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 built off Arch, a rolling-release distro. RR distros are notoriously unstable, and by design. It does exactly what it says on the tin.
I encountered this problem myself, and it was very stupid and annoying, but I had reason to re-install anyways. That’s the cost of bleeding-edge packages. If you’re unaware/unprepared for it, best not install anything arch-based. That’s why most servers are Debian-based.
They are unstable from a software compatibility perspective where every updates has a worrying chance of breaking compatibility with old “stale” software (software not managed/distributed by the distro itself), but that does not necessarily means unstable from a system stability perspective. If there was some kind of “system stability” scale for distros i would judge archlinux somewhere in the middle. And, with the nature of how linux development is you might actually get better system stability due to it having fresher software that better supports your hardware. That’s the main reason to try and be a the bleeding edge of desktop linux, sometimes you only get a few shallow cuts and stuff actually functions better.
Any serious breakage such as an unbootable or unusable system is supposedly very rare and only affects a minor portion of the users, with any change going through a long process that hopefully catches it before any harm is done. I do realize the irony of building a system restore functionality for precisely this case and me pushing against it. Again, I just think it should be made nearly bulletproof before it’s pushed into the users.
I’ve been using Arch for nearly 20 years and noted that things are a hell of a lot more stable than it used to be. It’s also hard to excuse it since it has grown and matured so much, it’s not a niche distro nobody knows anymore, even SteamOS is now based on it (though the immutability gives it a huge edge and essentially eliminates the aforementioned issue without relying on the, well meaning, but probably flawed system restore thingy).
Anyway, in my judgement, CachyOS being a downstream distro with a lot less manpower behind it should be quite a bit more careful when introducing such fundamental changes. I can’t say how bad it is affecting their user, it’s up to then to know that and if so hopefully change the defaults or at least better educate the user of the experimental nature of it.