Pika OS 4.0 Review: A Debian Dream for Content Creators & Gamers

[@CosmoHQ]

Thank you for the review, i will be working on them annoyances when my exams are over

[@A1RM4X]

Thanks for your awesome work!

[@DavidCoutinhoCG]

man, i've tried dozens of times days and weeks ago, i couldn't start PikaOS a single time, tried the KDE nvidia version tried starting with normal graphics, tried with safe graphics, all the times boot failed and i fall to initramfs terminal, what am i doing wrong? i've used ventoy, didn't work, i've used a default iso pendrive creator from kde, didn't work, i gave up.

[@uaQt]

@@DavidCoutinhoCG prob not ur issue if you exclusively use linux, but just in case, one thing that's stumped me many times is if you plug a flash drive into a windows computer it adds a file that fucks up the iso, if you disable the feature that does that or just dont let it do that it'd be fine

[@cyrilemeka6987]

@@DavidCoutinhoCG check if you have secure boot turned on in your BIOS, older systems have if off or non existent though. Worked for me when installing BigLinux a week ago, thought ventoy was broken and tried many others but turns out it was secure boot been on that was the issue, and most systems won't give an intuitive error message as to why usb boot failed.

[@domcaixote]

Rest of the world: just a regular distro name Brazilians: 😏😏😏😏

[@DavidCoutinhoCG]

8===> OS

[@ShaunaJagan]

KKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKK it's like having an OS called "CockOS" gonna try it for sure 😅

[@mako_bd7012]

it that why the logo is a bird?

[@spartv1537]

@@ShaunaJagan cock means chicken or...?

[@Maitreya3001]

Great review Papa! I love PikaOS and I found it from you and Mattscreative. Many thanks and love

[@MegaKiri11]

If you feel restricted by immutability of Bazzite, but are afraid of too much freedom in CachyOS, this might be a good option in the middle.

[@SecretlySeven]

This is the first distro I've honestly had zero issues with. Not one single complaint.

[@matthiasbendewald1803]

The name of the first chapter seems a bit odd...

[@A1RM4X]

Fixed

[@MrAlanCristhian]

I would like to see more people contributing to debian-backports. That's the mechanism to have up-to-date packages, but nobody is contributing to that, most people are making their own distros. I know that pikaos is not only providing new packages, precompiled and optimized packages are nice.

[@LtSich]

backport should include recent drivers, like nvidia-drivers... It was build for that...

[@MrAlanCristhian]

@@LtSich It doesn't because nobody is uploading those drivers. You see the problem? Instead of making their own distro, the community should contribute directly to backports.

[@LtSich]

@@MrAlanCristhian That's a good point.

[@silentJET85]

One issue is that, as I understand it, a package needs to already exist in Sid or Experimental before it can be backported to Stable. For some reason, they are really slow about adding the new versions of Nvidia drivers. Sid is only slightly ahead of Stable (currently 535.216.01 vs 535.183.01), and even Experimental is only on 545. But to their credit, Debian is actually pretty good about backporting the Linux kernels reasonably quickly. Surprisingly even sooner than Ubuntu usually does. I'd be curious to try building the Nvidia packages myself, but it's hard to find any good documentation or tutorials on the subject.

[@MrAlanCristhian]

@@silentJET85 yes, the documentation is not good, and the process is long. I've planned to learn the process, but with something simple, like a font. Then try to publish more complicated things.

[@mirkodiciano4647]

hey papa this is one off my favourite distro keep up the great work

[@beonyou]

I would appreciate a comparison between Nobara, CachyOS, PikaOS, aso. : pro and cons, why should i use one over another one. Cause each month a new distro is out, and is fantastic !

[@TruckFarmer]

My issue with PikaOS 4 is I have 3 other drives formatted EXT4 that I use for backup stuff. In PikaOS 4 if I try and mount them and go to one of them I get no icons and a error that it can't access the drive. If I use Gnome-disk-utility to take ownership of those drive, then I can access them. But if I go back to any other distro, I get that error again and have to use gnome-disk to take ownership again. I've never had any other distro do that. I had these drives setup a long time ago and until PikaOS 4 any distro I had tried never had issues with my other drives. Just a pain.

[@saberspecter]

So I'm not the only one. Had similar issues with two external drives. I kept getting mounting errors and files that were inaccessible. Other distros and Windows read them no problem.

[@fooboomoo]

maybe you need to be in a specific group? just wild guess bere, i don't use pika

[@chad_8313]

I was wondering why Pika wasn't booting. Been toying around with Bazzite again. EndeavourOS is giving me fits. I.e. The Finals causes a Wine crash, after loading shaders for an hour. Also on EndeavourOS, an older game such as Parkitect gives me a black screen and then nothing. (Which is native.)

[@raziel71]

Tiens je ne savais pas que Jesse Pinkman c'était mis à Linux. Tes vidéos sont supers en tous cas !!

[@LtSich]

Yeah, a good distro, based on Debian ! I didn't want to go to cachyos because of arch, but if I can use a distro based on debian, that's a very good news !

[@Maitreya3001]

And it’s rolling so the devs will push new features quickly after they came to Debian Sid But the devs will also do some tests to see if the packages are safe to use for users. Best feature is how active the devs are. When there’s an issue they answer super quickly and fix it possibly on the spot.

[@LtSich]

@@Maitreya3001 Good to know !

[@ardayazar5705]

I still don't understand why a rolling release debian is considered to be better than arch. As far as I understand, debian is not stable because its "Debian" but because it hardly ever changes. A rolling release removes that stability. Similarly Arch is not unstable because its "Arch", its because arch of this minute might be a different arch than a minute earlier or a minute later. At least with arch you have access to AUR and nice manuals. What do you get on rolling debian other than deb support, which sometimes doesn't even work.

[@Maitreya3001]

Idk if it's even applicable anymore to call one thing better over the other. It's more about usecase and taste. One likes one thing better than the other. They might be right or wrong, but it's still up to themselves. I personally only started Linux a couple months ago and I have installed base Arch before but don't really want to fiddle around with every package depenancy all the time when the time I have with my pc is already very limited. Others have other reasons. For the time being, PikaOS is a nice platform for me that gives me a nice foundation that works really well, but also still basic enough to continue learning. In fact I learned a lot from the dev. One day I will turn over to arch but that day hasn't come yet

[@santoshk1983]

@@ardayazar5705 Debian unstable rolls more slowly than Arch in my experience. Stability wise many say even Debian Sid is stabler than Arch but it wasn't my experience. Both have about similar stability issues from time to time. Rolling releases are inherently unstable since there's not enough time to test solidly... and if you QA for say six months then its no longer a rolling release.

[@ScottManser-eu2pg]

Are there any issues with installing more than one desktop. i.e. installing Gnome on install and adding Hyprland after? Also would like to see better community support other than Reddit or Discord.

[@paultapping9510]

nope, none. Though for preference I would install gnome first, then hypr.

[@paultapping9510]

pikman is great, though I do wish nintendo weren't so litigious so it could be called pikmin. Overall I'm pretty happy with this distro, gaming performance is definitely improved from vanilla debian, and access to hyprland is much appreciated. So far I'm glad I installed it. The only issues I have encountered is waking up from being suspended is a bit wonky.

[@e002840]

Brazilians can't use it 😂

[@77wolfblade]

It doesn't have language options for Brazilians?

[@e002840]

@77wolfblade It has. It's just a joke with the OS name, tho

[@UnifiedFriends]

​@@e002840I've been trying to translate it lately. My results were meh 😂 Can you give me a quick nudge? Thx in advance

[@77wolfblade]

@@e002840 ah ok

[@ScottManser-eu2pg]

@@77wolfblade Look up the portuguese translation for pika. lol

[@erixIsOffline]

Hi, I have a question how those it work if i want to customize distro and if for example i use blender and godot is there gonna be some problems? I know its Debian Sid which has newer things like kde 6 but its still behind and you said if there are some package that were not supported we can use apx but how does it work in practice especially with things i mention above. Im a noob and want to switch my current distro to this one but i cant find answer for my concerns. PS my english is not top tier, thank you for reading.

[@demerdemer328]

Does PikaOS support Secure Boot?

[@santoshk1983]

Sadly no because of their choice of bootloader as reFIND. Debian itself has a MS signed "shim" and supports secure boot but I think refind requires a manual setup to support secure boot.

[@LaBBe_]

​@@santoshk1983 there are instructions on how to get secure boot working on the wiki and it's quite straightforward, no need to mislead people

[@Dianaranda123]

The big question for me is also, how is the Wacom tablet support? Because on Cinnamon, it was horrible and terrible. And you cant really setup anything. While on KDE desktop its pretty good and you can setup alot of stuff.

[@saberspecter]

I installed this to try as it had everything I wanted but I panicked as a new user because I kept getting external drive mounting errors and I thought my data got corrupted. Reinstalled Windows just to be sure my files were safe. I do want to try it again though.

[@diyortestit]

I got the ISO for this but is not working on my "BOXING" :( I can t test it. Do you have a sugestion? or is bug?

[@marcinpawelski4091]

Thx🎉

[@Spark_Plug17]

I still don't find any good use of these gaming distro for me. What's the point when you can do the same in Linux Mint or Pop OS?

[@ltk20352]

@@Spark_Plug17 gamers moving from Windows

[@Spark_Plug17]

@ltk20352 maybe for a pure gamer user, this could be appealing. Just like console it come pre-configured

[@LaBBe_]

ofc you can do the same with both of those. but in order to get to the same spot, you have to recompile EVERY package and kernel with O3, LTO and avx2. otherwise you lose 10-20% of the performance those optimizations give you out of the box for free. have fun 👍

[@sperrex465]

Saving time + different distros have different optimizations that might work better on your system. In the end if you are not a tech savvy user that spends whole day testing and looking for how to optimize system even more, just try a gaming distro.

[@JasonEspin]

Tried Pika OS 4. Seemed okay to start with but it suffers from frequent hangs and crashes on really decent hardware. I wouldn't recommend it. Go for CachyOs instead.

[@Maitreya3001]

My experience was quite the opposite, performance was equal or better on my hardware compared to cachy.

[@CristianAlinPopa]

I'm on Cachy OS with decent hardware. I like the stability, but bigger games have stuttering issues no matter what I do and I don't really like Arch. My PC also can't get to sleep or hybrid-sleep for some reason. I'm waiting for Pika OS to fix the negatives in this video so I can run it with Ventoy and dual boot it to see if it's better

[@SecretlySeven]

Receipts? Make a video. Document it. I've been running it since release and have had exactly ZERO issues.

[@JasonEspin]

@SecretlySeven Why would I waste time making a video. It's an OS. I've moved on already. If it can't do the bare minimum and perform as an OS it's not worth spending anymore time on

[@SecretlySeven]

@JasonEspin who hurt you?

[@sgerwald]

Because i love debian this could be a distro to chango to from cachy

[@vinii2815]

well, they just cant release it in Brazil with that name 😂

[@rimenahi]

Thanks for the review.

[@ItsThicc]

Fedora is still king.

[@Amaqse]

So, instead of using more recent base, more updated base like for example fedora, or even actualy ubuntu since they said they are gona provide latest kernels and drivers nowadays. . . .they picked distro famous for old as f packages, then waste hundreds of man hours to selectively update packages putting you as a user right on the doorstep of potential dependency hell, then use contenerisation and virtualization for extra packages which wastes memory, cpu and in overall performance . . . . all of it for "gaming" ? Sorry, it sounds like an insane waste of dev time and I wonder for how long they will be able to afford repackaging every single piece of s package for "optimization". Unless they have unlimited money somehow or Jeff Bezos backing I dont see them going on it for a long time. Hacking in brand new packs into old Debian base means you are literally 1 not so good package install from nuking your entire system, as it might literally roll back half of your shit to Debian versions. Again, waste of time and dangerous. Use Nobara instead which comes with all gaming and content creation optimization and 0 of cpu wasting BS while based on fairly modern and stable fedora builds.

[@nemowei5553]

Still too many bugs. They need more time

[@gabrielfernandez3782]

La creme de la creme

[@rimenahi]

What does it mean?

[@UnifiedFriends]

The best of the best

[@kadircelikYT]

12:45 same issue i encountered while i wass installing dual boot linux with windows.

[@santoshk1983]

Yeah refind installs something into the Windows EFI partition even on another disk. And deleting all the non-Microsoft files in Windows EFI partition still doesn't make the refind entry go away from UEFI boot list. You need to install a BCD editor like Visual BCD and edit the Windows BCD data to delete refind's stale entry from it before all traces of it go. This is after deleting PikaOS. Grub doesn't write to Windows' BCD... so just deleting the Linux partitions is sufficient to completely remove it.

[@SecretlySeven]

Best part about this is no GRUB! A lot of us single boot. Don't like seeing the black text screen that doesn't need interacted with on boot. One of my pain points for all Linux has been that text on boot. Just use a visually pleasing splash screen like Windows does. Pika is the closest to looking professionally polished on boot like Windows I've seen so far since switching to Linux.

[@ardayazar5705]

you can go for 0 sec grub timeout if you really don't want to see that, but having multiple backup points on grub, I opted for 1 second timeout. Long enough when I'm spamming down button, short enough when I just need OS to boot.

[@paultapping9510]

you can install a program cli tool called Plymouth that runs full screen animated gifs over the top of all that ugly text. if you then set grub to 0 you would get POST screen > animation > login screen on boot.

[@sperrex465]

You do know that you can use grub 0 sec timeout, and if you dual boot just use uefi bootloader? And the splash screen you are talking about (I assume) is distro based not bootloader based hello??? Like Ubuntu, fedora, open suse splash screen. Jeez dude