6 ms·

This is bad. New user going onto an arch distro with a ton of tweaks is worst case scenario for a smooth experience. I'm sure cachyOS will work a treat out of

by AuthAuth 11mo ago

This is bad. New user going onto an arch distro with a ton of tweaks is worst case scenario for a smooth experience. I'm sure cachyOS will work a treat out of the box, but i'm also sure that one day things will stop working and cascade into a distro hop or reinstall leaving a sour taste in the users mouth. You do not need a "gaming" distro, all distros use the same software and you will be fine on ubuntu, fedora etc.

kevinfiol 11mo ago
Agreed. I'm surprised by the amount of Linux newcomers being directed toward these weird, specialized derivatives that have existed >2 years.
- cosmic_cheese 11mo ago
  It’s almost certainly driven by a desire for everything to work as expected out of the box. Speciality derivatives come with attention to detail and purpose-fitting that often isn’t found in general purpose distros, like how Nobara has a system to auto-apply fixes for common problems or how Bazzite includes an overlay for game stats (framerate, etc). Rolling and bleeding edge distros have been popular because people want to use the latest hardware. Can you get these things with a general purpose distro with older kernels? Sure, but the process varies depending on distro, hardware, use case, etc and isn’t necessarily accessible to many, even with the selection bias towards a technical mindset that comes with wanting to switch to Linux. It’s the same reason why Windows has been popular for so long and why Valve has seen outsized success with Linux: the fiddly bits have been minimized. Major distros could pull in many of these users by sinking resources into that golden “out of the box” experience and aggressive hunting down and fixing of papercuts.
  - beeflet 11mo ago
    okay but this should just be upstreamed into a real distro, we don't need 1000 distros that are all reimplementing the same thing
    - cosmic_cheese 11mo ago
      There’s merit to that idea, but upstreaming is easier said than done. There’s a whole gauntlet of politics and bikeshedding to get past among other issues, which is why these things are separate distros in the first place.
    - WD-42 11mo ago
      Bazzite provides a Steam-OS gaming-centric interface out of the box. How are you going to upstream that? You think Debian stable is going to agree all of a sudden provide it's users a gaming console UI?
      - saint_yossarian 11mo ago
        Isn't that just Steam's Big Picture mode?
        __aru 11mo ago
        It's an entire login session, steam game mode runs BPM via the game scope compositor, no desktop is loaded in the background, etc. The Steam client also enables hardware controls not available in traditional BPM. You can look up gamescope-session for more info. Its something that I generally wouldn't expect on traditional mainstream distros.
      - theevilsharpie 11mo ago
        Debian -- probably not, but Ubuntu has numerous variants whose primary purpose is providing a different desktop experience, and a SteamOS-like variant would fit in perfectly with that.
        cosmic_cheese 11mo ago
        That’d still come with the limits brought by the old kernels Ubuntu ships. Which as an aside, I think distros should advertise better. It must be awful to be sold on a distro only to find that it doesn’t support your newish hardware. A simple list of supported hardware linked on the features and download pages would suffice but a little executable tool that will tell you if your box’s hardware is supported would be even better.
  - johnny22 11mo ago
    i don't have a problem recommending people use bazzite because of the nature of the whole system. It makes it harder for regular users to break it, while making it easy(er) to rollback.
- brendyn 11mo ago
  To me, I find it a bit frustrating that Arch linux routinely has "manual intervention required" problems every single year where the intervention is just a single command that pacman could have just ran themselves if they so desired. Sometimes, they get a new developer and you have to manually install their keys first otherwise packages fail authentication. What can you do in the face of that except conclude they don't want things to "just work" and create a derivative in the hopes of making things just work.
galleywest200 11mo ago
Is it bad? SteamOS is an Arch based and extremely user friendly gaming-focused distro.
- charlie-83 11mo ago
  If all you want to do is play steam games then I'm sure steamOS is going to be the best experience possible. If you want to use it as a regular PC it probably works reasonably well but a user who doesn't want to use the terminal is more likely to run into a brick wall at some point (e.g. connecting to a printer or something). Something like Linux Mint is going to give an overall friendlier experience for someone new to Linux even if running steam games on it is slightly less friendly.
  - pelotron 11mo ago
    Ironically connecting a new Brother printer was the most painless thing I've ever done on Linux, because I didn't do anything at all. Linux saw it appear on the network and it just worked.
    - Ferret7446 11mo ago
      New printers implement the print server themselves, which I assume is why CUPS driver support is being deprecated. Basically, they're all HTTP* servers so no driver/etc support is needed.
    - charlie-83 11mo ago
      It certainly can be for newer printers. I guess my point was that, at some point, you will run into a problem. It might not be connecting a printer but, with an Arch based distro, there is a high likelihood you will need to do some cmdline stuff at some point. In a Mint etc that likelihood is smaller.
s1mplicissimus 11mo ago
I've stopped recommending ubuntu for beginners by default, as the now only-wayland mode is beyond the level I can support
WD-42 11mo ago
If you want to game, then picking a "gaming distro" probably is the right choice. Sure, you could use Fedora. But you need to know about enabling RPM Fusion, 32 bit repos for steam, etc. Now THAT is how you get someone to give up.
- cwillu 11mo ago
  It's two checkboxes in the gui to enable RPM Fusion, and then you click “Steam”. It's not that hard.
  - sockbot 11mo ago
    Itemized bill: Chalk mark $1 Knowing where to put it $999
  - WD-42 11mo ago
    So easy it requires a 140 lines of howto: https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/quick-docs/rpmfusion-setup/ https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/quick-docs/rpmfusion-se... It's easy for us. It's not clear how someone coming from windows would even know that they had to do this, much less do it.
    - AuthAuth 11mo ago
      This is part of the installer now. New users will select this when setting the distro up
      - WD-42 11mo ago
        That is amazing news! My biggest gripe with Fedora has always been that it is recommended to new users and then 80% of the time they have an Nvidia card and you end up with "Linux sucks if you use Nvidia" even though the official drivers work well if you install them correctly (i.e using your distro-provided method, not going to nvidia.com and downloading a file which is what most people coming from Windows will do).
Jigsy 11mo ago
I concur. I use Linux Mint and I have no problems with gaming.
- peterashford 11mo ago
  I couldn't get Rocksmith 2014 running on Mint, which was a real PITA for me
skirmish 11mo ago
I tried to install CachyOS with KDE on my wife's new laptop (Lenovo Yoga) about 3 weeks ago. The version available was 2025-08-28 (still is, just checked), and it was crashing KDE all the time. Quick research told me that version had lots of KDE bugs that have been since fixed, yet no new release. Maybe it's different on Nvidia (wife's laptop had AMD graphics), but I expect a very bumpy road ahead of him.
- HumanOstrich 11mo ago
  Most of the updates to CachyOS are delivered via packages. You don't need an entirely new version of the distro image that often.
  - skirmish 11mo ago
    Right, I wanted to add that the journalist will be fine if they immediately update all packages but OTOH this is not what Windows users usually do.
    - pixelpoet 11mo ago
      I also recently got my FD, also switching to Linux, also chose CachyOS. Worked great for a day or two but now updates aren't working because of some signing issue or something :| Maybe I should switch to Fedora or Bazzite before getting too setup...
    - Sammi 11mo ago
      Have you tried updating everything using "sudo pacman -Syu" ? I just had to update my CachyOS install last night, as some software I wanted to install was just getting 404 responses from the repos. Turns out they don't keep round old packages? I dunno, but the update command above fixed it.
      - skirmish 11mo ago
        No, I didn't, after the third freeze and reboot I just thought "why am I wasting my time on this crap?", wiped it and installed regular Arch Linux instead. That one was stable out of the box.
oompydoompy74 11mo ago
It’s immutable, so if something goes bad it will just rollback. SteamOS, Bazzite, and others also work in a similar manner. I run several Bazzite boxes for gaming and they are nigh impossible to brick.
- J_McQuade 11mo ago
  CachyOS is not an immutable distro.
p1necone 11mo ago
Partially agree. If you're only using your PC to play Steam games and absolutely nothing else, especially if you want it to auto boot into Steams big picture ui and behave like a dedicated gaming console something like Bazzite is ideal. But if you're using your PC like a PC and also doing other stuff imo it's better to install a 'regular' distro like Fedora or Ubuntu. I haven't had any difficulty installing steam and playing games on either of those.
- vondur 11mo ago
  I think something like Bazzite would be great for those wanting to game. The fact that it's going to be hard to break the system and just letting updates be applied automatically will make it more like a console than a PC in that regard. I also assume that switching to the desktop mode is not difficult. I just started using Fedora Bluefin last year, and I've been really happy with it and it's architecture is the same as Bazzite, but for devlopers.
  - Lord-Jobo 11mo ago
    I found it incredibly stupidly easy to break bazzite trying to change something relatively simple that isn’t even a required step most of the time (automatically mount my second internal ssd). Copy and pasted some change in some file, save, restart, fully totally bricked.
  - moltopoco 11mo ago
    Switching from and to desktop mode works exactly the same as on SteamOS, but if you are not setting up a handheld or HTPC, Bazzite also has regular KDE/GNOME desktop images, and even -dx images like Bluefin. I've been pretty happy with my various Bazzite installations.
kachapopopow 11mo ago
actually I am running the most fk'ed up system you can find (two gpus from different vendors, dedicated usb pcie card, highly customized kde slapped on top of catchyos) and I haven't had any issues, way less issues than kde neon.
reisse 11mo ago
New user choosing operating system has most likely just bought a new laptop or PC. Especially for laptops, Arch (or anything rolling with latest kernel) _is_ the best choice, because of drivers.
graynk 11mo ago
> You do not need a "gaming" distro, all distros use the same software and you will be fine on ubuntu, fedora etc. That's not necessarily true. I mean, you will be fine, but gaming is one of the areas where you can benefit from having everything on bleeding edge. And Cachy is surprisingly stable (and the "one day things will stop working" can realistically be said about any Linux distro, really).
BoxOfRain 11mo ago
Honestly I've been pleasantly surprised with CachyOS, admittedly I've been using Linux for over a decade but it was my first foray into Arch-land and I'm genuinely impressed with it. The stability is very good, and I'm yet to break anything seriously on it. The idea isn't that it's a 'gaming distro' specifically, and more that it's suited to performance in general which can be a useful thing. If someone's new to Linux and doesn't understand why they might want to run something like CachyOS I agree they should just pick Ubuntu or similar and be done with it, but personally I rate CachyOS as a daily driver.

kevinfiol 11mo ago

Agreed. I'm surprised by the amount of Linux newcomers being directed toward these weird, specialized derivatives that have existed >2 years.

cosmic_cheese 11mo ago
It’s almost certainly driven by a desire for everything to work as expected out of the box. Speciality derivatives come with attention to detail and purpose-fitting that often isn’t found in general purpose distros, like how Nobara has a system to auto-apply fixes for common problems or how Bazzite includes an overlay for game stats (framerate, etc). Rolling and bleeding edge distros have been popular because people want to use the latest hardware. Can you get these things with a general purpose distro with older kernels? Sure, but the process varies depending on distro, hardware, use case, etc and isn’t necessarily accessible to many, even with the selection bias towards a technical mindset that comes with wanting to switch to Linux. It’s the same reason why Windows has been popular for so long and why Valve has seen outsized success with Linux: the fiddly bits have been minimized. Major distros could pull in many of these users by sinking resources into that golden “out of the box” experience and aggressive hunting down and fixing of papercuts.
- beeflet 11mo ago
  okay but this should just be upstreamed into a real distro, we don't need 1000 distros that are all reimplementing the same thing
  - cosmic_cheese 11mo ago
    There’s merit to that idea, but upstreaming is easier said than done. There’s a whole gauntlet of politics and bikeshedding to get past among other issues, which is why these things are separate distros in the first place.
  - WD-42 11mo ago
    Bazzite provides a Steam-OS gaming-centric interface out of the box. How are you going to upstream that? You think Debian stable is going to agree all of a sudden provide it's users a gaming console UI?
    - saint_yossarian 11mo ago
      Isn't that just Steam's Big Picture mode?
      - __aru 11mo ago
        It's an entire login session, steam game mode runs BPM via the game scope compositor, no desktop is loaded in the background, etc. The Steam client also enables hardware controls not available in traditional BPM. You can look up gamescope-session for more info. Its something that I generally wouldn't expect on traditional mainstream distros.
    - theevilsharpie 11mo ago
      Debian -- probably not, but Ubuntu has numerous variants whose primary purpose is providing a different desktop experience, and a SteamOS-like variant would fit in perfectly with that.
      - cosmic_cheese 11mo ago
        That’d still come with the limits brought by the old kernels Ubuntu ships. Which as an aside, I think distros should advertise better. It must be awful to be sold on a distro only to find that it doesn’t support your newish hardware. A simple list of supported hardware linked on the features and download pages would suffice but a little executable tool that will tell you if your box’s hardware is supported would be even better.
- johnny22 11mo ago
  i don't have a problem recommending people use bazzite because of the nature of the whole system. It makes it harder for regular users to break it, while making it easy(er) to rollback.
brendyn 11mo ago
To me, I find it a bit frustrating that Arch linux routinely has "manual intervention required" problems every single year where the intervention is just a single command that pacman could have just ran themselves if they so desired. Sometimes, they get a new developer and you have to manually install their keys first otherwise packages fail authentication. What can you do in the face of that except conclude they don't want things to "just work" and create a derivative in the hopes of making things just work.

galleywest200 11mo ago

Is it bad? SteamOS is an Arch based and extremely user friendly gaming-focused distro.

charlie-83 11mo ago
If all you want to do is play steam games then I'm sure steamOS is going to be the best experience possible. If you want to use it as a regular PC it probably works reasonably well but a user who doesn't want to use the terminal is more likely to run into a brick wall at some point (e.g. connecting to a printer or something). Something like Linux Mint is going to give an overall friendlier experience for someone new to Linux even if running steam games on it is slightly less friendly.
- pelotron 11mo ago
  Ironically connecting a new Brother printer was the most painless thing I've ever done on Linux, because I didn't do anything at all. Linux saw it appear on the network and it just worked.
  - Ferret7446 11mo ago
    New printers implement the print server themselves, which I assume is why CUPS driver support is being deprecated. Basically, they're all HTTP* servers so no driver/etc support is needed.
  - charlie-83 11mo ago
    It certainly can be for newer printers. I guess my point was that, at some point, you will run into a problem. It might not be connecting a printer but, with an Arch based distro, there is a high likelihood you will need to do some cmdline stuff at some point. In a Mint etc that likelihood is smaller.

s1mplicissimus 11mo ago

I've stopped recommending ubuntu for beginners by default, as the now only-wayland mode is beyond the level I can support

WD-42 11mo ago

If you want to game, then picking a "gaming distro" probably is the right choice. Sure, you could use Fedora. But you need to know about enabling RPM Fusion, 32 bit repos for steam, etc. Now THAT is how you get someone to give up.

cwillu 11mo ago
It's two checkboxes in the gui to enable RPM Fusion, and then you click “Steam”. It's not that hard.
- sockbot 11mo ago
  Itemized bill: Chalk mark $1 Knowing where to put it $999
- WD-42 11mo ago
  So easy it requires a 140 lines of howto: https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/quick-docs/rpmfusion-setup/ https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/quick-docs/rpmfusion-se... It's easy for us. It's not clear how someone coming from windows would even know that they had to do this, much less do it.
  - AuthAuth 11mo ago
    This is part of the installer now. New users will select this when setting the distro up
    - WD-42 11mo ago
      That is amazing news! My biggest gripe with Fedora has always been that it is recommended to new users and then 80% of the time they have an Nvidia card and you end up with "Linux sucks if you use Nvidia" even though the official drivers work well if you install them correctly (i.e using your distro-provided method, not going to nvidia.com and downloading a file which is what most people coming from Windows will do).

Jigsy 11mo ago

I concur. I use Linux Mint and I have no problems with gaming.

peterashford 11mo ago
I couldn't get Rocksmith 2014 running on Mint, which was a real PITA for me

skirmish 11mo ago

I tried to install CachyOS with KDE on my wife's new laptop (Lenovo Yoga) about 3 weeks ago. The version available was 2025-08-28 (still is, just checked), and it was crashing KDE all the time. Quick research told me that version had lots of KDE bugs that have been since fixed, yet no new release. Maybe it's different on Nvidia (wife's laptop had AMD graphics), but I expect a very bumpy road ahead of him.

HumanOstrich 11mo ago
Most of the updates to CachyOS are delivered via packages. You don't need an entirely new version of the distro image that often.
- skirmish 11mo ago
  Right, I wanted to add that the journalist will be fine if they immediately update all packages but OTOH this is not what Windows users usually do.
  - pixelpoet 11mo ago
    I also recently got my FD, also switching to Linux, also chose CachyOS. Worked great for a day or two but now updates aren't working because of some signing issue or something :| Maybe I should switch to Fedora or Bazzite before getting too setup...
  - Sammi 11mo ago
    Have you tried updating everything using "sudo pacman -Syu" ? I just had to update my CachyOS install last night, as some software I wanted to install was just getting 404 responses from the repos. Turns out they don't keep round old packages? I dunno, but the update command above fixed it.
    - skirmish 11mo ago
      No, I didn't, after the third freeze and reboot I just thought "why am I wasting my time on this crap?", wiped it and installed regular Arch Linux instead. That one was stable out of the box.

oompydoompy74 11mo ago

It’s immutable, so if something goes bad it will just rollback. SteamOS, Bazzite, and others also work in a similar manner. I run several Bazzite boxes for gaming and they are nigh impossible to brick.

J_McQuade 11mo ago
CachyOS is not an immutable distro.

p1necone 11mo ago

Partially agree. If you're only using your PC to play Steam games and absolutely nothing else, especially if you want it to auto boot into Steams big picture ui and behave like a dedicated gaming console something like Bazzite is ideal. But if you're using your PC like a PC and also doing other stuff imo it's better to install a 'regular' distro like Fedora or Ubuntu. I haven't had any difficulty installing steam and playing games on either of those.

vondur 11mo ago
I think something like Bazzite would be great for those wanting to game. The fact that it's going to be hard to break the system and just letting updates be applied automatically will make it more like a console than a PC in that regard. I also assume that switching to the desktop mode is not difficult. I just started using Fedora Bluefin last year, and I've been really happy with it and it's architecture is the same as Bazzite, but for devlopers.
- Lord-Jobo 11mo ago
  I found it incredibly stupidly easy to break bazzite trying to change something relatively simple that isn’t even a required step most of the time (automatically mount my second internal ssd). Copy and pasted some change in some file, save, restart, fully totally bricked.
- moltopoco 11mo ago
  Switching from and to desktop mode works exactly the same as on SteamOS, but if you are not setting up a handheld or HTPC, Bazzite also has regular KDE/GNOME desktop images, and even -dx images like Bluefin. I've been pretty happy with my various Bazzite installations.

kachapopopow 11mo ago

actually I am running the most fk'ed up system you can find (two gpus from different vendors, dedicated usb pcie card, highly customized kde slapped on top of catchyos) and I haven't had any issues, way less issues than kde neon.

reisse 11mo ago

New user choosing operating system has most likely just bought a new laptop or PC. Especially for laptops, Arch (or anything rolling with latest kernel) _is_ the best choice, because of drivers.

graynk 11mo ago

> You do not need a "gaming" distro, all distros use the same software and you will be fine on ubuntu, fedora etc. That's not necessarily true. I mean, you will be fine, but gaming is one of the areas where you can benefit from having everything on bleeding edge. And Cachy is surprisingly stable (and the "one day things will stop working" can realistically be said about any Linux distro, really).

BoxOfRain 11mo ago

Honestly I've been pleasantly surprised with CachyOS, admittedly I've been using Linux for over a decade but it was my first foray into Arch-land and I'm genuinely impressed with it. The stability is very good, and I'm yet to break anything seriously on it. The idea isn't that it's a 'gaming distro' specifically, and more that it's suited to performance in general which can be a useful thing. If someone's new to Linux and doesn't understand why they might want to run something like CachyOS I agree they should just pick Ubuntu or similar and be done with it, but personally I rate CachyOS as a daily driver.