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.
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.
“Frequent updates” sounds to me like “breaks frequently”.
I’m using an Intel card, which is still seeing problems fixed with every update. But I’ve been on the road of bleeding edge before and it’s been one messy problem after another.
If I can strike a balance between latest and stable, at the cost of a slightly slower update speed, I’d prefer that.
Which game uses host system libraries? I think you have a wrong impression how things work in Linux gaming outside of Tux Kart these days. Valve maintains their own set of Linux containers called Steam Linux Runtimes and their entire point is to be relatively slow moving. Just have a look at all the package dates at https://repo.steampowered.com/steamrt4/images/latest-public-stable/sources/
On top of that, almost every game is a proprietary Windows application. So it runs on top of Proton which sits on top of the latest Steam Linux Runtime.
It’s similar with FOSS games where the foremost distribution outlet is Flathub and software published there relies on Flatpak Runtimes which are also relatively slow moving.
Barely any unless you’re installing FOSS games from their own repository for the reasons I outlined initially.
And that’s what’s important.
…and break things quite often. Considering the benchmarks Ive seen dont really show much difference between cachy and regular distros like Mint or Fedora for gaming performance, give me something stable any day over these ‘bleeding edge’ distros.
Any chance, have you ever used Garuda? I’m curious how CachyOS compares on the “ease of use” front. I’ve been on Garuda for like 3 or 4 years now as it is the only one (that I tried) that I’ve had “just work” for everything out of the box. My laptop had a lot of trouble with Bazzite and the nvidia drivers, but again, I don’t have to do anything under Garuda besides install it, periodically run updates, and it plays games just fine with no headaches. I’m not a huge fan of the decoration choices in Garuda, and some of the stuff you mentioned like Winboat and Gaming one-click installs sound amazingly helpful… but everything is working right now so there’s a hurdle to changing, lol.
Garuda “Dragonized” looks horrid, but personally I really enjoy “Mokka”.
I only disabled one or two window effects, left everything else as is. I also added some System Monitor widgets. Here’s my primary and secondary screen.
I think it looks great. Other than the unusual colour theme, nothing really gives off a “pr0 g4merzz” vibe, IMO.
“I am not a huge fan of the decoration choices in garuda”
May I recommend to you Yurihikari’s Garuda Linux Dotfiles?
You may recommend it all you like, but I’m not a huge fan of that either (from what I can tell looking at the githup you linked anyway), lol.