married to the traditional Solus approach of a resilient, curated rolling release with its mantra “install once, update forever”.

Those wishing to learn more about this new initiative can do so via the Solus blog.