Yeah, I noticed that secure boot was going to be an issue with CachyOS on first go, as I am used to this workflow of installing a new distro…I had already done so. Still, the installer is a boss battle and that is not the normal experience for most first time users. It often is a much smoother process with something like openSUSE, Debian, Ubuntu, Mint, or even Fedora. Windows doesn’t like playing with other OS because it expects to be the only one there. Hates house guests so much that it can interfere unexpectedly with Linux distros.

Starting with CachyOS if you are new to Linux is a gut punch to be sure. However, it gives you initiative to get up to speed ASAP because Arch is peculiar to deal with (even in a tamed form like CachyOS as it still has bite). As Arch-based distros expect more from you than a standard Debian, Mint, or even Ubuntu. It’s good that you are attempting to get up to speed with at least the basics of dealing with a Linux system, as that knowledge can get you pretty far with a bit of application. Even though I used Linux for years, I haven’t gone too profoundly deep within the reeds.

I mean I don’t think he is wrong entirely, but wasn’t he Lutris guy also VERY hostile to criticism? And just AI generated wallpapers is where I absolutely will draw the line. Just don’t have any then, use the Fedora stock ones. Use a black screen. Everything is better than slop.

I’m old enough to know that’s a lie. I gave up dual booting years ago to save us all the embarrassment.

Good for you buddy! What does that have to do with anything, though?

For gaming, I don’t really understand why anyone would prefer slower update cycles since there are frequent updates that fix compatibility or increase performance.

Which game uses host system libraries? I think you have a wrong impression how things work in Linux gaming outside of Tux Kart these days. Valve maintains their own set of Linux containers called Steam Linux Runtimes and their entire point is to be relatively slow moving. Just have a look at all the package dates at https://repo.steampowered.com/steamrt4/images/latest-public-stable/sources/

On top of that, almost every game is a proprietary Windows application. So it runs on top of Proton which sits on top of the latest Steam Linux Runtime.

It’s similar with FOSS games where the foremost distribution outlet is Flathub and software published there relies on Flatpak Runtimes which are also relatively slow moving.

CachyOS is apparently “optimized” for gaming performance—I don’t pretend to know what that means or how much of an impact it has.

Barely any unless you’re installing FOSS games from their own repository for the reasons I outlined initially.

I’m super impressed with how well everything just works

And that’s what’s important.

“Frequent updates” sounds to me like “breaks frequently”.

I’m using an Intel card, which is still seeing problems fixed with every update. But I’ve been on the road of bleeding edge before and it’s been one messy problem after another.

If I can strike a balance between latest and stable, at the cost of a slightly slower update speed, I’d prefer that.

Any chance, have you ever used Garuda? I’m curious how CachyOS compares on the “ease of use” front. I’ve been on Garuda for like 3 or 4 years now as it is the only one (that I tried) that I’ve had “just work” for everything out of the box. My laptop had a lot of trouble with Bazzite and the nvidia drivers, but again, I don’t have to do anything under Garuda besides install it, periodically run updates, and it plays games just fine with no headaches. I’m not a huge fan of the decoration choices in Garuda, and some of the stuff you mentioned like Winboat and Gaming one-click installs sound amazingly helpful… but everything is working right now so there’s a hurdle to changing, lol.

Ragebait.

it looks like there’s a new generation of “I run cachyos BTW”. While you are free to choose whatever distro you wanr, the passion with which you defend cachy is adorable.

Cachy is nothing but hype, surrounded by fanboys without much experience, who are willing to believe a governor and a couple of tweaks gives them the best os on the planet - I know, cause I used it and went back to arch because I prefer something that is real and the result of hard work, not a hacky job,that looks like someone just had fun hyping the shit out of “performance gains”.

You can keep your 1% gain, and the bloat.

vanilla arch user here, the installation is a totally different experience but it just gets you into that „go, read / listen and just try to understand what you are doing“ mode… which, in a long run, is quite helpful. Third year now, still mostly no clue what I am doing most of the time, but plenty of fun has been had in the meantime.

with the direction that Wind®ow(n)s took some time ago, I am willing to even write 0s and 1s by hand on a wet toilet paper to just avoid it. Super happy to see CashyOS or SteamOS grow, actually any distro getting popular is a great thing, more users, more knowledge, more problems being pointed out.

You will not see much difference in performance. This is from 2022 but should still be true?

https://www.phoronix.com/review/cachyos-linux-perf/5

I think it has some improvements in kernel settings but in day to day, you wont notice them.

This performance gains myth sounds like exactly the same wishful thinking as we used to heard back when Gentoo Linux was The Cool Hotness™. Don’t get me wrong, Gentoo was great, but its added value was not in the compiler optimizations, but rather in the modularity, where you could select a feature set you wanted for your system, and not worry about useless dependencies, their associated support libraries and bugs or vulnerabilities in those.

And when it comes to the kernel, can compile your own on any distribution, including using or omitting any kernel patches you want.

I did some Benchmarks and CachyOS claims of around 15% more performance seem to be true. Unigin Heavenbenchmark , Super Tuxkart and Furmark all got improved scores compared to PopOS. Additionally Fallout 4 now runs a lot smoother which is probably due to the BORE scheduler doing something better. My local LLMs also seem to be slightly faster and for some reason now need less V-Ram.

To add a tiny bit of technical detail here, vanilla Arch enforces support for x86_64 v1, meaning all software available in the Arch repos is built to not use any cpu feature that didn’t exist in v1. Not a bad thing since it allows for support of older (64 bit) hardware, but it does leave like 20 years of microarchitecture advancement on the table.

According to the CachyOS website, they have repos with software built for v3 and v4 which can apparently juice your rig for an extra 20% performance.

Yeah Arch exists for such a long time I will take base distros for reliability any day. Even if that means losing slight performance many things will go mainline in the future or if I cared enough I’d just patch them there. I honestly feel like baseline distros are really good long term and I think Archs barebones approach is perfect tbh

It’s a lot more than that. It doesn’t fork Arch like Manjaro, but they have tons of custom and extremely convenient and useful packages in their repos. It’s also a living “optimization experiment” in the vein of Intel’s Clear Linux (may it rest in peace).

Theoretically, you could replicate it in vanilla arch, but I can’t imagine how many man-hours it would take.

Totally fine, yeah I use fedora for desktop, the Ally is only for gaming as I don’t have a desktop setup

I believe they have a handheld distro that they use too. I heard it got a big update or something recently.

They do in fact have a handheld edition. I use it for my steam deck and it’s great.