CachyOs vs PopOs vs others?
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I had been rocking CachyOS for a year or so but the recent Nvidia drivers or something caused me a shit load on instability so I'm back on windows for now. Got tired of tinkering.
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While I like tinkering, I do want it to be relatively stable, not suprising me with issues when I need it.
I would suggest avoidig pure rolling distros then. Also bear in mind that usually the performance difference between distros is not really big enough to make a difference for most things.
I would consider something like Mint. But what I did on my new laptop was that I installed PopOS 24.04 Alpha and used gnome-session ("sudo apt install gnome-session") on it, though I've switched over to COSMIC now as I'm writing apps for it and it works for my games. It'll get regular kernel+mesa updates but the base os will remain "LTS stable".
You could also go the Fedora (KDE or GNOME spins) route, it has a regular update schedule, this might be a great option for you.
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but I wouldn't recommend it on a computer you're actively using
Debian is my daily driver on all my computers. Servers, desktop, laptop. Its called the universal operating system for a reason
Packages are regularly updated with bug fixes for security issues. Do you absolutely need the latest features for every software? Debian is fine unless theres some killer new feature you absolutely need.
Hardware support is mostly fine unless you have the absolute latest hardware (which OP doesnt). And backport kernels should take care of newer hardware
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Gnome 42.9 feels attacked.
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Debian 12.9 was released a few months ago based on kernel 6.1 LTS, the latest kernel is 6.13, with 6.12 being the new LTS.
Debian packages are updated for bug fixes and security updates, but they generally don't update to new versions.
If you're running KDE Debian, your version is plasma 5.27, meanwhile 6.3 was just released.
There are a massive amount of quality of life improvements that debain 12 stable will never get. Sure you can backport some, but then it's not really debain stable is it?
Meanwhile there are plenty of other distros that are almost just as stable, but have newer versions of everything. Not to mention the stability improvements of the newer software (one example is plasma 6.3 is a massive improvement over 5.27)
Like I said, I love Debian, but if you're doing daily driving of the computer, I think there are better alternatives
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It should lol. I'm not the biggest fan of Gnome but the newer versions have made so many improvements, I don't think I could stand using 42.9.
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is it really gnome 43+ that's better or that it has better wayland support?
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Wayland on Gnome 42 worked well enough for me, I definitely think the newer versions have made good improvements to Gnome itself, it just feels way more polished. The last 5 Gnome releases have so many improvements and are just way more polished. Some I can think of are the files refresh, quick settings redesign, new activities indicator (which would be especially useful with PopOS's tiling plugin) and that's just what I can think of between 42 and 45, when I stopped using it, I'm sure 46 and 47 have more. 48 will also soon be releasing with triple buffering support, which I love on laptops.
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There are millions of people out there who do 99% of their stuff in browser, and never need the newest shiniest features for graphics, or gaming or whatever. Plasma 5.27 works great for years. People only get fomo if they follow this stuff constantly. And most people dont. Lemmy/linux is a very niche gathering of nerds
To say that debian is not a good daily driver for most people, i still disagree for the above reasons
I'm not a professional or anything, but i get my basic photo and video editing just fine on debian.
For example, i used to chase all the latest and greatest digikam versions because "ooooh! New features!!"... In hindsight, there was nothing really that groundbreaking each update, and i just go back to using the core features that have been stable for years.
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Honestly you should be getting similar performance and package quality on all modern up to date distros. Pick whatever looks good to you.
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If it's worth anything I daily drive Bazzite but also only game around 20% of the time. It's still a great daily driver, does all I need it to do. Let me know if I can answer any questions.
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Prob gonna stick with cachy since im not having any issues, why do you like fedora/bazzite over arch/cachy? I cant really tell the difference
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I was more worried about compatibility and dependencies i might need and not know about, cachy seems to grab a lot of stuff that I wouldn't think to grab, not sure, installed cachyos and tired to open a steam windows game from my d drive noita and it worked/played fine using wine instantly. Not sure if the others would work as well as that. I think bazzite is based off fedora and also does what cachy does. I'm liking kde plasma, Im also liking a presetup version of hyprland (the 2nd most popular one, hard to remember name)
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I tried cosmic and wasn't a fan, felt too much like windows, really like kde plasma, like it more than windows, surprisingly like hyprland too, didn't think I would. Helped that the config I used had a tips/shortcut menu that was obvious to find.
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Have you tried EndeavorOS, any thoughts?
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I've been daily driving arch since 2021, it just works. In my experience, mother distros like arch tend to work better than downstream distros like manjaro or endeavouros. I haven't had any expreience with CachyOS yet though.
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It's also immutable
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I'm surprised to hear that, I don't think cosmics default configuration has much in common with windows. It uses a MacOS style dock and and status bar by default. I personally use it with just a status bar and always have tiling on, similarly to how one would use Hyprland or another tiling wm, since that's what I used before cosmic. I love plasma too, but the fact that you can't have separate workspaces per monitor unfortunately makes it unusable for my workflow.
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Not familiar with either arch or cachyOS, but I'm gonna go and guess that cachy isn't immutable(?) At least to me it's nice to know that neither myself or anyone else can break my system as all system files are read only. Additionally I quite like that I don't have to think about configuring or updating anything - it's all handled by the devs. That might not be for everyone but personally don't want to tinker with my PC that much, I have a server for that
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Yep, that was actually my second distros when I switched to Linux a few years ago (right after PopOS). Its a good distro, essentially Arch with a better out of the box setup. If were to go with an arch based distro today, I'd probably choose CachyOS for the package and kernel optimizations, but both are good.
Arch-based distros are definitely CLI centric, but if you don't mind that then its great! Just keep in mind it is a rolling distro, breakages aren't super common, but they can occur. A backup using Timeshift is probably a good idea. Also, I wouldn't rely too heavily on the AUR, remember they are unofficial packages and are more prone to breakage. Id prefer flatpak for GUI apps at least.
