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.
Me with a stick poking at LinuxMint : hey, wake up, do something, you have piled-up enough money under the bed already
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.
You can switch back to arch pretty easily and also just upgrade from arch. That’s the real benefit of cachy is standing on the shoulders of giants like Arch.
Does that mean moving from EndeavourOS to CachyOS is also easy?
Maybe I should first look into what the difference is between EndeavourOS and CachyOS. Is it even worth it to switch?
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
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.I’m old enough to know that’s a lie. I gave up dual booting years ago to save us all the embarrassment.
Please don’t kill me. How does this fare against a riced out Gentoo?
I tried it on my old pc and pretty good ngl.
Has a custom kernel and bunch of preconfigured options to run games I could not setup myself.
Has a bunch of riced DE options including openbox, wayfire, sway, etc. And the rice are good.
Has its own wiki and documentation.
Using paru instead of yay initially put me off, but then I found latter is written in go and paru is written in rust :3
My current issue is KDE setup still uses a lot of ram, but by a lot I mean 2 gb while browsing web and steam open.
Overall a very, very good gentop setup would be better, but mainly because custom rice is more personal.
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.
My son recently switched to CachyOS after bad experiences with Windows, Bazzite, more Windows, Mint and Zorin. CachyOS was the first time he was happy since losing his love for Windows.
And he doesn’t like command lines and configuring stuff, but he says for CachyOS everything was easy and there’s tutorials simply telling you what to type, and that works.
He does need to remember that after yay you still need to answer a bunch of questions, because he was wondering why a Discord update didn’t work while the update was waiting for his input. There’s probably an option somewhere to tell it to always use the default.
um. I install and use systems all the time with no hardware issues.
Good for you buddy! What does that have to do with anything, though?
What does CachyOS have over Bazzite?
It’s not a piece of shit atomic distro. Holy fuck that entire concept is toxic.
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.
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.
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.
CachyOS is apparently “optimized” for gaming performance—I don’t pretend to know what that means or how much of an impact it has.
Barely any unless you’re installing FOSS games from their own repository for the reasons I outlined initially.
I’m super impressed with how well everything just works
And that’s what’s important.
frequent updates that fix compatibility or increase performance
…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.
There are supposedly reductions in “cruft” from legacy CPU instructions, but I’ve never seen actual data to prove it helps that much.
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
You will not see much difference in performance. This is from 2022 but should still be true?
https://www.phoronix.com/review/cachyos-linux-perf/5
I think it has some improvements in kernel settings but in day to day, you wont notice them.
This performance gains myth sounds like exactly the same wishful thinking as we used to heard back when Gentoo Linux was The Cool Hotness™. Don’t get me wrong, Gentoo was great, but its added value was not in the compiler optimizations, but rather in the modularity, where you could select a feature set you wanted for your system, and not worry about useless dependencies, their associated support libraries and bugs or vulnerabilities in those.
And when it comes to the kernel, can compile your own on any distribution, including using or omitting any kernel patches you want.
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®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 CashyOS or SteamOS grow, actually any distro getting popular is a great thing, more users, more knowledge, more problems being pointed out.
You can use Endeavour OS instead just as well.
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.
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.
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.Do you have Limine working on your newer PC?
When I tried using something like Snapper on my own a year or two ago I was super confused and gave up, but Limine on Cachy has been so simple. I’ve rolled back updates a couple of times already.
For context, I decided to wipe my Windows10 install about a month ago and I’m using only using Cachy now.
Hopefully, someone does a comparison of SteamOS Desktop vs CachyOS, when the time comes. The latter is what I am considering if SteamOS Desktop isn’t quite flexible enough or has a gotcha of some kind.
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.
I have to admit, installing Cachy was annoying for me. It couldn’t deal with my Windows partitions or something. After I wiped my SSD completely, it worked.
Learning Linux stuff was a bit confusing too, but expected. Installer was a headache I did not expect.
(Disabling SecureBoot in BIOS was also a bit of trial and error)Yeah, I noticed that secure boot was going to be an issue with CachyOS on first go, as I am used to this workflow of installing a new distro…I had already done so. Still, the installer is a boss battle and that is not the normal experience for most first time users. It often is a much smoother process with something like openSUSE, Debian, Ubuntu, Mint, or even Fedora. Windows doesn’t like playing with other OS because it expects to be the only one there. Hates house guests so much that it can interfere unexpectedly with Linux distros.
Starting with CachyOS if you are new to Linux is a gut punch to be sure. However, it gives you initiative to get up to speed ASAP because Arch is peculiar to deal with (even in a tamed form like CachyOS as it still has bite). As Arch-based distros expect more from you than a standard Debian, Mint, or even Ubuntu. It’s good that you are attempting to get up to speed with at least the basics of dealing with a Linux system, as that knowledge can get you pretty far with a bit of application. Even though I used Linux for years, I haven’t gone too profoundly deep within the reeds.
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.
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
Setup in what way? Will it only compress when running low?
The hell is zram?
The hell is zram
It something than claims to handle swapping better on low ram systems… I never noticed much difference on the lower spec machines I tried it on.
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
Interesting thank you!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I’m also a user, it’s arch but more
ezintuitive, it also has some popular precomp aur pkg in the repo.
