Hey everyone! I’m finally fed up with Win11 and the bullshit that comes with it for the PC it’s on.

It’s being used as a Jellyfin+arr stack, qbit, Immich, and gaming PC for the living room.

I’m currently in the process of backing up all my important info and am doing research on which distro to use.

I don’t mind tinkering, but for this PC, stability is key. I don’t want to have to go in and update it every week… I want this one to work with minimal maintenance on my part.

I’d likely update it a few times a year, knowing me.

A few hardware specs:

MSI mobo (I’ve learned that UEFI can be a pain), 10600k, 2070 gpu, and will have a pool of 3x8tb drives that I would like to have in raid5 (or something similar) for storage (movies, TV shows, and Immich libraries), the OS will have its own drive, and I have a separate SSD that I have been using to store programs, games, yml’s for docker, and other such things that get accessed more frequently, but aren’t crucial if lost.

I’ve kinda narrowed it down to either Bazzite or CachyOS.

I’ve heard that Bazzite can be a little more locked down, which I’m not a fan of, but CachyOS has features I will likely never touch (schedulers, kernels, etc…).

I don’t want an upkeep heavy OS. I’m moving away from windows for that reason. Win11 has been a nightmare for me with constant reboots and things not loading up until after I log in. Not to mention driver conflicts and all the other BS that’s come with it.

So… What say the hive mind? Is Bazzite going to be too tinker-proof, or is CachyOS just way too much work? Or do I have it all wrong with my perception of both?

Thanks!

Ps: this will be my first full commit to Linux. I’ve dabbled in the past and am no stranger to CLI… So this will likely be a stepping stone into getting my primary PC onto Linux. Go easy on me lol

  • kumi@feddit.onlineEnglish
    1·
    3 days ago

    While you can put your root filesystem on ZFS and many people do it, it is considered a little more advanced setup and it’s more common to run ext4 on / and then zfs for mounted datasets on e.g. /var and /home.

    A catch with ZFS is that it does not have a compatible license with Linux, which prevents many distros from shipping compiled modules directly. So the most common way to ship it is by DKMS, which (automatically) compiles the ZFS module from source. This is done by installing the zfs-dkms package.

    The ZFS version obviously needs to be compatible with your kernel and sometimes it can take a while for ZFS to Linux. Arch does not coordinate releases so especially if you’re not on the LTS kernel, you can run into situations where ZFS is no longer available after an upgrade. Furthermore, zfs-dkms is not in Arch repos but in AUR so you have to build even that from source for each upgrade of ZFS. Not recommended for beginners.

    That a partial or failed system upgrade can leave you in a place without ZFS modules is one reason why putting / on ZFS is not more common.

    In debian, you just apt-get install zfs-dkms.

    Alpine Linux maintainers decided to just ignore the license issue and ship a compiled zfs package including kernel modules.