The Push
Forty years in R&D. Bleeding edge was the job description. If it wasn’t broken, you weren’t pushing hard enough. That mindset doesn’t retire when you do.
April 2024. Burned out. Done with code. Just wanted to game and forget that compilers exist. Pop!_OS 22.04 was the daily driver — stable, familiar, fine.
Except “fine” started feeling like an insult.
Packages lagged. Performance felt sluggish. Running an LTS base when you’ve spent four decades refusing “good enough” is like wearing someone else’s shoes. Technically functional. Constantly annoying.
I wasn’t looking for a project. I just wanted a distro that didn’t irritate me.
Famous last words.
The Search
CachyOS showed up in my feed. Performance-focused, Arch-based, promising optimizations for the gamer brain I was trying to appease. Started with KDE because the internet said it was “better for gaming.”
You know the saying: an elephant is a mouse built to government standards.
That’s KDE. Powerful, capable, endlessly configurable — and fragmented beyond reason. Too many moving parts. No cohesion. Every setting spawns three more settings. It felt like a desktop designed by committee, where every feature request got approved and nothing got edited.
Switched to CachyOS with Gnome. Closer to Pop, more familiar. Still wrong.
Somewhere in there I tried Garuda — too much flash, not enough substance. Ubuntu briefly, back to the Gnome I knew. Debian, because maybe I needed boring and stable.
Nothing stuck. Every distro solved one problem and introduced two more. Classic.
The Hyprland High
Then I found Hyprland.
Tiling window managers are hard to explain to people who haven’t used them. Windows don’t overlap. They tile. Hands stay on the keyboard. Everything has a place. For someone who spent decades optimizing workflows, it felt like the desktop finally got it.
CachyOS + Hyprland clicked. The aesthetic, the speed, the control. This was home.
Except Hyprland has a problem: Vaxry moves fast and breaks things. Config changes between versions. What worked yesterday throws errors today. For a window manager — the foundation everything else sits on — that’s not quirky. That’s exhausting.
I could have stayed. Kept patching my config every update. But something else was pulling my attention.
System76 was building COSMIC.
COSMIC Enters
COSMIC promised everything I loved about Hyprland — tiling, keyboard-driven, Wayland-native — but from a team building a complete desktop, not just a window manager. Written in Rust. Designed with intention. Backed by a company that ships hardware and has actual skin in the game.
Pop!_OS 24.04 alpha dropped with COSMIC. I jumped.
Too soon.
Alpha means alpha. Too many things didn’t work. Not daily driver territory. Back to CachyOS, now with their COSMIC build.
Back in the Code
Somewhere in this shuffle, my husband saw what I couldn’t admit.
The restlessness was back. The curiosity creeping in. He pointed me toward Rust — a language I’d been circling but hadn’t committed to. He could see it: retirement wasn’t going to be golf and gardening. The burned-out phase was ending.
I started reading COSMIC’s source code. Not just using the desktop — reading it. Rust, with a real project to apply it to, finally clicked.
Then I found the weather applet situation.
There was a weather app for COSMIC. It required manually entering longitude and latitude. No location detection. No alerts. In 2024. I spent 40 years building systems that scaled to billions of messages, and this applet couldn’t look up a ZIP code.
Tempest started there. Not because I wanted to write an applet — because the existing solution was unacceptable. I could fix it. So I did.
Suddenly the distro mattered differently. I wasn’t just a user anymore. I was contributing. And contributing to a Rust-based desktop environment means you need current toolchains, current libraries, a foundation that isn’t fighting upstream.
The burned out gamer was gone. The R&D engineer was back.
The CachyOS COSMIC Era
CachyOS with COSMIC worked. For a while. Pre-built packages meant no waiting for compiles. Performance optimizations felt real. Gaming was solid.
Then CachyOS started cracking.
ISO rollbacks. Package conflicts with upstream. Things broke — not because COSMIC changed, but because CachyOS’s layer introduced variance. When you’re developing against a moving target, you need to know which target is actually moving.
CachyOS adds value. Their kernel optimizations, the gaming-focused packages. But for COSMIC development, their repos became a variable I couldn’t control. And I’ve spent too many years debugging to voluntarily add variables.
The Fedora Detour
Tried the Fedora COSMIC Spin. Different base, same desktop. Maybe that was the answer.
Fedora’s solid. COSMIC ran fine.
Then came the NVIDIA stack.
RPM Fusion. Kernel module signing. Secure boot complications. Multiple repos with different priorities. Getting my RTX 4070 Super working correctly felt like assembling IKEA furniture with instructions in three languages, none of them complete.
I’ve debugged worse. But at some point you realize complexity isn’t buying you anything.
Fedora wasn’t it.
Back to Pop 24.04
Pop!_OS 24.04 hit stable. COSMIC from the team that builds COSMIC. The obvious choice.
It worked. Stable, polished, daily-driver ready.
The friction crept back anyway.
Ubuntu 24.04 LTS underneath means older kernel, older Mesa, older everything. For a desktop environment in active development, an LTS base feels like driving a sports car with the parking brake on.
MangoHud? Compile it yourself. Latest Rust toolchain? Not in repos. BTRFS with Snapper for proper snapshots? Not default, not integrated, not trivial.
My Rule #1: Blessed are the pessimists, for they maketh backups.
Pop 24.04 made following that rule harder than it needed to be.
I found myself compiling packages just to get current versions. Building tools instead of using them. Fighting the base instead of working with it.
Pop plans to move to 26.04 in March. That helps. But LTS means packages are behind the moment they release. For developing COSMIC applets with current tooling, it’s friction I don’t need.
The Landing
Nuked everything. Vanilla Arch.
No CachyOS repos. No third-party COSMIC builds. Just core, extra, multilib, and AUR.
Here’s what Arch gives me that nothing else did: I install exactly what I want. Not what someone thinks I need. Not what a distro decided to bundle. No bloat, no extras, no “we included this for convenience.” My system, my choices.
COSMIC from AUR means compiling, but it means compiling exactly what upstream ships. Zen kernel gives me desktop optimizations without CachyOS-specific patches I can’t debug. BTRFS and Snapper work out of the box — snapshots before every pacman transaction, exactly how it should be.
Current kernel. Current Mesa. Current Rust. When COSMIC updates, I’m building against the same foundation the developers use.
More work than Pop? In some ways. But predictable work. When something breaks, I know where to look. The variables are controlled.
Forty years of R&D taught me one thing: the bleeding edge is only sustainable when your foundation is solid. Arch gives me that. COSMIC gives me the desktop I want to use and develop for.
The Takeaway
A year of distro hopping. Here’s what stuck:
COSMIC deserves a current base. It’s built on modern Rust, targeting Wayland, actively developed. Running it on LTS creates friction between what COSMIC wants to be and what the base allows.
The grass isn’t greener. CachyOS has real optimizations — and real complexity. Fedora is solid — until NVIDIA. Pop is stable — and stale. Every distro is a tradeoff. Pick your pain.
Know what you’re optimizing for. Burned out and gaming? CachyOS made sense. Developing applets? Different calculus. The best distro depends on what you’re actually doing.
Your nature doesn’t retire. Forty years on the bleeding edge. I thought burnout meant I was done with that. Turns out I just needed a break. The R&D mindset came back, and when it did, I needed a distro that could keep up.
Vanilla Arch with COSMIC isn’t for everyone. But for developing COSMIC applets, gaming on an ultrawide with an NVIDIA GPU, and sleeping well because Snapper has my back?
Exactly right.
