Some people here may have been informed, some entertained, and others may applaud themselves by having avoided my distribution hopping of the last half-year. TL;DR: I did it. I installed CachyOS. And I'm happy with it so far. (But then again I was happy with Kubuntu and Fedora at the time I installed them too...) Recap for anyone keeping score: My hardware is a GMKTec EVO-X2 which uses the AMD "Strix Halo" architecture (Ryzen AI Max+ 395 CPU/NPU/GPU). My core use cases are running local LLMs, video editing/production, and Steam games. In a quest for the best balance of compatibility, stability and performance I have tried - KDE Neon - TuxedoOS - Kubuntu - Bazzite - Fedora - CachyOS (wouldn't install) - Kubuntu LTS - And now, as of this past weekend, CachyOS again Pretty well the only thing these distros had in common was KDE, a must-have in this search. (There's enough to learn about each distro, I don't need to keep relearning a GUI.) The ability to run AI software stacks and apps on this (relatively) bleeding edge hardware requires a distribution which is either officially supported by the software (Kubuntu LTS) or a community capable of providing sufficient unofficial support (everything else). Early on I learned that I would have to make tradeoffs between having current software and having a stable system. Of the distros above it seemed like only Fedora, Kubuntu and CachyOS even had sub-communities that cared about my use cases and hardware. In Fedora's case, the existence of said community enabled/allowed an update to the "linux-firmware" package to break LLM software on my platform and sat on fix for more than three months (because I no longer run it I don't even know if that fix has been released yet). And then there's Kubuntu LTS. Officially supported by AMD, this approach would, one would hope, avoid such severe breakage. It did, at least regarding the AI and video drivers. However, the 6.14 kernel was simply too old to support important features of this new CPU. Furthermore, going from Fedora to Kubuntu LTS was like a step back in time. My video software and kernel were now many releases older. Old Handbrake on Kubuntu would not read the backup of the config file I'd saved from New Handbrake on Fedora. And it seems unconscionable to me that any distro would not make one single decent browser that didn't force snaps upon me. The process of replacing Firefox-the-snap with Firefox-the-deb is well documented, but, as I found out, not particularly stable. I was receiving error messages upon starting Firefox that not even a purge-then-reinstall would fix. Sheesh, I thought I was going to Kubuntu LTS for its stability; yet mere weeks after installation its browser -- one of the components of it that I use the most -- breaks beyond repair. The fallback Falkon browser that's a part of KDE couldn't render any web page made in the last two decades. So enough of this. Then I recalled William Park's recent GTALUG post <https://lists.gtalug.org/archives/list/talk@lists.gtalug.org/thread/WNBZ36RA2N7G4VESRXD62GKQI5ARFYDP/> about moving from Slackware(!) to CachyOS and having a good experience. I had to re-evaluate -- I had previously avoided CachyOS because of the instability inherent in its rolling release model. But since "stable" distros such as Fedora and Kubuntu had already let me down, why not try CachyOS again? At very least I would be confident that its rapid release cycle would ensure that I had the minimal kernel rev I need (6.18.4) and that fixes in linux-firmware would not be sat on for months. So then I tried again to install CachyOS and discovered why my first attempt had failed. CachyOS has a very unique install-time quirk -- the EFI partition. This is a FAT32-formatted chunk of your storage that is normally mounted under /boot/efi and has to be at least 100MB (maybe 200MB if you're dual-booting with Windows or want to have multiple boot options). *CachyOS won't let you install without an EFI partition of at least 2GB*. This is fine if you're starting with a fresh drive, but will likely require manual resizing (and maybe movement) of partitions if you want to dual-boot or have anything previous that you want to keep. So I rebooted into my favourite PC repair tool, repartitioned so that my EFI area is now 4GB, and CachyOS is finally happy to install. I understand that all this space is needed to accommodate btrfs snapshots into which you may want to boot if you need to rollback due to an update breaking things. In hindsight maybe Fedora -- which also likes btrfs for its filesystems -- would have benefitted from this too. So far, touch wood, all is good. All my hardware and peripherals were recognized and work fine. In fact CachyOS is the first distro I've ever installed that picked the correct audio device immediately. I note that the EFI partition (here mounted as /boot) already has almost 600MB in use. I have not installed Steam or the AI software suite yet but I see that the documentation to do both appears robust. The video software is current, functioning, and for the most part taking advantage of this system hardware. The software maintenance system is ... different, but having to know one's way around dnf, apt, flatpak and snap this system is easy enough to pick up. Things feel "snappier" but I can't quantify it, and I haven't yet investigated if further system specific fine tuning can be done. If there's interest I'll report back on how well the AI and games work once installed as well as any hiccups in day-to-day use. And thanks, WIlliam. PS: Yes I know that Kubuntu LTS 26.04 is coming up in April and will refresh its app releases. It might even ship with kernel 6.20 which doesn't exist yet. But then it will be frozen in time for another two years. Don't want that, not on new hardware whose features have not been fully exploited yet. -- Evan Leibovitch, Toronto Canada @evanleibovitch / @el56