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?
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I’ve been loving Mint; the one thing I missed was WoW Classic but I finally found out how to get it to run under Steam and it’s been relatively great! <3
I think NixOS is a superb choice if you have the time and energy to invest in it. I’m currently using Guix System (a GNU fork of Nix) and I’m very very happy with it. Previously I’ve been on openSUSE Tumbleweed because I thought the most important thing for me was btrfs with an easy snapshot system. But then, one day, when I was writing ansible playbooks to configure my OS I realized that what I care most about is declarative configurations. Now I’ve completely stopped using ansible for my laptop/desktop, and just rely upon native Guix configuration. I love it.
I do still run MicroOS on all of my servers because it “just works” and I think transactional systems are great for servers. Recently, however, I’ve been thinking about trying out NixOS/Guix System as my server OS of choice, but we’ll see how that goes.
If you’re willing to put in the time, I think you’ll love NixOS.
Edit: Nix/Guix are also transactional.
i like bazzite/fedora atomic a lot, i also quite enjoy vanillaos (if you like debian). if you have an issue on any of them its trivial to rollback to a previous patch and pin that patch until someone does something about it
I did try vanillaos seemed like a nice distro but a bit too generic IMO? Bazzite was suggested before. I’ll daily drive it to test for a while. Thanks!
I see people recommending Debian but you also said you enjoy tinkering, so I’d recommend SpiralLinux. It’s basically Debian but it uses BTRFS so you can roll back to a previous snapshot if you break something. I don’t think Spiral has updated to Trixie yet so you’d need to manually upgrade but that’s not too big a hassle if you do it immediately.
Thanks for the tip. Running Bazzite now but your suggestion seems like a great recommendation too. I’ll check it out.
First of all U don’t need to reinstall anything switch to tty firstly and find out what wrong happened second u can boot in usual live cachyos iso chroot in ur main system and reinstall all packages of system it might help but better firsrly understand what caused this
So first of all, you could likely still access your drives when you boot from a USB. Goes for any OS
secondly: if you play with fire, don’t complain about the blisters. And yo be clear, with fire I don’t mean Linux, with fire I mean specialty distro
You need to ask yourself what you want. If you want something shiny and cool that does certain security things that are awesome but not really that needed for the average Joe, then fine, go with whatever.
I on the other hand need a Linux distro that works, that I can trust. I have been using Kubuntu (Ubuntu with KDE UI) for over the last 20. There are bugs, like everywhere, but bugs like “this little widget doesn’t respond right”, not “oh my OS suicided again”
True. Emergency mode or something similar might also be an option. But a live USB certainly is a good method. It’s just frustrating that it’s needed.
I don’t see how using an OS is playing with fire. I understand that sometimes comparability issues arise but on the other hand it’s not like I’m on a release candidate kernel or trying to slim down my OS to a single megabyte by removing stuff. Sometimes bleeding edge can actually be needed when installing new hardware. When stuff is released it should just work I think?
I have found bazzite to be very stable for my needs. My use case is mainly gaming with some light productivity. I have had very few problems.
I switched a couple of days ago. Seems very good so far!
What would your ultimate distro be like?
The one that fits one’s needs the best. Given your frustration with unstable systems, I’d say the best ones would be those that take longer to make major updates, like Debian, Mint and Slackware, as then issues aren’t introduced as frequently, and older ones are better known and easier to fix or even preemptively circumvent.
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…
simple update and sleep should not result in a black screen on any OS IMO
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.
I can totally get behind that. But then I’m left wondering: if that approach minimises the risk of interference, then why don’t all distros work that way?
My guess would be some value stability at all costs, others value user control, and others value uptime.
you are arguing from a place of stubbornness. cachy arch and nix are not supposed to be newbie friendly distros. 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 complains it’s not windows and breaks.
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.
I was never talking about either of them being noon friendly. Also, updating and failing to boot is kind of breaking easily I’d say. So I don’t get what point you’re even making.
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I’d argue that CachyOS is more noon friendly than arch.
I’d say no, Arch forces you to learn to use a terminal, chroot and other things so you can fix your system if it breaks. CachyOS expects you to know this but doesn’t force you to. It’s like saying jumping off an airplane is more noob friendly because of the static line.
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.
Yes, that’s correct, I have never ever in my 20 years of running Linux and administering Linux laboratories seen a system break because of a sleep during an update. It’s very likely that that was just a coincidence and the system would have broken regardless of the sleep. I don’t have all of the info but my guess would be either Nvidia driver related (as I see recent news mention it on both Arch and Cachy) or (more likely) you changed a system config and the update kept your version which is now not compatible (it happens, it’s part of the reason why Arch is called unstable, on stable distros that can only happen during version updates, and you get promoted about each of them, but Arch expects you to check pacnew/pacsave files after an update)
It’s you who’s missing the point that the other person made, your experience is not something that matches other Linux users. CachyOS is not noob friendly, these sort of thing should never happen in Mint or other more noob friendly, but Cachy expects you to be aware of certain things because it is a bleeding edge rolling release distro. People think Arch is difficult because of the installation process, but that’s not it, that’s very straightforward, maintain the system is what’s difficult.
As a newbie it is easier to set up Cachy. When shit hits the fan either fixing it on Arch or Cachy would give a similar experience to a noob I think.
I understand it might be a fluke or that I am at least a minority in this issue. But that makes troubleshooting harder. I’m even on all AMD hardware.
It’s interesting that the whole idea about stability (the system not breaking) shifts from the developer to the user.
Going from CachyOS to NixOS because you bricked something is wild. You very clearly have no clue what you’re doing and I regret to inform you that your choice of distro will not make an impact. But it isn’t all bad — you could stop panicking and acting like you know what you’re doing and learn about the technology you’re trying to use.
Or keep switching distros forever. I’m sure that will work too.
Love the condescending tone! Definitely helps people figuring out Linux. Very helpful reply too. Please keep adding to the community.
You clearly missed my point and instead of adding a helpful reply you decided to get on your high horse…
I think he has 2 ideas you are missing. The first is that this is a problem with the operative system, not the kernel, and to go with other operative system with ideology similar to the previous will likely make the same, regardless of kernel, so an operative system tailor for those whose do not want to configure is what should be aim for, like Linux Mint Debian Edition, which is my personal recommendation and preference when I do want something to work now but not to figure it out and configure in my Void ISO that like to make every now an then just when big updates arrives so I can simply install the image… The second is just referring to the posibility that by statistic you will end trying Mint soon or later.
Use something stable and boring like LinuxMint. No issues in 7 years.
I’ve really enjoyed NixOS the past few years. I think if I started over with it I’d be less ambitious about making it an impermanent setup over ZFS. It’s not a particularly enjoyable experience to set up as bugs abound with ZFS specifically. But other than that initial highly experimental choice at the time its been stable. I hope you enjoy it as much as I have!
Thanks! I tried before. I think I just need some persistence to catch the drift. I’ll try bazzite first but then maybe switch anyway.
I know its frustrating when this happens. But there is something called arch-chroot, its a program to fix your messesd up os. New users don’t know about this, but as you keep using Linux, you get familiar to these programs. It takes few mins to fix broken system using arch-chroot. I hopw your system won’t break anymore.
Thanks! And that’s true. Also part of the beauty of Linux IMO that it actually (almost) always can be repaired. Although it is quite involving at times.
Im always surprised how different the windows expirience seems to be for many people or do they ignore all the searching for drivers, editing registry entries, running sketchy bats, trying compatibility modes until something works, random blue screens, shutdowns that are reboots.
What do you mean? I hear that “SFC /SCANNOW” fixes everything!
Totally agree with Kichae. Adding to that I’d argue it’s easier for windows since more people use it so there’s more resources. Also, Windows is just a single way of doing things. There’s a difference between distros so a fix for Ubuntu might not work for Arch. Of course windows has it’s (huge) flaws and not everything works perfectly. There’s a reason I switched. But Linux in my experience breaks in a bigger way in my personal experience.
Well, most of us know how to deal with all of those, and the vast majority of them haven’t been an issue for the average user for, like, decades now. No one’s fucking with compatubility mode post, like, 2004.
Meanwhile, most of the help you get when trying to solve issues on Linux are command line commands that are not explained by the helper and which we have no idea what they actually do.
The fight I had just to get my printer to work. The fight I’m still having to get my audio interface to work consistently.
Every modern distro keeps previous kernel boot entries available at boot time. You don’t need to use snapshots to simply not boot a potentially problematic kernel update.
There are literally near zero reasons to ever have to reinstall any Linux install. Moving to a more complex distribution isn’t going to solve your problem here, which is just learning a different workflow. That workflow being more akin to software development workflows: if something fucks up, just revert.
That’s what i expected the snapshots to do too. NixOS seems harder to bork so that’s why i was thinking about that one.
It’s no hard to break than anything else. I’m not sure you understand what the issue is here…
Yeah the issue is a weird bug that broke my install. The thing is that it can be fixed but the fact that it has to be fixed is already sucky.
NixOS seems to be agnostic of hardware and more serious about software compatibility. Hence my hunch that it would be less likely to bork.
Nix is simply a different distro with a declarative composition for its package management. You won’t be getting different behavior from package selections or anything like that if it’s a bug in the software itself.
Just letting you know.
That’s fair, a bus is a bug.
