14 DAY TRIAL // A new day, a new Solus update. The developers are keeping themselves busy, and they are working to improve the operating system constantly. The latest might not look like a major upgrade, but the devs have managed to refine the boot time considerably.
Just two or three years ago, Linux distributions were comparing boot times. Which distro would boot faster was very important, but that comparison doesn't exist anymore. The culprit is the SSD drive, for the most part, which renders this argument moot. It's not like regular drives are no longer present, but somehow it's no longer important who's faster than whom.
The guys running the Solus project beg to differ, and they have just made some serious improvements to the OS that greatly improve the boot time. To be fair, those 8 seconds needed for the booting process were really annoying, but now that the time is down to three makes it much, much better.
What's new in the latest OS
In all seriousness, just the fact that the devs felt they could improve an aspect of the OS that would have passed unnoticed is proof that they mean business and that they are very serious about this endeavor. It's more than just the boot speed; it's the attention to detail. If we keep in mind that Solus is focusing on bleeding-edge package, then the result is all the more impressive.
"Some boot time optimisation here on the Live ISO, comparing git master against 0.201529.1.0. 8.07s down to 3.506s - that's over half of the boot time. Also note this is in KVM, so bare-metal with USB3 is going to be dream worthy <3. (We could have implemented a splash screen but this seemed way cooler)," wrote Ikey Doherty, the leader of the Solus project on Google+.
The latest daily build brings a few minor changes as well, but it also marks the introduction of the Arc-Darker theme as default. You can download the Solus daily build from Softpedia and give it a spin.