Linux

This will sound like heresy to some, but get away from the bleeding edge. You probably don't need the absolute latest version of every little thing. It can feel cool knowing you know how to fix a borked install but actually having to do so sucks. Dump the hype and get to something stable for your daily driver. If you want to experiment, do it on another drive/machine. Building a custom rocketship is cool, but you should probably build it without breaking the truck you use to go get parts.

What would your ultimate distro be like?

... Debian.

Pardon me for asking so ... but if you yearn for the "stability" ("simplicity"?) of Windows why not use a Linux distro with an approach more similar to that?

So something not Arch based, ... and even tho NixOS almost kinda is the correct direction (for an arch-ish thing), I got the feeling you don't really want to configure your system & potentially upkeep that config?

Also to note that the actual issue wasn't fully diagnosed. Reinstalling the full os to fix an update is fairly extreme for your mainstream Linux these days.

But to be at least a bit on topic - bcs I need "simplicity" & "stability" at times when I can't even (for months on end) I use Tumbleweed (rolling distro).

Im always surprised how different the windows expirience seems to be for many people or do they ignore all the searching for drivers, editing registry entries, running sketchy bats, trying compatibility modes until something works, random blue screens, shutdowns that are reboots.

How long have you been using Linux, so on the one hand you still keep thinking about Windows. And on the other hand you already progressed to an Arch derivate, use BTRFS, snapshots, a non-standard bootloader and all that stuff?

I like NixOS. But it's really for people with too much spare time to learn new programming languages, abstract concepts and weird quirks. It's great. But sometimes you'll also do a simple nixos-rebuild switch and it'll greet you with 4 pages of gibberish. Or you'll spend 3h packaging some weird Python stuff, because you can't just install and run it like on a regular distro 😅

You must have been of Microslop for a while if you think frustrating issues on update is a Linux thing. Just last a couple weeks ago, Microsoft released a security update that locked people out of their "C" drive. (In Windows, this is bad)

Why reinstall instead of just repairing the issue at hand?

We had to do that in Windows too.

Use something stable and boring like LinuxMint. No issues in 7 years.

If I'm being completely honest, it sounds like you hit a problem and then just kinda gave up (I'm not trying to sound mean or anything - please don't take it that way).

If I were in that situation I would probably drop to a terminal (ex. CTRL+ALT+3) and try to find what failed (journalctl). Especially if the screen just stayed black I would probably wonder what packages I just updated. I'm not going to remember, but it's probably something graphical. Maybe I installed nvidia dkms packages and I have a mismatch or I decided to try out a different login manager and it happens to not support Wayland or something. Snapshots would be my last resort, not my first.

As far as NixOS, I love it. Its incredibly stable and the declarative language is really handy to write in. I'm not aware of any graphical store though (outside of maybe some github project). Its declarative meaning you write the configuration.nix file and import any secondary files into the config. And packages are installed declaratively:

environment.systemPackages = with pkgs; [
    # GNOME core + extensions
    pkgs.gnome-tweaks
    pkgs.gnome-control-center
    pkgs.gnome-terminal
}

I would say if you are wanting GUI that NixOS is probably not a great choice. I mean just to get installed package version, you're going to have to do a one-liner (mine for example):

#!/bin/bash 
find /run/current-system/sw/bin/ -type l -exec readlink {} \; | sed -E 's|[^-]+-([^/]+)/.*|\1|g' | sort -ui

cachyos is not a system for newbies, or absolute stability. nix isn't it either.

try fedora, debian, ubuntu, mint or something newbie friendly if you want a newbie friendly experience.

no "ultimate distro", but i do wish there was a bigger culture of "no regressions for users"

Plasma 6 has been a series of regressions for me, such that i find my computer a little less functional almost every time i update.

That said i still like it miles better than mac or Windows, which are even worse about this

Ubuntu was the first Linux distro I tried, and I've never tried anything else, across three laptops. I've never experienced problems like the ones you describe.

I know its frustrating when this happens. But there is something called arch-chroot, its a program to fix your messesd up os. New users don't know about this, but as you keep using Linux, you get familiar to these programs. It takes few mins to fix broken system using arch-chroot. I hopw your system won't break anymore.

This is exactly what I think every time someone recommends CachyOS or Manjaro to new users. Arch is great, but it expects the user to know how to deal with things, it expects user to read the news and it pulls the rug periodically because it expects you to be able to figure things out.

In your case in particular I don't think it was Cachy on its own, otherwise we would have seen other users affected, but still, it's likely that the Arch philosophy got you because of something you changed without even remembering and now with the update your config is no longer backwards compatible.

NixOS is great, but it's a very different paradigm, you will not be able to install things from the graphical interface as you're expected to declare your system. And it can never be compatible with a graphical installation as that would beat the whole purpose of reproductible builds.

I think what you're looking for might be something like Bazzite, where the core system is immutable but you get user space freedom. But personally, if 0 downtime is your goal NixOS is better, as you can rollback to previous generations of your system if something goes wrong, but to get that you have to pay the price of declaring your whole system which might be too steep to pay for some.

Why sometimes Linux is hard to switch to

Switching is easy. Sticking to it is harder and involves relearning most of your activities in a new context.

So now I face another reinstall…

I'd honestly think that CachyOS was more 'sturdy'. Though, I suppose it's curious that you don't mention anything about your troubleshooting attempts. Beyond your rollbacks in hopes of resolving the issue*. If you don't like/want to (learn to) troubleshoot, then reconsider if CachyOS is your home.

FWIW, over (almost) 4 years of Fedora Atomic, I was only once 'forced' to reinstall; which happened in the first week (or so). And that was 100% a user error.

This and having to dive into the deep end of terminal commands to get drivers, programs or games working can be quite frustrating.

This isn't recognizable to me. Would you be so kind to clarify/elaborate? Perhaps with an example even?

I understand why people are turned off and go back to Windows…

The only time I felt this, was when I just cold-turkey switched to Fedora Silverblue and bashed my head to the wall when trying to implement Madaidan's hardening 😅. But, again, that was just very naive.

Onto NixOS for me.

NixOS is definitely based. So go for it.

What would your ultimate distro be like?

Stateless, and hardened AF. So, probably an amalgamation between your favorite security-focused Linux (be it secureblue or Qubes OS) and NixOS for its impermanence module.

You might be interested in an immutable distro. Like Bazzite or other Silverblue / Ublue flavoured system. They are recent but not bleeding edge, deploy well tested images that apply as all-or-nothing. Very stable, very featurful :)

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.

So first of all, you could likely still access your drives when you boot from a USB. Goes for any OS

secondly: if you play with fire, don't complain about the blisters. And yo be clear, with fire I don't mean Linux, with fire I mean specialty distro

You need to ask yourself what you want. If you want something shiny and cool that does certain security things that are awesome but not really that needed for the average Joe, then fine, go with whatever.

I on the other hand need a Linux distro that works, that I can trust. I have been using Kubuntu (Ubuntu with KDE UI) for over the last 20. There are bugs, like everywhere, but bugs like "this little widget doesn't respond right", not "oh my OS suicided again"

First of all U don't need to reinstall anything switch to tty firstly and find out what wrong happened second u can boot in usual live cachyos iso chroot in ur main system and reinstall all packages of system it might help but better firsrly understand what caused this

Under linux you have the option to not reboot after an update, use that power wisely.

You did not, so you took a risk and lost.

I see people recommending Debian but you also said you enjoy tinkering, so I'd recommend SpiralLinux. It's basically Debian but it uses BTRFS so you can roll back to a previous snapshot if you break something. I don't think Spiral has updated to Trixie yet so you'd need to manually upgrade but that's not too big a hassle if you do it immediately.

So I made the jump to Linux a few weeks ago - I used to use it a lot in the 90s but I've forgotten pretty much everything so I listened to the general advice and went with mint. I'd recommended it. So far it's been great, had anticipated issues with my drivers but nothing I couldn't sort out in the GUI. There are distro options out there that will give you fewer issues - but if you like problem solving and wanted to challenge yourself, enjoy!

I think NixOS is a superb choice if you have the time and energy to invest in it. I'm currently using Guix System (a GNU fork of Nix) and I'm very very happy with it. Previously I've been on openSUSE Tumbleweed because I thought the most important thing for me was btrfs with an easy snapshot system. But then, one day, when I was writing ansible playbooks to configure my OS I realized that what I care most about is declarative configurations. Now I've completely stopped using ansible for my laptop/desktop, and just rely upon native Guix configuration. I love it.

I do still run MicroOS on all of my servers because it "just works" and I think transactional systems are great for servers. Recently, however, I've been thinking about trying out NixOS/Guix System as my server OS of choice, but we'll see how that goes.

If you're willing to put in the time, I think you'll love NixOS.

Edit: Nix/Guix are also transactional.

What would your ultimate distro be like?

The one that fits one's needs the best. Given your frustration with unstable systems, I'd say the best ones would be those that take longer to make major updates, like Debian, Mint and Slackware, as then issues aren't introduced as frequently, and older ones are better known and easier to fix or even preemptively circumvent.