Concerns about negative press

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1

I wasn’t expecting to come across this, but I found an article from a medium sized news company called the register. Needless to say, the review was pretty negative to others I have read.

Whether you think the criticisms are valid, keep in mind that many readers aren’t very knowledgable on all the intricacies of linux. The author seems to pin a lot of blame on the developers of Cachy OS rather then others. I do think that you should offer a different desktop environment for installing CachyOS. I really do not believe that Kde is a great option. I think either lxqt, xfce or cinnamon would be a better choice. This article touches on a prior conversation in which I asked about plans for a possible alternative installer, this is why. Fair or not, you will be judged at face value by those readers and the author.

2

Hi,

Generally, I understand this article. But CachyOS is simply not done for the hardware they have tested.
They are using a super old not supported nvidia cards.

ThinkPad W520

Not supported

NVIDIA Quadro 1000 GPU

Also not supported

Complaining about too less packages installed

CachyOS comes barebones, that is intended to avoid bloat

We had to mount the CachyOS root partition for the Ubuntu version of GRUB’s os-prober to find it, but it wouldn’t boot, giving an error:

Maybe an issue of the Ubuntu bootloader? We have dozens of people, which are using OS PROPER on UEFI.
We are also not really want to support non UEFI systems, even tough we are still doing it. Maybe we should go the ciritical step and completly cut this people out, which is general something which we wanted to do since long time, but kept it for support of these old devices.

but most importantly adds openSUSE-style snapshot support and rollback

CachyOS has this too, simply a button in cachyos-hello does this

Despite downloading a just over 2.5 GB installation image, the installer won’t start until you make an internet connection because it always installs packages from the online repositories. For anyone on a metered internet connection, this is a very bad option. We feel the installer should offer you a choice, but it doesn’t.

This is explicitly intended. The requirements for for installing CachyOS are noted in the wiki, and that it requires a minimum of 50mbits. There is an offline installation available as fallback, but we do not support this.

However, we had repeated problems with installation failing to complete: Several times, but not only, at the final stage of installing the bootloader.

Using wrong partition schemes, because it seems they have installed “alongside” or “replace disk”. The parititon schemes of each bootloader can be also found in the wiki:

The installation media is slow to boot because it copies the live system into RAM, but even with 24 GB of memory, it doesn’t cache the package files.

What? This sentences does not really makes sense. Copying to RAM is slow → Slow USB Stick. Copying to RAM is only enabled for 8GB or higher configuration.
and why should it cache package files? Installing old packages does not make sense for an online installation

The installer was also unable to pick up an existing swap partition, even when pointed at it, and installed the ZRAM in-memory swap daemon instead.

Intended

Both UKUI and Cutefish consistently failed, with the window manager not starting

Cutefish has been removed, so it seems not using the latest ISO, see netinstall: packagechooser: Drop cutefish · CachyOS/cachyos-calamares@3857b81 · GitHub

UKUI I have made around 8 installations about this article, with different VPN connections as well as on barebone and QEMU. No issues has been observed.

Just my comments so far. It seems that this writer did not made any basic research in terms of what is published in the wiki. This should be for a reviewer really a basic task. If they would have just read the minimum requirements, then 80% of these issues would be not existent.

I dont want to say that everything is perfect. Package Updates, Online Installation can cause issues - no question.

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3

i doesn’t see any possible alternative installer, except the "arch way".
i follow calamares , more or less, from the start and i used calamares frequently, but calamares never worked as expected.

4

We are working on an own Framework, which can be used as a CLI and GUI Installer, but this takes a bit of time and I dont expect to replace Calamares till End of 2024.

5

I agree with your assessment. The hardware was the first thing that jumped out at me. And the whole complaint about stability with the installer was about the only thing that I could really empathize with. Calamares is not exactly my favorite installer based on past experience but it is the only major option at the moment. It is the most used one, even for debian distributions.

Calamares is not all that bad if you know a few tricks, mainly the nohup and disown command. Not many people are aware of this strategic approach to avoiding the install troubles.

6

I look forward to seeing the result of it. Who knows? Maybe by that point you lemine might be in a good enough state to include it as a boot loader option. I am already deeply appreciative of the work done to provide a cachy version of dracut. You guys are the first I have seen to give it a serious inclusion in the arch community.

7

Silly article, CachyOS seems to work like any other Arch distro I’ve tried except it’s way faster because of the v3 packages.

8

The article may but its readers are not. Not everyone is privy enough to have an informed opinion. Three quarters of the complaints from the author seem relatable until you realize how incompetence factors into the discussion. The author fails to understand why it didn’t work well. I was able to count at least 6 instances of user mistakes. The biggest one of note is without a doubt, the hardware. Apparently the author complained that they didn’t want a noisy gaming laptop. They wanted a big battery. I question what makes them think that such a laptop fitting their desires even exists, and if it does, the odds of it working well with linux are bound to be piss poor. A quiet gaming laptop. I have never heard of such a farcical computer out there.

9

Actually, after this article we had a massive amount of traffic and a lot of new users too. So, does not look too bad.

We can not do anything against these press. If this is their opinion - this is fine. We are not a company and it does not do us any damage.

1 Like
10

Interesting. Well it is good to hear that. That does show that any coverage of the distro seems to attract more attention that is driven by curiosity rather than assumption.