I tried it recently and had so many issues with it like apps not indexing in the “open with” file menu, and flatpak apps not interfacing with any system functionality.
Who the heck did that!?
I see lots of people doing it on reddit
Well there’s your problem. But really, it’s because long-time distro hoppers will finally find the one that meets all their needs and assume it meets everyone else’s needs as well.
About the only thing other than Mint that I recommend to beginners is Endeavor or Bazzite if they need gaming. And even then, is lean toward Endeavor first just because it’s less modified and they’ll get more consistent results during troubleshooting.
But yeah, new users really don’t need anything other than the bare minimum otherwise they’re likely to get turned off pretty quickly by documentation not lining up to their distros edits.
I’d not recommend Endeavour. It’s just a preconfigured Arch, which is great if you want Arch but not great for users not used to dealing with Arch.
Which is why I only recommend it when people need the bleeding edge for gaming stuff. It’s my recommendation if they need more than Mint and Bazzite doesn’t work well with their hardware. And even then, I try to avoid Bazzite since it does a lot of non-standard stuff with the setup.
Arch is good if you already know what you want, but if someone needs the bleeding edge and don’t want to configure Arch, it’s the most straightforward route.
That’s weird, there’s only a handful of distros I would recommend against for newbies and that’s one of them.
As far as Arch-based distros go, CachyOS has a lot of helper tools included, and a lot of GUI programs. That’s probably why people consider it beginner-friendly.
I wouldn’t really consider CachyOS as a beginner distro. It’s probably the most accessible for anyone looking for something highly optimized, but there are plenty of others that are easier to set up and use.
Been daily driving Cachy for a couple years now, and I love it. It’s not for everyone, though.
Yeah, it has more graphical abstraction than Arch but nowhere near enough for a beginner!
I tried CachyOS. Took three tries for the installer to install without bombing on an error. Third time I got it after changing file system type to ext4 and not using full disk encryption.
Then I updated everything post-install. Black screen. No boot. AMD CPU and GPU.
Installed Fedora KDE. Works perfectly. Haven’t looked back in three months since leaving Mint.
I, too, don’t understand it. I’d rather install straight Arch. The archinstall works fine.
I’m almost in awe at how unlucky you were. Out of hundreds of cachy installs on countless system. Iv never seen or heard of such problems.
It’s weird how that happens sometimes. Back when endeavourOS was all the hype i tried installing it in a vm multiple times, and for some reason the installer would always fail. But everyone was singing it’s praises, so i’m assuming i just had bad luck and tried it at a bad time.
Yeah I’m sure it was an outlier. I’ve never had such a hard time installing a distro before.
I’ve always been very confused why fedora isn’t the go to distro…I mean I do understand why Ubuntu is so popular to newcomers but I’ve never understood why fedora always goes unmentioned
It’s by far been my easiest out of the box experience for regular desktop use
At least for a long time, you had to set up RPMFusion to be able to play media, and having the additional repos tended to break on major upgrades for a bit after release
So, for beginners, it was a bit painful to suggest
Yes, thank you! Ubuntu, in my opinion, is not a beginner friendly experience. It also tends to break easily, at least in my opinion. I’ve had ongoing problems with Ubuntu, as soon as I installed Fedora all the problems went away.
I used it as my first Linux OS and didn’t have any issues. I didn’t use flatpaks though? I just used the AUR.
Because it is the only distro I tried so far that works 90% smoothly for a MacBook with T2 chip. Wifi doesnt work yet… but with fedora, ubuntu, mint, pear and debian I had no wifi, keyboard or trackpad.
Just use EndeavorOS
Bingo! Arch with an easy installation and core tweaks almost any user needs. Then you install just the apps you want.
That said I believe CachyOS has some out of box apps that make sense for the gaming oriented user base it is usually aimed at. Not sure the performance difference is worth the hassle beyond some very specific use cases.
Cachy is literally just more sane gamer defaults. It also holds your hand with updates more then endeavour with it’s updater. That would be why.
How to define a beginner? A kid, new to computers or someone who was able to install a local win11-user and now switches to Linux or maybe a bankruptcy mac-user?
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Agreed. The need for Flatpak goes way down in a distro with access to the AUR.
I use Flatpak for pgAdmin because the Arch packages are terrible. But it is the only one.
Probably the same reason people were pushing to get people on MX Linux not that long ago.
Because it’s cachy \s
I installed it on my Lenovo Legion Go, as a recommendation from Google Gemini after the fallout from Bazzite. It has gone well overall, with only a handful of issues (controllers not detected, SD card mounted as an SSD, screen not always turning on, Bluetooth headset connecting at low quality, WiFi dropping signal) that were all solved with a few minutes of querying AI and running the recommended commands in Konsole. Without AI, though, I’d have been lost.
Genuinely curious but what was the fallout from Bazzite? Wondering what I missed lol.
This is the “post-mortem”: https://ba.antheas.dev/bazzite-postmortem.html
