[Discuss] Adventures in Modern Linuxing, or, recommended distros revisited

[Rich Pieri]

(With apologies to The Buggles)

Around 2 years ago I was pondering what I was going to do when Windows
10 went out of support and all that, because Windows 11 was and remains
a miserable pile of advertising and AI slop shoveled into what was
turning out to be a reasonably usable desktop (with extensive
assistance from WSL and VcXsrv).

First I switched to Arch. I had a good experience with SteamOS on Steam
Deck and that's Arch, right? That bit me, because it's a curated,
immutable Arch. As occasionally happens with real Arch, an update went
bad and I was left with an unfixable mess. Okay, maybe I could have
fixed it but I didn't have the desire to do so. I wanted something a
bit more stable/reliable/fixable.

I switched to openSUSE Tumbleweed. And it was good for a long time.
Especially for Btrfs and snapper which makes rolling back botched
updates almost trivially easy. And it was good for nearly a year. But
Tumbleweed has some problems that became deal-breakers for me. One is
video codecs which SUSE can't ship due to Cisco's licensing terms.
Working around that can break libraries. The other is a dodgy nVidia
driver situation which turned completely unusable on me back in
November last year. Time to start digging again.

I discovered CachyOS which is an Arch derivative with several killer
(for me) features. First is the they recompile with CPU optimizations
that stock Arch does not. CachyOS requires a reasonably recent CPU for
it but getting the performance really is nice. The CachyOS kernels
include the Asus kernel patches which is a huge win for Asus owners.
nVidia and DRI_PRIME work out of the box. And the most important
feature: Btrfs and snapper integrated with pacman out of the box.

The last is what prompted me to write this little essay. An update
earlier today broke video decoding. I traced it to a faulty library in
that update, rebooted, selected the previous pacman snapshot, reboot,
verify that problem is gone (it is). Ran btrfs-assistant to permanently
roll back to that snapshot, reboot. And that's where I am right now.

So I'm tossing CachyOS into the recommendations list. It's Arch with
some performance improvements and one of the best safety nets I've seen
on Linux.

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