i had cachyOS installed for a couple of months but was plagued with random system freezes (only hard reset possible, no leads in journalctl). i tracked it down to an issue with the combination of wayland, KDE plasma and the kernel or at least that’s what i could gather from web searches. i had at least one of those freezes per week, often more.

i am now on kubuntu which basically has the same combination of things (wayland and KDE) that should cause the problem but it has been running fine for three weeks, no freezes. so something with the cachy kernel didn’t agree with my system.

i was now told i could use the arch kernel on cachyOS, which was news to me. i tried switching to the cachy LTS kernel but the issue persisted. i now wonder how does the compatibility of the linux kernel work? is it compatible because it is both arch linux? or would the kubuntu kernel also work on cachyOS?

  • Björn@swg-empire.de
    10·
    8 hours ago

    The kernels (and accompanying modules/drivers) are more or less freely interchangeable.

    Bugs in the kernel are pretty rare in my experience. I think it’s more likely that the bug was somewhere in KDE Plasma. Kubuntu’s version should be older than the one on Cachy. On top of that Kubuntu has their own patches for KDE, so even if the version numbers are the same they are not the exact same programs. And on top of that the way they compiled KDE will be slightly different.

    • bad1080@piefed.socialOPEnglish
      3·
      7 hours ago

      Bugs in the kernel are pretty rare in my experience
      i chalked it up to some kind of optimization that doesn’t agree with my computer but that’s just my head-canon

      I think it’s more likely that the bug was somewhere in KDE Plasma. Kubuntu’s version should be older than the one on Cachy. On top of that Kubuntu has their own patches for KDE
      interesting, distrowatch says plasma-desktop “6.4.5” for kubuntu 25.10 and “6.5.3” for cachy 251129 (the version i likely was on) so it is a possibility. (plus i feel like it started after an update)

    • gens@programming.dev
      2·
      8 hours ago

      Don’t forget Mesa, the userspace part of graphics drivers. Also versions freely changeable.