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Comment by ajross | Hacker News Reader

> I installed CachyOS, a performance-focused Arch-based distribution

Ooph. It's frustrating to see the community starting (again) to get purchase in public mind share at exactly the moment when it's least prepared to accept new users.

The Linux desktop right now is a wreck. EVERYONE has their own distro, EVERYONE has their own opinions and customizations, and so everyone is being pulled in like 72 different directions when they show up with search terms for "How do I install Linux?"

For a while, 15-ish years ago, the answer was "Just Install Ubuntu". And that was great! No one was shocked. Those of us with nerd proclivities and strong opinions knew how to install what we wanted instead. But everyone else just pulled from Canonical, a reasonably big and reasonably funded organization with the bandwidth to handle that kind of support.

Now? CachyOS. Yikes.

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I totally get that. But I read about it, and that custom kernel with the BORE scheduler really caught my eye, especially for music & gaming.

I know a lot of people suffer from shiny object syndrome, and to some extent I do too (realistically something like Ubuntu or Fedora would have served me well), but it is what it is.

It's not anything about CachyOS in particular, frankly I don't know it and I'm sure it's fine. It's that the culture of "I'll grab this known-good base and tweak it, then advertise it to the world as the next best thing" is just toxic for Regular People wanting to learn about stuff.

Imagine if you were trying to, I dunno, introduce your friend to Minecraft. And instead of the base game someone handed you a menu of crazy modlists. Is that representative of the feature set you think they're looking for in a casual game?

People coming to Linux are coming from a culture of "I've used MacOS or Windows for years and know how it works, where's the browser?". They're very much NOT looking for experimental kernel scheduler implementations!

There are at least a dozen very stable and reliable distros with decades of history and support in addition to the cool new “hey guys I made a OS!” types.

> There are at least a dozen very stable and reliable distros

Exactly. "WTF?! There are a dozen distributions?!" Users love customization and choice when they understand it. No one wants to be confused. The Linux desktop world is a confusing mess right now.

Also note that the distinction between "very stable and reliable" and "hey guys I made a OS!" is only obvious to people who know how the distro is put together.

But that's the point. Choice and customization. It's the natural result of FOSS and the as-designed modularity of the Linux ecosystem.

Exploring popular options and finding what works for you is easier than it has ever been, and fun too. The difference between Linux today and the Linux of old is that for most setups, all the pieces you choose can fit together nicely and "just work." Despite all the different flavors and variations and distributions and desktop environments and window managers and the like, pretty much every popular distro uses a recent or near recent version of the monolithic Linux kernel + system-d, so all the important stuff is more or less the same (with tweaks here or there.)

I use it for a month as daily driver. For Linux it is ok.

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