TLDR: Which distro is better for gaming and video editing (NVIDIA GPU), CachyOS or Ubuntu?
Hi! It’s been probably a month since I started using Linux (escaping from Windows), and I choose LMDE since the distro that I felt aligned more with what I want from a distro on in general is Debian, but since it was my first time using Linux on my main device (just tried Debian on a laptop to run a Homelab) I got recommended Mint to make it easier for me to adapt. The thing is that since I started using LMDE I’ve discovered that it doesn’t cover perfectly my needs. Two things that I didn’t want to lose when switching to Linux were gaming and the ability to run video/audio/photo editing programs flawlessly, mainly DaVinci Resolve and AffinityPhoto. It’s been practically impossible to achieve that, since DaVinci doesn’t work, can’t even get to install AffinityPhoto and some videogames need more recent (NVIDIA) drivers than what Debian and of course LMDE can offer. So, seeing that I want to keep LMDE (and maybe in the future upgrade from LMDE to Debian) but at the same time I’m not willing to give up on those 2 things, I believe the dual-boot option is the one that suits me the most. Now, what I’m here for. I’ve been doing some research and the ones that caught my atention the most were CachyOS and Ubuntu:
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CachyOS: PROS: · High gaming performance and (looks like) compatibility. · Looks like DaVinci works perfectly for a lot of people (although some other people claim having issues). CONS: · Sounds too complex as a distro for someone who has close to zero programming knowledge and just started using Linux. · The rolling release aspect feels a little scary too.
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Ubuntu: PROS: · May not be THE gaming distro but it seems to be working for a lot of people without having extensive programming or Linux knowledge. · Generally may be more compatible and stable than CachyOS in general · Seems it will be easier for me to adapt to since it’s Debian-based. CONS: · Doesn’t seem as good as CachyOS on a performance standpoint, affecting both video editing and gaming capabilities.
Now, my questions would be: Am I mistaken in any of the info I have revolving these two distros? Could I be missing any other options? Which do you think is the distro that could suit me the most? Any recommendation when doing the Dual-boot? I have never done it and it scares me a little tbh.
My main priority is having a stable (and compatible in the first place, of course) experience (maybe Ubuntu?), but I don’t mind having to put more work into it to achieve a better experience (maybe CachyOS?).
I would love to hear from you and, of course, if I’m missing any relevant information I’ll be more than happy to share it too.
Thank you very much! :D
My experience with Ubuntu desktop has always been a real poor one but I realize other people like it. I’d go with cachy or endevourOS personally. My wife has probably less technical skill than you do and I’ve had her on endevourOS for nearly a year at this point. All she does is YouTube and gaming and it all runs near flawlessly. I also have both our systems dual booted but I also can’t remember the last time I booted into windows for either machine.
Install Ubuntu and see if you can get your games and video editing software to work. If you can’t, go for CachyOS.
Why Ubuntu first? Because millions of people have been using it for years. When something breaks, you’ll be able to fix it because someone else would have already encountered this issue before and reported it.
Why Ubuntu first? Because millions of people have been using it for years. When something breaks, you’ll be able to fix it because someone else would have already encountered this issue before and reported it.
Funnily enough, that’s actially a source of some of my headaches with Ubuntu. I tend to run into really weird errors, and while there’s usually someone who’s dealt with it before it’s sometimes so long ago that the fixes are outdated
Definitely Fedora. It needs a bit of setting up, but otherwise has awesome security and rather recent packages.
Hm… LMDE is Debian under the hood, so if you have non standard requirements then you have to be flexible to make something to work, combining .deb repositories with other solutions like flatpaks, distrobox, compiling from source, nix, guix, appimages, wine prefixes, etc. Just don’t mess with system directories and libraries and you’re good.
Maybe Mint were a better choice to a newbie, but in the end it’s almost the same thing with some nice driver utilities. Look for the release in December.
Try Debian, nut ubuntu, it just makes problems
In my opinion vanilla Fedora is the best beginner distro. And once you fell comfortable with Linux you can try Arch, CashyOS, rpm-ostree based distros or anything else.
Might just be my old experience (happy to learn otherwise) but dual booting ended up with more of a painful experience than not. When Windows would update, it would fuck my grub up and cause issues booting into Linux and Windows. You can fix it (most of the time) but expect to do it rather often; especially unpleasant as a beginner.
I know there’s issues with GPU passthrough on vms but IDK if dual booting is the moves unless they seriously improved the experience in the last couple years.
I’ll try not to dual-boot unless it’s the only way; first I’ll stress all options inside LMDE (with makeresolvedeb, VMs, distrobox(?), etc.) and if it still doesn’t solve the issues I’m having in LMDE, I’ll dual-boot (preparing for these cases of course). Thanks!
Between these two, Cachy.
If choice is open: Fedora.
“Gaming” focussed distros are often a worse choice imo, because they offer zero performance benefit, are bloated in an attempt to bundle drivers out of the box, are harder to troubleshoot because worse documentation, and the preinstalled configs can cause headaches.
If you war a good first Linux experience, stick with anything Ubuntu-/Debian-based; they are
- stable workhorses, i.e. they don’t break on you as easily as rolling release distros like CachyOS.
- wildly popular, i.e. you’ll find plenty of resources to help you get started (although, to be fair, the Arch wiki is also ridiculously detailed).
Whatever you do, steer clear of immutable distros like Bazzite for now. As cool as the concept is (I run Bazzite on my gaming machine) - as soon as you do something “non-standard” (and modding your Minecraft .jar with Optifine already qualifies as such), you’ll have to fiddle with the terminal and distrobox containers, both of which will be alien concepts for you at the start and may be top much to make it a good first impression.
- stable workhorses, i.e. they don’t break on you as easily as rolling release distros like CachyOS.
I disagree. When I had Ububtu on my old server it would randomly break every few months. It was generally because I had an Nvidia card and the drivers needed updated, but it makes no sense for graphics drivers suddenly causing issues without an associated OS update
Caution, dual-boot means you have to power down your system before you can start the other, if you share any file systems. Hibernate and then booting another distro will result in file system damage.
The alternative would be a virtual machine.
It can also occasionally mess up the grub configuration, which means you have to reinstall grub.
It never even occured to me to hibernate and then switching OS. I just use a command to reboot and tell grub to preselect the other OS and go do something else for 60 seconds while it reboots.
It’s true that sometimes the grub config gets messed up, but in two years doing this, I’ve had to reinstall grub once (many more times if you count me distro-hopping).
Woah, didn’t know that about grub. I hardly understand what it is, so it leaves me with a question: I don’t know if that makes any sense or goes directly against the nature of the bootloader definition but, can I switch one OS’s bootloader to Limine (got told by another user that grub failed for him with Cachy and switching to Limine solved it) and the other still be grub?
You can chain-load bootloaders but I am sceptical whether more complexity is helpful. At lesst grub is relatively easy to reinstall.
Seeing as you have an Nvidia card, I’d caution against Ubuntu. People talk about how “stable” it is, but it’ll break on it’s own even if you don’t try to update it, and it’s all because of Nvidia drivers.
I recommend getting a distro that has the Nvidia drivers baked it, which mostly narrows it down to Bazzite, Nobara, CachyOS, or Pop!OS.
I’m personally not a fan of Pop! since it’s based on Debian.
I personally use Nobara right now since it’s essentially Bazzite if it weren’t immutable. It’s OK. It does some things well and has some headaches.
I recently had to dual-boot CachyOS alongside Nobara. I haven’t had much time to tinker with it, but it’s definitely different. But one big benefit to Cachy is that you can pick whatever desktop environment and bootloaders you want. Just pick the correspondjng option in the installer.
At the end of the day, Bazzit, Nobara, and Cachy all have the same gaming-focusses system optimizations. It just boils down to specifics from there
Didn’t know Pop! was Debian based. I guess it’s not ideal for gaming because of drivers not being up to date just like debian?
No, you’re entirely misunderstanding distros.
In fact pop exists at least in part explicitly to make it easier to install nvidia drivers to support system 76 gaming laptops.
It’s a good option if you want up to date nvidia drivers.
No, you’re entirely misunderstanding distros.
Jfc you could write this better to not sound like a dick.
OP’s a newbie asking for advice, not someone with the completely wrong idea despite 5 years of experience
I would throw bazzite in as an option, especially for a new user.
Bazzite has a good out of the box experience, is meant for gaming, and it uses an immutable distro.
In my opinion the only reason people don’t like immutable distros is bad habits that are hard to break, or wanting highly custom system configurations, both do not apply to a new user. If you never go into the terminal there’s no difference, and if you do a system like brew works pretty well.
The advantage of an immutable system are that you can’t mess up your system and it’s more secure. It also stops you from doing dangerous things or leasing habits that require modifying system packages without knowing what they do.
For just gaming and desktop use (with KDE), it’s a good low maintenance system.
In my opinion the only reason people don’t like immutable distros is bad habits that are hard to break, or wanting highly custom system configurations, both do not apply to a new user
Disagree with the second point. The first thing I did when I finally swapped was to fiddle with it until it felt like what I was used to with Windows. Of course, that’s also the same thing I do in a Windows PC: Make it feel like an older less shit version of Windows.
Over time, I started experimenting. Even use a heavily modified Gnome for my laptop which is a big change. Maybe I just like to mess with stuff.
But you can still theme the hell out of plasma and it will just save to your ~/.local or something, that doesn’t need to hit the system packages.
I am curious if you have examples when you needed something that didn’t work with bazzite, as my opinions are opinions that can be changed
Personally I found Fedora atomic really good for being able to update the rpm os tree if you do want to tweak heavily, but I found fedora without dnf was not a good place (it works with brew, but they don’t include it and I think they still push toolbx, which is great, but not a casual user system).
I am curious if you have examples when you needed something that didn’t work with bazzite, as my opinions are opinions that can be changed
Fyi, I’m not the same guy, and I haven’t used Bazzite. But on SteamOS, Syncthing has been a headache to try to get working right. The flatpak for it is unmaintained and the only other way to get it working is setting up a systemd service that gets wiped with every OS update
Sounds very very good. I’ll definitely give it some priority. Thank you!
I can’t really tell you what will work for you, but I took a similar starting path…
When I finally took linux seriously as my Primary OS a few years ago, I too picked LMDE, and generally thought it was good. I eventually moved on because I wanted access to newer stuff like Nvidia drivers.
My next distro was Fedora KDE Edition, and.tjis would be my generic recommendation for anyone coming from Windows. Rolling updates isn’t scary, actually it means you don’t have a terrifying big upgrade looming on the horizon.
About a year ago I started hand-crafting my own Hyprland on Arch setup. It’s great. Bleeding edge stuff, and contrary to the memes it’s actually been the easiest to maintain - possibly because I only have the packages I need. BUT I wouldn’t recommend this for someone without a software engineering background.
I also dabbled withe EndeavourOS which deserves a shout.
Have you tried kdenlive? https://youtu.be/9dIqJDy78TI
I’m not a programmer either. Never have been. You don’t need to be one to use any desktop distro. You’d be fine with CachyOS. It is popular enough that getting help with anything that does pop up should be easy. I’ve used it as well as Nobara and Bazzite. Ultimately, I landed on Bazzite. That was about a year ago and I am happy.
Very useful insight, thanks!
