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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 16th, 2023

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  • If that is necessary depends on your BIOS/MoBo. I did have to on mine. But the effort for a normal CachyOS install is t really like 5 minutes: boot into live iso, enter ‘cachy-chroot’ or whatever the command is, follow instructions on screen. Then just reinstall grub and/or kernel (which regenerates initramfs). There’s a wiki entry and pinned posts in discord for this whole thing. Ask in discord if you get stuck, they are incredibly responsive and helpful.

    Once you’ve done it, you’ll notice it’s really no big deal. Btw. “Losing” your Linux install is very hard. It’s not as fragile as Windows. You can bork things, but they can usually be un-borked as well. The only real way is fully deleting partitions or their contents, which you can’t just do accidentally.

    Especially just moving it to a new host can’t break it, you just need to get it to boot. Once you know how, it’s like 5 minutes. You can take the drive from a 20 year old PC, pop it into a modern system and it’ll work fine (assuming the system is semi-updated). Windows has a hard time moving to a different MoBo or platform. Linux doesn’t care. Drivers aren’t ‘installed’ like they are in Windows. They are just in the kernel available to be used. Almost everything is detected fresh on every boot, making this incredibly robust. As I said, you might just have to fiddle a bit to get it to boot, once it does, it’ll just work fine.


  • This is actually not even necessary. The systems are similar enough it’ll just work. I have recently swapped an SSD from a laptop to a newer model with CachyOS, and that was more of a generational jump in terms of cpu and other hardware.

    But CachyOS has a quirk. Linux systems specify which partitions are mounted to which directories in the /etc/fstab file. Unfortunately, the boot partition is specified using a device name and not a UUID. this is problematic when switching an SSD from a system to another as this may very well change device names. It did for me and I then had to rescue boot + chroot to fix it.

    The fix, if done before, is trivial: edit the line for /boot in that file to start with UUID= (followed by the actual UUID of the partition) instead of with /dev/nvme0n1p1 or whatever the current device name is. Google should be able to tell you how to find the UUID of your boot partition.






  • CachyOS is basically vanilla Arch, from a resource point of view. They have their own repos, but they just mirror the arch repos. The arch wiki fully applies. For the very few special things, there is documentation (basically a few notes on gaming related performance options).

    So why use it? Carter it’s trivial to install, and everything you need is preconfigured to just work with sane defaults. Installing it is like Mint or Ubuntu. But it uses optimized repos according to your available CPU instruction set, and optimized proton and wine (their own). Games just work (even more so than they already do generally), and are faster. Programs are faster (where it matters). But you don’t need to do anything for that, it’s just there by default.



  • It’s a misconception that is any “trouble”. I’m using CachyOS, which is basically Arch but with additionally optimized repositories and settings. You just install it an use it, like Mint or Ubuntu. It just works, but it’s also faster for performance related tasks (especially gaming, but also others), importantly and explicitly without any tinkering.

    Quite the opposite, actually: there much less tinkering required to get gaming specific things to “just work”, as the tweaks are all there by default. This includes running Windows programs often considered hard to run (through Wine).

    I do happen to enjoy and want a rolling release. There’s a new kernel released, and I can install it like a day later. New KDE comes out, update is there for me in a few hours. Software is generally up to date, which was such a refreshing experience as I’m used to running Debian server side. Oh what a contrast.






  • Many distros have screenshots bound to a shortcut by default. So it’s working by default, just not the default you know. Even Windows only introduced that shortcut a few years ago. The real shortcut (working without any program even in Windows) is the dedicated PrtScr button. If you hold alt, it’ll only capture the current window. It won’t be saved but put in the clipboard.

    On KDE Ctrl+shift+s worked by default for me, but I don’t didn’t know if that comes from my distro or from KDE.


  • Sorry but the theoretical price of cells isn’t relevant to the consumer. The price of products containing them is. This thing costs currently on the official site 900€ (with some sort of sale going on). The Elite 100v2 with comparable capacity, but using LiFePo4 (included in the same current sale) costs just 550€. To add insult to injury, it also outperforms the Na model in nearly every aspect except sub-freezing performance (where it at least still works, but nowhere near normal spec values either). This includes an abysmal solar charging efficiency for the Na of roughly 50% at normal temperature. Somehow.

    Again, once the price reflects the cell cost, this could be a very attractive option. At the moment, unless you’re into camping in sun-zero climates, it’s just a very bad deal.

    Edit: to be clear the Na model also doesn’t have a better life expectancy, not according to the spec. Both models are specified to “over 4000 cycles”, not there is no percentage threshold specified for the Na model. The LiFePo4 model includes “to 80% capacity” in that definition. If this is specified somewhere for the Na model, I can’t find it.


  • The thing currently costs at least 50% more than the closest equivalent LiFePo4 from the same brand. The only real advantage seems to be it’s ability to handle sub freezing temperatures, but usability still drops dramatically (both capacity and available power delivery). Everything else is straight up worse in this one in direct comparison.

    It’s only the first product, so it’ll most certainly get better. Also as numbers of products sold rise, costs fall. Once these are cheaper, that are a real choice.


  • No, if you’re in the EU you get 1 year updates free.

    Microsoft has already made this available many months ago to US and the rest of the world, but required the weird MS login and settings backup to OneDrive. This is against EU rules, and the ruling that it isn’t ok came like a month ago or so. Since then Ms has been scrambling to make this possible, but I know many people who didn’t have the option even a week ago.

    If you’re in the US or most of the world (but not EU), you can enable 1 year of updates by logging in with Ms account + backing up settings once per OneDrive. This enables updates, and you can instantly undo both things again, which won’t undo the update status.