It took 30+ years, but I finally managed to migrate from Slackware, to CachyOS. I can now hang out with all the cool kids. These are my observations: 1. BTRFS was excellent and defining choice, in hind sight. Snapshot makes backup so easy. I'm willing to take speed hit, but I found it's quite fast. BTRFS filesystem has "subvolume", eg. for CachyOS, - root is "@" subvolume, mounted at / - home is "@home" subvolume, mounted at /home So, - to back up /home within the current filesystem, just take snapshot. - to back up to another BTRFS filesystem, do "btrfs send | btrfs receive". I see 60MB/s throughput on my machine with SATA2 harddisks. 2. Font was surprising. Using same Firefox, same website, - Fedora has the best fonts. - CachyOS is close second. - OpenSUSE has the worst fonts. 3. CachyOS is the fastest. Fedora and OpenSUSE felt about the same in speed. 4. Vim is Vim is Vim. It should be, but each distro has their own configuration stack. You have to watch out for that. I took me some time to get "indentation" that Slackware gives you by default. Conclusion: ----------- I'm satisfied with CachyOS, so far. I recommend people to try BTRFS distros. It will make your backup much easier. And, ability to do "rollback" is bonus. --William
Many thanks for this. On Wed, Jan 7, 2026 at 4:09 AM William Park via Talk <talk@lists.gtalug.org> wrote:
So, - to back up /home within the current filesystem, just take snapshot.
Where are the snapshots stored? Do you have to allocate space? How many snapshots can be saved? Can you boot from a snapshot? 2. Font was surprising. Using same Firefox, same website,
- Fedora has the best fonts. - CachyOS is close second. - OpenSUSE has the worst fonts.
Can this be solved by installing fonts or is it a rendering issue? Conclusion:
----------- I'm satisfied with CachyOS, so far. I recommend people to try BTRFS distros. It will make your backup much easier. And, ability to do "rollback" is bonus.
Reading some of the CachyOS forums, the rollback feature seems to be the *main* reason btrfs is preferred. More than one war story describes a process that sounds like: 1) An update did something unexpected to my system 2) I was easily able to rollback to its state before the update 3) I went to the wiki to find out what went wrong and took appropriate steps to fix or mitigate. Again, thanks. Great report. Great to hear you're happy with the choice. - Evan
On 2026-01-07 16:30, Evan Leibovitch wrote:
Many thanks for this.
On Wed, Jan 7, 2026 at 4:09 AM William Park via Talk <talk@lists.gtalug.org <mailto:talk@lists.gtalug.org>> wrote:
So, - to back up /home within the current filesystem, just take snapshot.
Where are the snapshots stored?
Snapshot, like all subvolume, shows up as "directory", and you use it like "directory". My interest is for backup. Eg. to back up /home, btrfs subvolume snapshot -r /home home--2026-01-06 A read-only snapshot "home--2026-01-06" will be created immediately, and it will show up as "./home--2026-01-06" directory. You can create it anywhere, but I do it in /root. Now, to move it to storage. (1) Within the same BTRFS system. Well, you just did it. Or, you can "mv" to different location. Treat it like "read-only" directory. (2) To another BTRFS system. (This is my case). You have to "dump" over stdin/stdout, btrfs send home--2026-01-06 | btrfs receive /backup/ A new read-only snapshot will show up at /backup/home--2026-01-06. With my SATA2 harddisks, I get about 60MB/s throughput. Nowadays, you can buy a single big harddisk. But, if you want to re-purpose old harddisks, then BTRFS is the only reasonable filesystem that can pull multiple harddisks together. (3) To copy to EXT4 system. Since subvolume is directory, cp -a home--2026-01-06 /backup/ or tar -cf - home--2026-01-06 | tar -xf - -C /backup/ or find ... | cpio ...
Do you have to allocate space? How many snapshots can be saved?
No allocation is needed. You create/delete subvolume like you create/delete directory.
Can you boot from a snapshot?
Snapshot is just another subvolume, so "yes". Normally, CachyOS is booting from "@" subvolume, and Fedora is booting from "root" subvolume. For CachyOS "rollback", it's booting from a snapshot, but it's only temporary. Eventually, you are asked to "restore" it as normal filesystem. If you mean, booting from your own snapshot, that I don't know... yet.
2. Font was surprising. Using same Firefox, same website, - Fedora has the best fonts. - CachyOS is close second. - OpenSUSE has the worst fonts.
Can this be solved by installing fonts or is it a rendering issue?
I have English as primary language, and Korean as secondary. I didn't have to do anything on Fedora and CachyOS. They showed all the YouTube pages correctly. OpenSUSE showed only English, at first. After downloading Korean fonts, it showed Korean fonts, but very poorly. I don't understand. OpenSUSE and Fedora have been doing this for many many years. Fedora got it all worked out. OpenSUSE is still tripping over.
Conclusion: ----------- I'm satisfied with CachyOS, so far. I recommend people to try BTRFS distros. It will make your backup much easier. And, ability to do "rollback" is bonus.
Reading some of the CachyOS forums, the rollback feature seems to be the /main/ reason btrfs is preferred. More than one war story describes a process that sounds like: 1) An update did something unexpected to my system 2) I was easily able to rollback to its state before the update 3) I went to the wiki to find out what went wrong and took appropriate steps to fix or mitigate.
Yes, that's why I said "bonus", because distro guys are doing all the work. I don't do anything here. My interest is doing my own backup.
Again, thanks. Great report. Great to hear you're happy with the choice.
- Evan
On 2026-01-08 02:38, William Park via Talk wrote:
Now, to move it to storage.
(1) Within the same BTRFS system. Well, you just did it. Or, you can "mv" to different location. Treat it like "read-only" directory.
(2) To another BTRFS system. (This is my case). You have to "dump" over stdin/stdout,
btrfs send home--2026-01-06 | btrfs receive /backup/
A new read-only snapshot will show up at /backup/home--2026-01-06. With my SATA2 harddisks, I get about 60MB/s throughput.
Nowadays, you can buy a single big harddisk. But, if you want to re- purpose old harddisks, then BTRFS is the only reasonable filesystem that can pull multiple harddisks together.
(3) To copy to EXT4 system. Since subvolume is directory,
cp -a home--2026-01-06 /backup/ or tar -cf - home--2026-01-06 | tar -xf - -C /backup/ or find ... | cpio ...
Update: I tried "incremental" backup, and it's FAST. You can try it out locally. - Create 2 snapshots of /home, say /home.1, /home.2. btrtr subvolume snapshot -r /home /home.1 btrtr subvolume snapshot -r /home /home.2 - Copy the first one normally. time btrfs send /home.1 | btrfs receive /backup - Copy the second one incrementally, using the first as base. time btrfs send -p /home.1 /home.2 | btrfs receive /backup The only drawback is, you have to keep same set of backups on both side, sender and receiver. But, because they're snapshots, they don't take much room. That completes my migration journey. --William
participants (2)
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Evan Leibovitch -
William Park