Please I beg of you, just recommend people Mint. Catchy is great, it’s very easy and smooth as arch goes.

But if you have someone who is under the illusion that Linux is hard. The moment they have any issue it might frustrate them enough to bounce off. I know so many people who have gotten recommended some flavor of the week like Manjaro, Bazite, Pop_Os or Nobara, who that has happened with. I’ve never talked to anyone who was recommended Mint with Cinnamon, used it, and then decided it was too hard and went back to windows. Plenty of people will say “well I used XYZ and didn’t have any issues” or the issues were minor enough and the answers easy enough that they stuck around, but that’s survivorship bias, the people who didn’t deal with it aren’t here to say otherwise.

So just send them to cinnamon mint, there will be no hiccups, it will just work. Maybe later they’ll be like “yah, I kind of want to see what else is out there” and then they can try other things. I get that, cinnamon mint is limited in some ways, but not in ways a first time Linux user is going to care about.

LMAO Cursing your friends isn't nice, CachyOS is for those that are comfortable with Linux...And the dreaded Arch.

I think SteamOS Desktop is what will tip the balance. People want a corporation with a familiar and quality reputation. CachyOS, Bazzite, Fedora, Arch, Red Hat, all are just weird entities that the ordinary person wouldn't know.

As for myself, I will pick CachyOS or SteamOS, depending on what reviews say when comparing the two. I want flexibility for modding and some other power-casual stuff, but also want documentation and a large community of people familiar with my OS of choice. SteamOS is likely to be that choice, assuming that Valve doesn't mess up.

Gone from Windows to Ubuntu based to Fedora based to finally an Arch based distro with CachyOS over the last couple of years and I have never once regretted making the jump.

Especially since I still have a windows install that I use for a couple of very specific uses that I can't do on Linux and it's a pain in the proverbial every single time.

recommends arch based distros to everyone

“Wait why do you guys say linux is complex and difficult!?”

I’m a NixOS fanboy now :/

Let me suggest you EndeavorOS

i used to use cacht, but after updating to kde plasma 6.6 it would freeze after i put the correct login and password. thankfully it has snapshots, so i could just not update it for a while.

i waited for 6.6.1, and instead of freezing it just closed and reopened the login page. 6.6.2 went back to freexing forever.

so i gave up, and installed base arch to see if that'd work, and it did! i also found out that archinstall is a thing! (i had installed arch manually many times a while back, and the clock time always broke) i did break it once by not configing limine snapper correctly, but now it's great, and feels basically equal to cachy (except things don't break and there isn't a bunch of unecessary programs installed)

Why is cachyOS the current thing?

I'll Bully Spam every gaming CEO until they support ONE god damn Linux distro like SteamOS. SLOP MICROSLOP SLOP, anticheat doesn't fix shit! BF6 is basically proof.

On W11 I have gotten 2 popup ads for copilot today. Linux users, i know you think W11 is bad but its worse than you think.

CachyOS is a good option. maybe not as a brand new person to Linux but it's fast and has everything you need.

Bazzite is fine too if you just depend on flatpaks which might make a windows to linux transition easier.

I'm currently trying PikaOS for the week and it's ok. It's fast, games as well if not ever so slightly better than CachyOS, but it feels a little TOO opinionated. For example if you install the Niri version (and I assume the hyprland version also) Kitty is baked into it to the point were potentially removing kitty breaks other dependencies. I don't like that. Kitty is a bloated mess of a terminal and I'd much rather use Foot. Also the Pikabar thing is garbage. it's a fork of Noctalia with ALL the options stripped out of it for whatever reason. But PikaOS is very easy to install and fairly minimal with what it does install. It's nice but it's kinda all over the place with things.

I'll probably just end up going back to NixOS in a week anyways.