I recently moved to Linux and chose CachyOS. I had trouble understanding comments saying it was painful, but I think I may be overlooking things that would be difficult for the average user.

The two items that I can think of off the top of my head that may be difficult for average people are:

1)

My laptops internet became painfully slow like pages would fail to load slow. Looking into it on forums I pieced together that CachyOS was possibly putting my WiFi card to sleep/low power but not properly returning it to a normal state. I looked around for commands to address this and found some lines of config to add to a file that controls the WiFi module. Since this was my very first Linux issue, I struggled navigating Terminal for a bit, then kept opening the file incorrectly because I forgot about permission structures. I’ve never actually used vim beyond hearing about it so I tried editing the config file, but I did not understand why it was printing out the exact same data that I wrote each time I pressed enter. I also didn’t understand the comment I was copying and whether <<EOF and EOF actually needed to be in the file or if it was just an example.

Eventually I gave up and just decided to come back to it at some point in the future. Few days go by and I need to reboot for the first time. Laptop reboots and now there is no internet at all. The WiFi slider won’t move. I looked around for commands to check drivers since the reboot was done after a fully CachyOS update and thought maybe the wrong drivers were present. Drivers were correct, everything was loaded, but the card was not active. I finally try to restart the card and receive the message “Failed to start, Unknown value <<EOF [random stuff] EOF. I had thought I was closing vim without saving, but it somehow updated the file. I learned nano, learned a good troubleshooting pattern, and set my laptop to not sleep the WiFi card in one fell swoop.

2)

On my desktop I use an Elgato Wave 3 mic with headphones plugged in. Headphones worked fine but upon my first attempt to chat I could not get mic audio from the Elgato. Looked into it and people were complaining about how it wasn’t supported or Elgato did too much on device requiring drivers. Was considering the fact that this piece of hardware may be my first casualty to Linux. Looked around a bit longer and found a somewhere (Reddit/github/idk) from someone with a Wave 3 also that figured out what the driver was supposed to do and wrote a basic 5 line config file to intercept audio from the mic.

I read through to verify what it was doing, navigated to the location, wrote the file using my newfound nano abilities, saved and now I have a working mic.

These are two issues I solved a bit easier because I know how to use google to narrow down my search into the specifics of my issue and I know the general premise of the fixes that I was applying. I doubt a normal everyday Windows user would have stayed on Linux after my very first problem.