Please tell me 10 (or more ;) Do`s & Dont`s for Cachy-Newcomers

General
1

Hello everyone,

I’ve been using Linux for about 10 years, tried various distributions, and really appreciate the stability of Debian and Mint.

There are now many reasons for cachy (I’m primarily focused on professional audio).

Arch-based systems have always given me headaches sooner or later in the past.

I know: that’s part of the Arch experience :slight_smile:

But I’d like to have some “cachy-rules” that will save me some headaches the next time I try caching.

Here are a few topics to consider:

  • KDE Plasma has the best integration - so should I go with it? (I’m so fascinated by Niri - but not at any cost :slight_smile:

  • Manage software via Pacman/Paru or OctoPi?

  • Which boot manager offers maximum ease of use and selectable snapshots during boot?

  • Which encryption method (home is basically sufficient) is the easiest on the CPU AND my nerves?

  • What other things should I (not) do for the most Debian-like experience possible?

My Usecase:
I have two ThinkPads (6/8Core, 32GB Ram) and, as I mentioned, besides office applications, I’m only focused on professional audio (Bitwig).

Thank you so much for your tips!

rockschmidt

2

Don’t be afraid to try out CachyOS’s Niri implementation. In in its current form it’s pretty unique compared to the other WM choices on the list in the fact that it runs an opinionated desktop shell out of the box. This shell, Noctalia, gives Niri a near desktop environment like experience and might appeal to you.

Do use all of the above at your leisure. pacman is the base package manager of Arch Linux. paru is an “AUR helper”, that allows you to make use of the AUR in concert with the rest of the package system that you maintain with pacman. Octopi is a graphical front end for both of those programs. You can toggle between the two with the green alien icon in the top bar.

Don’t use anything else. Unless you also intend on using Flatpaks as well(though there’s rarely a reason to given the software selection provided by the AUR).

I would personally just stick to managing Flatpaks with the command line, but graphical utilities like KDE Discover do exist they just need to be used with care. As long as you don’t install its optional dependency packagekit-qt6 you’re safe.

Do use Limine or GRUB combined with your filesystem using btrfs to have the installer automatically configure bootable snapshots for you. Whether you choose one or the other is largely a matter of whether you want to encrypt your boot partition, but the full list of features can be found here.

Since you don’t need /boot encrypted, the default selection of Limine sounds like what you’re looking for.

If you select the box to encrypt your system partition in the installer, it will be done with LUKS2. This should not fray your nerves.

Don’t expect a Debian-like experience immediately. It will likely take you a little time to adjust to the rolling release update lifestyle and there’s really nothing you can do to avoid that. Once you settle in and understand updating then everything calms down once again.

Don’t update too often. This is a frequent mistake that people migrating from other distro families make, exacerbated by update utilities(like cachy-update) that give you a pesky tray icon nagging you to update since you almost always have pending updates on a rolling release system.

While useful elsewhere, since you now have the potential to be updating hundreds of system packages that are frozen on other distros, updating too often increases the chances of broken packages that might present as much more serious situations than they really are.

Also if you updated every time there was a new version of anything, you’d drive yourself absolutely crazy. Seriously.

It’s best to update on a cadence. My suggestion would be every 1 to 7 days.

Don’t panic if something breaks. The drawback of bleeding edge rolling release is that occasionally things are going to go pear shaped. The advantage is that you’re using bleeding edge software, and when things do break they get fixed quickly.

If you’re not feverishly updating your system, it’s likely software you use will suffer regressions and you’ll never even know it since they were fixed within the same update window. This is why it’s useful to update when you’re about to stop using your system for at least a few hours. If you start using it again and something is wrong, often the fix is as simple as updating again, as time has already elapsed since something went wrong.

And if not, then that’s what snapshots are for.

There are pros and cons to rolling release, but the cons are well mitigated and once you fall into rhythm with it, it’s not nearly as frantic as it seems.

I could probably go on but I’ll stop for now.

3

Mostly just don’t do partial upgrades (Pacman/Paru and Octopi all fine).

Rather than trying to automatically migrate config file changes Arch distros create “pacnew” files when updates change. You need to merge these manually. Do not just blindly overwrite your existing configs (which include changes specific to your system).

This ALSO makes updates more trouble-free over time because it doesn’t get fooled by corner cases (unless you do)

Limine with BTRFS snapshots is the most “modern” snapshot combo for ease of use and development focus. Just don’t scrimp on your EFS partition size as it uses…more space than ideal.

Just select encryption at install and encrypt the full system. CPU load is negligible, you avoid any info leaks, and it’s hassle-free.

Overall stability in terms of not crashing is generally great. Just don’t update every 5 minutes.

4

Hey rockschmidt! Welcome! Are you sure about Cachy now? Cool :slight_smile:

I wrote a little bit on these topics here and here

5

Very helpful, thank you!
So better Flatpak or AUR, if i have the Choice?

6

It depends. There are packages in both flathub and the AUR that are packaged by the developers as official releases. There are also packages in both that are sketchy malware.

7

Okay, let me try to break that down for you. All views expressed are personal.

If you ask me: go with KDE during the installation process. It’s the most solid experience (for me at least, but I’ve been an actually happy Windows-user for 30 years, so ymmv).

Install Niri on top of that if you want to play around with a new kind of vibe, you may switch between them in your login screen.

But expect Niri to be configured via config file only, that’s where I back out.

And really, I can’t live without my Plasmoids and Panels and Taskbar niceties :grin:

  • Manage software via Pacman/Paru or OctoPi?

Right in that order, just as Dirge said. And like mattsteg mentioned, never do partial upgrades, for they are upsupported. That is: never ever do pacman -Sy (except maybe when you are in a live ISO environment).

  • Which boot manager offers maximum ease of use and selectable snapshots during boot?

I would guess Limine, but I will have to check that out once I figured out how to layout my Laptop with Cachy and LUKS and whatnot :smile:

  • Which encryption method (home is basically sufficient) is the easiest on the CPU AND my nerves?

I wish I knew :smile:

  • What other things should I (not) do for the most Debian-like experience possible?

Who will want a Debian-like experience? We are on Arch, BTW, remember? :rofl:

Jokes aside, I really would not want a Debian-like experience when that is what you get with Mint, Ubuntu or Tuxedo (which sums up my Debian-derivative experiences so far).

Just yesterday, I was pretty annoyed by the fact that a flatpaked Audacity does not respect my global dark theme because $containerReason. Like, really, I can’t stand these inconsistencies that flakpaks/appimages/snaps/$insertFavoriteContainerSolutionHere bring with them :confounded_face:

Oh, and let me add two things: cachy-update and maclean will be your friends sooner or later even sooner.

8

Hello everyone, and thank you all for posting comments to the original post by @rockschmidt – I am also working through CachyOS for a primary use case of professional audio development and a secondary use case for Proton Steam games, game audio, and just music. For about a month or two, I was sidetracked by setting up a new studio environment and furniture–there are a lot of wires, and a lot of labels!

I tried CachyOS-KDE Plasma last fall with my first attempt at integrating my 4th gen Focusrite Scarlett 18i20 interface, using early Arch (AUR) drivers based off of early work by Geoffrey Bennet. I have since upgraded to Focusrite Clarett+ 8Pre with Claret+ 8OctoPre, and today’s search indicates that both of these are now improved and working. I’ll take another look.

I started learning about Bitwig DAW last fall, since I have a copy that came with my LinnStrument purchased last summer. I am about to upgrade it to the new Bitwig 6. I haven’t looked at Reaper yet, but I know a few people that love it. I’m also learning how to use my iConnectivity mio XL for MIDI connectivity between my instruments, controllers, and DAW. It is Ethernet network capable, but most of my instruments are legacy MIDI or USB MIDI.

In January I started using Ubuntu Studio LTS (where everything suddenly just worked, including the Focusrite via USB Audio Device Class specification level of functionality, which was integrated nicely into Ubuntu Studio (or something from the flatpak Bitwig shimmed it up). I then tried Kubuntu LTS with all of the studio stuff hand installed, + low-latency kernel and AI stack. That was a good learning exercise, but the Debian flavor didn’t grab me like Arch, so I broke it by installing CachyOS on the primary i9 CPU TitanRTX workstation.

Currently, I’m trying Cosmic for the first time, with CachyOS. I may do Rust code later, and Cosmic appears to have a nice balance of simplicity and functionality.

I tend to break the audio a lot under Arch: this time it took me about a week, it was working well, testing the Clarett+ audio with the Star Rupture early access on Steam. I think I didn’t follow the guidelines everybody mentioned above. After a few days of updating with pacman -Syu, I saw some issues, and will need to seriously study the pacman logs and review the btrfs rollback steps or take log-based suggestive steps.

1. Now the loading of the Clarett+ device pair stack just cycles on and off in a loop, and it is painful to watch, I always start with the audio level down, so I don’t know if it would be destructively popping.

2. There were a few ALSA or pipewire updates that flashed in a few days ago… I’ll have to grep logs.

2. I turned off the TU102 HD Audio plugin (the integrated high-definition audio controller Turing architecture built into the NVIDIA Titan RTX (No, not again!), which I normally don’t use, since I use the studio monitors with the Focusrite interfaces. I’ll have to inspect if that was changed in anyway.

3. The CPU architecture was upgraded to v4, I may need to back it down to v3. It’s a large-cache i9, so it might be OK.

4. I noticed on Distrowatch today that there is another new CachyOS ISO available, I’ll check that version against the one I downloaded last weekend, but I think this time I will finally roll-up my sleeves and learn how to use chroot, I’m way over due for that knowledge.

5. I’ll need to review my btrfs notes and re-familiarize with snapper.

6. I’ll need to carefully review the comments everybody wrote above, and make sure I follow best known methods. Any suggestions or comments about things I overlooked are welcome.

Thank you.

I want to roll up my sleeves and get to work on making it work CachyOS.(Still might need the LTS kernel or even have a migration path to a immutable build, if I get some serious job work.)