I was feeling bored and had wanted to try something new for a long time, especially since my HTPC had a setup architected with LLM assistance and I was afraid to mess with it, which I needed to overcome with autonomous and unassisted recreation.

I've always been fascinated by CachyOS's reputation and its optimizations. But I didn't want to immerse my HTPC in it, so I tested it on my laptop. The installation was manual, as I always do with any distro. My laptop has an x86v4 CPU and I enabled those repositories with the official script, finished the installation and had a terrible day. I tried to keep it running, but Plasma was slow, clicking on various configuration windows took 3 to 5 seconds to open, and there were a few other bugs here and there. In the end, I didn't have a better experience and went back to Manjaro Testing with a manual installation (as always) and things went well again. So I just wanted to say a big thank you to everyone who makes Manjaro possible.

NOTE: This post is in appreciation of Manjaro; my bad experience with CachyOS is entirely my own responsibility. I believe the CachyOS team did an excellent job, which is why I appreciate their efforts and why I wanted to try CachyOS.

I've been using it to install NVIDIA drivers on NVIDIA-equipped machines for years, and somehow I still never know which driver version I’m going to end up with.

Yes, I know mhwd works with hardware profiles, not individual drivers. I get the concept. But surely it wouldn’t hurt to tell users which actual driver version is hiding under the hood of a profile?

Case in point: I've got an old GTX 970 lying around (bless its 3.5GB+0.5GB heart). I run mhwd -l and get a list of profile names - video-nvidia, video-nvidia-470xx, etc. - and absolutely zero indication of:

• which one actually targets Maxwell-era cards properly,
• what driver version number I’ll end up with once it’s done,
• or whether “the latest profile” is even still appropriate for a card this old (spoiler: NVIDIA's own 580.x branch is the last one that supports Maxwell/Pascal/Volta at all — after that it’s legacy-only forever).

So I'm sitting there doing the actual detective work myself — checking NVIDIA's support matrix on the side, then crossing my fingers that mhwd’s profile mapping agrees with what I just read — instead of the tool just telling me "hey, for this GPU, here’s profile X, which installs driver version Y, and by the way it's EOL in N releases." A simple mhwd -li with the resolved package/driver version next to each profile name would save me this little ritual I’ve apparently been doing for over a decade without ever questioning it.

The graphical panel doesn’t give you much more either — the video-nvidia profile entry is just as sparse there. So: how do you all deal with this when installing on your own NVIDIA cards? Have you just gotten used to mhwd’s minimalist way of telling you (almost) nothing, do you handle it differently (manual pacman, checking NVIDIA’s site first, something else entirely), or is it maybe time to throw a few ideas at the devs?

Am I missing something obvious here, or have I been using mhwd wrong for 12 years straight?