[godelski]

  > But I just want a Linux distro that works.

This is perfectly valid. But I would add that Arch is not that distro. Even though projects like Endeavour and Manjaro are trying that I don't think it'll ever be the case. You have rolling-releases and even though they've done a great job you're never going to be the most stable because of this.

But I think Pop is the best distro for this. System76 is highly incentivized to do exactly this and specifically with nvidia drivers and laptops (laptops create extra complications...). I can't promise it'll be a cure-all but it is worth giving a shot. I would try their forums too.

I totally get the frustration. I've been there, unfortunately. I hope you can get someone to help.

[LargoLasskhyfv]

CachyOS just works for me. Highly optimized Arch working flawless and without hassle.

I know my ways around Arch, and in the about two years using CachyOS I never needed to intervene, with the exception of things like changed configs/split packages. But those are announced in advance on their webpages, be it Arch itself, or CachyOS, and also appear in good old Pacman in the terminal, or whichever frontend you fancy. It's THE DREAM!

What's lacking is maybe pre-packaged llm/machine learning stuff. Maybe I'm stupid, but they don't even have current llama.cpp, WTF? But at least Ollama is there. LM-Studio also has to be compiled by yourself, either via the AUR, or otherwise. But these are my only complaints.

[godelski]

  > Maybe I'm stupid, but they don't even have current llama.cpp, WTF?

I don't understand. It's in the AUR...

https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/llama.cpp

  > has to be compiled by yourself, either via the AUR

I don't think I'd call the AUR "compiled by yourself". It's still a package manager. You're not running the config and make commands yourself. I mean what do you want? A precompiled binary? That doesn't work very well for something like llama.cpp. You'd have to deliver a lot more with it and pin the versions of the dependencies, which will definitely result in lost performance.

Is running `yay -S llama.cpp` really that big of a deal? You're not intervening in any way different for any other package (that also aren't precompiled binaries)

[LargoLasskhyfv]

> I mean what do you want? A precompiled binary?

Yes, exactly :-)

Haven't used yay or other aur helpers so far. Maybe that's why my systems run so stable?

Should maybe look into it.

Have used Yaourt on Arch in the far past, with...errm...varying success ;->

[godelski]

  > Haven't used yay or other aur helpers so far. 
  > Have used Yaourt on Arch in the far past,

Yaourt is an aur helper?

  > Maybe that's why my systems run so stable?

Sorry?

  >>> I know my ways around Arch

Forgive me, you said this earlier and I think I misunderstood. What does this mean exactly? How long have you been using Arch? Or rather, have you used Arch the actual distro or only Arch based distros?

I guess I'm asking, have you installed the vanilla distro? Are you familiar with things like systemd-boot, partitioning, arch-chroot, mkinitcpio, and all that?

[LargoLasskhyfv]

I have used plain Arch in the past, for several years, no derivatives.

At that time there existed an AUR-helper called Yaourt, which I made heavy use of. But often in haste, sloppy. Which lead to many unnecessary clean-up actions, but no loss of system. Meanwhile I had to use other stuff, so no Arch for a while. When the need for using other stuff was gone I considered several options, like Gentoo, but naa, I don't wanna compile anymore!1!! (Yes, Yes, I know they serve binpkgs now, but would they have my preferred USE-flags?) Maybe Debian, which can be fucking fast when run in RAM like Antix, but I had that for a while, and while it's usable, Debian as such is bizarre.

Anything Redhat? No thanks. SuSe? Same. So I came across CachyOS, and continued to use that, from the first "test-installation" running to this day, because it works for me, like I wrote before. Like a dream come true.

Remembering my experiences with Yaourt I abstained from using the AUR. And that worked very well for me, so far. Also the Gentoo-like 'ricing' comes for free with their heavily optimized binary packages, without compromising stability.

> I guess I'm asking, have you installed the vanilla distro? Are you familiar with things like systemd-boot, partitioning, arch-chroot, mkinitcpio, and all that?

Yes.

Are we clear now?

Edit: I'm so overconfident I'm even considering disabling the pacman-hooks into BTRFS-snapshots, because I never needed them.

No rollback necessary, ever, so far. Same goes for pacman cache. After every -Syu follows an immediate -Scc.

Because the only way is forwaaaaard ;-)

[godelski]

I've used Yaourt too. Things are a lot better these days. Yay is the standard. But I think the biggest help of helpers is updating.

Yes, we're clear now, but are you surprised by my hesitation? Because having that experience would imply you've had a lot of experience compiling things the long way. Running makepkg -si isn't that complicated. It's as easy as it gets. There's no make, no configure, no cmake, no determining the dependencies yourself and installing those yourself too. I don't get the issue. Take too long? Not happen automatically?

  > I'm so overconfident I'm even considering disabling the pacman-hooks into BTRFS-snapshots, because I never needed them.

lol yeah I'm sure they're not needed. Not hard to recover usually and yeah I agree, things are stable these days. I can't remember the last time I needed to chroot (other than an nspawn). I only snapshot data I care about these days and it's usually backed up remotely too. I've learned my lesson the hard way too many times lol.