EDIT: Since I mentioned it I might as well link it
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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.
recommends arch based distros to everyone
“Wait why do you guys say linux is complex and difficult!?”
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! ;)
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.
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
That’s why bleeding edge distributions should not be recommended to new users.
LMAO Cursing your friends isn’t nice, CachyOS is for those that are comfortable with Linux…And the dreaded Arch.
Better than normal Arch I guess… idk I would give beginners Mint, Ubuntu or maybe Debian.
