Also, the folks behind this are nice..
CachyOS originated in the Polish Arch community IIRC, but all the discussion I've seen from them is just... cool.
Nothing weird or dramatic like one tends to see in linux projects, just folks really into building this stuff.
I think they have a bunch of Arch veterans, right? Like the guy who started it is also some big time Arch maintainer. You can go to archlinux.org and search the repo for packages by maintainer and Peter Jung gives you 100+ results.
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.
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
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.
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
The hell is zram?
You know how you can compress files? It work for ram as well.
Downloaded more ram, got it
Oh god the meme is true
Basically it compresses your data in the RAM. Needs a little more work form the CPU but it is still faster than swap. fyi
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.
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.
I think it’s aimed more at newbies than seasoned veterans like yourself.
Everything.
Mostly, it's just too convenient, but it's way more than just a preset. I wouldn't go back to vanilla Arch if you paid me.
I am a CachyOS acolyte. It's my end boss distro.
If you try the installer, be careful when selecting multiples DE/WM as the conflicts were not listed anywhere for the installation process.
Yeah, they do need to clean up the installer a bit. It's also not quite turnkey for a Windows dual-boot.
I know this is an unpopular opinion at the moment but I currently think Bazzite is still my favorite for the ROG Ally
The RogAlly is not Cachy's objective. It's for regular desktop use.
I believe they have a handheld distro that they use too. I heard it got a big update or something recently.
CachyOS is awesome. I just switched a few months ago after the praises from SomeOrdinaryGamer. I also wanted to use hyprland again after using plasma for sometime. It's amazing that Cachy lets me use the hyprland DE, but also has libraries to let me run kde software without the need for plasma.
It’s amazing that Cachy lets me use the hyprland DE, but also has libraries to let me run kde software without the need for plasma.
Which distribution doesn't allow to run KDE software on non-KDE desktops? How would this even be possible?
While I will most likely never switch from pure arch, I'm very happy that we're getting more and more polished distros for everyday use.
I've thought about making the switch but what holds me back is stability.
I don't mean stability from a software perspective. But from a distro perspective. Distros come and go all the time. Four or Five have stable enough support through community developers and industry sponsorships that they've managed to become large enough and supported enough to be considered Evergreen Distros for lack of a better word. In other words, distros where the support base is large enough to be considered "too big to fail" (Ubuntu, Mainline Arch, Manjaro, Fedora, Gentoo, etc...)
The rest eventually just fade away. I've always avoided distros that are maintained by a small community of enthusiasts because enthusiasm goes away really quickly once the real work of maintaining a distro rolls around.
I won't pull the trigger on any small community project until I'm reasonably sure I'm not going to have to jump to a new project a year from now when the developers get tired of it and move on to something else.
In other words, distros where the support base is large enough to be considered “too big to fail” (Ubuntu, Mainline Arch, Manjaro, Fedora, Gentoo, etc…)
bruh, no Debian?
Or Suse
I'm trying a conversion from endeavorOS with CachyOS repositories, it was pretty seamless, I can keep my settings and endeavorOS theming, and allegedly you can switch back at any time. The cachyOS wiki has a short script for converting vanilla arch or endeavorOS to use cachyOS binaries. Been running for about a week and haven't noticed any problems.
Must...resist...distro...hopping
I've been comfortable on Bazzite for a couple years now but this is giving me the itch.
Don't worry.
It will simply be a live environment testing.
You will not be curious about the preconfigured openbox and wayfire DE options either.
It will be a small partition to test bare metal.
You will not expand that partition later.
It will be an equal dualboot.
You will not neglect updating your bazzite and feel guilty about it and finally distrohop fully.
JSYK the differences are marginal between a vanilla arch install and cachy. You have you dig really deep to see any difference in performance.
iMO cachy is a good marketing arch distro.
You skipped over the fact that getting vanilla Arch installed is often what trips people up, and also what makes people who run vanilla Arch feel like they accomplished something and truly built something - because they did.
You’re also glossing over the fact that a lot of people run the CachyOS kernel even on vanilla Arch because of the performance gains from having a kernel specifically compiled for instructions your CPU supports.
In other words; I don’t think the convenience of a proper installer, nor even just a 5% gain in performance, is just “marketing”.
Bias disclaimer; I run CachyOS btw
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(r)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 CachyOS or SteamOS grow, actually any distro getting popular is a great thing, more users, more knowledge, more problems being pointed out.
Landed on Cachy after Ubuntu> Mint > Bazzite. Wish I had just skipped Mint and Bazzite. A lot of DEs too, so it's kind of however you like it.
Sometimes you gotta know what you don't like to really understand what you do like.
What do you prefer about Catchy over Bazzite. I'm currently using Bazzite but not in love with it. I mean it's just an OS that works for my gaming and browsing.
I game, browse, and do audio production. Between all these things, I've had the least issues with Cachy. In fact, everything's been shockingly easy.
The flexibility of Cachy has been great too. Very customisable if you want it to be and lots of DEs to choose from, so really it's can be setup exactly how you want it. This is something I like in most things, a "do it once; do it right" or "set and forget" setup. I've also had the best performance from Cachy overall, but when you're comparing that against something like Bazzite, the victor could literally just come down to the hardware, they're so close.
I'm also a user, it's arch but more ~~ez~~ intuitive, it also has some popular precomp aur pkg in the repo.
I'm pretty happy with Nobara at the moment, but if I hopped at this point it'd probably be to CachyOS
Nobara user here too. Glorious Eggroll was defending Lutris dev for using AI & the Nobara exclusive wallpapers right now are AI generated by GE.
I personally plan to distro hop after reading GE's post. AI bubble can't pop if these people are actively supporting and using them.
I recently switched to it because I wanted to finally have a good try at wayland with a distro made for it, and wow was I blown away, cachy is the closest I've ever been to a "it just works" OS (including every windows version I've used, from 98 up to 10), just a couple hardware specific issues that I have fixed (except for one). I also really like plasma, I'm mot committed to it but it was nice to come back to it after using mint for a while. I still wouldn't recommend it to a newcomer but damn, it's good.
Me with a stick poking at LinuxMint : hey, wake up, do something, you have piled-up enough money under the bed already
I'm using NixOS and I have had no problems gaming. Getting the kernel from CachyOS is also easy enough, if you want that.
What does CachyOS have over Bazzite?
The biggest difference, I think, is rolling releases. 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.
CachyOS is set up to install everything needed for gaming from the main Hello app. Once the Winboat and Gaming one-click installs are run, it just works. I got an itch.io .exe game running by double clicking the .exe. For Steam, I just needed to choose a default Proton compatibility package to use in the app and after that it's been seamless.
CachyOS is apparently "optimized" for gaming performance—I don't pretend to know what that means or how much of an impact it has. I don't really care about eking out a tiny bit more performance, tbh. But I'm super impressed with how well everything just works and (as a bit of a power user) how completely customizable things are, so I can install just about anything I need easily.
It's still an unreal to me, as I remember CachyOS failing to install twice for various reasons. One related to being unable to install the kernel correctly and, the other failing to install the boot loader, leaving me with a dead install. I prefer Bazzite, openSUSE Tumbleweed, Ubuntu for gaming. They seem like nice people, having read the CachyOS forum...But the installer is scuffed AF in my experience.
Funny that Flatpack is one of the most popular distros.
It makes sense. Steam can be kind of a PITA to install natively on some distros with all of the ancient dependencies.
Nobara is my kingdom. Had a pretty bad experience with cachyOS...
I really liked CachyOS when I tried it on my spare Laptop, but when I tried to switch to it on my main Laptop I had a lot of issues with Limine (the default installer made the boot partition 2GB which filled up instantly, so I had to figure out how to manually partition something for the first time) and eventually gave up on it and went back to Bazzite.
Then I finally built a real PC and put Bazzite on it, but Bazzite absolutely shits the bed when I try to run any VR stuff on it. But Cachy handles VR really well, so now I'm dual-booting Bazzite and Cachy on my PC 🥹 I'm actually starting to get more comfortable with Cachy that way, so I might completely switch to it one day, but the prospect of having to keep up with updates and learn how to install and manage stuff the arch way still has me slightly nervous.
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