Normally I always forget why I still keep thinking about switching back to Windows. Today was a great reminder. Linux can be frustrating. This post is somewhat about awareness and partly about me learning about other peoples experiences. I updated my CachyOS as usual. There were some system packages upgraded and I got the notification to reboot. Figuring I’d do it later I left after some time and the PC went to sleep. Upon returning the screen stayed black. Even upon forced reboot. Remembering I was using Limine with BTRFS snapshots I tried multiple previous snapshots but to no avail. I remember this happened before. So now I face another reinstall… This and having to dive into the deep end of terminal commands to get drivers, programs or games working can be quite frustrating. I understand why people are turned off and go back to Windows…
Onto NixOS for me. A big dive but it seems very stable which might be just what i need. I feel like the philosophy of NixOS combined with a graphical store to install programs and what not seems like a great solution.
What would your ultimate distro be like?
Every modern distro keeps previous kernel boot entries available at boot time. You don’t need to use snapshots to simply not boot a potentially problematic kernel update.
There are literally near zero reasons to ever have to reinstall any Linux install. Moving to a more complex distribution isn’t going to solve your problem here, which is just learning a different workflow. That workflow being more akin to software development workflows: if something fucks up, just revert.
That’s what i expected the snapshots to do too. NixOS seems harder to bork so that’s why i was thinking about that one.
It’s no hard to break than anything else. I’m not sure you understand what the issue is here…
Yeah the issue is a weird bug that broke my install. The thing is that it can be fixed but the fact that it has to be fixed is already sucky.
NixOS seems to be agnostic of hardware and more serious about software compatibility. Hence my hunch that it would be less likely to bork.
Nix is simply a different distro with a declarative composition for its package management. You won’t be getting different behavior from package selections or anything like that if it’s a bug in the software itself.
Just letting you know.