Normally I always forget why I still keep thinking about switching back to Windows. Today was a great reminder. Linux can be frustrating. This post is somewhat about awareness and partly about me learning about other peoples experiences. I updated my CachyOS as usual. There were some system packages upgraded and I got the notification to reboot. Figuring I’d do it later I left after some time and the PC went to sleep. Upon returning the screen stayed black. Even upon forced reboot. Remembering I was using Limine with BTRFS snapshots I tried multiple previous snapshots but to no avail. I remember this happened before. So now I face another reinstall… This and having to dive into the deep end of terminal commands to get drivers, programs or games working can be quite frustrating. I understand why people are turned off and go back to Windows…
Onto NixOS for me. A big dive but it seems very stable which might be just what i need. I feel like the philosophy of NixOS combined with a graphical store to install programs and what not seems like a great solution.
What would your ultimate distro be like?
If I’m being completely honest, it sounds like you hit a problem and then just kinda gave up (I’m not trying to sound mean or anything - please don’t take it that way).
If I were in that situation I would probably drop to a terminal (ex. CTRL+ALT+3) and try to find what failed (
journalctl). Especially if the screen just stayed black I would probably wonder what packages I just updated. I’m not going to remember, but it’s probably something graphical. Maybe I installed nvidia dkms packages and I have a mismatch or I decided to try out a different login manager and it happens to not support Wayland or something. Snapshots would be my last resort, not my first.As far as NixOS, I love it. Its incredibly stable and the declarative language is really handy to write in. I’m not aware of any graphical store though (outside of maybe some github project). Its declarative meaning you write the configuration.nix file and import any secondary files into the config. And packages are installed declaratively:
environment.systemPackages = with pkgs; [ pkgs.gnome-tweaks pkgs.gnome-control-center pkgs.gnome-terminal }I would say if you are wanting GUI that NixOS is probably not a great choice. I mean just to get installed package version, you’re going to have to do a one-liner (mine for example):
#!/bin/bash find /run/current-system/sw/bin/ -type l -exec readlink {} \; | sed -E 's|[^-]+-([^/]+)/.*|\1|g' | sort -uiNot having a display output made me feel like I’d need a live USB and fix it with root which is often to always quite involved. Thank you for your detailed guide. That’s part of why I love the Linux community. There’s often to always someone knowledgeable that has a solution. I will try this later!
I got the same impression. Which is fine if that’s someone’s approach, but that same person probably shouldn’t be on an arch-based distro if that’s the case.