I tried it recently and had so many issues with it like apps not indexing in the “open with” file menu, and flatpak apps not interfacing with any system functionality.
Just use EndeavorOS
Bingo! Arch with an easy installation and core tweaks almost any user needs. Then you install just the apps you want.
That said I believe CachyOS has some out of box apps that make sense for the gaming oriented user base it is usually aimed at. Not sure the performance difference is worth the hassle beyond some very specific use cases.
Who the heck did that!?
I see lots of people doing it on reddit
Well there’s your problem. But really, it’s because long-time distro hoppers will finally find the one that meets all their needs and assume it meets everyone else’s needs as well.
About the only thing other than Mint that I recommend to beginners is Endeavor or Bazzite if they need gaming. And even then, is lean toward Endeavor first just because it’s less modified and they’ll get more consistent results during troubleshooting.
But yeah, new users really don’t need anything other than the bare minimum otherwise they’re likely to get turned off pretty quickly by documentation not lining up to their distros edits.
I’d not recommend Endeavour. It’s just a preconfigured Arch, which is great if you want Arch but not great for users not used to dealing with Arch.
Which is why I only recommend it when people need the bleeding edge for gaming stuff. It’s my recommendation if they need more than Mint and Bazzite doesn’t work well with their hardware. And even then, I try to avoid Bazzite since it does a lot of non-standard stuff with the setup.
Arch is good if you already know what you want, but if someone needs the bleeding edge and don’t want to configure Arch, it’s the most straightforward route.
Arch has so much good documentation that any beginner with issues can easily troubleshoot their way out of nearly any problem.
I was a complete Linux noob when I settled on EndeavourOS as my distro, and its been my daily driver for 5 years now.
If the person you’re recommending a distro to is illiterate, then yeah, Arch would be a terrible suggestion. EndeavourOS would still be a good suggestion though since it’s dead simple to set up and has good defaults.
Endeavour was the one I actually installed to my drive some years ago after spinning up a handful of “classic” recommended distros in a VM (Ubuntu, Mint, Fedora, etc).
It was recommended to me by a close family member who had used Linux for a while, but we’re both in IT/tech.
My SO, on the other hand, while quite intelligent and capable of troubleshooting absolutely detests having to touch the CLI or open their PC tower.
It heavily depends on the end user and what they want to do, not just what they’re capable of. Frustration isn’t limited to incapability.
Imo anyone who wants to learn doesn’t stay a beginner for long. Those people will find Arch/Endeavour naturally without prompting.
Real beginners are those who don’t want to learn anything beyond the basics and those are the people I mean when I talk about beginners.
That’s weird, there’s only a handful of distros I would recommend against for newbies and that’s one of them.
As far as Arch-based distros go, CachyOS has a lot of helper tools included, and a lot of GUI programs. That’s probably why people consider it beginner-friendly.
I wouldn’t really consider CachyOS as a beginner distro. It’s probably the most accessible for anyone looking for something highly optimized, but there are plenty of others that are easier to set up and use.
Been daily driving Cachy for a couple years now, and I love it. It’s not for everyone, though.
Yeah, it has more graphical abstraction than Arch but nowhere near enough for a beginner!
It is certainly debatable whether cachyos is a beginner distro. That aside though, there may be some “lost in translation” effect going on in regards to flatpak. I’ve used arch for somewhere in the ballpark of 15 years, and have still to find a usecase on this distro.
I can certainly see the benefits on less bleeding edge distros though. Are you positive your issues come from lack of flatpack integration, and not from using flatpack in the first place?
I used it as my first Linux OS and didn’t have any issues. I didn’t use flatpaks though? I just used the AUR.
I recommend it for gamers. It has many convenient features for them.
Otherwise I prefer Debian/Ubuntu-based distros that are - in my perception- much more user friendly. LinuxMint is my goto recommendation.
Honestly, I think Kubuntu is slept on as a beginner’s distro.
Yes, Ubuntu has its issues … but those sorts of issues are really not going to affect a newbie much. And it’s stable, easy to use, KDE defaults will be pretty familiar-feeling for Windows refugees, and it should be relatively easy to find help – 90% of the time, if you just type “how do I _____ in Linux?” into
GoogleDuck Duck Go, the results you find will be perfectly applicable to Ubuntu. Want to install 3rd party software that’s not in their repos? In pretty much any software that offers a Linux version, the Ubuntu-compatible install method is the first one they list.(Oh, and the installer is literally one click if you just let it do everything in automatic mode. No keyboard needed. The install image boots into a full GUI installer with mouse support, and if you want, all you have to do is click ‘automatic install’ and wait. Once it’s done and reboots, you’re in your new OS.)
Once you become an advanced enough user that you get annoyed by Snap packages or feel like you need more cutting-edge package updates … well, then you should also be advanced enough to do your own distro-hopping.
Then recommend Kubuntu. It is not like this is a competition or I need to he convinced ☺️
There are enough distributions for everyone and every need.
How to define a beginner? A kid, new to computers or someone who was able to install a local win11-user and now switches to Linux or maybe a bankruptcy mac-user?
Which DE? CachyOS has several options. The “Open With” menu option works great for me, but I’m running Gnome on CachyOS.
Flatpak doesn’t always work correctly, because you may need to explicitly allow the app container to access certain system services and paths. You can usually do this easily in a program like Flatseal. Most apps should work correctly, however.
I installed it on my Lenovo Legion Go, as a recommendation from Google Gemini after the fallout from Bazzite. It has gone well overall, with only a handful of issues (controllers not detected, SD card mounted as an SSD, screen not always turning on, Bluetooth headset connecting at low quality, WiFi dropping signal) that were all solved with a few minutes of querying AI and running the recommended commands in Konsole. Without AI, though, I’d have been lost.
Genuinely curious but what was the fallout from Bazzite? Wondering what I missed lol.
This is the “post-mortem”: https://ba.antheas.dev/bazzite-postmortem.html
