i had cachyOS installed for a couple of months but was plagued with random system freezes (only hard reset possible, no leads in journalctl). i tracked it down to an issue with the combination of wayland, KDE plasma and the kernel or at least that’s what i could gather from web searches. i had at least one of those freezes per week, often more.
i am now on kubuntu which basically has the same combination of things (wayland and KDE) that should cause the problem but it has been running fine for three weeks, no freezes. so something with the cachy kernel didn’t agree with my system.
i was now told i could use the arch kernel on cachyOS, which was news to me. i tried switching to the cachy LTS kernel but the issue persisted. i now wonder how does the compatibility of the linux kernel work? is it compatible because it is both arch linux? or would the kubuntu kernel also work on cachyOS?
I don’t know how old your hardware is, but iirc cachyos’s kernel specifically doesn’t support older hardware, so it could be that it is just too old. If I were you I would try out endeavoros if you can deal with a little more technical package management or you could use the base arch kernel on cachy. Of course your switch to kubuntu should continue to work assuming it was a kernel issue, I just don’t like canonicals vision.
it’s an 8th gen i5 8500
Some quick googling tells me that their optimized packages require 12th gen or newer, so that is likely what was messing you up. here is the link I found if you are interested, but I think your hardware is just to old.
here it lists cpu’s dating back to “Intel 4th Gen Core (Haswell)”:
https://wiki.cachyos.org/installation/installation_prepare/I can’t help you there, I don’t personally use cachy I am just making assumptions based upon what I have heard and how it works on other distros
thanks! nobody on the cachy forums brought this up. what would this mean for a different kernel? would switching to the arch kernel fix/circumvent this?
Packages != kernel, so probably not. I don’t know how power usery you want to be, if fine with some tinkering then staying with arch makes sense and as I said in the prior post I recommend endeavoros. If you want no tinkering, kubuntu is fine I would just lookup snaps and see what you are getting yourself into, and if that turns you away I would recommend mint lmde.
i tried endeavor os at some point but didn’t like it (don’t remember specifics). and i am not keen on kubuntu…
If I were to take a guess, it is because it requires you to do software installation via CLI. If you are looking for a distro with a software store, I would say fedora or lmde is the move
it very well could’ve been, yeah. i tried fedora but due to their “absolutely no proprietary code” policy just getting vlc to play a x265 HEVC video file was a major PITA…
i also tried mint at some point but didn’t like it for some reason. i feel like at this point i tried all the major distros.i was happy on cachy os but the freezes made it non-viable. maybe i go back at some point and try with a different kernel.
The kernels (and accompanying modules/drivers) are more or less freely interchangeable.
Bugs in the kernel are pretty rare in my experience. I think it’s more likely that the bug was somewhere in KDE Plasma. Kubuntu’s version should be older than the one on Cachy. On top of that Kubuntu has their own patches for KDE, so even if the version numbers are the same they are not the exact same programs. And on top of that the way they compiled KDE will be slightly different.
Don’t forget Mesa, the userspace part of graphics drivers. Also versions freely changeable.
It’s hard to say for sure what’s causing the issue, but it’s definitely possible that it’s kernel related. I’ve never used cachyOS, but when i was still using Arch i’ve had issues with newer kernels multiple times. Switching to the LTS kernel would usually fix the problem though. I’m actually facing a weird issue myself right now on GNU Guix, where my pc has randomly rebooted itself multiple times over the past few weeks. My first thought was the kernel since Guix is also rolling release, but i haven’t tried the LTS kernel yet because the nonguix substitute servers are having issues, so i would have to wait for it to compile lol.
Oh btw regarding your question, i don’t know if cachy offers the regular arch kernel in its repos as well, but generally speaking kernels should be pretty compatible regardless of distro. You can also install the cachy kernel on NixOS for example.
CachyOS has a handy kernel tool which let’s you select what kernel you’d like to run. You can try and play with that.
in your shoes: i would try distros/implementations without wayland or kde to rule those out as possible sources of the problem.
i know that ubuntu will let you switch to xservers, so kubuntu might let you as well.
by not switching those and having no more freezes i ruled them out successfully, no?
You don’t have to change distro to do this BTW just install a desktop environment that uses X11 instead of Wayland and try that. If it doesn’t fix it you can uninstall it.
i did switch to x11 on cachyOS and i had no freezes but i only tested it for a little over a week (because it uses a lot more power), so i might’ve gotten lucky idk.
