It took me quite a while to get my CachyOS running. I finally made it and am happy with it. Just asking what where your experiences, and what else do you maybe know, like from statistics or other people? I’m thinking to recommend COS to some friends. Do you think that my installation struggle is common? OTOH: do you believe my experience is an exception and it’s quite likely that my friends will have a smoother installation process? kindest rgds, M.E.N.P. <3
Its impossible to say whether anything is alike or how frequent such occurrences are if we do not know what we are comparing to.
What was your ‘struggle’ ?
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All I can offer is that generally my Arch installation experiences are inconsequential. I chose my hardware for Linux compatibility and usually get it right.
Certainly I have seen issues with hardware compatibility but for the most part, that’s going to be on any Linux (and perhaps more so the older Debian based ones with regards to newer hardware).
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First: I had the interesting behaviour that at end of installation the standard bootoader errored out, which i think caused some other things not to be installed too. systemdboot kinda said it’s not installed (gen) but using the setup command it said the opposite. I figure it didn’t like my partition setup. (or was it ‘cuz W11 is installed in parallel? not sure…)
- After installing GRUB from a liveUSBstick it went into recovery mode. There where some partitions not found. Maybe ‘cuz i made a ext4 boot partition, but btrfs root partition, while the EFI one is fat32? not sure.
3rdly: After clearing THAT away, it didn’t start into graphilcal mode, some kernels booting with a dimmed screen so i barely could read the CLI. When i got that fixed, added and configured some more stuff and brought over some older user data - now it’s a great blazing fast experience, quite the opposite of the other system installed in parallel 
p.s.: I still have some copy pasted error messages, but I think all of my “issues” I caused by myself or are already discussed (and fixed) in other forum posts. or solutions in wikis present. I could at least figure everything out on my own without special help, other then online reading resources. Which btw is awesome!
very true. my humble experience too. (using older, AMD only HW.) I tested several dozen distros the last 2 years btw. use GNU/Linux Distro’s since 1997… many installers didn’t agree with my “demands” so that’s fine, I’m not complaining. I am quite happy <3 there is freedom to do things the way you want if you accept the addtional work. I will listen to any advice here though when considering friends not as enthusiastic as me - but OTOH also not as deviating from “standard ways” ….
My install was anything but easy. I have a total of 10 hard drives (6 sata, 4 M.2) in btrfs raid 10 which completely changes the install methods. I had to use an AI engine and many many hours of install processes since my hardware also is a bit high with 192GB of RAM and I also forgot to disable the integrated video on my MB and have a NVidia 4070 Ti Super video card. In my opinion if you are running a single hard drive and new hardware the install should be a wizard install. If you have anything that is not fully and completely supported on the hardware/bios/drivers then you will have some difficulties. I personally do not know what works and what doesn’t for drivers other than many things are trial an error after error on my side. I do love my COS now and it is working Marvelous with the latest patches and updates on my drivers!
I experienced a few issues when installing COS on a 2nd SSD (other one Windows), however, mostly because I didn’t prepare too well, so that’s completely on me (Secure boot, TPM, Bitlocker, etc). With other distro’s I experienced issues with my laptop brightness (100% all the time,) and spend numerous hours modifying configs but finally gave up. With COS no issue and everything went really smooth, until sleep-mode didn’t work (it can’t be too good, can it?). Fans kept spinning, issues with black screens at startup, non responding, etc. The issue is/was the Nvidia card i.c.w. an AMD CPU/GPU and powerstates. Again some hours (try) solving that (drivers, etc.), but nope (I finally disabled it and that was it). I can live with that because I play games on the Windows SSD and COS for productivity. I’m still learning and one day I’ll probably figure it out (Nvidia), but for now it’s (blazingly) fast, silent, stable and nicely configurable with KDE Plasma and a good repository.
I am on a desktop and have installed Garuda, Nobara, and CachyOS. None of them gave me any issues with my hardware. However, it looks like laptops, it is hit or miss from some of the posts I have seen. Your friends, what sort of skill level do they have? Maybe it would be better to recommend a newbie distro like Mint or Zorin.