Solus (previously known as Evolve OS) is an independently developed operating system for the x86-64 architecture[2] based on the Linux kernel and a choice of Budgie, GNOME, KDE Plasma or Xfce as the desktop environment.

[10] On November 2, 2018, technology website Phoronix published an open letter from original founder Ikey Doherty confirming that he was stepping back from the project, assigning "any and all intellectual, naming and branding rights relating to the ownership of Solus" to the development team "with immediate and permanent effect, acknowledging them as the official owners and leadership of the project.

[14] On April 16, in a post on Reddit entitled "Righting the ship", Josh Strobl announced a series of measures aimed at restoring order to the project.

[15] This was followed by a blog post "A New Voyage" which provided more detail about the new personnel, and announced the intention to explore re-basing Solus on Serpent OS.

[21][22] HecticGeek blogger Gayan has described Solus 1.1 as a "well optimized operating system",[23] praising significantly faster boot and shutdown times than Ubuntu 15.10.

[27] Michael Huff, a programmer and data analyst, wrote in his second review of Solus in Freedom Penguin that "we finally have the power and ease-of-use of a Mac in a Linux distribution" and "that the only people who need to use Solus are those who value their happiness in computing", praising the operating system as only one of few independent projects assured of "a tight cult following with the potential for mass appeal.

[42] Solus 4.5 "Resilience" was released on January 8, 2024, and included the new Calamares installer, PipeWire as a replacement for PulseAudio, and a version using the Xfce desktop environment.

This group is responsible for researching, guiding and influencing matters of technical development in the larger arc of evolution for Solus.

This group consists of Ikey Doherty, Joshua Strobl, Joey Riches, Reilly Brogan and Rune Morling.

By prioritizing usability (curated rolling release) over availability (pure rolling release), Solus intends to make the operating system accessible to a wider target market than Arch Linux, which is mainly aimed at more advanced users possessing in-depth technical knowledge about their system.

Solus is also a curated rolling release in allowing its users to participate in the actual curation process, broadly conceived as the process by which software is selected, maintained and updated (on the server side in the software repositories of the operating system as well as on the client side on the end users computer system).

Solus comes pre-installed with a wide range of software that includes the latest Firefox, Thunderbird, LibreOffice, Transmission and Celluloid.

[48] Michael Huff has quoted project founder and lead developer Ikey Doherty that Solus will not be defined by its package manager.

In July 2015, Solus announced integration of Clear Linux patches to deprecate insecure SSL ciphers, responding to a community post on Google+ by Arjan van de Ven.

[64] Matt Hartley praised Solus in his overview of the best Linux-based operating systems of 2017, as "Perhaps the most interesting distro in recent years...taking a unique approach to a logical user workflow, package management and how they work with the community.