Switching from Nobara to CachyOS as a semi-noob - is it the right choice? :O

CachyOS Community
4

Bonjour! I am also still a noob (I installed Cachy 6 months ago and this is my first “real” Linux experience after playing around with several Live-ISOs in the past years).

Regarding AUR:

  1. There is a popularity level. Quote from the site: “Popularity is calculated as the sum of all votes with each vote being weighted with a factor of 0.98 per day since its creation.” The package you mentioned has a popularity level of 3.15, which is pretty good. Also, always take a look at the number of votes and when the account was created. In your case, the account exists since 2019 so it is safe to say the account is solid
  2. Always look at the “Last Updated” timestamp. Be very suspicious when a package is older than a month or two because it will much likely depend on outdated packages which is a risk in itself
  3. As others said already, you should check the PKGBUILD script, but that is a little overwhelming, even for a software developer like me
  4. My personal rule of thumb: I try to avoid AUR packages whenever possible :wink:

Regarding other distros: On my laptop, I tried Mint, MX Linux and Kubuntu and I didn’t like any of them, especially the snap-package-philosophy of Ubuntu is a waste of precious hard-drive space in my eyes. I failed installing Cachy on that machine, so I settled for TuxedoOS (because the machine I own was once rebranded as a Tuxedo laptop, so I was hoping for good hardware support and that hope was met).

Regarding “apps from various sources”: I would advise the same as @mattsteg : try to avoid too many sources, especially in the beginning. I had to learn that not everything is updated when you do a system update, even with cachy-update and adding more sources generally means more manual work on your side.

I also just recently had to learn about *.pacnew files and how to handle them, which is something nobody tells you in the beginning.

Generally speaking I would advise to watch some of Chris Titus’s videos on Arch maintenance (for example this one but also the whole playlist) or this famous video by PewDiePie and the reaction by Michael Tunell to get a general feeling of what you are about to jump into. Also, the Arch Llinux Wiki page on system maintenance is something to dive into better sooner than later.