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?
As a newbie it is easier to set up Cachy. When shit hits the fan either fixing it on Arch or Cachy would give a similar experience to a noob I think.
I understand it might be a fluke or that I am at least a minority in this issue. But that makes troubleshooting harder. I’m even on all AMD hardware.
It’s interesting that the whole idea about stability (the system not breaking) shifts from the developer to the user.
Yes, but Arch prepared you for it. Arch philosophy is one of teaching you why you need to do something, and then how to do it, so if something breaks you have some vague idea of what was and how to fix it. CachyOS is Arch, it has the same expectations of you knowing things, and having read the wiki, but you skipped the tutorial. This is why me and many others despite the idea of recommending an “easy” Arch to newbies, it’s not easy and only causes trouble.
Arch is very unstable (in the sense that anything can change) and that means it’s easier to break things if you’re not careful with things you don’t know to be careful about. For example, not saying that this is your case, but I’ve seen people install drivers and programs through binaries downloaded form a webpage like they would on Windows, that is a TERRIBLE idea as it will likely break on the next update, and if it’s something important like a GPU driver you will be dropped to a terminal.
It’s not about being a minority, it’s about we don’t have all of the info so can’t help you. From the info you gave us I can tell you it’s not something known, as I haven’t seen it being reported by others, which means it’s something specific that you did to your system. Every thread I find for CachyOS update breaking things is a unique case where the person did something.
And I know your knee jerk reaction will be “I did nothing, I only updated”, but that’s probably not true, otherwise we would see other people reporting the issue. If simply updating now was enough to break the system we would be hearing from hundreds of people whose system broke. But we haven’t, the only report we have is yours, which very likely means you did something different from everyone else. And I get that you don’t know what it is, when I first started using Linux I used to break my system every couple of months, and I always thought it was the system fault, but guess what? It wasn’t. Eventually I learnt to use Linux and my system never broke again, I can’t tell you for sure what I was doing before, but clearly I was doing something.
Well, that’s bound to happen if you own the system. Same reason most companies have a warranty void if you fiddle with the internals, once you do that it’s impossible to say if the issue was caused by you or them, and the same thing is true for a Linux system. My guess here is that you changed a config, or installed an unofficial package or something or the sort, it might have been months ago, but now the update changed one of the underlying things and it broke. I would probably lean to the config side of things, since I don’t expect you installed anything critical from outside the repos. Or another possibility is that you went a long time without updating, that can have consequences on Arch systems.
PS: I get it, I know this seems harsh, I know you’re probably thinking “I did nothing, this Linux is unstable and finicky”, I know that because I was in your shoes 20 years ago. Arch is not for everyone, even some extremely knowledgeable people dislike the high maintenance it sometimes imposes, for new people without experience it can be like walking on a landmine field. Which is why I always recommended more newbie friendly distros like Mint, because they try to be more stable in all senses of the word (you can still break them though, as you are in control of the system, but it’s more difficult).