CachyOS Plasma - Summary
THE BAD
Overall, I was prety much pleased with Cachy, but not without reservations. I was unable to get applications to accept keyboard input at first, and obviously that's a showstopper. I shut down the VM, and went through its settings, where I discovered that VirtualBox had changed the video support from the newer VBoxSVGA that I'd selected to the older VMSVGA. I changed it again to the newer video "card", and upon restarting the VM, I was able to enter text without a problem, so I was able to go ahead with configuring Thunderbird and syncing Vivaldi.
I'm relating what happened, and what the results were. I have no idea what the root cause was, or whether I actually solved the problem correctly. Indeed, on my second day with Cachy, keyboard input stopped again, on a couple of occasions. I was able to reboot and continue working.
More serious -- and this won't apply to everyone -- is that I couldn't easily access my NAS from Cachy. After I got Thunderbird working, I was able to get the text I needed to add to /etc/fstab, and I had no problem thereafter mounting my NAS shares. But accessing them in Dolphin was a different matter. Usually Dolphin defaults to smb to locate my NAS on the network, as it operates as a smb (and nfs) file server. Thus it lists the shares and provides access to their contents. Not so with Cachy. It couldn't locate the NAS on the network at all.
After I modified /etc/fstab and issued a mount -a command, Dolphin showed a list of those shares, but would not allow me to access their contents. To be honest, this has happened before with several other OSs that I've explored, but many handle it properly. All the Solus editions, for example, Ultramarine, and various others work as they should. The only way I could access the data in those shares with Cachy was in the terminal.
I should point out that these NAS issues affect me severely, but may not matter at all to most users. I use an NAS server at home to provide access to personal documents, backups, music library, books, photos, videos, and more to the 7 computers in this house, and to any VMs I may create. Thus, most of the computers here have a very small SSD, because all the significant data storage is done by the NAS.
THE GOOD
Indeed, there is some good to talk about. Although Cachy loads and enables 20 unit files, which makes it slower to load and to shutdown than we're used to with Solus (3 or 4 unit files, depending on DE), it's lightning fast compared with the heavyweight distros. The one I need to wait on the longest is Ultramarine Budgie, which once loaded 152, but has recently been trimmed down to about 120.
Cachy's default command shell is Fish, which I find a lot fancier than I want to see when I work at a command line. It's easy to invoke BASH from Fish, though, and I'm sure it could be changed permanently on a per-user basis, but I didn't take the time to do that. Terminology was in the repository, and it's a very good version of it. It has none of the issues that plagued its early versions.
Cachy's web browser is simply called Cachy, and it's a Firefox spin-off, so it will be very familiar to many, if not most, users. It uses extensions from the Mozilla add-ons store. It's said to be improved over Firefox with better security and privacy.
There was no software that I needed, that I couldn't install from either Pacman in the terminal, or from the AddRemove Software utility (like Solus' Software Center). Since it doesn't support .DEB or .RPM files, that's a good thing. I did install LibreOffice and Flatpak from the terminal at Tom's request, so although those are not provided by default. they're easy to get.
CONCLUSION
For users who have no need to connect with a file server for data storage, I think Cachy will provide a very enjoyable experience. It's fast, and responsive, with a huge software repository.
After such a brief trial, I can't vouch for its kernel improvements relative to its parent, Arch Linux, but I didn't notice any obvious problems in that regard, either. I suspect the issue I had with keyboard input may have a simple long-term solution, and it's very likely to be a VM issue that wouldn't affect an installation on hardware.
Cachy's implementation of KDE Plasma is one they can be proud of, in my opinion. It's very standard, with all the usual settings in the usual places, and experienced Plasma users should find it very easy to configure and use. Its infrastructure is up-to-date, as I've listed in previous posts, so I won't repeat all that here. New hardware shouldn't have any problems with its support.
I'll be leaving this VM up and running for a couple days, to monitor its daily updates (inherited from its Arch parent), so if you have anything you'd like me to check, just ask.
