To Linux, Again, Or Not

I won’t rehash Microsoft’s fuckery, despite spending most of my technological life on Windows (with a not-too-infrequent use of Macs). But this “AI” nonsense (it’s not AI, it’s a statistical sentence construction machine that frequently lies) has given Microsoft levers I can’t unpull. And, while I find some utility in limited use of LLMs, what I don’t want it my operating system recording every screen I see, every keystroke, and filing it in the most unhinged manner. I also don’t presume that, should I have wanted that, making my system a place where others who do not want such features act as a recording device simply because they interact with me is.. well, fuckery. Oddly, those features are, for the time being, able to be disabled if you know the right commands. What I could not work around was a change Microsoft made to SMB support. I tried every guide, setting, PowerShell command, and hidden toggle and nothing stuck. Which meant that I could write files to my Synology NAS, not copy them from the NAS to Windows.

So, while I do love my Macs (and prefer macOS for work), I still do like to play games. And gaming, despite Apple’s insistence, is still the domain of Windows for now. Which means trying to find a way to make the hardware I have function in a way that lets me a) work, b) access my local networked resources and, c) install and run most games available via Steam.

My first foray was popOS, mostly because I run Ubuntu on a local NUC for some containers and felt comfortable there. popOS was fine, But popOS changed at some point and the UI got to be… cartoony? Bubbly? It wasn’t for me. I wasn’t invested in it yet after a week or so, so I started fishing. More than a few people on a Discord I frequent were crowing about CachyOS and I thought “why not”.

I’ll skip the install process, there’s plenty of guides. I will catalog some of my mistakes, though, because I’m probably (am) doing some dumb, dumb things.

Problem 1: KDE Wallet is Keychain

I use Brave for work and Vivaldi for personal internetting. I installed those first, set up the various sync services, set defaults. Then I started spelunking in Cachy’s settings and saw KDE Wallet. Having just gone through and turned off all the Web3 crap in Brave, “wallet” sounded pretty crypto-ish. Flipped it off and moved on. After a while, updates happened and the computer needed to restart.

And, when I fired up those browsers, it was Bad. Brave crashed on startup, never rendering a page. You could see the previous tabs, but within a second the whole thing just crashed. Vivaldi also could not find anything about the active profile, forcing a new one to be created, forgetting all the synced data.

After reading Mike Olson’s blog post about setting up Cachy, and seeing the section about KWallet, a lightbulb went off. Turning on KDE Wallet restored the browsers back to normal. So, lesson learned and, for the search engines/LLM thieves: if Brave is crashing on startup on CachyOS and you turned off KDE Wallet. turn that back on.

Problem 2: I Dismiss Onboarding Experiences Too Fast

Cachy helpfully displays an onboarding window when you first install, giving you options to enable and install some helpful/necessary packages (want Bluetooth? Click this button.) I clicked a few that seemed right, but didn’t know what all of them meant. Assuming I’d run across these settings again (noooope), I dismissed the window for good. Then I started reading Mike Olson’s blog again (hmm, is that a theme I hear starting?) and realized I couldn’t get back to that window.

Well, it’s still there and you can run it again from the command line from /usr/bin/cachyos-hello. Thanks Reddit.

Problem 3: Unknown Unknowns

And, to save the read, this is where I gave up. Again.

The machine I’m using for Cachy (indeed, for most of my Linux experimentation) is an MSI-branded Intel-based system. 14th Gen Intel chip, major brand nVidia 4070, I think a Samsung SSD. Standard kind of PC you’d get for general gaming, no customization, no enhancements. Stock as stock gets.

I’ve had to revert to a snapshot half a dozen times already. I mean, thankfully they’re there, but every other update, no matter how minor (this last one was an update to Tabby for fuck’s sake) tanked the machine on startup. Just an endless spinning circle and no OS loading. So, revert again (twice, since the first point I picked also didn’t load), and now I’m writing this from a build that’s… three days old?

I don’t know why, though. I’m running the out-of-the-box system updater. And, I note, when some part just doesn’t work, the system tanks. Don’t know why, don’t know how to exclude pieces of the update

Now What

I haven’t jumped distros just yet, although I will be grabbing the latest Ubuntu tomorrow. I also, after each of these experiments, feel incredibly disheartened. Hearing people find that Linux “just works” now and I never get to experience that is frustrating. I try not to do weird shit when I use Linux distros; it’s too easy to break something I don’t understand in ways I can’t diagnose. But I also want my computer to work for me, and that inevitably leads to tweaking. I haven’t done that this time on purpose because I thought Cachy was meant to route around that need. And maybe it does and I’m the idiot that they can’t engineer around. It’s happened before.

I really, really want this to work. But I also want a computer that works without me having to become a sysadmin. And, for me at least, Linux isn’t it.