The developers of the Solus operating system are working on their ypkg tool and they are migrating it from Python to C. This will allow them to considerably shrink the size of the ISO.
Not all of the development work done on an operating system is about fancy UI changes or some other major improvements. Sometimes it's about doing some grunt work that holds no glory and that's not all that relevant for the regular user.
Regular people don't really care if the ypkg packaging tool used by Solus is written in Python or C, or if Python is a blessing or a curse. This kind of problems are reserved for the developers who lose nights over the size of the ISO.
In fact, the size of the ISO doesn't really matter anymore and neither most devs nor users are interested in this aspect for Linux distros. With the advent of USB drives, it doesn't really matter anymore if it fits on a CD. Well, it turns out that some developers do care.
Solus is getting smaller
The most obvious modification after the ypkg rewrite is the size of the overall ISO, which is expected to shrink considerably.
"Our ISO is too big. Our base system is too big. We're guilty of this. Once this is complete, we're going to storm around rebuilding things, and cutting all the fat out of the default user installation. We do actually mean cutting down the ISO by several hundred megs. Big chunk of change, that," developer Ikey Doherty wrote.
Another improvement determined by this migration is the faster package builds that should help the devs tremendously. One of the most boring aspects of building a Linux distro is the packaging, especially when it also takes forever.
You can download Solus 1.0 right now from Softpedia or from the official website and take it for a spin.
