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Linux Steam Integration, the project originally made while developer Ikey Doherty was working on the Solus Linux distribution now seems to be continuing on under Intel with their Clear Linux distribution.

As a reminder on what it is, in their words: "Linux Steam Integration is a helper system to make the Steam Client and Steam games run better on Linux. In a nutshell, LSI automatically applies various workarounds to get games working, and fixes long standing bugs in both games and the client."

The majority of the work done on it is by Doherty, who left Solus with a message sent to Phoronix in November. The LSI project didn't really see much activity for many months, however this changed last month when a new repository popped up under Intel's Clear Linux account. I'm not too up to date on what Doherty is doing now, but it seems he's doing stuff for Intel again (he originally left Intel to work on Solus) with the LSI project now under the Intel banner.

It's going to be interesting to see what they plan to do with it now. Whatever helps make Linux gaming better, I'm all for it. Find the new repository on GitHub.

Hat tip to Jacob.

Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
Tags: Misc, Steam
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Julius Jan 1, 2019
Great, I guess changes will get into Solus then ;)
Even without Doherty it seems to be going well and is probably one of the best Distros for gaming due to it's bleeding edge GPU driver support.
iiari Jan 1, 2019
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Quoting: Juliusone of the best Distros for gaming due to it's bleeding edge GPU driver support.
Genuinely curious, how is this different from any other rolling distro? When new Nvidia drivers are announced, I'm getting those about a day later on Manjaro testing branch.
iiari Jan 1, 2019
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QuoteI'm not too up to date on what Doherty is doing now, but it seems he's doing stuff for Intel again
Yes, as part of the Solus drama recently, it was made clear he's back at Intel, although his role there hasn't been publicly announced from anything I've seen.

I was originally a Solus backer, and I had hoped that Solus Budgie would become a kind of performance oriented Clean Linux for the masses. Without him there, I'm not exactly sure what Solus' mission is at this point or how they'll differentiate themselves from any other rolling system...
ManganMan Jan 1, 2019
I believe that I've used that tool before on Manjaro via AUR.
So far I didn't had any use for it, yet it's good that it's available anyway.
Julius Jan 1, 2019
Quoting: iiari
Quoting: Juliusone of the best Distros for gaming due to it's bleeding edge GPU driver support.
Genuinely curious, how is this different from any other rolling distro? When new Nvidia drivers are announced, I'm getting those about a day later on Manjaro testing branch.

No idea :) Budgy as a DE is a nice GTK based option for those that do not like GNOME3 too much.
Not having tried Manjaro, I would guess the strong point of Solus is friendliness for people switching from Windows while the same time giving them all the latest software updates so that they don't complain about "outdated" software in the Ubuntu repos and then mess up their system by trying to update stuff manually.


Last edited by Julius on 4 January 2019 at 6:52 am UTC
johndoe86x Jan 1, 2019
Quoting: iiari
QuoteI'm not too up to date on what Doherty is doing now, but it seems he's doing stuff for Intel again
Yes, as part of the Solus drama recently, it was made clear he's back at Intel, although his role there hasn't been publicly announced from anything I've seen.

I was originally a Solus backer, and I had hoped that Solus Budgie would become a kind of performance oriented Clean Linux for the masses. Without him there, I'm not exactly sure what Solus' mission is at this point or how they'll differentiate themselves from any other rolling system...

I knew he left Solus, but I didn't realize he was back at Intel. I think Solus's differentiation from other rolling release distros is that they have a very "curated" set of software that's supposed to be streamlined with the rest of the system. Meaning if you download something from the software center then it should just work with no dependency conflicts and accept the previous theme settings accordingly. I liked Budgie, but I despise Nautilus.
Tiedemann Jan 1, 2019
They have a lot to do if they want me to buy any Intel HW or use an Intel distro this year but maybe the ice will melt some day :P
iiari Jan 1, 2019
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Quoting: johndoe86xI think Solus's differentiation from other rolling release distros is that they have a very "curated" set of software that's supposed to be streamlined with the rest of the system. Meaning if you download something from the software center then it should just work with no dependency conflicts and accept the previous theme settings accordingly. I liked Budgie, but I despise Nautilus.
I think that's *kind of* a point of it. It's perhaps too curated for me. My workplace's software doesn't work on Solus (but works on every other distro) and I had lots of gaming issues on Solus when I was on it. Solus also broke my system with updates 3 times in about 4 months of use, while Manjaro (on testing) has yet to do that once for me.

If people like the Budgie DE (which, actually, I do a lot) I personally prefer the Ubuntu flavor of it (Ubuntu Budgie) with the terrific applets they've designed for it. Manjaro Budgie if you want to use the AUR and the Manjaro apps is excellent as well. That said, I give credit to Solus for starting to focus on Budgie again as they move to version 10.5 and start fixing some problems.

Again, I'm pulling for Solus, but I want them to do something different and I'm just not completely sure how they stand out in the Linux world right now...

Rolling: Arch, Manjaro, Antergos
Curated: Elementary
Newbie friendly: Mint, Deepin, Elementary
Flexible with tremendous options: Ubuntu
Corporate: Fedora

What is Solus doing those don't?


Last edited by iiari on 1 January 2019 at 5:34 pm UTC
kyrios Jan 1, 2019
Quoting: iiariI think that's *kind of* a point of it. It's perhaps too curated for me. My workplace's software doesn't work on Solus (but works on every other distro) and I had lots of gaming issues on Solus when I was on it. Solus also broke my system with updates 3 times in about 4 months of use, while Manjaro (on testing) has yet to do that once for me.

If people like the Budgie DE (which, actually, I do a lot) I personally prefer the Ubuntu flavor of it (Ubuntu Budgie) with the terrific applets they've designed for it. Manjaro Budgie if you want to use the AUR and the Manjaro apps is excellent as well. That said, I give credit to Solus for starting to focus on Budgie again as they move to version 10.5 and start fixing some problems.

Again, I'm pulling for Solus, but I want them to do something different and I'm just not completely sure how they stand out in the Linux world right now...

Rolling: Arch, Manjaro, Antergos
Curated: Elementary
Newbie friendly: Mint, Deepin, Elementary
Flexible with tremendous options: Ubuntu
Corporate: Fedora

What is Solus doing those don't?
Usually when office software don't work it's because they are shipped only in .deb or .rpm package and usually rely on (quite old) libraries that are shipped with the releases of Ubuntu or Redhat for example. So I don't really understand why it would work on Arch-based distro but not on Solus.

Games usually work very well on Solus, issues reported on games where usually addressed quite fast and LSI has been originally created for this very specific purpose.

There are very few breakages on Solus because curated rolling means that all updates aren't just tested individually but the whole updates are tested globally before they are released on stable. In the same way Manjaro is also a kind of curated rolling in the sense that they wait a little to make sure there were no breakage on Arch before pushing the updates to their users. To my experience, most of the time the breakages affect individuals and the main causes are people cherry picking updates without knowing what they do and of course it ends by some shared libraries updated but keeping software built against older version of that libraries that don't work anymore, or people updating modifying the stateless configuration files that are of course overwritten by some updates (because most people don't know/understand that principle) and lastly hardware issues (the Solus team is small and doesn't have lot of different hardware to test against so it happens that such issue occurs). The question is did you report the problems you faced so they could be addressed and fixed for everyone?

Regarding Ubuntu Budgie applets & co, it's a pity that they kept working on their own and did not upstream their work and make it distro agnostic. It would have been nice to have Budgie as cross-distro collaborative project and it is sad imho that Solus had to take back the project under their umbrella.
kyrios Jan 1, 2019
Quoting: iiariI was originally a Solus backer, and I had hoped that Solus Budgie would become a kind of performance oriented Clean Linux for the masses. Without him there, I'm not exactly sure what Solus' mission is at this point or how they'll differentiate themselves from any other rolling system...
Solus (all flavors since they share the same core, toolchain, etc) is performance oriented in the sense that they use more aggressive settings that other distributions and that they borrow some of the optimizations made on ClearLinux. This is not going to change because the guy working on that Peter O'Connor (aka. sunnyflunk) is still there. It's funny how many people believe that only one guy does all the work alone (well there are plenty of them... on the dormant/discontinued distributions list of distrowatch because one or two people cannot develop, follow the updates and the vulnerabilities, handle bugs and resolves other problems, make roadmaps, etc... this 7/7 365 days a year meaning no holidays, no illness, nothing... it's just impossible).
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