7
EDIT: Since I mentioned it I might as well link it
LMAO Cursing your friends isn't nice, CachyOS is for those that are comfortable with Linux...And the dreaded Arch.
this post was submitted on 06 Apr 2026
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Better than normal Arch I guess.... idk I would give beginners Mint, Ubuntu or maybe Debian.
I'd recommend Ubuntu or Mint for most new users; straight up Debian only in cases when the user don't need the latest or greatest in terms of updated packages. As Debian is great, I've used it as extensively as Ubuntu...
However, Debian is built against older drivers and kernel, making it stable, if not a bit stale.
Ubuntu is a bit fresher with a higher kernel version (packages can still be behind something like openSUSE or Arch, Debian based distro truth). However, flatpaks allow for more recent software versions!
I install most of my software via Flatpak and Snap anyway, so I don't need the latest and greatest in terms of apt packages, and Debian brings the benefit of a rock solid base.
I agree, so many people disregard Debian, but if you're not gaming and don't need to keep up with the latest things - Debian is rock solid and most of your packages you can just use flatpak. For the majority of daily users who aren't gaming, I think it's a super solid choice.
I game on debian and I don't run into problems. I use lutris and have played pragmata with no issues (other then some nvidia reflex issues)
i don't recommend ubuntu anymore. recently tried it on my laptop and holy hell it's bad. couldn't install flatpaks and the only way to install from repo was to use terminal. couldn't get any version of steam to work at all. and I've been a linux user for years now...
also for some reason mint wouldn't install on the same thinkpad, the installer wouldn't boot at all, just gave some grub message. also fedora was no success, the usb media wasn't recognized. ultramarine finally worked even though it's just fedora with tweaks. some say it's a bad thing to have tons of distros, but for me it's been a blessing. one distro won't work for every pc.
I was pretty successful doing the terminal commands necessary to make flatpaks work on Ubuntu in recent memory, as out of the box the distro is Snap centric. Its odd you had so many issues on a fresh install of Ubuntu. Oof, sounds like my legendary problems with Arch.
Yeah, Mint requires some workarounds on older hardware. Its possible, but, probably not worth it unless you've got a burning desire to use Mint on that hardware.
i looked up multiple guides to enable flatpaks and all i achieved was that i could install them from terminal, but the apps never actually appeared so i couldn't run them.
took me a while to realize the default store is snap only, but i couldn't install another store either (can't remember why). if i wasn't so pissed i probably could've figured it out, but steam not working was too much of a dealbreaker that it wasn't worth the effort
Something fundamental must have been wrong with your install and you needed to do a total reinstallation of Ubuntu. As personally I had no issues with that, I was able to install the Flatpak for Warehouse and then used Warehouse to install/manage other flatpaks (I prefer that over installing yet another store).
For me all i had to do was a handfull of commands to get flatpaks to appear in the software store. https://flathub.org/en/setup/Ubuntu
I think it is annoying that Ubuntu software store defaults to snaps, and it is easy to not notice this at first and be mystified why you can't find normal apt packages.
Also, snap and flatpak packages often have problems that the system version doesn't have. For example, flatpak Firefox cannot access machines over the local network by their network names (e.g. hostname.local), and that is just a limitation of flatpaks.
The snap for Steam also sucks but it is useable enough at first that I wasted a bunch of time trying to get it to work better, and eventually just installed the .deb the way Valve intended.
Arch isn't necessarily unstable or "dreadful". It's a distro that requires the user to know what they're doing and to be a tinkerer by nature. Whether this is a feature or a downside is dependent on the user.
But I agree with you, recommending an Arch based distro to someone who is not a tinkerer and just wants to use the PC - which is the vast majority of PC users - is a mistake.
PS: I use EndeavourOS btw
I heard cachy was better than average arch in complexity. I am very new to Linux with minimal computer skills and have been very happy with bazzite but most of my friends I try to convert are cachy loyalists
CachyOS is still going to demand more from you than Bazzite in terms of computer skills...Manual interventions (because the Arch Team cannot help themselves but move too fucking fast). Not like I can complain about that, given I have openSUSE Tumbleweed installed and am in SELinux range.
Bazzite is nice, as it can be as simple or as complex as you'd like!
I am loving, loving KDE and Bazzite. It feels like such a mature operating system compared to ol' Windows :D
It is. Fedora is on version 44
Cachy is great for newbies. There's no tweaking required, at least not more than mint. The AUR has all your weird niche programs you had on windows that apt and flatpak don't have. It just works out of the box.
So you say, but, the installer...Man that thing doesn't want to work with my system (even with secure boot off). It was the one that had the most failures with not creating a boot record, failing to install the Linux kernel, or the NVIDIA drivers. Other distros have very polished and sleek installer experiences (rarely issues as a bonus). CachyOS, in my personal experience I don't find it to be a good one. On paper, it is (I did a lot of reading to figure out how to get CachyOS installed).
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.
Please I beg of you, just recommend people Mint. Catchy is great, itβs 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. Iβve 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 βwell I used XYZ and didnβt have any issuesβ or the issues were minor enough and the answers easy enough that they stuck around, but thatβs survivorship bias, the people who didnβt deal with it arenβt here to say otherwise.
So just send them to cinnamon mint, there will be no hiccups, it will just work. Maybe later theyβll be like βyah, I kind of want to see what else is out thereβ 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! ;)
Fedora does this unfortunate thing, which I have not researched how to turn off yet. It will schedule a restart for you, and then just restart right in the middle of whatever you were doing, kind of like windows in that respect.
That IS unfortunate o.O. How weird!
Every other distro I've used has just been like "Hey, some of this stuff was system integral, recommend a restart when you feel like it. π"
Yeah, I'm used to Ubuntu and other Debian distros to act like that.
Zorin OS is also a good choice if they have a high resolution screen, because Mint's Cinnamon desktop has awful screen tearing when you increase the scaling.
Zorin user here. Might switch to Mint. Might not help, but after almost 2 years, I still don't know what I'm doing.
Unless it's flatpak.
But like, I have no idea how to update my bluetooth driver. And I really want to.
There are other utilities that I can't install. It's like the tools you need to install to make linux easy still need terminal to install.
It's all "you're missing prerequesits. They won't be installed".
So you need to be smart enough in linux to install the tools to make it easy, but if you knew how to install the tools, you wouldn't need them.
recommends arch based distros to everyone
βWait why do you guys say linux is complex and difficult!?β
It just works out of the box. Not much tweaking required with cachy. Arguably less than other distros since all my weird niche prigrams are available on the AUR and not apt or flatpak.
Eventually some update will break stuff, and you'll be expected to know how to web search and fix it yourself
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.
No you can't, CachyOs is to gamers as Kali is to scriddies
Arch?
Yes CachyOS is based on Arch
Except with a sane installer, and more performance optimizations.
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.