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CachyOS Is Now the Most Popular Desktop Distro on ProtonDB (boilingsteam.com)
submitted 6 months ago by to c/linux_gaming@lemmy.world
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It is also first in the Distrowatch rank

https://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=cachyos

I distro hopped to it from Bazzite a couple of months ago, and I could not be happier.

If you try the installer, be careful when selecting multiples DE/WM as the conflicts were not listed anywhere for the installation process.

Picking a single environment and then adding the others later was what worked for me.

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[–] 49 points 6 months ago (25 children)

What's the difference between this and a fresh install of Arch with a DE like KDE/Gnome?

I've been using Arch for so long now that if I bought a new machine I would find it hard to try anything else.

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  • [–] 64 points 6 months ago (18 children)

    Arch gives you a bare bones DE, and you have to install/configure everything yourself.

    CachyOS gives you a larger volume of default applications in a basic install, and lots of the stuff comes with useful configs out of the box. It also has hardware specific optimisations for multiple generations of CPU in its repos, but how much of a difference that makes in the real world is unclear

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  • [–] 25 points 6 months ago (16 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 16 points 6 months ago (15 children)

    My local LLMs also seem to be slightly faster and for some reason now need less V-Ram.

    This is likely due to zram being setup by default

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  • [–] 14 points 6 months ago (7 children)

    The hell is zram?

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  • [–] 16 points 6 months ago* (2 children)

    Basically it compresses your data in the RAM. Needs a little more work form the CPU but it is still faster than swap. fyi

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  • [–] 4 points 6 months ago (4 children)

    I had zram setup on my previous OS as well and on cachy the LLM didn't need to use it while on my old OS it did. My guess would be that the driver had a little less overhead.

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  • [–] 3 points 6 months ago (3 children)

    It would still use zram if it's setup, only way it wouldn't is if you gone out of your way to disable it. Combine zram and the bore scheduler and it's going to run better for sure.

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  • [–] 2 points 6 months ago (2 children)

    But if the LLM stays in the V-RAM or even just stays in normal RAM does it still benefit from zram? I thought that only helped when the ram was not enough.

    So I'd say it is more likely the bore scheduler + better drivers.

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  • [–] 4 points 6 months ago (1 child)

    It's all three! Cachy OS sets it up where it applies to both regular ram and vram. Even if just using a swap in ram, it will still be much faster than swapping to disk. Plus to the application, it looks like it has more ram/vram than there is physical ram/vram.

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  • [–] 1 point 6 months ago

    Yes but my previous OS had zram setup as well, unless PopOS was using a worse compression algorithm, zram was not the main player here. Also there is no such thing as zram for vram unless you are talking about hardware compression.

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  • [–] 1 point 5 months ago*

    Zram kills my LLM speeds, big time. I had to disable it or almost disable it (limiting to like 0.5GB) and move swap to the SSD to get my system usable.

    The issue is that LLM frameworks allocate a whole bunch of CPU RAM up-front, statically. So if I'm riiiight at the edge of the limit, that bit of RAM zram eats pushes me over to swapping, which utterly obliterates token gen speed and system responsiveness, and it never recovers once it starts.

    I think CachyOS helps hybrid inference from better default scheduling, though. This is another thing llama.cpp gets very picky about. More optimized default compilation flags, GPU libs and such would also go a long way.

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  • [–] 9 points 6 months ago

    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.

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  • [–] 18 points 6 months ago

    Pretty much everything. Seperate package repo shipping cpu modern optimized binaries, custom kernel, and a ton of gaming and preformance related patches applied ontop of various packages. As well as a gui installer.

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  • [–] 12 points 6 months ago (1 child)

    I think it’s aimed more at newbies than seasoned veterans like yourself.

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  • [–] 2 points 6 months ago

    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

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  • [–] 1 point 6 months ago (1 child)

    Only different config, since it's based on arch.

    They have their own pacman-mirror, pacman is set up to download a lot more in parallel and they set the scheduler formerly known as "cachy", which is supposedly really good for a snappy UX.

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  • [–] 13 points 6 months ago*

    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.

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