CachyOS

 At this time I would just like to note that I have been using CachyOS exclusively for a couple of months.  An earlier iteration didn't work for me, at the time of the great Archlinux Nvidia debacle that made it functionally impossible for someone with my limited expertise to use my GTX 1050 card.  Too old.  It works, but no longer supported.  

 

As of earlier this year, however, CachyOS automatically chooses the correct older driver version to run this card.  No wonder it climbed up to the top of the hit list on DistroWatch.  I think deservedly so.  I understand that it will also run other cards---the 1650 series-albeit with some manual intervention.  I hate that term, but I would love to have one of those.  My system works quite well, and I was grateful that an NVIDIA card had drivers, even proprietary, that work really well.  I am opposed to proprietary drivers, but I admit I have been using several for years, because I cannot just go and change my hardware choices every time I would like.  I home built, on the cheap, with a nice CPU, some good amount of RAM, good storage, and at least some kind of affordable video card.  It hurts that companies can just decide it's not worth it to support hardware that's little more than 10 years old.  IMO, it's criminal.  PT Barnum had something to say about this.  Basically we are the suckers.  Next time, will there ever be a next time, I will probably go with AMD.  Corporate decisions don't work out for the consumer.  

 

That said, this old card is doing its job.  -

 

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It's been a few months since I wrote the above.  The system is still running nicely.   I have noticed one thing: updates, which I like to run every so often, take quite long on this system, as opposed to my Thinkpad with it's Intel graphics, because the kernel must be compiled together with the Nvidia bits, on every update.  Even with a 26 core Intel i7, this takes a good long time.  It's worth the wait.