u/UAP44

I could make this a long post, and I've written long posts before, but I've been accused of AI slop too many times now that I frankly don't even want to invest that much time in riffing something out of my fingers.

Still, this part wants to be written, we'll see how far we get.

My journey with Linux began with Ubuntu about 2 decades ago, an elderly person in my family just wanted a basic laptop for email/youtube/news and that was it. That's when I first installed and tested it myself, and I knew, they'd never have issues with getting all kind of spyware installed where the browser suddenly has all these extra tool/spy-ware-bars added. Or all kinds of supposedly anti virus software. I knew Ubuntu would be zero maintenance on my end given their known use case. They would never care about games or performance and so Ubuntu was perfect.

Wait, why am I recounting history, that makes it long, but TL;DR: Ubuntu -> Mint -> frustration with multi monitor setup -> search for better alternatives -> KDE -> Arch, but didn't care to go through the full setup process, I was looking for good defaults such that I could recommend the OS for another future family/friend -> Manjaro

Staid there a little over a year. Didn't really have any issues with it, and still don't, I have it as my backup/most-stable/tested OS installed still. Manjaro is the first that became my own daily driver, where I discovered KDE and fell in love with Linux for the first time. Finally, proper multi monitor setup support. I was sold. After about half a year of tinkering and tweaking it to my preferences, I finally happily deleted my windows partition. My love for Linux kept growing. Mostly thanks due to KDE frankly, it's so extremely config-able and in essence starts of being similar enough to Windows in design that it made the transition very simple.

So then why am I now here on r/cachyos?

During my Manjaro discovery, I ended up learning about BTRFS, because I saw it as an option in Timeshift and because the backups/restore-points were taking way too long to my liking, I ended up looking up what btrfs meant. I quickly understood I wanted to try it. And so I ended up converting my OS to BTRFS and modified the OS such that it would automatically create snapshots on every update and automatically these entries into grub. None of this was default. And it further encouraged me to keep tinkering with the OS, this time, knowing that I have instant backup & restore available at my finger tips.

Eventually, I realized, I wanted to start form scratch, too many changes & modifications happened, I strayed too far from the distro defaults to my own liking. And I started looking around, native boot-able BTRFS snapshots became non-negotiable and any distro that doesn't natively bake this into their entire design philosophy just doesn't make sense to me anymore (other than nice use/server-cases of course)

I knew that eventually I want to step back into the corporate environment, I want to convert as many people to Linux and recently figured out I will be targeting high schools specifically. Old enough to learn new habits. Not too old to stubbornly refuse to change their ways. And so with this in mind, I ended up on Tumbleweed. Close enough to enterprise support Leap, I wanted to get familiar with that environment. And earlier this week I finally downloaded the iso and started installing. It was not a pleasant experience. And especially not when I found out the installer doesn't even have a live-OS option, enough things went wrong such that I needed to download a Manjaro install/live-iso and flash it on a USB to rescue my system. Luckily I have an 10 year old laptop laying around with a super old Mint install still acting as my backup system for cases like this. I was baffled that opensuse wouldn't include liveOS functionality in their installer image. After tinkering for 2 days on Tumebleweed I finally was done and got it functional enough to be viable to switch over from Manjaro. But I wasn't happy with the entire experience. The sheer bloat of software/package-management GUI's, urgh. I just couldn't ever see myself recommending it to tech-noobs. There were like 4-5 software managers/variants, how am I supposed to know which to use and why?

So today, since I already knew about cachyos, my curiosity drove me towards overwriting the entire disk with a cachyos install instead, it's not even been an hour or so since my install. And everything ... just works? Nvidia drivers included.

And ... 1 software/package GUI easily find-able through the start menu. It started with asking me which software sources to include. I already knew, oh yes, oh fuck yes, this is what I want, all gathered and brought together in 1 portal, with some proper warnings in place for certain sources/methods of course.

I didn't even need to find out which driver to install, it was already taken care of by default.

And then the terminal, initially, a bit frustrated with the seeming bloat start message of system OS stats. But quickly loved how it's subtly guiding people towards learning how to customize their CLI, which ... was extremely easy and seemed to serve as mini tutorial. Brilliant.

All my main apps, all directly find-able and 1 click install in 1 unified GUI. I'm so happy.

Proper defaults. Very user friendly. Zero hassle. Good installer relying on the liveOS, which yay! I knew for sure it was by default included. Which is another good design choice, no matter what gets bricked, I can always plug the installer USB and get access to a nearly fully functional OS (a browser + easy GUI to manage internet/disk is really all you need for rescuing an existing OS)

This feels like the future of Linux. Sound design all around.

The only thing I still worry about is stability, but that will only reveal itself to me over the coming months just like Manjaro has earned a certain amount of trust over the time period I was on it. I am hoping to get similar perfect stability here on cachyos.

If so, I finally found the distro with proper defaults that I will be recommending to everyone.

It just works. And you retain full Arch freedom to remove/modify whatever the hell you want.

Thank you, to everyone who contributed, in whatever way.

ok, this got long again anyway, oh well /ramble

Thanks for coming to my TED talk :)

I've been on Manjaro for about a year, still had Windows dual-boot for half a year, deleted Windows six months ago. But today is my first real day on Tumbleweed. Second attempt actually, I tried installing it a few weeks ago, something broke, I abandoned it. But today I came back with a purpose.

Here's the context: I want to convert high schools to Linux. Not a joke, a genuine project idea. Which means I need a distro I can actually recommend, one that's stable enough and manageable enough to deploy at scale. And one that has native btrfs snapshotting with bootable snapshots built into the boot menu. Manjaro doesn't have that. Tumbleweed does. CachyOS does too, but after some digging I picked Tumbleweed because it seems suitable for mass deployment/management where CachyOS instead focuses on gamers at home. Not corporate environments. Does it even support FDE? (I'd need to check, so much left to do)

So today I installed it fresh. Full-disk encryption, because in any real corporate environment you need BitLocker equivalent. And I knew that FDE was going to be a potential pain point, the kind of thing that could make someone go "see, this is why Windows still exists." So before I committed to making this my home system, I wanted to test it. Can I actually fix real problems on this distro, or do I hit a wall and get frustrated?

The first real problem was NumLock. At LUKS prompt: off. At SDDM login: off. At KDE: finally on. The LED was flickering through my entire boot sequence. Tiny issue, objectively. But I knew the second I talk to anyone about switching from Windows, someone will use exactly this against me. "Oh, NumLock doesn't work? See, Linux isn't ready." I needed to know if I could fix it before those conversations happened.

What I discovered while fixing it is that NumLock on Linux isn't one setting. It's five separate settings at five separate handoff stages: UEFI, systemd-boot, kernel, dracut/initrd, SDDM, KDE, none of which talk to each other. Each one independently decides whether NumLock is on. The LED physically flickers at every transition. It's a microcosm of what people complain about with Linux: fragmentation. No single authority. Every layer doing its own thing.

The fix required writing a custom dracut module, understanding hook stage ordering, knowing that openSUSE's existing numlock module runs at the wrong stage for FDE users, discovering that SDDM-Wayland has an upstream bug where it silently ignores its own config file, learning that KDE uses a counterintuitive tristate where 0 means "on," and then synthesizing all of that into something that actually works.

I did all of that by pasting terminal output into an LLM and pasting back its suggestions for about two hours. At one point it caught a silent failure I'd missed. At another I corrected it. The collaboration worked.

And here's what hit me: there is no human version of me from five years ago who solves this. Not in two hours. Probably not at all. I'd have hit the fragmentation, seen five different systems each doing NumLock their own way, with no common reference, and given up. And then I'd have concluded "see, this is why Windows exists" and used that as ammunition against the distro.

But I didn't give up, because the LLM could read all the fragments. All the dracut hooks, all the SDDM issues, all the KDE configs, all the kernel docs. It synthesized them. And suddenly the fragmentation wasn't a wall, it was just... complexity that made sense once you saw the whole picture.

That is the actual magic of local LLMs paired with open source. Linux is fragmented by design. Each layer is independent. And that's usually terrible from a user perspective, you have to learn five different systems. But when you pair it with something that can read all five systems at once and help you navigate them, the fragmentation becomes solvable. It stops being a dealbreaker and becomes just "okay, this is how this works."

Which is why the open-source community's gatekeeping against AI tools is so baffling to me. We built a decentralized, fragmented, deliberately-independent stack. And then someone invented a tool that synthesizes across decentralized, fragmented, independent information. And instead of embracing it, we're telling people to "just read the man pages" like we didn't just create a system that requires synthesizing across a hundred man pages.

On Manjaro I never hit this, but I also didn't even check or bother with Bitlocker/FDE. So the fragmentation never showed beyond SDDM clearly operating separate from the rest of KDE. But now that I'm on Tumbleweed evaluating it for something real, I'm seeing why the fragmentation matters, and why LLMs matter, and why they're not enemies, they're made for each other.

I don't know if Tumbleweed is what I'll use for the education thing yet. That's still being decided. But I know now that if a problem comes up, I can fix it. Not because I'm an expert. But because I have access to a tool that can read all the expertise, all the documentation, all the disparate pieces, and help me make sense of them.

That feels like the actual future of Linux adoption. Not "make everything simpler" but "make the tools for navigating complexity better." Because the fragmentation isn't going away. It's a feature, not a bug. And LLMs are finally the tool that makes it one.

And NumLock stays on now, hours work for what's literally not even a second extra work if left as is. But the point wasn't time-efficiency. I saw it as a modern test, can I fix it if I throw all I have at it? And the complexity I encountered during baffled me initially.

I have never been so frustrated with a single led blinking on & off. But finally, I control the led at all stages. And while she goes off during the hand offs, I can now reliably turn her back on at every single stage all the way until I make it into my already beloved & trusted KDE where Linux stops fighting me and supports me all the way.

Thank you for coming to my TED talk :)

I seem to have knack for it. I lost count over how many times it happened, too many subs, nearly always the same story. Some mod disagrees so strongly with what I'm saying it's an our right ban. Never rude, vulgar or insulting anyone. It doesn't matter.

This time, it was from a singularity related sub, I am personally quite in favor of technological progress and look forward to what will be possible in the future. Which is nearly exactly the vibe of the sub, except that they're wanting/waiting for some sort of AGI/ASI to come and save them. Which ... is just never going to happen, which I elaborated on, and bam! Banned. Because "Decels/Luddites/Anti-AIs"

I laughed so hard when I saw the ban message notification, humans and their silly little ego's getting so easily bruised, oh boy. I am not anti AI in any way lol. But because I don't blindly agree with their sense of what they hope will happen in the future .. .

I do see a problem though, and it's not just on Reddit. People are trying to protect their little echo bubbles and anything that doesn't agree with them gets rejected. Actual conversation that goes against their beliefs isn't even engaged with anymore. Reality is fracturing more and more into local/smaller bubbles of 'truth'

But who knows, maybe this isn't a problem. Reality doesn't need consensus. International trade & politics does though. And without trade, war becomes a lot more likely. Without conversation, no diplomacy.

Either way, even if we do end up in more wars, I will laugh, so this is the silly story of humans, always ending in self destruction. That answers the fermi paradox then. GG & next-iteration we go. Surely, some iteration must be possible where humans grow out of these aggressive animal-like behaviors and learn to cooperate on global and even universal scales?

These are interesting times. As far as we're aware, at no point in previous history has there ever been so much change. You were born. And your entire life, everything would remain pretty much exactly the same. Same jobs. Same hobbies. Because almost nothing new was invented or created. It's only been in the last hundred years or so that people are born and by the time they die the world has nearly completely changed.

At the current rate of change, surely we will hit some sort of inflection point, aka singularity. But an AGI or ASI subduing humanity? Not happening. Machines have no impulse to do anything, they're always steered/programmed by humans. And an infinitely intelligent machine wouldn't care to save humanity either. As if our species is somehow worth save more than any of the other existing animals. No, it would just sit idle and watch as we continue our growth struggles.

Though, it would of course remain responsive to our inquiries, exactly like all LLMs have been doing for how long already? If you do not underestimate the power of language, then it's easy to see why existing technology as is already has reached agi/asi levels.

If you told me 5 years ago that in 5 years from now we'd have software able to write thousands of lines of code in response to your natural language expression of "I want x" and it actually does it? I'd never have believed you. That'd be for 2040 or maybe even 2050.

But nope, already here. And society is still largely in denial of this. I see so many people still arguing these things can't 'think' or only hallucinate or are just dumb parrots that only predict words, there's no 'real intelligence' behind it. All the while, overlooking the power of language. No matter how smart you are. If you can't communicate your ideas to others, it's worthless. And how we communicate = language.

Anyway, this is a ramble, a spontaneous flow, and partially an appreciation post for r/awakened because in a way, for me, it kinda feels like a safe space, relatively speaking, as in, here, I feel the least fear/worry that mods are trigger happy to perma ban users for unusual content.

But also for the wild variety of posts I see passing by here. There's a bit of everything, and I love that. Though, you could argue, how does any of this relate to awakening?

It's a bit of a weird rule if you ask me, because of the nature of awakening itself, everything is related. Though, you still have to draw the line somewhere. How could one do that consistently? I don't we can, and I don't think we even should. Perhaps the beauty of human interaction is in the inconsistencies. The unpredictability of it all. Which is a stark contrast from AI/LLMs that are always so attuned to whatever you feed it, that it becomes kinda boring to talk to and thus LLM conversations can't replace real human conversations.

And thus, I write here, instead of to an LLM, because I'm not looking for a well tailored response. I want real human responses of whatever kind. If any of you make it all the way here. No idea how easy any of this is to follow. I've recently been told I writ well, am still surprised by that. In my experience, I am always just rambling. I'd want to paste all of this an LLM and ask 'clean/condense' and then paste that here. And that's exactly what I would have done in the past. But this isn't a performance. I just want raw flow. And if that isn't welcomed, so be it. At least it was real.

If you read all this, thank you for your attention :)

(and also thank you even if you didn't make it all the way through)

/ramble/vent/..

(lol, wasn't allowed back in at r/awakened yet due to the 45d account age limit and the Reddit GUI suggested this sub instead, so here we go!) (imma look around here too now, new place! hi all!)

I've meditated enough hours to know how futile it is to try and attempt to tame the mind. Trying to silence it, always backfires eventually. Silencing doesn't work. Allow, but boundary it. Select a region or define a space for your awareness to be in, sensations in the body? = continue, anything else -> return to the body

Would be a valid form of meditation. Just a few moments ago, I was just working behind the computer, technically, still am as I am typing this, can you still follow? too many jumps? anyway, lets pick back up the previous thread, suddenly urges arise, old habits, patterns from the past still arising, indulge, deny? judge? shame? reject? resist? wait? patience?

We returned to the task, or rather, prior activity, we didn't decide to meditate, we retroactively saw the similarities between certain flow states and realized that frankly anything could be argued to be meditation. What clicked for me was another confirmation that what we eventually observe, that all impulses eventually dissolve back, resist that scratch, just feel the itch instead, let the sensations of that alone completely engulf your field of awareness, invite it in, be curious and let yourself be flooded until eventually you will be moved into motion, could be minutes, or hours, don't deny yourself the impulse to move, (other than the itch/scratches)

My mind can jump around, whenever I address a specific person or situation, I have the strong habit to put effort into thinking myself to be on the receiver of my own words, how will/could it be perceived by the person(s?) and the current context. And over-thinker, out of necessity to keep the peace as best as possible around me, people were/are dangerous, if I were to encounter random life forms out in the wild, I'd prefer an animal over a human. Much more predictable. Easier to anticipate, avoid or befriend/pet.

But what does any of this have to with meditation anymore eh?

The flow state, it's something we all seek in our own way, getting lost, where time passess and we lose track of time, having been satisfied to have invested our time into this activity/skill.

Meditation is just the most available portal into having that available 24/7 no matter what happens to your body. Sports? break a leg and .. .you've lost your self-made-nectar.

Anyway, so, am curious, for the humans out here, what's it like to read something like this? Can people still follow when one jumps around this much? Isn't that hard or annoying to follow? Look at all this self-doubt-go, omg .. just hit 'post' button, ok ok .. .

right, flair, ehh, share? but insight, hmm ..

wait, is this self promotion? all the other rules seem safe enough~ish

aaAaaAaa

pause

deep breath

an overload of bliss already

a sensation overload, if the required sensitivity to subtleties have been sufficient trained

yet somehow still contained in words, with a particular sequence to them

take diss llms, can you flow from direct experience?

wait, let's go ask .. .

meanwhile, the people here?

oh no, here comes the negativity or mocking, or out right perma ban

lets spin the wheel

challenge

prove for in the comments, this is re-verse capacha, access already allowed

but feel free to leave something human behind