My wife has used PikaOS for about four months on both a Microsoft Surface Pro 5 and a desktop, and it had been working very well for Krita, her XP-Pen Deco L tablet, Godot, Blender, and OBS. A few days ago, the Surface installation stopped booting after its filesystem superblock became corrupted. We initially suspected a faulty power cable and ordered a replacement.
Then the desktop installation started having problems too. The NVIDIA display drivers stopped working, and reinstalling the 595 drivers for her RTX 5060 only restored one DisplayPort connection. Audio through the monitor also stopped working. The graphics card works correctly in another Windows system, including all display outputs and audio, so the hardware seems fine.
The desktop has a Ryzen 5 9600X, 32GB of DDR5 RAM, an RTX 5060, and a 750W PSU. She prefers X11 because the XP-Pen tablet drivers do not work properly for her under Wayland. After trying to investigate a kernel rollback, the system began showing "Failed to start plymouth-start.service - Show Plymouth Boot Screen" during startup.
Is there a reliable way to repair this PikaOS installation? If not, what distribution would be a good replacement for creative work, NVIDIA graphics, and an XP-Pen tablet while retaining X11 support?
4 Answers
It may be worth testing Wayland again before ruling it out. An XP-Pen Deco tablet can work properly in KDE Wayland without separate drivers; KDE’s tablet settings can detect it, adjust pressure, remap buttons, and map the tablet area to a display. An immutable distribution such as Aurora could also be a good fit because the base system is harder to break and the NVIDIA driver is kept aligned with the kernel.
For a replacement, openSUSE Tumbleweed is worth considering because its snapshots make it easy to roll back a bad update from the bootloader, then finalize the rollback from a working session. NVIDIA can still occasionally be troublesome, but snapshots provide a useful safety net. Keep in mind that KDE is moving away from X11, so an X11 desktop such as Xfce or LXQt may be needed in the future. A larger EFI partition also gives the system more room to retain snapshots.
Check which kernel the system is using. Some of the newer 7.x kernels have reportedly caused display and graphics problems. If an older 6.x kernel is still installed, try selecting it from the boot menu and see whether the NVIDIA and display issues disappear.
Debian 13 would be a more conservative option. You could copy over her configuration files and install the NVIDIA driver manually. It will generally have older packages and a less current kernel than PikaOS, but it avoids many of the extra modifications made by a specialized distribution. Fedora KDE is another possibility, although the X11 requirement makes it less suitable long term.
We tried starting it up to check the kernel, but the desktop has now deteriorated further and shows a “Failed to start plymouth-start.service - Show Plymouth Boot Screen” error during boot.