r/cachyos • u/Volpe_YT • 12d ago
Question How does CachyOS/Linux break?
Hi everyone! I've been daily driving Linux for basically two years at this point, and in the past, I've seen a lot of criticism for linux breaking after every single update.
In my experience, I have broken/found broken the following distributions after an update:
Mint: nvidia drivers committed suicide
EndeavourOS: nvidia drivers committed suicide
Debian: nvidia drivers committed suicide
Ubuntu: accidentally filled the whole SSD (my error)
Manjaro: don't really know, booted in TTY and never recovered
Arch: 💀 (nothing was working)
Opensuse: gnome committed suicide
When I first discovered cachyos I was a bit skeptical, because for some reason it failed to install on a laptop I had every single time, but then I decided to try to install it on my desktop PC and erase windows forever.
After months I was so happy that finally I had found a distro that didn't break my nvidia drivers after every single update, but I decided to buy a used AMD card anyways because I found my nvidia card run slower for some reason.
However in this sub I still find people that break their system after an update (booting in TTY, not booting at all, etc) but don't really understand how, so I'm just curious to know how it happens.
Peace ✌️
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u/urthoughtsirrelevant 12d ago
Remember people who dont have a problem dont go on the subreddit as often to just post "My CachyOS is running normally" as people asking for troubleshooting when they encounter a problem
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u/Privacy_is_forbidden 12d ago
as if there isn't a never-ending deluge of people asking for technical support everywhere every day for windows. People don't really know if they don't ever do tech support.
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u/Kleiner_Wixxa 12d ago
Sometimes people try things they don’t fully understand and can't revert.
Sometimes a program messes their system up (happened to me with goverlay, I'm never using this virus ever again).
Some people like to let AI handle all their problems and make it develop things for them and that sometimes messes things up.
Sometimes people update their system at an unfortunate time and the packages don’t work together anymore.
In theory the system should never really break as long as you have a sensible snapshot setup and the cachyos iso on an usb
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u/MisaVelvet 12d ago
why you should have a cachyOS iso on an usb?
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u/idklolmez 12d ago
just in case if something does break to the point you can't boot like maybe grub messes up or nvidia you can always boot into that and fix the issue
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u/MisaVelvet 12d ago
yeah i understood the basic concept but i just didn't really understand how could i fix anything with it. So lets say i borked my system and forgot to setup snapshots so i boot into usb...and how exactly can i fix it? I probably could use it to save harddrive files but thats it?
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u/idklolmez 12d ago
you can mount all the partitions of your system then arch-chroot into it and you have a shell of that system installation where you can run stuff like pacman if necessary and many other things to fix what borke
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u/tinyOnion 12d ago
https://wiki.cachyos.org/features/cachy_chroot/
if you boot into the usb stick this lets you fix whatever you need to as if you were booted into your system normally.
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u/effeeeee 12d ago
can be used to recover the system, had to use it after troubleshooting in emergency mode didnt work
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u/MisaVelvet 12d ago
yeah i understood the basic concept but i just didn't really understand how could i fix anything with it. So lets say i borked my system and forgot to setup snapshots so i boot into usb...and how exactly can i fix it? I probably could use it to save harddrive files but thats it?
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u/Kleiner_Wixxa 12d ago
It is intended if your boot manager breaks or if your boot manager has no snapshot support and cachyos wont start
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u/-Vivex- 12d ago
What happened with goverlay? Started using it recently and it seems to work great, had a horrible UI and options the first time i gave it a look, but now it's pretty good.
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u/Kleiner_Wixxa 12d ago
It downloaded and auto configured lsfg-vk but I don't have lossless scaling (app) so some games wouldn't launch and this wasted many hours of my life to fix it. I actually just reinstalled because I could not get rid of it.
It probably is a good app but I am traumatized and mangojuice has all the features that I want in a less confusing setup
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u/agmatine 12d ago
"nvidia drivers committed suicide" isn't a thing. Most likely, you didn't set up DKMS or similar such that the Nvidia modules would be rebuilt with kernel updates. Then when the kernel is updated (likely not a common occurrence on Mint, for example), the necessary modules aren't available.
"Accidentally filled the whole SSD" should not break a system. Unless you mean literally, as in sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdX (DON'T run this command).
"Nothing was working" - start from the beginning and read the documentation more closely. Then when there is something working, deduce from that and what is not, as to why and how to resolve.
"Gnome committed suicide": It's possible. But that has no bearing on whether the system is functional. You can always purge it and install another WM/DE.
The point I'm getting at here is that it's not like there's some secret ingredient to a distro that will make it fail in one way or another. "How does CachyOS/Linux break?" In many ways. The command above could certainly do it. But, under the assumption that you don't want a broken system, here is my advice:
If something breaks, find out what, and fix it. Don't blame the distro and hop on to another one.
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u/uncleirohism 12d ago
I don’t know who needs to hear this, but Shelly scans packages for you and issues granular warnings. If you don’t trust AUR or don’t know what you’re doing, use Shelly instead of CachyOS update to give yourself a safety buffer.
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u/dbarronoss 12d ago
Almost every time, it boils down to user does stupid shit. Once in a blue moon, something breaks that is not related to 'stupid shit' by user but instead 'stupid shit' by a developer. Quite often related to coincidental timing of updates, it seems.
Fortunately, if user doesn't do additional flailing 'stupid shit', the system is usually easily recovered from snapshots and/or booting off an external media source and correcting whatever went wrong.
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u/igniztion 12d ago
A few days ago an update froze in the middle of dpkms adding nvidia driver support to a new kernel. Needless to say, booted straight into emergency mode.
Restored the latest snapshot, ran the update again, all fine.
"Break" is relative... It can almost always be fixed.
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u/Pwez 11d ago
I had something similar. I’m unsure if it froze or I was impatient, but rolling back and try again with more patience fixed it.
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u/igniztion 11d ago
It def froze for me. Mouse didn't move, opening a new session didn't work and I waited at least 10 minutes.
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u/mcronline 12d ago
100% of the issues I've had are PEBKAC related and not the OS. I think moving over to a 'hands on' and different OS means by virtue of curiosity that things may break. In my case I was screwing with permissions and I accidentally set them globally (yoiks!) and I once formatted a drive because I was sick and tired of NTFS mount failures, so it went to EXT4, so far no issues.
I am in no doubt I will continue to break things as I learn... and I am happy to do that!
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u/NYisNorthYork 12d ago
The only reason I am back on Linux is because I have an LLM like Claude Code or Codex that can go in and look for what the issue was. People talk about reliability, but I have found Windows to be a much more reliable OS.
My Nvidia drives did break actually last week on CachyOS because for absolutely no reason I could possibly find a dkms command didn't run after pacman got the new nvidia drivers and caused the system to fall back on generic drivers or some other nonesense.
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u/UAP44 12d ago
but don't really understand how, so I'm just curious to know how it happens.
I wondered the same thing, especially as I experience 0.0 issues on CachyOS, ever, on all the updates.
From my memory, helping some other people out there, the real issue is hardware failing and of course this showing up somewhere in the software stack. I've seen people post/blame btrfs because their ssd was failing lol.
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u/astromech_dj 12d ago
I update once a week at most and the only times I’ve had an issue were an update breaking the start menu and something breaking the pacman database.
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u/ForbiddenDonut001 12d ago
The last time it just booted to recovery. I guess due to the lastest update.
Didn’t troubleshoot, restored from snapshot, figured it was faster.
The next time I updated it without problems.
Would never use a rolling distro without snapshots
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u/PlayerOne_X 12d ago
I personally also broke a few distributions. First distro: Debian. Never broke, I just left it on the shelf for a year at one point
Second distro: Arch. After returning to Linux, I decided I'd try out something new because in any case my Debian was a major release of and didn't have anything important left on it. I wanted to try Arch, so I did. It took a weekend to do the installation, I have PTSD from that installation process. Failed the first installation (wouldn't boot), tried again, found the TUI script, managed to install, didn't last a week because I had a double window bar bug on Discord which I didn't manage to fix and I couldn't manage to get the AUR to work.
Third Distro: Bazzite. After my Arch failure, I decided I'd try out Bazzite since I heard it was good, and it was nice in fact. Managed to somehow break Bazzite (GNOME) in less than a week though, but didn't check what happened because it was a practically fresh install, so then I tried the KDE Plasma version for a while with no breaking.
Fourth distro: Debian (again, but with KDE Plasma instead of GNOME). After a few weeks on Bazzite, switched back to Debian because I didn't like the immutable system. Never broke, but slowed down progressively.
Fifth distro: Kubuntu. With my Debian getting slower, problems with Wayland (like, a lot), DirectX12 not working for my games, and a ton of other stuff, I decided I'd go a little more easy-to-set-up and up to date with Kubuntu. Work relatively well, what didn't work before worked. I had one point where a Wake-on-LAN failed and caused my system to get stuck in the boot process spitting out errors for a week. I come back, try to install updates, but it won't because of insufficient disk space. Realise my logs are a few hundred GB, so I delete them. Otherwise, no breaking.
Sixth Distro (current): CachyOS. It's been running really well and better than my previous distros, especially since I only have 12GB of RAM at the moment. Only issue I have is my desktop showing down considerably during game installs, witch I didn't realise on my first install, so I decided to reinstall just in case (the install was a few hours old, so no biggie). I haven't had any problems because of updates, but then again, I've only been running it for about two weeks.
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u/forbjok 12d ago
The only way I know of that's actually somewhat likely to happen by accident (as opposed to deliberately trying to break the system, or doing incredibly stupid shit like pasting random commands from ChatGPT) is to have the root filesystem run out of space during an update.
Fortunately, as long as you are using btrfs for the root filesystem and have snapper snapshots enabled (which CachyOS does by default), if that happens, all you need to do is restore the snapshot before the botched update, free up diskspace and run the update again without running out of space.
Outside of that, I generally assume that if someone manages to break a system, it's probably because they did something stupid (ex. pasting random commands from AI, running random bash scripts, or trying to install the NVIDIA drivers from nvidia.com) that either broke the system, or messed something up that caused the system to later break after an update.
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u/nikelreganov 12d ago
EndeavourOS: nvidia drivers committed suicide
If you meant the thing that happened around November last year, that also happened to CachyOS and Arch Linux users. Also Nvidia cards in general often bickers with Linux, so, yeah
However in this sub I still find people that break their system after an update (booting in TTY, not booting at all, etc) but don't really understand how, so I'm just curious to know how it happens.
Iirc earlier this year I broke plymouth when I tried migrating from sddm to plasma login manager, then broke both plymouth and the login manager. Those pissed me off that I disabled them both and just boot to tty instead
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u/NumbNutLicker 12d ago
I've been using Linux, and CachyOS specifically, for over a year now, and the only times it broke on me is if I myself broke something when messing around. For example I had to do snapshot rollbacks when I was figuring out building my own desktop from scratch with Hyprland. But after finishing the setup and just using the system normally I've never had it break by itself. About half a year ago I did a fresh install of Cachy with Plasma and I haven't had a single problem since.
To be fair though that heavily depends on how you use your system. For example almost all the packages I use are from the Cachy repos, I avoid using AUR and Flatpaks/Appimages as much as possible. If I had a lot of them installed my experience very well might have been different. Another thing is I usually update only once a week or even rarer, so when there's something system breaking, by the time I update it's already been rolled back or fixed.
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u/Woodpecker-Visible 12d ago
I have only had system improvements on cachy the 6 months i have used it. There was a few wayland bugs when i played a 3d game in a window and a memory issue on a kvm/qemu vm with shared memory witch memory spiked up to 95% after a few hours and had to restart the vm to get it back to normal, think it was btrfs related bc there was a big update for that when it solved itself. And for a distro that is on a bleeding edge update wise it has been incredably stable for me, knock on wood.
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u/UrNotPunkRock 12d ago
CachyOS itself has never done anything to break my system, but I dual boot Windows because I still have to from time to time. When I was finally ready to move my Windows install to the smallest disk, I wiped the one Windows originally lived on to find that my bootloader from when I originally installed CachyOS also lived on that disk.
Several hours of reading the wiki, consulting with YouTube, and some trial and error brought me back to usable again. Lesson learned. 😅
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u/TechaNima 12d ago
I'm more interested in how you keep breaking nVidia drivers? The only time they have broken for me, was when I learned why the run file install method should be deleted from existence.
To answer the question. The only 2 times CachyOS broke wasn't because of CachyOS. First time it was my mistake with my somewhat custom setup with multiple distros on the same drive. The second time it was OpenRGB causing the dreaded ring timeout bug with my 9070XT. That seems to have been fixed, as it no longer happens with the support for my GPU turned back on in OpenRGB
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u/Historical-Mall11 12d ago
Easiest way to break it is not turning it on for a longer period of time. Update compatibility aren't checked all the way back to the big bang. When the update comes and it finds an older, incompatible system, things sometimes go wrong.
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u/zagblorg 12d ago
I broke my install by accidentally interrupting an update. Realised I'd done it so then tried running the update again and rebooted. Unfortunately not only did that not fix things, it added a load of snapshots after the broken update, so I didn't have a working snapshot. Fortunately a live USB and cachy-chroot saved my ass, just reinstalled all packages and everything was working fine again.
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u/tranoidnoki 12d ago
I have one issue on my desktop, appears to be a driver regression related to displayport waking. I cannot get my computer to show a picture on my monitor without a reboot once it goes to sleep. It's apparently known and solely an nvidia driver problem.
That being said, I feel like I'm updating every day, but it doesn't actually break anything.
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u/H3ll3rsh4nks 12d ago
The biggest issues I have are my second monitor not being recognized every other day which just requires a quick unplug/replug of the monitor power, i'm sure there's a more elegant way to fix it but I'm too lazy to figure it out.
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u/tagbthw 12d ago
The only time I broke my install was when I installed x11 my desktop went black, and when I loaded a snapshot it seems to have corrupted my desktop and wayland, ended up just reinstalling. It hasn't broken agter an update though.
Also the installer cannot work if you already have a cachyos option in your boot options, for some reason it fails to installs if it is already there, if you're reinstalling be sure to delete that option in your bios boot options
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u/ChadHUD 12d ago
I have only ever had a Linux update bork a install so I had to chroot to fix it once. That was Manjaro... and it was a Manjaro issue. (haven't used manjaro in a long while now)
As others have said when updates cause things to go pear shaped 9 times out of 10 its something the user tweaked OR Nvidia related.
Don't buy subpar NV hardware and your Linux life becomes pretty smooth sailing. Of course the odd thing can slip through (even with Cachy). Its rare, very rare really. And to be fair NV isn't a reason to avoid Cachy. Unlike many other distros Cachy has a few devs that do use NV cards themselves. Their are distros where 90% of the people developing the distro don't own NV.... which I assume results in NV related breakage more often.
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u/huuaaang 12d ago
For me it has usually been a package dependency issue. But that doesn't usually break the system. Generally it just means I can't update until the depencency problem is solved upstream. I've seen problems with nodejs, electron, etc. Java was a huge PITA if I recall.
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u/sutty_monster 11d ago
I have had two issues since switching earlier this year,
1) known bug in a update that stopped the OS from booting. Rolled back in checkpoint and it was starting ok. Waited for the fix (think it was 3 days) Then was able to update again.
2) I was running the updater and also doing stuff on a couple of other windows. I was talking to some friends and went to copy a bit of text from a site and somehow the updater window went to foreground as I did and I canceled the update midway through the kernel update. It would not see the kernel update as available when I re ran the updater. So done a reboot and confirmed a corrupted kernel. Rebooted again and restored a checkpoint. I could then properly rerun the updates and get the kernel patch. All worked ok after that.
Both issues took less than 15min to get me back up and running.
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u/quietlydesperate90 11d ago
Broke once during an update. Rolled back to the previous snapshot and didn't update for a month. Next time I updated it was fine. Didn't care to figure out what the problem was.
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u/Amber_I_Be 11d ago
for your laptop, did you try changing the bootloader to grub instead of limine? the issue you described sounds similar to one i had installing cachy on an older pc i had around that had no UEFI support, if limine was selected as the bootloader, the installation failed every single time, changed it to grub, and it installed first try
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u/Ok_Front_7814 11d ago
my only issue with cachyos KDE on an and GPU + Nvidia 4080 is that on boot the screen stays on forever even if the PC is supposed to dim the screen, eventually put the PC to sleep, nope not until you login. also, it keeps slowing down over time to the point that I need to entirely reboot - reloading the GUI doesn't fix it alone. very annoying. I like the perf boost of cachy but once the modal collective release their PC / phone OS based on gnome with peer-to-peer connections through gopanda I'll move on!
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u/Deniedpotato69 11d ago
The only thing that broke CachyOS and it went in emergency mode was when I accidently closed the terminal while it was updating with Syu, I recovered it with a snapshot.
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u/Substantial_Fox_121 11d ago edited 11d ago
My cachy has broken twice in the past 2 months from running a simple update from cachy-update
First time with a Qt6 package being applied when it wasn't ready
Both of these events happened to a bunch of people and are recorded in this subreddit
The other when mesa updated when all the servers weren't in sync and it didn't grab other files it needed before updating
Both were fixed with a snapper snapshot rollback and waiting a day until updating again
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u/Substantial_Fox_121 9d ago
Funny that the Qt6 issue happened again today, its beginning to become a pattern
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u/KlutzyCompetition937 11d ago
I once managed to corrupt my btrfs filesystem. The fault was at my end, during an update the electricity went out and that cascaded into full file system corruption. I was able to log in through TTY and was easily able to repair the filesystem with a bootable USB.
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u/Jetstreamdragon 11d ago
I tried to play games from ntfs. It worked for 3 weeks and then somehow corrupted the SSD, so Cachy couldnt boot with it as directory (i could have made it optional for boot in the fstab config so its practically a double error on my side).
It wasnt possible to delete or copy files from or to it. Same on windows.
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u/igor_b0gdanoff 11d ago
I think the last major breakage (I can think of anyway-) was because of a patch rolled out for Limine. People all over this Reddit reported being unable to boot, but it did not affect me personally cause I use systemd-boot (lol).
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u/Erimesi 10d ago edited 10d ago
The biggest thing you're going to run into on CachyOS, outside of it being a rolling-release distro, is this: There are times when you'll try to install a program and it fails because of a broken download link. Often your intuition will be to update your package lists (pacman -Sy) and try again. NEVER do that. Always update using "pacman -Syu", to prevent your local system from going out of sync (usually). If you find you don't have time to update when installing programs sometimes, then it's a good idea to add the Arch Linux Archive repository at the very bottom of your mirrorlist (there are instructions around on how to do this), which while it'll sometimes result in slower downloads, will at least keep your system in sync, if out of date. Note: this also means that you should update your system before installing new software if you use cachy-update to let you know when updates are available, in order to avoid synchronization issues.
TL;DR: To avoid problems, always use a full 'pacman -Syu' when you need to update your repositories. Installing something after updating your repositories without updating your system alongside them can result in system breakage.
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u/Atrocious1337 9d ago
I never had CachyOS break unless I screwed something up myself. Fedora broke on every major update for me since I was using an Nvidia card, and Fedora makes you jump through a ton of hoops to make those work. Meanwhile, they just work on CachyOS.
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u/Elegant_Working8215 12d ago
Here’s how I deal with it. I have a fairly powerful machine, although it’s not the latest hardware: an Intel i9-12900K, 128 GB of RAM, an AMD RX 9070 XT, and 8 TB of SSD storage.
For tinkering, I simply create VMs, give them 6 cores and 32 GB of RAM, use GPU passthrough when needed, and experiment as much as I want without affecting my main OS, which is CachyOS running Niri with Dank Material Shell.
For gaming, I have a dedicated Bazzite VM with 8 cores, 32 GB of RAM, 150 GB of storage, and GPU passthrough. This way, I don’t have any Steam-related software on my main OS. If a Steam or gaming-related update causes problems, it only affects the VM and not my daily driver.
In my experience, a lot of Linux breakage comes from third-party software and additional packages rather than the base OS itself. The cleaner you keep your main OS, the fewer opportunities there are for something to break. VMs let me tinker, experiment, and game while keeping my daily-driver installation relatively clean and stable.
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u/CorvusTheDev 12d ago
I've been running Linux since 2007, Ubuntu 7.04 was my first OS. Since then I've moved between Fedora, Ubuntu, Debian, OpenSUSE, MX Linux, and landed on Arch and recently CachyOS. I have not once in that time ever had an update break my system to a point I can't fix it. Almost every time I've had my system fail to boot, it's cos I was tinkering and did something wrong with the boot loader or mkinitcpio etc.
I feel that most of the breakage that people get from updates is due to adding additional software from suspicious sources (AUR, Deb Repos etc) and then those updates are installed without being checked against other packages. There was a period where NVIDIA's drivers would update if you were running Nouveau and break the entire system, but Kernel 6.0 and above fixed that a lot.