EDIT: Since I mentioned it I might as well link it
No you can’t, CachyOs is to gamers as Kali is to scriddies
I think SteamOS Desktop is what will tip the balance. People want a corporation with a familiar and quality reputation. CachyOS, Bazzite, Fedora, Arch, Red Hat, all are just weird entities that the ordinary person wouldn’t know.
As for myself, I will pick CachyOS or SteamOS, depending on what reviews say when comparing the two. I want flexibility for modding and some other power-casual stuff, but also want documentation and a large community of people familiar with my OS of choice. SteamOS is likely to be that choice, assuming that Valve doesn’t mess up.
Putting all your eggs in one basket is dangerous
I am counting two eggs in my case. SteamOS and CachyOS. Honestly, Linux doesn’t need ‘advocates’ like you, because you ignore other people, even when they give context. Seriously, you make Linux look like a religion, not a tool. 😒
That’s a weird way to spell FreeBSD 😈
Please I beg of you, just recommend people Mint. Catchy is great, it’s very easy and smooth as arch goes.
But if you have someone who is under the illusion that Linux is hard. The moment they have any issue it might frustrate them enough to bounce off. I know so many people who have gotten recommended some flavor of the week like Manjaro, Bazite, Pop_Os or Nobara, who that has happened with. I’ve never talked to anyone who was recommended Mint with Cinnamon, used it, and then decided it was too hard and went back to windows. Plenty of people will say “well I used XYZ and didn’t have any issues” or the issues were minor enough and the answers easy enough that they stuck around, but that’s survivorship bias, the people who didn’t deal with it aren’t here to say otherwise.
So just send them to cinnamon mint, there will be no hiccups, it will just work. Maybe later they’ll be like “yah, I kind of want to see what else is out there” and then they can try other things. I get that, cinnamon mint is limited in some ways, but not in ways a first time Linux user is going to care about.
I’ve been using Linux for 20 years: Ubuntu, Arch, elementaryOS, etc. I’ve tried and used a bunch of them.
But I need to get work done. I don’t have time to tinker anymore.
I’ve switched to Mint last year. Best choice ever. It just works, easy peasy.
Of my friend group we’ve got 2 people on Kubuntu, 2 running Pop_OS, 1 with a Steam Deck running Steam OS, and 2 running Bazzite. We’ve all dipped our toes in Linux over the years in various ways and at various times/
Funnily enough I’m the only one who started on Mint, everyone else started on Ubuntu (well, except Steam Deck guy).
Personally I’ve only dipped my toes into CachyOS in the last few weeks. The main reason was due to it being talked about a lot and a more popular distro will be easier to get help with.
The first person I met who used Mint was asking me how to fix his Nvidia output stutter lol.
The answer was updated kernel shenanigans which is probably Mint’s only weakness.
Anyways, that’s usually why I recommend Fedora since I think it properly fits the same spot where Ubuntu was like 15 years ago. Cutting edge stable, large community, and much easier support than something more downstream.
That being said, a good chunk of users have been quite happy with stuff like Bazzite and CachyOS because they’re mostly here to play games.
But yeah I agree, the popular recommendations of the week really need to be ignored for first time users. I still remember when they were pretty much all just Ubuntu downstreams that never fixed any of the upstream issues that Canonical created, which led to a ton of youtubers thinking Linux stability was behind.
On a similar note, it’s also why I recommend literally any DE except GNOME. It looks and functions like a knockoff ChromeOS tablet, despite the fact that it used to be the home of Compiz 15+ years ago, which is the peak of desktop UX lol.
I hear a lot of love for Fedora.
Even though I happily run OpenSUSE Tumbleweed myself, I have run into the occasional “What the ever-loving heck” issue that I’ve had to stubbornly troubleshoot, and I worry that’d make some people run away crying.
I have a family member with a really old laptop enjoying Mint, but my wife’s and my best buddy’s gaming PCs might be worth giving Fedora a shot on.
Like me, they need those updated Nvidia drivers and Wayland, and honestly most importantly for familiarity + cool-new-thing factor: KDE plasma 6! ;)
Zorin OS is also a good choice if they have a high resolution screen, because Mint’s Cinnamon desktop has awful screen tearing when you increase the scaling.
The screen tearing from UI scaling being at an uneven interval has been fixed with the switch to Wayland. Screen tearing can still happen but it’s due to something being messed up in the rendering pipeline and not an issue particular to mint.
Zorin user here. Might switch to Mint. Might not help, but after almost 2 years, I still don’t know what I’m doing.
Unless it’s flatpak.
But like, I have no idea how to update my bluetooth driver. And I really want to.
There are other utilities that I can’t install. It’s like the tools you need to install to make linux easy still need terminal to install.
It’s all “you’re missing prerequesits. They won’t be installed”.
So you need to be smart enough in linux to install the tools to make it easy, but if you knew how to install the tools, you wouldn’t need them.
Most drivers are just in the Linux kernel so updating it will fix issues with them, unless the drivers can’t be bundled in to the kernel for license conflict reasons. In which case they need to be updated manually.
Mint has a GUI program for managing drivers that aren’t in the kernel. It actually has a GUI program for most things that would normally need commands in the terminal. Which is why I think it’s kind of insane to recommend anything else to people who aren’t familiar with using a command line interface.
Using Zorin’s Software Updater app will update everything for you.
i used to use cacht, but after updating to kde plasma 6.6 it would freeze after i put the correct login and password. thankfully it has snapshots, so i could just not update it for a while.
i waited for 6.6.1, and instead of freezing it just closed and reopened the login page. 6.6.2 went back to freexing forever.
so i gave up, and installed base arch to see if that’d work, and it did! i also found out that archinstall is a thing! (i had installed arch manually many times a while back, and the clock time always broke) i did break it once by not configing limine snapper correctly, but now it’s great, and feels basically equal to cachy (except things don’t break and there isn’t a bunch of unecessary programs installed)
This has been fixed since then.
Also to get around it just press ctrl alt f2 and sign in in the window that appears. But like I said, no need since it has been fixed.
that’s great, but i have already switched after waiting for around 3 patches, and i do not care about cachy anymore, since i got snapshots and everything working perfectly on base arch
Still unacceptable
People just want something that works reliably
That’s why bleeding edge distributions should not be recommended to new users.
Why is cachyOS the current thing?
it’s the current arch based distro that makes arch more accessible to newcomers
(Sad forgotten Endeavour OS noises.)
YouTube and social media drive a lot of it. I call them bandwagon distros.
Yeah I thought that might be it.
Because it’s what I’m using and I’m a victim of the availability hueristic.
I do like it though. I didn’t try Endeavor OS but figure it’s similar.
It’s very optimized.
It’s pretty well done.
I switched to cachyos recently from nobara, and I’m facing an annoying bug. I have a 2.1 sound bar connect to my monitor, which connects to my PC via display port. My audio keeps cutting out when watching movies on stremio or playing games on steam. It comes back whenever I press the volume key, but goes away when there’s silence or low volume. It also comes back automatically when there is a sudden increase in volume. For example, during bgm, the sound cuts off, but when somebody suddenly starts talking it comes back on, but not all the time, if that makes sense.
I’ll Bully Spam every gaming CEO until they support ONE god damn Linux distro like SteamOS. SLOP MICROSLOP SLOP, anticheat doesn’t fix shit! BF6 is basically proof.
I’m a NixOS fanboy now :/
*em
LMAO Cursing your friends isn’t nice, CachyOS is for those that are comfortable with Linux…And the dreaded Arch.
Cachy is great for newbies. There’s no tweaking required, at least not more than mint. The AUR has all your weird niche programs you had on windows that apt and flatpak don’t have. It just works out of the box.
So you say, but, the installer…Man that thing doesn’t want to work with my system (even with secure boot off). It was the one that had the most failures with not creating a boot record, failing to install the Linux kernel, or the NVIDIA drivers. Other distros have very polished and sleek installer experiences (rarely issues as a bonus). CachyOS, in my personal experience I don’t find it to be a good one. On paper, it is (I did a lot of reading to figure out how to get CachyOS installed).
That’s unfortunate. I have gotten 3 of my non-Linux friends to install it and everything “just worked”, I hadn’t heard of any issues like that before.
Arch isn’t necessarily unstable or “dreadful”. It’s a distro that requires the user to know what they’re doing and to be a tinkerer by nature. Whether this is a feature or a downside is dependent on the user.
But I agree with you, recommending an Arch based distro to someone who is not a tinkerer and just wants to use the PC - which is the vast majority of PC users - is a mistake.
PS: I use EndeavourOS btw
I am exaggerating for effect, as all of my Arch experiences (never being able to pass the installer without a fatal error or showstopper) are all I know. Its quite vexing that getting other distros installed and configured is easy for me.
I do recognize the power of and capabilities of the distro. Yet, its never been at my fingertips; I must not know the soft, gentle latin curses required to make an Arch install successful.
I even tried to install EndeavourOS and CachyOS. To be met with failure and the need to retreat to another distro.
I heard cachy was better than average arch in complexity. I am very new to Linux with minimal computer skills and have been very happy with bazzite but most of my friends I try to convert are cachy loyalists
CachyOS is still going to demand more from you than Bazzite in terms of computer skills…Manual interventions (because the Arch Team cannot help themselves but move too fucking fast). Not like I can complain about that, given I have openSUSE Tumbleweed installed and am in SELinux range.
Bazzite is nice, as it can be as simple or as complex as you’d like!
I am loving, loving KDE and Bazzite. It feels like such a mature operating system compared to ol’ Windows :D
It is. Fedora is on version 44
Oh yeah? Windows 98 will blow you out of the water!
Better than normal Arch I guess… idk I would give beginners Mint, Ubuntu or maybe Debian.
I’d recommend Ubuntu or Mint for most new users; straight up Debian only in cases when the user don’t need the latest or greatest in terms of updated packages. As Debian is great, I’ve used it as extensively as Ubuntu…
However, Debian is built against older drivers and kernel, making it stable, if not a bit stale.
Ubuntu is a bit fresher with a higher kernel version (packages can still be behind something like openSUSE or Arch, Debian based distro truth). However, flatpaks allow for more recent software versions!
I install most of my software via Flatpak and Snap anyway, so I don’t need the latest and greatest in terms of apt packages, and Debian brings the benefit of a rock solid base.
I agree, so many people disregard Debian, but if you’re not gaming and don’t need to keep up with the latest things - Debian is rock solid and most of your packages you can just use flatpak. For the majority of daily users who aren’t gaming, I think it’s a super solid choice.
i don’t recommend ubuntu anymore. recently tried it on my laptop and holy hell it’s bad. couldn’t install flatpaks and the only way to install from repo was to use terminal. couldn’t get any version of steam to work at all. and I’ve been a linux user for years now…
also for some reason mint wouldn’t install on the same thinkpad, the installer wouldn’t boot at all, just gave some grub message. also fedora was no success, the usb media wasn’t recognized. ultramarine finally worked even though it’s just fedora with tweaks. some say it’s a bad thing to have tons of distros, but for me it’s been a blessing. one distro won’t work for every pc.
I was pretty successful doing the terminal commands necessary to make flatpaks work on Ubuntu in recent memory, as out of the box the distro is Snap centric. Its odd you had so many issues on a fresh install of Ubuntu. Oof, sounds like my legendary problems with Arch.
Yeah, Mint requires some workarounds on older hardware. Its possible, but, probably not worth it unless you’ve got a burning desire to use Mint on that hardware.
i looked up multiple guides to enable flatpaks and all i achieved was that i could install them from terminal, but the apps never actually appeared so i couldn’t run them.
took me a while to realize the default store is snap only, but i couldn’t install another store either (can’t remember why). if i wasn’t so pissed i probably could’ve figured it out, but steam not working was too much of a dealbreaker that it wasn’t worth the effort
I’ve only recently dipped into it
I’ve been using Kubuntu though for awhile on all but 2 of my systems, my NAS and my main rig. I’m testing CachyOS though and I’m seeing no issues so far.
Of course once I’ve got KDE up it all looks like it should lol
It’s always a matter of time with Arch…Always. Hell, the damned thing wouldn’t install the 4 times that I tried. (checks notes) Failed to install the boot loader, fatal issue with installing the OS, failed with installing the kernel twice. You got lucky, I swear Arch (LOL) hears the mad shit I talk and readies the mortar to blast my chosen installer with condensed malice.
Any other distro and it’s installed within 9 to 15 minutes, then I’m ready to customize…
First Arch based distro I used was Manjaro. Served me well for the time despite the criticism, but I had a lots and lots of configuration to do for my needs, specially as a nooby. Since moved to CachyOS after the latest Manjaro debacle and said fuck that shit.
Was pleased that CachyOS was pretty much ready for my needs out of the box.
This is what I always hear, but Arch eludes me…
I’ve developed a deep appreciation for openSUSE Tumbleweed as a rolling release, that gives me more up to date repos for software and packages.
No real struggles save for me being a goose on the loose and doing something “that seemed fine”, but didn’t work like it was intended. ROFL or SELinux being its strange self after an update. That was easy to fix with an auto touch command and a few others (forgot to document).
recommend them a newbie friendly distro instead though
Let me suggest you EndeavorOS
I use Mint, by the way.
has mint finally fixed the bug where autosuspend and monitor suspend stop working? the only reason i don’t wanna touch it anymore, troubleshooting that almost drove me nuts
i’ve run Mint and morr lately LMDE for nearly 3 years and not had that problem, AMD only.
I’ve been running Mint for years and have never experienced this issue. Either I’m lucky or your not. I say give Mint another shot, the devs have put in a lot of work over the years.
i left mint about half a year ago, after using it for over two years. i distrohopped during that time, i must’ve done like 7 clean installs and the issue persisted. weirdly though, it doesn’t happen on my media pc. it has crapped itself a few times but it always seems to suspend just fine. no idea what it is about my desktop that causes a wakelock, but ultramarine works just fine. I’d like to go back to mint just because i like cinnamon more…
Is the computer an old windows machine? I had a Lenovo laptop a while back that was a win 10 machine that I ran DBAN on then threw Mint on. After about a year of slow but solid performance I started having Grub issues and I just got sick of debugging it and gave up on it since it was just a hand-me-down and I prefer my desktop.
yes it has had windows in its previous life, it’s lenovo p1 and i think gen 3. performance is quite ok though
I accidentally convinced my friend to try CachyOS last week. Despite owning a Steamdeck he didn’t know Proton worked outside of SteamOS and was surprised when I said I was playing on Linux (even though I’m sure I mentioned it ages ago). He then decided to give it a go and picked CachyOS himself.
recommends arch based distros to everyone
“Wait why do you guys say linux is complex and difficult!?”
It just works out of the box. Not much tweaking required with cachy. Arguably less than other distros since all my weird niche prigrams are available on the AUR and not apt or flatpak.
I recently swapped from Aurora, a Fedora immutable distro with KDE, to Cachy on my AMD 7040 Framework 13. I’m loving it. I use plain Arch on my desktop, so I felt right at home for the most part, and it really does just work.
It also fuckin’ flies my dudes.
