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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
Still unacceptable
People just want something that works reliably
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.
Why is cachyOS the current thing?
it’s the current arch based distro that makes arch more accessible to newcomers
It’s very optimized.
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.
YouTube and social media drive a lot of it. I call them bandwagon distros.
Yeah I thought that might be it.
I’m a NixOS fanboy now :/
*em
recommend them a newbie friendly distro instead though
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.
recommends arch based distros to everyone
“Wait why do you guys say linux is complex and difficult!?”
They really do be taking the pis out of pistachios.
CachyOS is a good option. maybe not as a brand new person to Linux but it’s fast and has everything you need.
Bazzite is fine too if you just depend on flatpaks which might make a windows to linux transition easier.
I’m currently trying PikaOS for the week and it’s ok. It’s fast, games as well if not ever so slightly better than CachyOS, but it feels a little TOO opinionated. For example if you install the Niri version (and I assume the hyprland version also) Kitty is baked into it to the point were potentially removing kitty breaks other dependencies. I don’t like that. Kitty is a bloated mess of a terminal and I’d much rather use Foot. Also the Pikabar thing is garbage. it’s a fork of Noctalia with ALL the options stripped out of it for whatever reason. But PikaOS is very easy to install and fairly minimal with what it does install. It’s nice but it’s kinda all over the place with things.
I’ll probably just end up going back to NixOS in a week anyways.
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.
Arch?
Yes CachyOS is based on Arch
why use CachyOS when you could use Arch? I use Arch btw
Except with a sane installer, and more performance optimizations.
I just use EndeavourOS. It’s mostly a work machine and I have little use for performance optimizations. Besides, I think my hardware is too outdated to get any real benefit out of those.
nonsense! the Arch Wiki was never used as capital punishment
