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?
cachyos is not a system for newbies, or absolute stability. nix isn’t it either.
try fedora, debian,
ubuntu, mint or something newbie friendly if you want a newbie friendly experience.I use fedora, debian and mint because I have several computers for different usecases. I wouldn’t recommend Fedora for this, all the others are gold in my experience, but newbies really should go through Mint first.
i find that bazzite can be a great beginner distro, as it has some sane quality of life defaults baked in over fedora, but fedora is not bad if you can get used to default dockless gnome for example.
I’d argue that CachyOS is more noon friendly than arch. As would EndeavourOS be. People fail to see my point that sometimes Linux breaks very easily and I’m not blaming Cachy or Arch specifically but a simple update and sleep should not result in a black screen on any OS IMO. It’s just off putting… If this would happen on windows I’d definitely complain too. And there have been plenty of instances where microslop added OS breaking things…
you are arguing from a place of stubbornness. cachy arch and nix are not supposed to be newbie friendly distros, period. linux doesn’t break easily at all, but only if you accept you need the right tool for that job.
it’s like that youtuber that keeps insisting on using pop os with a beta desktop when he knows its not windows and breaks, and then complaining it’s not windows and keeps breaking.
i work with linux and i’ve been updating hundreds of debian, ubuntu and assorted turnkey distros over decades without issue, and you could too.
That’s the thing. Different distros handle it in different ways. Some have the option to do offline updates so it will not actually install the update until after reboot so there is minimal risk of something interfering. That’s why often the recommendation is to try and find one that is more stable if that is what you value more.