I've not heard of CachyOS, but to capture 2.54% of the steam linux market feels significant. It jumped right past other established Arch-based distros like Endeavor and Manjaro.
A lot of gamers want better performance, so a performance oriented distro with gaming quality of life features fills that gap. And ultimately there are a lot of YouTube channels promoting it and it kind of turned into a cool distro to use. This might explain the phenomenon.
I've been using it for a while now, and it's genuinely so good. Before this I was using EndeavourOS which was also a great distro, but I realized that I was basically putting in work to do things CachyOS does out of the box, so I switched and it's been great.
What kind of out of the box things?
Well, I started using their repos for their x86-64-v3 optimized packages and builds of popular packages from the AUR. Later I started using their kernel because it pulls in upcoming features and is compiled with optimizations like ThinLTO and AutoFDO and has a more advanced scheduler. I also like how Cachyos comes with things like zram pre-enabled and scripts for things like zink and NGX. It's basically just a ton of small things like that, some that I don't even know about yet, that makes CachyOS really nice and easy to use.
they offer some optimisations to the kernel and the packages that are supposed to yield a tiny bit better performance.
an incredibly small thing that rubs me the wrong way more than it probably should about their setup is that they set Plasma animation speeds to much higher values than the stock Plasma desktop uses. sure, it could be just a part of their customisation tweaks the same way using fish
as the default shell is, but it feels like a cheap trick to reel in the "I installed it on my desktop and it's soooo much snappier" review kind of people. like, if your work is as good as you claim, you shouldn't need to artificially make the improvements seem bigger than they really are.
I'm not familiar with it, but I think that that could be a reasonable UI tweak. I disable virtually all animation in software where possible because I want it to be as responsive as possible and don't care about the animation. Simply reducing the time in animation is a middle ground---one still gets animations, but cuts out some of the time.
I started using linux full time about a year ago. I started with Arch, but moved to Cachy really quickly when I discovered it. All of the advantages of Arch, but repos optimised for modern hardware, and a whole heap of useful pre-configured tools, like Wine/Proton, fish, snapper etc. Arch is a bare bones, pick and configure your own setup rolling release distro. Cachy is a pre-optimised, rolling release distro with lots of useful stuff right out of the box.
Tumbleweed users RISE UP!
I'm doing my part
There are dozens of us, dozens!
Man, if only Linux would be adopted by the masses for gaming...
Android uses the Linux kernel but none of the familiar "Linux" stack: GNU, X or Wayland, GTK or Qt, GNOME or KDE or other DEs, PulseAudio or PipeWire, APT or YUM or other package managers, and many others that define the Linux experience. Google could replace the Linux kernel with something else tomorrow without touching the rest of Android and most users won't tell, and many apps will run as-is.
Google tried that once, they developed Fuchsia with the intention of replacing Android and ChromeOS and realized the investment to develop a replacement is not worth it and decided to layoff all the secondary development team to find the budget for the AI people that they pay to not work in competitors.
Hoping for the AI bubble to burst any time now. I'm fucking tired of the management stuffing AI everywhere. Heck even the CEO now outsources Slack replies from ChatGPT.
Awesome. Will be interesting to see the November December numbers with unpaid Win10 support ending.
My prediction: Ten percent increase for Windows 11 with 25 percent still on 10 and barely an increase for Linux.
I hope I'm wrong.
Phone is Android, PC is now Linux Mint, for gaming I use a Steam deck, and my NAS is now TrueNAS.
Where are all the Ubuntu Core 22 installs coming from? Is there some large device or distro that uses it?
AFAIK, this corresponds to the snap package of Steam.
I feel like Ubuntu has the greatest exposure among non-Linux folks. It's the only OS any place I've ever worked used on WSL back when I was still on windows. Probably a lot of corporate nerds want to stick to what's comfortable?
I have no idea if that's the reason, but Ubuntu and Mint are the only two distros I've tried for basically that reason. Heard good things about PopOS. Might try it some time if I wind up with an extra computer.
Regular Ubuntu I get; it's specifically the separation in the list between core and the standard 24.04 distro that I don't get. I can't imagine that droves of nerds are installing straight Ubuntu Core unprompted. I'd absolutely buy though that some distro or some handheld is based on one.
Yay!
Doing my part
o7 linux mint since april
i use mint btw
Nearly a third are coming from the Steam Deck and other Steam OS handhelds. Impressive.
I use Debian. Does this mean I'm in the top 0.05% of Steam users?
Not sure wtf those 97% are thinking
More people should use EndeavourOS. It's fantastic for gaming.
I'm somewhat surprised there isn't a Fedora there, it's a pretty great and up-to-date distro. And pretty popular.
I'm also surprised Flatpak isn't higher!
bazzite bitches
Huh. The Year of the Linux Handheld.
The Year of the Linux Handheld on the Desktop
where is fedora?
Interesting to see that Arch Linux ishe most popular, even more so than endeavorOS which is way easier to install. I know Ubuntu isn't the hotness anymore but I figured mint would have jiat replaced it at the top. Apparently not. Then again power user who insults their own operating system but is also a game her might select for more advanced Linux users. Otherwise they might just dual boot or are the likes users who run it on a spare laptop.
I've been in Ubuntu user since I was 13 and I still am on my primary desktop but my old desktop which is now a utility server for me is running endeavor
For gaming purposes endevour is a terrible choice when cachy is a thing. Not that endevour is bad, its just cachy just pre does literally everything you would have to do AFTER an endevour install. Along with they have a ISO that is for the steamdeck.
Arch is also just objectively better then every other option again if your goal is first and foremost gaming. Because it has by far and away the best support for new hardware and nearly every third party community tool for every game ever is on the AUR and every gaming community with modders ONLY support arch basically because of it.
Again not because other options are bad, but this is teh steam report. Its gamers. So the best option FOR gaming is going to be on top. Thats arch, steamOS is arch, cachy is arch, and gamers with good hardware will graviate to arch because its the only way to have a painless and easy first time install for new hardware or to use teh community tools they got use to on windows.
Debian/Ubuntu and the others in that family all tend to have problems for gamers, fedora is a nightmare for new users. So they almost always end up just on cachy, or endevour/arch. Mostly cachy tho, as its canabalized most of manjaros gamers as the easy to install preset up distro.
🙋🏼♂️ new to Linux gaming.
I’ll just sit quietly over here with my Fedora machines…
Why are some in quotes?
$ cat /etc/os-release
NAME="Arch Linux"
PRETTY_NAME="Arch Linux"
(...)
Because this is how distributions declare their names
2.nice
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