If anyone is looking for a niri based opinionated set of configuration on top of CachyOS (or vanilla Arch) I put together: https://github.com/nickjj/dotfriedrice
The goal is after installing the official ISO, you can get a developer focused desktop environment up and running in ~10 minutes with 1 command. It's quite configurable so you can change around anything you want ahead of time or after you install it. I use it with vanilla Arch but I know of quite a few people using it successfully with CachyOS.
For CachyOS, the only manual adjustment you have to make before running the repo's install script is uninstalling `jack` since it conflicts with `pipewire-jack`. I could easily roll this into the script but so far no one has complained loud enough to automate this. I also wonder if CachyOS will eventually drop that AUR dependency in its official ISO.
If it matters to you, 99.9% of the code is hand coded. The only time I use AI is when I'm 100% stone walled on something and it's a last resort move. Even then it's copy / pasting small snippets into web based AIs where I fully review and refactor its output so you could say the 0.1% is still human vetted.
Moving away from Windows last year was so worth it. I've been wanting to switch since 2017 but always ran into hardware issues. The same hardware I had back then works beautifully with Arch today.
It's not just a gaming and performance distro, it includes QoL fixes on modern hardware.
On my Lenovo laptop, fixes that would take over a day to enable and patch on most distros:
- Wake from sleep
- Nvidia GSP firmware workarounds and correct version OOTB (proprietary)
- Mouse lag/jitter
- External display hotplug
- DDC/CI over type-c
- Embedded controller power profiles from taskbar with correct TDP limits for CPU/GPU
- Battery charge limiter support right from KDE settings
- Working `switcherooctl` in hybrid graphics mode on AMD
- Firefox with video decode acceleration (YouTube) on almost all GPU models
Another gaming feature that is otherwise useful in workstations is the external scheduler support.
Currently using BPFland which makes multitasking as responsive as idle while compiling Yocto/Chromium in the background.
Windows, Mac (mini M1), and kernel built-in scheduler Linux jank and become almost unusable (Ryzen 5800H).
I tried CachyOS and Niri this weekend, and was pleasantly surprised hibernate/suspend actually worked with no customizations on my Desktop.
I’ve tried like 5 other distros and usually when it goes into sleep/hibernate the monitor never wakes up so I have to force shutdown using the power button.
I’m going to install this on an older machine and see how it goes. So far it’s been great!
Question to the Arch Linux veterans out there. Is CachyOS better than EndeavourOS or vice versa?
From what I read Cachy comes with a lot of proprietary repos and gaming stuff already installed along with a custom kernel tuned for gaming performance which makes it more bloated and less stable than vanilla Arch distros like Endeavour which just ships with the bare minimum quality of life tweaks over installing arch from scratch.
What's your experience and what would you recommend for someone switching their laptop from Windows mostly for dev work but who doesn't play too many games. I see arch is the most popular community favorite now, but I was thinking maybe a Fedora based distro would be a better fire-and-forget daily driver after the Arch AUR malware attack conundrum, as I don't have the time to deal with stuff like that on a daily basis.
CachyOS takes the default arch repos and re-builds packages targeting CPU generations and their instruction sets. There are no proprietary repos. Cachy has their own personal repo where some packages not in arch repos are built.
Gaming stuff is NOT installed by default, but there is a button in the Hello app new users can click that installs 2 meta packages that install almost everything one might want for gaming. Take a look at it in a VM and see for yourself.
The performance increases from their kernel + optimized packages are small but noticeable to me. Give their wiki a read-through:
https://wiki.cachyos.org/
I've used Cachy for about 2 months, having used Arch for a long time prior to that.
It just feels a lot faster (anecdotally) than Arch. I don't tend to play a lot of games either, but for tasks like web browsing and watching YouTube, it feels smoother. I don't think I'd go back to Arch unless Cachy did something really stupid to mess up which I hope they won't. No point in leaving free performance on the table with little downside.
Also you should never need the AUR. I've never needed it for anything in years, so the malware attack wasn't a concern at all. Yes, absolutely do switch away from Windows.
I few months ago, I backed up my windows gaming machine and overwrote the partition with CachyOS. Haven't looked back. Gaming performance and compatibility has exceeded my expectations. Just a much better experience overall. I feel sorry anytime I see someone using Windows.
I feel sorry every time I'm stuck going back to Windows. And admittedly, the situation is not even comparable to how it was ~25 years ago when I first started playing around with Linux, most things I want to do with a computer just work on Linux nowadays. There are still such things that just are not there yet - but for most of them, it's not necessarily Linux's fault.
If we limit the conversation to gaming specifically, one area where I don't see Linux taking over any time soon is competitive/esports oriented titles and their invasive ~rootkits~ anti-cheats. Another place I kind of have to live with Windows is simulation (in my case Elite: Dangerous and iRacing/Le Mans Ultimate) - the overlays and other third-party utilities either don't exist on Linux, or I couldn't get them to work and kind of abandoned the idea.
Audio production is also kind of a no-go. The DAWs and hardware support are absolutely getting there - Bitwig studio is apparently very good for something Ableton-like, and my DAW of choice, Reaper, has native Linux support. But the plugins and virtual instruments for the most part just don't exist. Some work through a Wine bridge, if you're lucky.
However, if you're not too deep in a niche with very specific pieces of software, or don't care about esports offerings, there isn't much tying one to Windows nowadays.
I think the situation with anti-cheat on Linux is changing. Studios are putting resources into anti-cheat that will work on Linux. If I'm being a bit cynical, I could say this is "just" because of Steam Deck and Steam Machine, but I think the number of potential players switching to Linux right now outside of the Steam ecosystem is starting to be worth considering.
The only way they could even consider making it work would involve blessing certain kernel builds, and their integrity would need to be verified. If I am able to swap out the kernel, anti-cheat cannot be effective.
Ubisoft added Easy Anti-Cheat support for Linux and Valve's Proton compatibility layer. I play Division 2 and it runs just fine. More of them are being added by the AAA studios. Missing is Vanguard / Riot Anti-Cheat, no idea when that will get added. Thus far games have not tried to dork with my kernel.
EAC has supported Linux for a while now as far as I remember. The problem is, it is up to the game developers to enable support in their config for that or not, and most of them are choosing not to especially for games where any weakness would be abused like Rust. Someone had posted a proof of concept where they ported the Linux EAC to Windows, which allowed them to bypass checks that would be performed on a Windows machine.
I always see this as a yes and no. Yes if you didn't start giving up on mainstream DRM encumbered audio production 10-15 years ago you aren't going to be ready to switch. Those people have sunk too much into their work flows and collections of licensed plugins.
No if like me you gave up on those tools and found new ones, because I didn't like the direction things were going with usb license keys, always online drm, and offline license management installs that feel almost as rootkit/malware coded as modern anticheat systems.
It helps that I gave up on ableton back in 2008 and swapped to Reason & Logic, before ultimately giving up on those as well. Now I just use Renoise & VCV Rack while trying to work up the will to dabble with Puredata and Supercollider.
Bitwig sounds nice but its too expensive and locks me back into the same cycles of update purchases Ableton & Reason once did.
Do I miss my Korg VSTs & Reason Racks? Yeah, I just can't be bothered enough to go back.
In the end for me its just a hobby so I've been willing to throw away my setup and workflow entirely more than once since starting with digital music in 2004.
I just haven't found anything on the amp sim side that remotely approaches what NeuralDSP gives me. Similar to drums, haven't found any libraries that sound remotely as good as something like GGD. I've replaced most of my "simple" effects plugins with free stuff, sure, but VSTi/libraries have been more of a miss than a hit for me. I started around the same time you did. Back then it barely was thinkable to even consider Linux as a main OS for music production. Whatever works for what you do with it, and I can definitely see some workflows work with what it offers today, just not mine.
Yeah for drums I still rely heavily on my sample library I've built up from other hobby music friends, sound library cd/dvd purchases, and freesound.org digging. But it works for IDM/Industrial stuff I do.
A balanced take. You name several exceptions that don't work seamlessly on Linux. Recognizing that, I'll note:
- Bitwig 5.x (haven't tried the latest 6.x) is working really nicely for me now across several NixOS machines (I'm using BitwigBox so that yabridge smoothes out VST integration).
- Le Mans Ultimate is working for me now. It would hang on loading a track until a month or two ago (GE Proton recommended).
For sim, its mostly the modding and third-party utilities that I can't be bothered to make work hehe. Maybe I just didn't spend enough time searching for alternatives, or maybe they just didn't exist, but I couldn't be bothered to spend the time to make them work last time I tried.
Interesting, I've always had the opposite impression - CUPS has always made it quite easier for me to use whatever printer I had at hand instead of having to hunt down drivers off the manufacturer's website, only to find out they stopped supporting it back in the Vista days.
Same, games aside, it’s just so snappy. I knew windows was slow at a lot of things but I hadn’t quite realized how slow things as banal as locking/unlocking had become. The first week with cachyos was mind blowing on just that front.
It's over a year for me with CachyOS now after endless issues with Manjaro after bigger updates, and after Mint getting hiccups-freezes randomly during operation.
And it's also a return to KDE for me, after many years with Xfce and Gnome. The whole environment feels more stable and mature - tho, I miss title bar window shading that's not present under Wayland.
The main asterisk is that if you use newer GPUs, you’ll need to use a newer kernel / drivers to get solid support (which is why Arch (& CachyOS) is a popular gaming distro). And certain technologies may not be supported for a while, or take some time to set up (ray tracing, DLSS, frame gen type stuff etc.)
Performance is comparable to windows, and sometimes better because windows is a bloated piece of shit. Lol.
A lot of stuff you can try and it works ok, but the main things that are permanently unsupported are kernel-level anti-cheat (like Valorant) or online games with anticheat that will detect something weird in the setup and ban you. But some competitive games work fine (like overwatch)
If "works most of the time" is acceptable for you, it's good enough.
If you actually want to be able to play whatever you want to play - instead of what runs - you have to either stay on Windows, or have it as second system.
Wine has evolved a lot, but there's an entire community dedicated to improving games specifically building Proton, essentially a Wine fork focused on games, including big contributions from Valve.
This has made many old and modern games playable without issues. On Steam or Heroic Launcher, running a game has mostly become as simple clicking install and later play.
That being said, it's not all peachy. There's not really been much progress on native Linux gaming outside of Flatpak/Steam Linux runtime. Many native games run worse or with issues.
And Proton/Wine isn't perfect. Many games need tweaks or may not work without glitches. And games with anticheat don't work more often than they do, on purpose.
Still, depending on what games you play and hardware you own it has become entirely possible to ditch Windows and not suffer for it.
Everyday user of CachyOS (after trying a few other distros, this one seems to be so far the best for my use case scenario).
I play a few games (used to stream videogames although not for a living but wasn't a small streamer with 1 or 2 viewers). The one that I've been playing the most is The First Descendant (I'm a Destiny 2 fan and now that there's no more Destiny, I'm trying to find my next game).
I game about 3-4 hours every evening unless I have something to do. My last 300 hours or so have been all in CachyOS. It's super stable and I'm a nitpicky guy (for example, I run Windows still for those kernel level anti cheat games, with Secure Mode on, and although even CachyOS doesn't support it out of the box, `sbctl` is the best solution to enable it and quite easy to do so!)
Performance is comparable, it's basically some Wine bottles or, thanks to the SteamDeck, a Proton environment with GPU passthrough. For The First Descendant, which doesn't work OOTB with Steam's Proton, I installed ProtonGE (not super hard to install, there's a flatpak of a few apps that can do it automatically for you) and that works great. I need to tell it to enable the Linux anti cheat and since TFD uses Easy Anti-cheat, it's an env var away (which you can configure from the Steam settings for that game).
Performance-wise I actually get better framerate. Presumably because nowadays windows comes with so much nonsense running in the background that I bet you the fact they're not running in the Wine bottle is perfect.
I don’t play multiplayer stuff like Fortnite or Call of Duty, so I might not be your typical user. I use Steam for everything, as well.
But I fully switched to Fedora a while ago because every game I played was either just as performant or ran better on Linux. It’s plug and play, too. I just downloaded Steam and that was it.
I know there are other commenters saying the same thing, but I’m just super excited because of what this means for Linux market share on consumer machines
PC gaming on linux these days is joy these days. The main games you're likely to struggle with are games that require some windows kernel level anti-cheat software running, so some online multi-player will not be playable for that reason. Proton, wine, and the ecosystem have evolved a lot in the last couple years to the point that I'm surprised when a game can not run on linux. Occasionally, you need to look at https://www.protondb.com/ to see if there is some startup option that needs to be added to get the game to run. If you're into single player games, Linux is generally a really solid choice.
In the last few years, Valve has made incredible progress with their equivalent set of API wrappers to what Wine does. Apparently (not experienced first hand) it’s like 97% of the way there, now.
if you have a steam account, and you open it on Linux most of your games will be present to be played. Most of them will just work.
Those that don't you can look up details on protondb.com.
as mentioned above if you play any competitive games that come with anti-cheat features, then you won't be able to join in the fun. So if you don't care about those games, you'll be fine.
Forza Horizon 6 was a bit of a shit-fight to get it working. GPU crashes, audio just failing, and 20-questions with what combination of runtime and configs would get it to play ball, and it would break after some patches, but it really stabilised now and most issues I’ve had have disappeared.
In short, it is the default assumption that a game will play on Linux these days, vs. assuming it won't.
Steam/Valve has built Proton, which I believe is a fork of Wine, and put significant resources into it. Steam distributes it on its own but CachyOS distributes even more patched/optimized versions of it in their repositories.
The games I know do NOT work on Linux are usually online multiplayer competitive games which have kernel-level anti-cheat. Notable for me is Fortnite - though I hear that now, there are even options for enabling strong anti-cheat in Linux but Epic chooses not to support it.
I'm not informed on other niche game types like simulators or games requiring special equipment, but chances are if it's not competitive, or it's single player, you can get it running with good performance on Linux with modern hardware.
Most of the games I play are resource management or base/city building games. I haven't bothered checking if a game works in the last few years, I just fork over my money at this point.
I think the closest to a AAA game was Anno 1800 and Mount&Blade Bannerlord, both worked fine. All the current popular city builders work fine (eg. Timberborn, Foundation, Manor Lords). A lot of the games I play are early access too, or the pre-release stream.
The one game that didn't work was Bongo Cat, which is free anyway. The devs are working on an X11 version though, and it's practically a whimsical keylogger, so it might not appeal to fans of Linux anyway!
Former Windows 11 user here. Microsoft operating systems have been my primary desktop since DOS 6.0, but the embedding of advertisements in Win11 drove to me finally try out Linux distributions, and CachyOS was the only one that stuck for me in terms of familiarity and performance. It's been my daily driver for 1.5 years now, and I've been extremely grateful for it.
Yeah I really enjoyed Cachy but the model of using the AUR to install third party applications just seems broken. I don't want to have to trust some random install script maintainer in addition to the 3p app developer. And sadly I don't have the time and attention to spare to review the AUR scripts of apps every time I update.
I switched to Kubuntu to keep KDE (which I really found I enjoyed from Cachy) while using a more stable and familiar ubuntu base. It's not one of the "gaming" distros but I haven't noticed any major drawbacks with the games I play.
I have not needed AUR support for games. The only time I was tempted to install an AUR package was on my laptop for Zoom chat. My gaming machine will never see any of those packages.
The AUR is very user managed and orphaned packages can be picked up I guess to continue maintenance. Obviously, this can lead to some issues. It's one of the tradeoffs for a heavily user supplied repository of packages. You get a lot of good stuff quickly, but I personally will stick with Debian.
That's what I'd probably do, but I'm a software engineer and devops person that also likes to tinker, so I like to have a lot of packages available. Fedora with its 80k packages (~30k apps) has been a blessing.
In comparison, Arch official repos only have 15k packages (~10k apps). There are ways to plug the gap (such as compile missing packages, add Nix package manager), but it's even better if you don't have to.
I was nervous about this too - but it's "just" the AUR. That means it's only unofficial packages, which we should always take great care when installing anyway.
I’ve been in love with cachy since I switched from windows but this past weekend has been extremely trying after experiencing metadata exhaustion probably due to the snapshots filling up my home drive. Learned a few things and I realize btrfs is not specific to cachy, but this was definitely the hardest thing I’ve worked through since switching from windows.
I almost ran into the metadata exhaustion problem myself. Thankfully I noticed before in btrfs assistant that the remaining metadata space is filling up dangerously fast. Before that I thought btrfs is as easy as ext4. Fire and forget, no adjustments necessary. Now I know that you have to limit the number of snapshots in some way or another. Wish there would be a more noob-friendly default configuration. Or two configuration options to choose from when installing: simplified, expert.
I switched from Windows a couple of months ago. I am loving it. I cloned my favorite Windows window management solution, WindowGrid to KDE, https://store.kde.org/p/2363952/
I switched to Bazzite from CachyOS and while I really appreciate how accessible it is, the immutability of the core OS doesn't do enough to scratch my Linux tinkering fix. So I'll probably install this in a few days.
I loved Bazzite for hardware compatibility out of the box but the necessity of flatpak made it enormously inconvenient as a general machine. CachyOS sounds worth checking out if I still want to game but also occasionally do real work.
Does anyone have any idea why Cachy is so hard on I/O? If I run it with disk encryption my entire system hangs intermittently when downloading large files. (eg steam updates, etc.) Even testing without disk encryption, I will get brief hangs when writing large files.
Is Cachy just assuming that everyone's got a high-quality NVME? Is there something about newer OSes that cause a CPU bottleneck for large disk writes?
Which filesystem do you have on top of the encryption? If it's the default btrfs that might be one factor. Have you tested using ext4? What is the make/model of the physical storage?
I tried it with BTRFS and had really terrible performance. I ended up trying ext4 and it was not appreciably better. I don't know the make and model of my SSD, but I'm sure it's a not-very-impressive SSD. Unencrypted with EXT4 was the only thing that offered good performance.
Mind you, I'm really happy with CachyOS, but I don't really understand why this is a problem and it doesn't seem to be an issue others are having.
I'll check that out. In my case I had moved straight from Fedora and was using LUKS + EXT4 -- with no issues whatsoever. Further, rather than losing some write speed, my system will actually hang quite aggressively. It seems to be CPU-related, but perhaps it's disk reads that are hanging? (or maybe both) My PC case is also not extra-hairy :)
To benchmark the encryption if you suspect CPU related, try
cryptsetup benchmark
though it's more useful if it was run prior on your previous OS installation. For storage, fio [1] may be useful but that is a much more involved topic and having baseline tests run in your former OS that you said worked fine.
First day was a bit rough, first week was still a little rough, but it's been pretty smooth since then, even when learning how to fix things and trying new software.
I'm using Niri and Noctalia as my desktop setup, and it's been different than my Windows experience, but it feels fun and cool to just use a computer in a new way.
I hv been out of distro hopping for years now, apart from pkg build, what makes Cachy os standout? I don't really care about kernel optimizations if we don't have any significant benchmarks.
I wouldn't recommend CachyOS personally. If you wish for a distribution with a traditional read and write filesystem and new features and package versions I'd recommend Fedora, which I always end up going back to.
Personal preference, but I like my software to have as little patching or customisation done by my distribution as possible, and to be able to use it as upstream intended. This is a longstanding benefit of Arch Linux, but CachyOS goes beyond this to kit out a default install with garish themes and shell configurations to the point that the default user's login shell gets set to /bin/fish.
Some fume was had because I really do not believe that Shelly is a good choice for the primary system package manager. It's written in C# and compiled with .NET AOT and I just cannot shake the sense that it is an incorrect choice for a core system program.
The GUI needs a little bit of polish, but the command line user interface is terrible; there is a DNF/APT style subcommand interface which has no search subcommand, and other features are split into a Source->Action->modifier "shortcode", but that is very different from Pacman. The action letters differ between sources; for example to search repositories you use "-SQa" but to search the AUR it is "-AS", and I believe that it is like this for the sole reason that no thought has been put into it. I'd also suggest that the authors have little experience with Unix and so it isn't made with the same kind of attitude. There are other things like table wrapping at 80 columns making the output unreadable and lack of a package download counter.
When I brought it up to the "community" I was relentlessly flamed for not being entirely positive about this change to the distribution. I'm of the opinion that the maintainer had her feelings hurt because I criticised her project, and lied about the issues I had raised. A pile on ensued.
The final straw for me that made me dump another 24 hours in moving distribution again is that the attitude of the CachyOS project can be summed up as "script kiddie" and the "community" spaces are populated by and large by children. Despite having the same sort of audience Bazzite has a much more pleasant community. Fedora seems to avoid all of this kind of nonsense, I suppose by dint of being run by professionals, and avoiding Discord.
There is no single 'upstream'. Furthermore I'd give a shit about intent. That's just their opinion.
The garish themes can be ignored, deinstalled, avoided by choosing an appropriate environment.
The fuming about Shelly? Yah, hrrm. Had some of that, too.
Solution? yay -Rd shelly You are not forced to use it, and it can be deinstalled.
The moment it's not optional anymore, I'm gone.
Don't use the community spaces, if you can't handle spoiled brats chasing the latest fads.
Bazzite is bloat (conceptually). Fedora no good. RedHat neither.
Always felt sluggish to me. Haven't tried since years though, but don't intend to either.
Not missing anything from 'there'.
There is a TUI-client called concord for the terminal, where you can disable all the gifs, movies, memes, cat pics, avatars, whatever. That's making it much more bearable :-)
This one seems particularly attractive to Windows refugees especially gamers. The default desktop looks very much like Windows: even the wallpaper is one of those blue gradient 3d wave shapes.
I tried it in a VM and I don't think I can deal with the jank. The default install comes with 3 different GUIs for installing software, all of them confusing and inconsistent. Apps with context menus that go 5 levels deep everywhere, confusing layouts, sometimes icons, sometimes not. I guess if you are coming from Windows this is the status quo so that's fine.
Not for me but I'm glad this new wave of Linux users are finding success with it.
My newbie recommendation is https://bazzite.gg/. It ships a very simple GUI package manager and the system silently updates in the background. It's also atomic, so rollbacks are easy and destroying the system is hard. It's not a separate distro per-se but a layer atop Fedora Silverblue/Kinoite (you can re-base to/from them without a reinstall).
It's been my daily driver for ~2 years.
The Cachy/Arch approach is more flexible, I'm fine with atomic since containerized workflows are my preference.
Ahem! Even old unix-users can find success with it, by simply not using/deinstalling the yank and relying on pacman and/or yay in the terminal. Shouldn't be that difficult for someone from another era?
The only things left installed are cachy-os-hello, and the kernel-manager. They are useful, and don't break things. Though one could do, without them too.
I’m annoyed that games I play use BattleEye and the use of BattleEye prevents me from being able to switch over to CachyOS on our family gaming PC+TV setup in the play room. Doubly so because BattleEye appears to do absolutely nothing to prevent PC lobbies from becoming rife with cheaters anyway, so I don’t really get the point of it.
This has been my experience as well. My main game right now is escape from Tarkov and battle eye wont let me into official servers. I’m able to manage my stash and buy from traders just fine.
For other steam titles, popOS and proton were just fine
If anyone is looking for a niri based opinionated set of configuration on top of CachyOS (or vanilla Arch) I put together: https://github.com/nickjj/dotfriedrice
The goal is after installing the official ISO, you can get a developer focused desktop environment up and running in ~10 minutes with 1 command. It's quite configurable so you can change around anything you want ahead of time or after you install it. I use it with vanilla Arch but I know of quite a few people using it successfully with CachyOS.
For CachyOS, the only manual adjustment you have to make before running the repo's install script is uninstalling `jack` since it conflicts with `pipewire-jack`. I could easily roll this into the script but so far no one has complained loud enough to automate this. I also wonder if CachyOS will eventually drop that AUR dependency in its official ISO.
If it matters to you, 99.9% of the code is hand coded. The only time I use AI is when I'm 100% stone walled on something and it's a last resort move. Even then it's copy / pasting small snippets into web based AIs where I fully review and refactor its output so you could say the 0.1% is still human vetted.
Moving away from Windows last year was so worth it. I've been wanting to switch since 2017 but always ran into hardware issues. The same hardware I had back then works beautifully with Arch today.
It's not just a gaming and performance distro, it includes QoL fixes on modern hardware.
On my Lenovo laptop, fixes that would take over a day to enable and patch on most distros:
Another gaming feature that is otherwise useful in workstations is the external scheduler support.Currently using BPFland which makes multitasking as responsive as idle while compiling Yocto/Chromium in the background.
Windows, Mac (mini M1), and kernel built-in scheduler Linux jank and become almost unusable (Ryzen 5800H).
I tried CachyOS and Niri this weekend, and was pleasantly surprised hibernate/suspend actually worked with no customizations on my Desktop.
I’ve tried like 5 other distros and usually when it goes into sleep/hibernate the monitor never wakes up so I have to force shutdown using the power button.
I’m going to install this on an older machine and see how it goes. So far it’s been great!
Question to the Arch Linux veterans out there. Is CachyOS better than EndeavourOS or vice versa?
From what I read Cachy comes with a lot of proprietary repos and gaming stuff already installed along with a custom kernel tuned for gaming performance which makes it more bloated and less stable than vanilla Arch distros like Endeavour which just ships with the bare minimum quality of life tweaks over installing arch from scratch.
What's your experience and what would you recommend for someone switching their laptop from Windows mostly for dev work but who doesn't play too many games. I see arch is the most popular community favorite now, but I was thinking maybe a Fedora based distro would be a better fire-and-forget daily driver after the Arch AUR malware attack conundrum, as I don't have the time to deal with stuff like that on a daily basis.
CachyOS takes the default arch repos and re-builds packages targeting CPU generations and their instruction sets. There are no proprietary repos. Cachy has their own personal repo where some packages not in arch repos are built.
Gaming stuff is NOT installed by default, but there is a button in the Hello app new users can click that installs 2 meta packages that install almost everything one might want for gaming. Take a look at it in a VM and see for yourself.
The performance increases from their kernel + optimized packages are small but noticeable to me. Give their wiki a read-through: https://wiki.cachyos.org/
I've used Cachy for about 2 months, having used Arch for a long time prior to that.
It just feels a lot faster (anecdotally) than Arch. I don't tend to play a lot of games either, but for tasks like web browsing and watching YouTube, it feels smoother. I don't think I'd go back to Arch unless Cachy did something really stupid to mess up which I hope they won't. No point in leaving free performance on the table with little downside.
Also you should never need the AUR. I've never needed it for anything in years, so the malware attack wasn't a concern at all. Yes, absolutely do switch away from Windows.
I few months ago, I backed up my windows gaming machine and overwrote the partition with CachyOS. Haven't looked back. Gaming performance and compatibility has exceeded my expectations. Just a much better experience overall. I feel sorry anytime I see someone using Windows.
I feel sorry every time I'm stuck going back to Windows. And admittedly, the situation is not even comparable to how it was ~25 years ago when I first started playing around with Linux, most things I want to do with a computer just work on Linux nowadays. There are still such things that just are not there yet - but for most of them, it's not necessarily Linux's fault.
If we limit the conversation to gaming specifically, one area where I don't see Linux taking over any time soon is competitive/esports oriented titles and their invasive ~rootkits~ anti-cheats. Another place I kind of have to live with Windows is simulation (in my case Elite: Dangerous and iRacing/Le Mans Ultimate) - the overlays and other third-party utilities either don't exist on Linux, or I couldn't get them to work and kind of abandoned the idea.
Audio production is also kind of a no-go. The DAWs and hardware support are absolutely getting there - Bitwig studio is apparently very good for something Ableton-like, and my DAW of choice, Reaper, has native Linux support. But the plugins and virtual instruments for the most part just don't exist. Some work through a Wine bridge, if you're lucky.
However, if you're not too deep in a niche with very specific pieces of software, or don't care about esports offerings, there isn't much tying one to Windows nowadays.
I think the situation with anti-cheat on Linux is changing. Studios are putting resources into anti-cheat that will work on Linux. If I'm being a bit cynical, I could say this is "just" because of Steam Deck and Steam Machine, but I think the number of potential players switching to Linux right now outside of the Steam ecosystem is starting to be worth considering.
The only way they could even consider making it work would involve blessing certain kernel builds, and their integrity would need to be verified. If I am able to swap out the kernel, anti-cheat cannot be effective.
Ubisoft added Easy Anti-Cheat support for Linux and Valve's Proton compatibility layer. I play Division 2 and it runs just fine. More of them are being added by the AAA studios. Missing is Vanguard / Riot Anti-Cheat, no idea when that will get added. Thus far games have not tried to dork with my kernel.
EAC has supported Linux for a while now as far as I remember. The problem is, it is up to the game developers to enable support in their config for that or not, and most of them are choosing not to especially for games where any weakness would be abused like Rust. Someone had posted a proof of concept where they ported the Linux EAC to Windows, which allowed them to bypass checks that would be performed on a Windows machine.
>Audio production is also kind of a no-go
I always see this as a yes and no. Yes if you didn't start giving up on mainstream DRM encumbered audio production 10-15 years ago you aren't going to be ready to switch. Those people have sunk too much into their work flows and collections of licensed plugins.
No if like me you gave up on those tools and found new ones, because I didn't like the direction things were going with usb license keys, always online drm, and offline license management installs that feel almost as rootkit/malware coded as modern anticheat systems.
It helps that I gave up on ableton back in 2008 and swapped to Reason & Logic, before ultimately giving up on those as well. Now I just use Renoise & VCV Rack while trying to work up the will to dabble with Puredata and Supercollider.
Bitwig sounds nice but its too expensive and locks me back into the same cycles of update purchases Ableton & Reason once did.
Do I miss my Korg VSTs & Reason Racks? Yeah, I just can't be bothered enough to go back.
In the end for me its just a hobby so I've been willing to throw away my setup and workflow entirely more than once since starting with digital music in 2004.
I just haven't found anything on the amp sim side that remotely approaches what NeuralDSP gives me. Similar to drums, haven't found any libraries that sound remotely as good as something like GGD. I've replaced most of my "simple" effects plugins with free stuff, sure, but VSTi/libraries have been more of a miss than a hit for me. I started around the same time you did. Back then it barely was thinkable to even consider Linux as a main OS for music production. Whatever works for what you do with it, and I can definitely see some workflows work with what it offers today, just not mine.
Yeah for drums I still rely heavily on my sample library I've built up from other hobby music friends, sound library cd/dvd purchases, and freesound.org digging. But it works for IDM/Industrial stuff I do.
A balanced take. You name several exceptions that don't work seamlessly on Linux. Recognizing that, I'll note:
- Bitwig 5.x (haven't tried the latest 6.x) is working really nicely for me now across several NixOS machines (I'm using BitwigBox so that yabridge smoothes out VST integration). - Le Mans Ultimate is working for me now. It would hang on loading a track until a month or two ago (GE Proton recommended).
For sim, its mostly the modding and third-party utilities that I can't be bothered to make work hehe. Maybe I just didn't spend enough time searching for alternatives, or maybe they just didn't exist, but I couldn't be bothered to spend the time to make them work last time I tried.
Printing is still a disaster on linux, but in linuxs defense, its also a disaster (n windows just a but less of one
Interesting, I've always had the opposite impression - CUPS has always made it quite easier for me to use whatever printer I had at hand instead of having to hunt down drivers off the manufacturer's website, only to find out they stopped supporting it back in the Vista days.
Same, games aside, it’s just so snappy. I knew windows was slow at a lot of things but I hadn’t quite realized how slow things as banal as locking/unlocking had become. The first week with cachyos was mind blowing on just that front.
It's over a year for me with CachyOS now after endless issues with Manjaro after bigger updates, and after Mint getting hiccups-freezes randomly during operation.
And it's also a return to KDE for me, after many years with Xfce and Gnome. The whole environment feels more stable and mature - tho, I miss title bar window shading that's not present under Wayland.
Wait... what's gaming like? Can you describe it for someone who only ever could play Unreal Tournament back in the day on Linux?
What games are available? Do you use emulators or stuff like Wine?
Many single player games work out of the box in Steam, because they’ve invested a huge amount of effort into Proton (their compatibility layer).
Here are some games that have worked pretty well out of the box:
- Factorio
- Arc: Raiders
- Overwatch
- Age of Empires 2 DE
- Abiotic Factor
- Subnautica 2
- Windblown
- Dune Awakening
- Cybperpunk 2077
- Star Citizen (with the community installer to help set it up)
See here for a database: https://www.protondb.com/
The main asterisk is that if you use newer GPUs, you’ll need to use a newer kernel / drivers to get solid support (which is why Arch (& CachyOS) is a popular gaming distro). And certain technologies may not be supported for a while, or take some time to set up (ray tracing, DLSS, frame gen type stuff etc.)
Performance is comparable to windows, and sometimes better because windows is a bloated piece of shit. Lol.
A lot of stuff you can try and it works ok, but the main things that are permanently unsupported are kernel-level anti-cheat (like Valorant) or online games with anticheat that will detect something weird in the setup and ban you. But some competitive games work fine (like overwatch)
It works most of the time.
If "works most of the time" is acceptable for you, it's good enough.
If you actually want to be able to play whatever you want to play - instead of what runs - you have to either stay on Windows, or have it as second system.
Wine has evolved a lot, but there's an entire community dedicated to improving games specifically building Proton, essentially a Wine fork focused on games, including big contributions from Valve.
This has made many old and modern games playable without issues. On Steam or Heroic Launcher, running a game has mostly become as simple clicking install and later play.
That being said, it's not all peachy. There's not really been much progress on native Linux gaming outside of Flatpak/Steam Linux runtime. Many native games run worse or with issues.
And Proton/Wine isn't perfect. Many games need tweaks or may not work without glitches. And games with anticheat don't work more often than they do, on purpose.
Still, depending on what games you play and hardware you own it has become entirely possible to ditch Windows and not suffer for it.
Everyday user of CachyOS (after trying a few other distros, this one seems to be so far the best for my use case scenario).
I play a few games (used to stream videogames although not for a living but wasn't a small streamer with 1 or 2 viewers). The one that I've been playing the most is The First Descendant (I'm a Destiny 2 fan and now that there's no more Destiny, I'm trying to find my next game).
I game about 3-4 hours every evening unless I have something to do. My last 300 hours or so have been all in CachyOS. It's super stable and I'm a nitpicky guy (for example, I run Windows still for those kernel level anti cheat games, with Secure Mode on, and although even CachyOS doesn't support it out of the box, `sbctl` is the best solution to enable it and quite easy to do so!)
Performance is comparable, it's basically some Wine bottles or, thanks to the SteamDeck, a Proton environment with GPU passthrough. For The First Descendant, which doesn't work OOTB with Steam's Proton, I installed ProtonGE (not super hard to install, there's a flatpak of a few apps that can do it automatically for you) and that works great. I need to tell it to enable the Linux anti cheat and since TFD uses Easy Anti-cheat, it's an env var away (which you can configure from the Steam settings for that game).
Performance-wise I actually get better framerate. Presumably because nowadays windows comes with so much nonsense running in the background that I bet you the fact they're not running in the Wine bottle is perfect.
Happy to answer any other questions!
I don’t play multiplayer stuff like Fortnite or Call of Duty, so I might not be your typical user. I use Steam for everything, as well.
But I fully switched to Fedora a while ago because every game I played was either just as performant or ran better on Linux. It’s plug and play, too. I just downloaded Steam and that was it.
I know there are other commenters saying the same thing, but I’m just super excited because of what this means for Linux market share on consumer machines
PC gaming on linux these days is joy these days. The main games you're likely to struggle with are games that require some windows kernel level anti-cheat software running, so some online multi-player will not be playable for that reason. Proton, wine, and the ecosystem have evolved a lot in the last couple years to the point that I'm surprised when a game can not run on linux. Occasionally, you need to look at https://www.protondb.com/ to see if there is some startup option that needs to be added to get the game to run. If you're into single player games, Linux is generally a really solid choice.
In the last few years, Valve has made incredible progress with their equivalent set of API wrappers to what Wine does. Apparently (not experienced first hand) it’s like 97% of the way there, now.
if you have a steam account, and you open it on Linux most of your games will be present to be played. Most of them will just work. Those that don't you can look up details on protondb.com.
as mentioned above if you play any competitive games that come with anti-cheat features, then you won't be able to join in the fun. So if you don't care about those games, you'll be fine.
> if you play any competitive games that come with anti-cheat features, then you won't be able to join in the fun.
I'd say it's a majority of games that won't work if they require anti-cheat, but some will.
Forza Horizon 6 was a bit of a shit-fight to get it working. GPU crashes, audio just failing, and 20-questions with what combination of runtime and configs would get it to play ball, and it would break after some patches, but it really stabilised now and most issues I’ve had have disappeared.
Game companies are adding their anti-cheat into Proton. Ubisoft for sure. Others will follow.
In short, it is the default assumption that a game will play on Linux these days, vs. assuming it won't.
Steam/Valve has built Proton, which I believe is a fork of Wine, and put significant resources into it. Steam distributes it on its own but CachyOS distributes even more patched/optimized versions of it in their repositories.
The games I know do NOT work on Linux are usually online multiplayer competitive games which have kernel-level anti-cheat. Notable for me is Fortnite - though I hear that now, there are even options for enabling strong anti-cheat in Linux but Epic chooses not to support it.
I'm not informed on other niche game types like simulators or games requiring special equipment, but chances are if it's not competitive, or it's single player, you can get it running with good performance on Linux with modern hardware.
Most of the games I play are resource management or base/city building games. I haven't bothered checking if a game works in the last few years, I just fork over my money at this point.
I think the closest to a AAA game was Anno 1800 and Mount&Blade Bannerlord, both worked fine. All the current popular city builders work fine (eg. Timberborn, Foundation, Manor Lords). A lot of the games I play are early access too, or the pre-release stream.
The one game that didn't work was Bongo Cat, which is free anyway. The devs are working on an X11 version though, and it's practically a whimsical keylogger, so it might not appeal to fans of Linux anyway!
Former Windows 11 user here. Microsoft operating systems have been my primary desktop since DOS 6.0, but the embedding of advertisements in Win11 drove to me finally try out Linux distributions, and CachyOS was the only one that stuck for me in terms of familiarity and performance. It's been my daily driver for 1.5 years now, and I've been extremely grateful for it.
Running CachyOS has overall been great for me in the past year but the AUR supply chain attack (or whatever it was exactly) was a little unnerving.
Yeah I really enjoyed Cachy but the model of using the AUR to install third party applications just seems broken. I don't want to have to trust some random install script maintainer in addition to the 3p app developer. And sadly I don't have the time and attention to spare to review the AUR scripts of apps every time I update.
I switched to Kubuntu to keep KDE (which I really found I enjoyed from Cachy) while using a more stable and familiar ubuntu base. It's not one of the "gaming" distros but I haven't noticed any major drawbacks with the games I play.
I have not needed AUR support for games. The only time I was tempted to install an AUR package was on my laptop for Zoom chat. My gaming machine will never see any of those packages.
I also just moved from Linux Mint to Cachy and haven't had to use a single AUR package (yet). I use some relatively obscure programs too.
CachyOS does pull some packages from the AUR into the CachyOS repo, but they state that they go through a validation process first.
To clarify, the packages in the CachyOS repo from the AUR are manually reviewed by a team member before inclusion and updates.
The AUR is very user managed and orphaned packages can be picked up I guess to continue maintenance. Obviously, this can lead to some issues. It's one of the tradeoffs for a heavily user supplied repository of packages. You get a lot of good stuff quickly, but I personally will stick with Debian.
https://cybersecuritynews.com/arch-linux-aur-packages-compro...
I've been CatchyOS curious, but AUR is exactly what's been keeping me using Fedora.
I hope official, veted Arch repositories grow over time.
It's simple: Don't use the AUR to download anything if you're worried. AUR is like COPR.
That's what I'd probably do, but I'm a software engineer and devops person that also likes to tinker, so I like to have a lot of packages available. Fedora with its 80k packages (~30k apps) has been a blessing.
In comparison, Arch official repos only have 15k packages (~10k apps). There are ways to plug the gap (such as compile missing packages, add Nix package manager), but it's even better if you don't have to.
I was nervous about this too - but it's "just" the AUR. That means it's only unofficial packages, which we should always take great care when installing anyway.
How many packages are you using from AUR vs the official repos though? The official repos have almost everything I need
TIL about Shelly. https://github.com/Seafoam-Labs/Shelly-ALPM
In the release notes they said they removed Paru and are recommending Shelly instead.
I like that I can manage Flatpack and AUR!
Gonna give this a try!!
Shelly also has static analysis for AUR packages that looks for all the common, shifty ways a pkgbuild might try to give you something bad.
I’ve been in love with cachy since I switched from windows but this past weekend has been extremely trying after experiencing metadata exhaustion probably due to the snapshots filling up my home drive. Learned a few things and I realize btrfs is not specific to cachy, but this was definitely the hardest thing I’ve worked through since switching from windows.
I almost ran into the metadata exhaustion problem myself. Thankfully I noticed before in btrfs assistant that the remaining metadata space is filling up dangerously fast. Before that I thought btrfs is as easy as ext4. Fire and forget, no adjustments necessary. Now I know that you have to limit the number of snapshots in some way or another. Wish there would be a more noob-friendly default configuration. Or two configuration options to choose from when installing: simplified, expert.
I'm surprised this is the default. How good are the snapshot management tools?
I switched from Windows a couple of months ago. I am loving it. I cloned my favorite Windows window management solution, WindowGrid to KDE, https://store.kde.org/p/2363952/
I haven't found anything on Linux like it.
I switched to Bazzite from CachyOS and while I really appreciate how accessible it is, the immutability of the core OS doesn't do enough to scratch my Linux tinkering fix. So I'll probably install this in a few days.
I loved Bazzite for hardware compatibility out of the box but the necessity of flatpak made it enormously inconvenient as a general machine. CachyOS sounds worth checking out if I still want to game but also occasionally do real work.
I'm on SteamOS and like the immutability for tinkering with Distrobox. Lets me tinker worry free.
Ha, so true. Bazzite cured my tinkering obsession. I now have no choice but to get shit done or to... play actual video games.
Does anyone have any idea why Cachy is so hard on I/O? If I run it with disk encryption my entire system hangs intermittently when downloading large files. (eg steam updates, etc.) Even testing without disk encryption, I will get brief hangs when writing large files.
Is Cachy just assuming that everyone's got a high-quality NVME? Is there something about newer OSes that cause a CPU bottleneck for large disk writes?
Which filesystem do you have on top of the encryption? If it's the default btrfs that might be one factor. Have you tested using ext4? What is the make/model of the physical storage?
I tried it with BTRFS and had really terrible performance. I ended up trying ext4 and it was not appreciably better. I don't know the make and model of my SSD, but I'm sure it's a not-very-impressive SSD. Unencrypted with EXT4 was the only thing that offered good performance.
Mind you, I'm really happy with CachyOS, but I don't really understand why this is a problem and it doesn't seem to be an issue others are having.
Maybe this is something you have already checked but first get your device with blkid or whatever you prefer, then
Look at the temperature when you are pushing the IO really hard. Some devices will throttle when hot.Is this on a laptop? Do you have any indoor pets that have fur? Yaks shed a lot this time of year.
I'll check that out. In my case I had moved straight from Fedora and was using LUKS + EXT4 -- with no issues whatsoever. Further, rather than losing some write speed, my system will actually hang quite aggressively. It seems to be CPU-related, but perhaps it's disk reads that are hanging? (or maybe both) My PC case is also not extra-hairy :)
To benchmark the encryption if you suspect CPU related, try
though it's more useful if it was run prior on your previous OS installation. For storage, fio [1] may be useful but that is a much more involved topic and having baseline tests run in your former OS that you said worked fine.[1] - https://fio.readthedocs.io/en/latest/fio_doc.html
I switched to Cachy in late February this year.
First day was a bit rough, first week was still a little rough, but it's been pretty smooth since then, even when learning how to fix things and trying new software.
I'm using Niri and Noctalia as my desktop setup, and it's been different than my Windows experience, but it feels fun and cool to just use a computer in a new way.
I hv been out of distro hopping for years now, apart from pkg build, what makes Cachy os standout? I don't really care about kernel optimizations if we don't have any significant benchmarks.
I wouldn't recommend CachyOS personally. If you wish for a distribution with a traditional read and write filesystem and new features and package versions I'd recommend Fedora, which I always end up going back to.
Personal preference, but I like my software to have as little patching or customisation done by my distribution as possible, and to be able to use it as upstream intended. This is a longstanding benefit of Arch Linux, but CachyOS goes beyond this to kit out a default install with garish themes and shell configurations to the point that the default user's login shell gets set to /bin/fish.
Some fume was had because I really do not believe that Shelly is a good choice for the primary system package manager. It's written in C# and compiled with .NET AOT and I just cannot shake the sense that it is an incorrect choice for a core system program.
The GUI needs a little bit of polish, but the command line user interface is terrible; there is a DNF/APT style subcommand interface which has no search subcommand, and other features are split into a Source->Action->modifier "shortcode", but that is very different from Pacman. The action letters differ between sources; for example to search repositories you use "-SQa" but to search the AUR it is "-AS", and I believe that it is like this for the sole reason that no thought has been put into it. I'd also suggest that the authors have little experience with Unix and so it isn't made with the same kind of attitude. There are other things like table wrapping at 80 columns making the output unreadable and lack of a package download counter.
When I brought it up to the "community" I was relentlessly flamed for not being entirely positive about this change to the distribution. I'm of the opinion that the maintainer had her feelings hurt because I criticised her project, and lied about the issues I had raised. A pile on ensued.
The final straw for me that made me dump another 24 hours in moving distribution again is that the attitude of the CachyOS project can be summed up as "script kiddie" and the "community" spaces are populated by and large by children. Despite having the same sort of audience Bazzite has a much more pleasant community. Fedora seems to avoid all of this kind of nonsense, I suppose by dint of being run by professionals, and avoiding Discord.
There is no single 'upstream'. Furthermore I'd give a shit about intent. That's just their opinion.
The garish themes can be ignored, deinstalled, avoided by choosing an appropriate environment.
The fuming about Shelly? Yah, hrrm. Had some of that, too.
Solution? yay -Rd shelly You are not forced to use it, and it can be deinstalled. The moment it's not optional anymore, I'm gone.
Don't use the community spaces, if you can't handle spoiled brats chasing the latest fads.
Bazzite is bloat (conceptually). Fedora no good. RedHat neither.
Always felt sluggish to me. Haven't tried since years though, but don't intend to either.
Not missing anything from 'there'.
There is a TUI-client called concord for the terminal, where you can disable all the gifs, movies, memes, cat pics, avatars, whatever. That's making it much more bearable :-)
Another era, another Arch based distribution.
This one seems particularly attractive to Windows refugees especially gamers. The default desktop looks very much like Windows: even the wallpaper is one of those blue gradient 3d wave shapes.
I tried it in a VM and I don't think I can deal with the jank. The default install comes with 3 different GUIs for installing software, all of them confusing and inconsistent. Apps with context menus that go 5 levels deep everywhere, confusing layouts, sometimes icons, sometimes not. I guess if you are coming from Windows this is the status quo so that's fine.
Not for me but I'm glad this new wave of Linux users are finding success with it.
My newbie recommendation is https://bazzite.gg/. It ships a very simple GUI package manager and the system silently updates in the background. It's also atomic, so rollbacks are easy and destroying the system is hard. It's not a separate distro per-se but a layer atop Fedora Silverblue/Kinoite (you can re-base to/from them without a reinstall).
It's been my daily driver for ~2 years.
The Cachy/Arch approach is more flexible, I'm fine with atomic since containerized workflows are my preference.
Ahem! Even old unix-users can find success with it, by simply not using/deinstalling the yank and relying on pacman and/or yay in the terminal. Shouldn't be that difficult for someone from another era?
The only things left installed are cachy-os-hello, and the kernel-manager. They are useful, and don't break things. Though one could do, without them too.
That's one way to look at it. At the end of the day though its just arch linux with a jetpack. So you can use and treat it like any other arch distro.
Two years.
Same install.
No problems at all.
Fully succumbed to plasmonic thrall.
Satisfied by being speedy.
So boring. Almost snoring.
(must not distrohop! must not distrohop! must not distrohop!)
TIL you can run CachyOS kernels on Fedora: https://github.com/CachyOS/copr-linux-cachyos
I’m annoyed that games I play use BattleEye and the use of BattleEye prevents me from being able to switch over to CachyOS on our family gaming PC+TV setup in the play room. Doubly so because BattleEye appears to do absolutely nothing to prevent PC lobbies from becoming rife with cheaters anyway, so I don’t really get the point of it.
This has been my experience as well. My main game right now is escape from Tarkov and battle eye wont let me into official servers. I’m able to manage my stash and buy from traders just fine.
For other steam titles, popOS and proton were just fine
Agreed, anti-cheat and DRM are the last things truly preventing Linux to be a true one to one replacement for gaming in most people's cases.