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Comment by GeoAtreides | Hacker News Reader

>I picked CachyOS rather than a better-known distro like Ubuntu because it’s optimized for modern hardware,

>First challenge: My mouse buttons don’t work. I can move the cursor, but can’t click on anything.

Maybe should've picked Ubuntu? I suspect this is the Linus (tech tips, not Torvalds) strategy of picking up an obscure distro for content purposes. Can't really have an article if everything just works, right

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I suspect they sincerely picked CachyOS because they read people advocating for it, and were convinced by the advocacy. People advocate all kinds of distros, and all of them except the one I advocate are bad choices.

There's this reply in the comments from the author.

> Nah, it’s a problem with this particular mouse in X and Wayland and it’s been seen on Fedora and OpenSuse almost since the mouse came out. Not a Cachy issue, a nonstandard USB HID implementation by the vendor

Tbh, I don't even know what a distro would have to do to break this.

I don't think PopOS could be called "obscure". At the time that the LTT video came out, PopOS and Manjaro (IIRC) were the distros to game on, if you wanted up-to-date OOTB working drivers.

Even so, it was hard to take LTT's attempt at using linux seriously when part of it included Linus bitching about how right clicking a list of files on github and clicking "save link as..." didnt give him a copy of the file. It just highlighted how utterly clueless he was and made it clear he couldn't be trusted for the rest of the video either.

Ubuntu's UI isn't particulates intuitive for people coming from Windows anymore (it hasn't been for the past 13 years tbf).

Mint is the best default to advise to someone switching to Linux (it's mostly Ubuntu under the hood, but without the snap nonsense and with a less imaginative UI).

I really struggle when folks recommend a distro that is only now getting itself unstuck from a decade++ of inaction, starting an advance that other distros have been up to for decades.

Starting people out on a dinosaur has some advantages yes but personally I think it's malpractice, setting users up to have to make major painful shifts in the future to update all the derelict knowledge they gain. https://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?t=449033

> I really struggle when folks recommend a distro that is only now getting itself unstuck from a decade++ of inaction, starting an advance that other distros have been up to for decades

What are you talking about?

Agreed. As a long time windows user, I never liked ubuntu much (and always had issues with my hardware too). Mint has been amazing for me.

Yeah, if the goal of the article was to convince Windows users to switch to Linux then Ubuntu would provide as frictionless an install as Windows. Since the author chooses CachyOS, of course there's going to be some important steps during installation that need to be handled with some forethought and extra software to handle all hardware issues. After all, CachyOS is based on Arch Linux and inherits it's minimal mindset. But the article about switching from Windows to Ubuntu has been already written a thousand times.

It’s not exactly obscure. It’s Arch with a nice installer and binaries with compiler optimizations for the latest hardware. It’s not a crazy choice if you have very new hardware. It feels exactly like Arch because it is.

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