This is exactly what I think every time someone recommends CachyOS or Manjaro to new users. Arch is great, but it expects the user to know how to deal with things, it expects user to read the news and it pulls the rug periodically because it expects you to be able to figure things out.

In your case in particular I don’t think it was Cachy on its own, otherwise we would have seen other users affected, but still, it’s likely that the Arch philosophy got you because of something you changed without even remembering and now with the update your config is no longer backwards compatible.

NixOS is great, but it’s a very different paradigm, you will not be able to install things from the graphical interface as you’re expected to declare your system. And it can never be compatible with a graphical installation as that would beat the whole purpose of reproductible builds.

I think what you’re looking for might be something like Bazzite, where the core system is immutable but you get user space freedom. But personally, if 0 downtime is your goal NixOS is better, as you can rollback to previous generations of your system if something goes wrong, but to get that you have to pay the price of declaring your whole system which might be too steep to pay for some.

I think NixOS is a superb choice if you have the time and energy to invest in it. I’m currently using Guix System (a GNU fork of Nix) and I’m very very happy with it. Previously I’ve been on openSUSE Tumbleweed because I thought the most important thing for me was btrfs with an easy snapshot system. But then, one day, when I was writing ansible playbooks to configure my OS I realized that what I care most about is declarative configurations. Now I’ve completely stopped using ansible for my laptop/desktop, and just rely upon native Guix configuration. I love it.

I do still run MicroOS on all of my servers because it “just works” and I think transactional systems are great for servers. Recently, however, I’ve been thinking about trying out NixOS/Guix System as my server OS of choice, but we’ll see how that goes.

If you’re willing to put in the time, I think you’ll love NixOS.

Edit: Nix/Guix are also transactional.

Ubuntu was the first Linux distro I tried, and I’ve never tried anything else, across three laptops. I’ve never experienced problems like the ones you describe.

I know its frustrating when this happens. But there is something called arch-chroot, its a program to fix your messesd up os. New users don’t know about this, but as you keep using Linux, you get familiar to these programs. It takes few mins to fix broken system using arch-chroot. I hopw your system won’t break anymore.

What would your ultimate distro be like?

The one that fits one’s needs the best. Given your frustration with unstable systems, I’d say the best ones would be those that take longer to make major updates, like Debian, Mint and Slackware, as then issues aren’t introduced as frequently, and older ones are better known and easier to fix or even preemptively circumvent.

cachyos is not a system for newbies, or absolute stability. nix isn’t it either.

try fedora, debian, ubuntu, mint or something newbie friendly if you want a newbie friendly experience.

So I made the jump to Linux a few weeks ago - I used to use it a lot in the 90s but I’ve forgotten pretty much everything so I listened to the general advice and went with mint. I’d recommended it. So far it’s been great, had anticipated issues with my drivers but nothing I couldn’t sort out in the GUI. There are distro options out there that will give you fewer issues - but if you like problem solving and wanted to challenge yourself, enjoy!

I think the fault here is at Cachy OS for shipping experimental and advanced stuff as if it is ready for most users.

When I installed it recently on an old machine I purposefully stayed away from these fancy options and chose EXT4 + Grub. I admit having some bad memories about casually using btrfs also made my choice easy. No, most users don’t want to have to baby sit their file system.

Anyway, what even is the point of a system restore functionality if it hasn’t been thoroughly battle tested? They should have been behind an “ADVANCED/EXPERIMENTAL” disclaimer or something until it is very hard to break (including brtrfs not borking itself) and actually rescues users from a bad time rather than creating more problems.

Use something stable and boring like LinuxMint. No issues in 7 years.

Going from CachyOS to NixOS because you bricked something is wild. You very clearly have no clue what you’re doing and I regret to inform you that your choice of distro will not make an impact. But it isn’t all bad — you could stop panicking and acting like you know what you’re doing and learn about the technology you’re trying to use.

Or keep switching distros forever. I’m sure that will work too.

I’ve been loving Mint; the one thing I missed was WoW Classic but I finally found out how to get it to run under Steam and it’s been relatively great! <3

So first of all, you could likely still access your drives when you boot from a USB. Goes for any OS

secondly: if you play with fire, don’t complain about the blisters. And yo be clear, with fire I don’t mean Linux, with fire I mean specialty distro

You need to ask yourself what you want. If you want something shiny and cool that does certain security things that are awesome but not really that needed for the average Joe, then fine, go with whatever.

I on the other hand need a Linux distro that works, that I can trust. I have been using Kubuntu (Ubuntu with KDE UI) for over the last 20. There are bugs, like everywhere, but bugs like “this little widget doesn’t respond right”, not “oh my OS suicided again”

First of all U don’t need to reinstall anything switch to tty firstly and find out what wrong happened second u can boot in usual live cachyos iso chroot in ur main system and reinstall all packages of system it might help but better firsrly understand what caused this

This will sound like heresy to some, but get away from the bleeding edge. You probably don’t need the absolute latest version of every little thing. It can feel cool knowing you know how to fix a borked install but actually having to do so sucks. Dump the hype and get to something stable for your daily driver. If you want to experiment, do it on another drive/machine. Building a custom rocketship is cool, but you should probably build it without breaking the truck you use to go get parts.

Pardon me for asking so … but if you yearn for the “stability” (“simplicity”?) of Windows why not use a Linux distro with an approach more similar to that?

So something not Arch based, … and even tho NixOS almost kinda is the correct direction (for an arch-ish thing), I got the feeling you don’t really want to configure your system & potentially upkeep that config?

Also to note that the actual issue wasn’t fully diagnosed. Reinstalling the full os to fix an update is fairly extreme for your mainstream Linux these days.

But to be at least a bit on topic - bcs I need “simplicity” & “stability” at times when I can’t even (for months on end) I use Tumbleweed (rolling distro).