I run CachyOS, it works great for me. It’s not the easiest one, but I like the rolling release style and it’s by far the fastest distro I’ve used (cold boots to gnome desktop in maybe 10 seconds).
I love CachyOS but you need to be a certain kind of nerd who can handle updates breaking stuff. Or more importantly, willing to RTFM and prevent a lot of it.
Basically I need to read these two sites before I update:
Rule of thumb is to not update constantly/daily. Nor should you update too seldomly. Weekly or monthly is the usual. If that sounds like a PITA then yeah, that’s why it’s not recommended.
The stability of Arch/Cachy updates is not just about time between updates (more often is generally better) but also about accumulated old configs files with deprecated options that have been ignored and reading about breaking changes.
I updated 4 machines at the same time earlier this week (pacoloco for the win). One is a cachy/arch hybrid that started life as arch. The one with the oldest continually updated installation (it is a ship of theseus, I don’t believe it has any of the original hardware) couldn’t get to a graphical login and it took me a few minutes to replace an obsolete config file with a pacnew and get it back up.
This might have been a show stopper for someone coming from Windows or Mac. Perhaps even for some Linux users. But I am decades into this and it is how I like it. I ran slackware for years and Debian Sid. The loss of time to breakage from upgrades is absolutely trivial to me compared with the advantages of a well packaged and up to date system. If people aren’t into that there is no shame in using an immutable distro. The diversity of distros might be confusing but it is a huge advantage because there is something out there for everyone.
my ‘arch based’ system is a cinnamon-flavoured manjaro. manjaro gets shit on for reasons, one of them being they hold back updated packages for a bit… which is basically what you recommend, and it’s what i usually do anyway–defer updates for awhile (even on windows), unless it’s a super critical issue that could actually be a problem.
that manjaro desktop has been solid, never once messed-up an update even with the aur packages i have installed, and even if it’s been a month or two since it last updated.
It’s very popular to the point where multiple other distros are starting to offer its patched kernel on their distro. It’s very focused on gaming performance, particularly around Steam and Proton.
Cachyos seems like the general recommendation. Haven’t used it myself, but I’ve used its kernel so I guess that counts for something.
I run CachyOS, it works great for me. It’s not the easiest one, but I like the rolling release style and it’s by far the fastest distro I’ve used (cold boots to gnome desktop in maybe 10 seconds).
I love CachyOS but you need to be a certain kind of nerd who can handle updates breaking stuff. Or more importantly, willing to RTFM and prevent a lot of it.
Basically I need to read these two sites before I update:
https://archlinux.org/news/
https://cachyos.org/blog/
Rule of thumb is to not update constantly/daily. Nor should you update too seldomly. Weekly or monthly is the usual. If that sounds like a PITA then yeah, that’s why it’s not recommended.
The stability of Arch/Cachy updates is not just about time between updates (more often is generally better) but also about accumulated old configs files with deprecated options that have been ignored and reading about breaking changes.
I updated 4 machines at the same time earlier this week (pacoloco for the win). One is a cachy/arch hybrid that started life as arch. The one with the oldest continually updated installation (it is a ship of theseus, I don’t believe it has any of the original hardware) couldn’t get to a graphical login and it took me a few minutes to replace an obsolete config file with a pacnew and get it back up.
This might have been a show stopper for someone coming from Windows or Mac. Perhaps even for some Linux users. But I am decades into this and it is how I like it. I ran slackware for years and Debian Sid. The loss of time to breakage from upgrades is absolutely trivial to me compared with the advantages of a well packaged and up to date system. If people aren’t into that there is no shame in using an immutable distro. The diversity of distros might be confusing but it is a huge advantage because there is something out there for everyone.
my ‘arch based’ system is a cinnamon-flavoured manjaro. manjaro gets shit on for reasons, one of them being they hold back updated packages for a bit… which is basically what you recommend, and it’s what i usually do anyway–defer updates for awhile (even on windows), unless it’s a super critical issue that could actually be a problem.
that manjaro desktop has been solid, never once messed-up an update even with the aur packages i have installed, and even if it’s been a month or two since it last updated.
Monthly might be too long to not fuck an Arch update, from my previous experience.
I have never heard of Cachyos until this comment.
It’s very popular to the point where multiple other distros are starting to offer its patched kernel on their distro. It’s very focused on gaming performance, particularly around Steam and Proton.
Their proton ran BL4 about 10% faster than Valves for my specific hardware. IDK what they are doing but it might as well be magic.
Cachy is the most popular distro on distrowatch. Has been for a month or more. That’s a good place to get the list of current distros.