It was all just a bunch of rich tech bros that made that $8M investment, with $1M from DHH himself.
Its not the standard investment from another company where they do some due diligence. This was just a “we think this is the future of Linux” vibe investment.
Copium
To address some of the author’s points.
If you want LTS, you would pick something like RockyLinux. They offer support for 10 years per release.
Its unstable as a target platform for development. You never know when it will break API/ABI compatibility. It’s why most containers target Ubuntu, Debian, Alpine, and UBI. The versions can be locked and you can be assured that your software won’t randomly break one day after and update.
For some reason people have taken that as being unstable to use as a system, which hasn’t been the case for me either.
This would have been better received if they just didn’t use AI in the name. Sure, it’s just using an LLM under the hood, but it’s running purely locally. It also betters Linux since it helps address an accessibility issue.
Just drop the AUR and swap those packages to flatpak/appimage.
Are those people really developers or just sloperators?
There are a few big differences when it comes to the package management. Pacman, AUR, and rolling release are some of the largest differences. Y
ou will want to familiarize yourself with some of the most common commands for pacman such as Syu, S, Rsn, Si and such. If use the default shell for Cachy (fish), then tab completion should help.
As for the AUR, that is where you will want to install things that aren’t part of the base repo. Keep in mind some stiff is community packaged, so you might not get the support you would expect on Ubuntu.
Finally, Cachy is a rolling release so every time you install a new package, you need to also update your system. In the past rolling distros have been more unstable due to the release schedule, but things don’t break too much now. Cachy helps avoid breakage by having snapper which will let you boot into your system with older packages from your boot loader.
That really depends on distro. With something like Arch and Debian, that is definitely the case. On the other hand, Bazzite requires almost no configuration and has scripts for common use cases.
Software compatibility is probably the biggest issue. If someone relies on a piece of software that is Windows or MacOS exclusive, that can be enough of a deal breaker. Open source alternatives may exist, but they do not always have the same features or behave as expected compared to what they are replacing.
I’ve been running Linux full time for 4 years and still have my Windows troubleshooting knowledge. I would say it’s more frustrating since logging isn’t nearly as good compared to Linux.
The biggest feature on Mac is the battery efficiency of Safari with the features of something like Zen Browser. On Linux I would just stick with Zen for similar features.
Nvidia will stop supporting the card officially around the same time on both platforms. With Linux, a viable open source driver may exist in the future, as there is work on nvk which should support that generation of card.
There is LMDE which is just based on Debian.
https://orionbrowser.com/. Browser for macOS and iOS. It is a browser that is based on WebKit (like Safari) for macOS and iOS. Right now the only WebKit browser on Linux is Epiphany (GNOME Web), but it is lacking in features compared to Orion.
I personally use it on my Mac, and it would be nice to have other options for Linux given the shrinking market share of Firefox.
Feels like it’s usually Mint or something niche.
The largest item keeping me from swapping to COSMIC is the lack of HDR support. They stated it would be implemented before or at the 1.0 release. Has that already completed?
I think Cosmic will be the best compromise once it finally releases. Having the ability to swap between tiling and floating quickly and per workspace gives you the best of both worlds.
You could use something like homebrew for your packages while keeping just system packages to the default package manager. It has the upside of being separated and more recent, but it can mean duplicate packages are on the system.
Its not the future of Linux, most likely a fad. The most it will be is a cult OS used by people on the far right.
The only thing good I can say about it is that it has interested some people into Linux because of how all of the components are unique compared to Mac and Windows. Cosmic could be the main stream option for those users once it becomes more stable.