Venting: CachyOS is great unless you want to do anything
Just me venting. I've been using M$ platforms since 1989 so I know how to download more RAM. After (1) Having a Steam Deck and using SteamOS, which works pretty well in desktop mode and having poked around Ubuntu in the past. (2) Seeing Linus' videos on trying linux, and that going ok even for those idiots (3) Watching any tech youtuber talk about how windows is the antichrist (agree) (4) Using Claude ai to answer questions / feed me terminal commands and (5) Watching a video or five about which linux distro to use... I though well shit lets finally give Linux a try. CachyOS seems popular and uses Arch which is the backend for SteamOS, so that experience will transfer over.
I specifically wanted to set up a new NVME SSD (Samsung 9100 Pro) using TGC OPAL hardware encryption so there's no performance hit. I was looking at using SEDutil but my boy Claude tells me it's jank from 9 years ago and wanted to set me up with using LUKS and some other shit to handle the hardware encryption. Alright so that took like 4 hours, and there's a bug with my motherboard (MSI B650 Pro) that if I restart the PC (anything but the a dead cold boot), it hangs forever and never POSTs. If I hit the reset button it proceeds, but then leaves the other SSD with windows/NTFS in a dirty state so now Linux can't read it. Ok I don't actually restart that often so if I know it's a problem I can work around it.
So since I'm doing a non standard CachyOS install with the hardware encryption, I end up with a terminal and nothing else, then claude has me install the desktop environment and all of the other shit with commands through the terminal. Alright then we get booted into KDE Plasma and have some more terminal stuff to do and... where the fuck is the terminal? Oh I need to download that using Discover. Ok Konsole loaded.
Then on mistake number 1, using Discover to load things. "But that's what Discover is for" I hear you say, sure, unless you want the program to work. Using Discover loads flatpaks which are self contained programs that have all the dependencies included. Great right? Nope they're sandboxed and can't talk to each other or the system. So when I loaded Waterfox and Chromium, they couldn't interface with KeePassXC my password manager of choice. Ok so uninstall waterfox and reinstall it through "sudo apt get" NOOOOPE that's a different linux. Arch linux uses "pacman". Alright so load through pacman and NOOOOPE the program you want is not part of the offical distro, so use "yay". Alright so use "yay -S program" and NOOOOPE, CachyOS doesn't include yay or something and so you use "paru" instead. What the fuck are these names? (See meme.)
Alright so up and running, I need something to control my CPU fans since I have a gaming computer. The googlemachine points me toward "coolercontrol" so I do a paru to get that and load it up, it detects all of the sensors but then can't actually control the motherboard fans. Oh well. Lets reconfigure my logitech mouse buttons. So there's "Piper" for mouse stuff and it doesn't detect either of my mice. Ok lets try "solaar"... ok that tells me my mouse's battery level but nothing else really. Ok lets try "input-remapper" which works for some of the buttons but not the DPI up or DPI down buttons, unless you use some other utility to disable those buttons to make them mappable. Oh and good fucking luck trying to get that to apply the next time you startup.
Hmm why are all of the colors flickering a bit... oh because I had adaptive sync on. Turned it off and now my colors are stable (Gsync / freesync compatible screen)
Hmm you know the colors seems to look really shitty. (I noticed this on the steamdeck after they switched to "Wayland" from "X11".) How do I adjust the brightness and contrast, where's the nvidia control panel? Fuck you that's how. Oh shit ok. Well there's tool called "nvibrant" that some dude made lets try that. Oh wow my screens look good again. Restart. Oh no they look shitty again. How do I make that apply to every boot, is there an autoexec.cfg somewhere? Yeah just use this terminal command that might as well be in Chinese and is as long as the litany of the machine spirit and light some incense. Oh it didn't work. Turns it it was a race condition between nvibrant running before the compositor actually drew the screens.
I used Claude ai to give me the terminal commands for most of this and did some googling on the side, and there is no fucking way I could have done this by myself. If you look on reddit or other forums the linuxtards will inevitably respond with "mAyBe iF yOu rEaD tHe dOcuMenTaTion yOu cOuLd fIgUrE iT oUt". Bitch I have a job. Even reading the arch wiki and endless forum posts, you need to have an autistic level of base knowledge to even start. I spent half of Saturday getting from formatting the drive to the terminal, then 8 hours on Sunday working through these issues.
So CachyOS and linux in general is probably great unless you want to (1) Use hardware encryption (2) Play games with kernel level anti-cheat (3) Control your fans or gaming peripherals... I didn't even think about the TrackIR or joystick or throttle (4) Understand anything that is going on in your operating system. (5) Have taskbars on both monitors. You can... but they're not synched.
Now there's some things I really like. The "KDE Plasma" desktop environment is amazing. I love the window and transparency effects. I disabled the animations on preference. Looks good, runs good. The "Dolphin" file browser is really good. I like the split view. (I use it old FTP style, I put the 'local' on the left and 'remote' on the right.) "Discover" app store would be great if it didn't set you up for failure with the sandboxed flatpaks. I like the concept of flatpaks, and I guess you can use "flatseal" to unsandbox things but I didn't get to it. They also need something like Discover for non-official things like "paru" is pulling in, and to select the option between flatpak and native install. Updating stuff in linux is probably the biggest improvement over windows, where there's a centralized console to do it. (It used to be that spam and pr0n were X% of internet traffic, I think it's been surpassed now linux program updates.)
And I understand that all of this software was developed by hard working and passionate individuals and teams that are doing it for no / not enough pay. And in that respect they're doing a great job. A lot of this is the chicken and egg problem. Program and peripheral developers only make a windows version because that's 95% of the gaming PC market.
Back to my use case: I stopped and thought, is there anything linux is going to do that windows doesn't, and the main benefit is not being microsoft. Actually that's the only benefit and it's a big one. I've done a lot of the windows 11 debloat / privacy stuff and it's pretty good, but I still have 9gb of ram allocated on startup. (Vs 3-4 from CachyOS) So I dunno I'm gonna stew on it whether to abandon the experiment and just try software encryption and stick winblows.
Discover helps you find and install applications, games, and tools. You can search or browse by category, and look at screenshots and read reviews to help you pick the perfect app.
With Discover, you can manage software from multiple sources, including your operating system's software repository, Flatpak repos, the Snap store, or even AppImages from store.kde.org.
Finally, Discover also allows you to find, install, and manage add-ons for Plasma and all your favorite KDE apps!
That all sounds good and leaves you wondering why it's not working.
And the encryption did work, it was just a pain in the ass to install, and it's just unfortunate that my hardware is bugged, which there was no way to know ahead of time.
You’ll do anything but read the instructions that most of these programs provide lol.
The reality is that Linux isn’t as supports or as easy to use as Windows. If you’re really don’t have time, it’s not just something you can’t expect to be as a drop in replacement for windows.
Making this entire post would’ve taken more time than searching through a document with a web browser.
It seems you’re incapable of reading in general. If you can’t be bothered to learn something new then don’t use it.
You’re complaining about needing to spend time to learn something new… No shit it takes time to learn something new. If you can’t be bothered to then don’t use it.
CachyOS is Arch based and you really shouldn't use it if you don't want to get your hands dirty. You don't need a gaming specific distro, at best they provide a few percent performance increase. Games will work fine on pretty much any distro, so just use something simple like Mint or Zorin.
Anyways the majority of your problems were caused by Claude. You can enable regular disk encryption in the CachyOS installer and have a regular install with KDE from the get go. The performance impact is negligible, there is really no need for hardware disk encryption.
Yeah flatpaks suck I hope they fucking die soon. Sadly it does not seem to be going this way. Although you should have had Konsole already, Claude messed up, only giving you a minimal KDE installation without the base apps.
That giant terminal command you got is just a really stupid way to make a file. It could've just told to open a text editor and copy and paste in a much more readable file but instead it gave you this. And the method it used to run something on startup, a systemd user service, was stupid for this use case. It would make much more sense and be far simpler to have KDE autostart it, which would've been configured through a GUI.
Tldr ai is stupid, linux users are terminally online you can always ask on Reddit or discord and get some proper advice
Thanks for the input. The concept of flatpaks seems fine to me and even the sandboxing, but boy is that not obvious. I was wondering about the performance of software encryption. I use it currently for my HDD but the CPU is plenty faster than the disk so no problem, and I've used True/Veracrypt in the past on SATA SSD's for laptops, but never on NVME SSD's.
Eh I don't know about asking for help online, the GLOWING POSITIVE responses I've got in this thread is basically what I was expecting if I was to ask for help.
These posts make me laugh because, if your only motivation for using Linux is it's not Microsoft, please tell me one time Windows has ever put you through what you described here lmaooooo
Imagine if you didn't have Claude telling you what to do
Yep it’s why I gave up on Linux after fedora wasn’t working when I was just trying to play a game but it wouldn’t launch. I was blindly copy pasting commands from ChatGPT and was like this is stupid. I installed windows again the next dat
I think we've landed in the dystopian future we all feared, but I will now simp for Claude ai as my favorite datacenter driven megawatt consuming clanker. I signed up for the $20/month pro account, and it does a pretty good job at helping with computer stuff and programming. (Certainly as good or better than I could do in 1/10th the time.)
Nothing this bad in the Windows 10/11 era. I've been fucking with windows for 30 years trying to get it to work lol. It's not microsoft's doing that things work, it's that the platform is mature enough and the developers support it.
Imagine if you didn't have Claude telling you what to do
I wouldn't have even tried it without the ai feeding me commands. I've dabbled in other distros before like Ubuntu and it's great if you want to set it up on Grandma's computer so she can browse the interweb. I've also used it as a recovery console. Boot into a live USB of linux and then unfuck the target machine. And it works well on the Steam Deck desktop mode, but that's because Valve already worked out the underlying stuff to get it to work on that one hardware configuration.
What you described in the post most definitely wouldn't work out of the box on SteamOS either. This is customization, and it is attention-demanding by definition, since nobody can pre-make whatever you want from your machine.
If you want "just works" you'll need to stay in the validated well traveled path, preferably in distros managed by teams of people who are paid to do it. Linux gives you the capability to color outside the lines but you will be on your own.
There's a large portion of the community who thinks linux support and development is free, but everything has a cost, and it's paid either in time or money.
I use Linux exclusively and have experience with Arch, and using CachyOS felt like having the same amount of problems and troubleshooting with extra UI. It was miserable for me
I was asking if SEDutil on windows could unlock the drive then read it with WinBtrs. It was steering me toward using LUKS. I told it I wanted to go with SEDutil and it gave me a plan to do it. I started doing it, but couldn't get the SEDutil downloaded with paru and gave up on it there. Skill issue I guess. 🤷
Next time, don't try the fancy distro of the week-month-year or whatever some neckbearded internet guy recommends. Try something that's tried-and-true, well supported and with TONS of documentation and users like (K)ubuntu or Debian. It saves your sanity. Will this work better for you? I don't necessarily know lol.. but it does for me. Using software encryption will def help too if you want easy mode.
Sure. How is one supposed to know that? 🤷 And yes, it was a good learning experience. In my post I wanted to outline the problems that I had and the solutions when found, so that it hopefully helps someone (somebot) in the future.
Generally-speaking, you can cut yourself on the bleeding edge. Especially when you don't know how to use it, or when you modify it further.
I second what the commentator above said: try daily-driving a more standard distro first, like fedora or ubuntu. There's a reason why Luke was the one to install CachyOS and not Linus; you need a lot more technical skills (or time and effort) if you're going to use anything Arch-based.
But yeah, absolutely; the community is built around those who are hyper-technical. That comes with some major downsides, like people not knowing which distro to use or what to install.
Feel free to use AI to help you! It can be massively helpful, especially when you just want to know syntax or the like or are chasing down a really finicky bug. Just don't let it talk you into doing things like custom installs unless you absolutely absolutely have to.
Yeah it's lame how LLMs are also picking up on the hype that neckbears make on their distro choosing. But I've tried Linux Mint, Pop!_Os, Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Fedora and Debian. And now I know which of those worked best and in what regards.
Pop!_Os right now ships a desktop environment (COSMIC) that's frankly just not very feature rich yet, I don't want to be alpha or beta tester. Next we have Linux Mint which is a solid OS with a stable base (Ubuntu), but lack features because their Cinnamon DE is not very feature rich compared to GNOME and KDE. Next, Fedora is what I am running right now u/powerdynamics2000 just commented that it's a more standard distro. Well yes, but if you want to not play troubleshooting simulator after an update, you better not run Fedora. Recently a MESA update messed up GPU acceleration and made me think my computer was dying. The updates go to quickly to have all issues ironed out. Kernels are sometimes so new that you can forget support for out of tree drivers since they might first need updates (capture cards, ZFS drive support)l
Landing me on my decision to only recommend Ubuntu, Kubuntu or Debian. Or well, Linux Mint but as a power user I won't really touch that because of Cinnamon.
Updates on these distros don't go as quickly, they've existed for decades and won't suddenly go away over night and there's tons over users, forums and documentation for them.
Everyone's free to choose but at the end of the day my computer just needs to work. I'm tired of playing troubleshooting simulator.
"So when I loaded Waterfox and Chromium, they couldn't interface with KeePassXC my password manager of choice."
That's a big issue when using flatpaks. I had the same problem with jdownloader as flatpak. The extension couldn't communicate with the software.
"Bitch I have a job"
That's exactly why I have left linux. I was fed up with wasting my time tinkering my system because I wanted to install a program not available in repositories or to make unrecognised devices work.
"And I understand that all of this software was developed by hard working and passionate individuals and teams that are doing it for no / not enough pay."
That's a myth. there are lots of big corps employees who work on linux and others tools (see the linux foundation). I don't say volunteers don't exist but when people have a job and a family, I don't think they have time to develop and maintain an OS.
You have summarized the problem with Linux. If you want a software that is not in the repositories, cross your finger that the developers made it easy to install on your distro. And when it's a compatibilty issue with hardware, good luck.
"and the main benefit is not being microsoft." yes there is no other interest than that.
"but I still have 9gb of ram allocated on startup" It's normal, windows automaticaly allocate RAM to the most used softwares. If you need to launch another software it will release ram.
"C'mon SteamOS you're our only hope."
Big corps like Valve are always the only ones that make linux evolve. After canonical and google they are the only ones who have made Linux usable for a wider audience for 20 years.
That's a big issue when using flatpaks. I had the same problem with jdownloader as flatpak. The extension couldn't communicate with the software.
I don't think I've used the same version of jdownloader twice lol. I didn't even know there was a browser plugin, I'll check that out.
The other flatpak issue I ran into was trying to get "bottles" (the container for "wine") to run some old windows games (simcopter). Couldn't find the OS root or the simcopter files. Where the fuck is it? Oh sandboxing and flatseal... eh I'll get back to this.
That is absolutely not a myth. Sure the kernel and other major component like KDE will get lots of corporate funding and contributions but even stuff as important as GNU coreutils will get much less corporate support, and there will be libraries and utilities in the dependency tree of these things that will literally be developed almost entirely by one guy with no funding.
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u/itbytesbob 16h ago
"I don't understand how flatpaks work or the implications of the encryption method I want to use, it must be Linux that is at fault"