My wife has used PikaOS for about four months and has been very happy with it. Krita, her XP-Pen Deco L drawing tablet, Godot, Blender, and OBS all worked well, and she prefers using X11 because her tablet setup has not worked properly under Wayland.
A few days ago, PikaOS stopped booting on her Microsoft Surface Pro 5, apparently because the filesystem superblock became corrupted. We suspected a failing power cable and replaced it. Then yesterday, the PikaOS installation on her desktop also developed problems. The Nvidia display drivers stopped working, and reinstalling the 595 drivers seemed to help only partially: just one DisplayPort output worked, and audio through the monitor stopped working.
I tested the RTX 5060 in a Windows computer, where every display output and GPU audio worked correctly, so the hardware appears to be fine. The desktop has a Ryzen 5 9600X, 32GB of DDR5 RAM, an RTX 5060, and a 750W power supply.
Today the desktop showed another error while starting: "Failed to start plymouth-start.service - Show Plymouth Boot Screen." We would prefer to repair the existing installation if possible, but we are also open to a reliable replacement that supports Nvidia hardware, creative applications, and preferably X11. What troubleshooting steps or distributions would you recommend?
4 Answers
It may be worth testing the tablet under Wayland before ruling it out completely. My XP-Pen Deco works in KDE Wayland without a separate driver; KDE's tablet settings detect it and allow pressure-curve, button, and screen-mapping adjustments. An immutable system such as Aurora could also be a good fit because the base system is harder to break, and its Nvidia driver and kernel are designed to stay compatible.
PikaOS may simply be too unstable for this particular machine. If you want a rolling release with an easier recovery path, openSUSE Tumbleweed is worth considering because it uses system snapshots that can be selected from the bootloader after a bad update. You can then finalize the rollback with Snapper. Nvidia can still occasionally be troublesome, but snapshots make update failures much less risky. Give the EFI partition several gigabytes if you want to retain more snapshots.
One caveat is the X11 requirement: KDE Plasma is moving away from X11 support, so a rolling KDE system may eventually force a choice between an older stable desktop, a different desktop such as Xfce or LXQt, or Wayland.
Debian 13 would be a more conservative option. You would need to install and maintain the Nvidia drivers yourself, and its kernel and packages will generally be older than PikaOS's, but you would avoid the extra customizations and rapid changes added by a specialized distribution. Copying the relevant application and desktop configuration files over can make the transition less painful. The main drawback is that Fedora KDE is not a great fit if X11 is mandatory.
First check which kernel is installed. Some of the newer 7.x kernels have caused display and boot problems for users. If an older 6.x kernel is still available in the boot menu, try starting with that and see whether the Nvidia and display issues disappear.
Before we could try the kernel rollback, the desktop started showing the Plymouth boot-service failure as well, so the installation seems to be deteriorating further.