Running Kubuntu atm but looking to see if I can get more out of my hardware. I booted up Cachy last night from ISO and it took barely any of my ram, 3gb I think, for the test I was going to install Steam and link to my existing game library mounting my kubuntu drive. My VR experience is quite acceptable at the moment, but it could be better. I get occasional stutters and sometimes I am put into the steamVR environment for a second if I turn too fast, I am hoping a more up to date kernel could help. Using the steam system monitor shows that when this happens my CPU/GPU/RAM are never close to being at 100% often at or less than 75% usage each, though the FPS is often around 40 - 60 (og vive headset, on windows rarely went above 50fps often down to 30). Hardware is Ryzen9 9950X and Radeon RX 9070XT OC. So the questions are:
- Will everything just “work” as stated? Install steam, link to steam library for games (I expect these to just work, downloading for a one off test will take a long time on a problem game of 15+gb) and steamvr (this is my kinda concern, though it should be small enough to install in ram if necessary)?
- I have 64gb ram, will this run similarly to being properly installed on an m.2 drive?
- Is there anything I should look out for when doing this?
Any tips, suggestions, or links would be appreciated. I am not at my pc but should be able to answer most questions.
Asking here as this IS gaming related, but if another place would be better I will move the post there.
Running from a Live image is not going to be performant for a number of reasons I won’t get into, but mainly that you’ll have a loop with some crucial systems back through that USB still. Not absolutely everything is always loaded directly into memory unless you ensure that it is.
The USB medium you’re using is probably slow, so any I/O access to that drive is going to cause performance hits briefly.
That being said: there isn’t going to be any appreciable difference between your two distros in a way that will blow your mind. The “gaming distro” is kind of a farce/myth, with package selection and user interaction being the biggest differences between them.
If the distros are on the same general kernel line, you’ll get very similar performance between them (check Phoronix benchmarks). CachyOS on certain benchmarks may see something like 5-10% in VERY specific areas that probably don’t even impact gaming that much, and you’d never register that difference as a user.
Just switch if you like it. It sounds like you have your other data separated already, so just install along side what you have, boot that, and try it out.
Just don’t be let down in when there isn’t a big performance difference. Also keep in mind that whatever tweaks any other distro has implemented for gaming, you can simply apply to whatever you’re running as well. There are no hidden tweaks, fixes, or proprietary knowledge in any of them that you can’t also apply to your running install.
If the distros on the same general kernel line
my kubuntu (24.04.3) is using 6.8 I believe
Just don’t be let down
I won’t be, I am simply exploring some of other options and if there is no noticeable improvement I’ll stick to what I am using. Just wanted to avoid the install if possible (I am so tired after work hours reading/setups gets tedious, if I go full install that will be a weekend thing).
Thank you
You could update your Kubuntu to 25.10, and then enable the backports ppa too for even newer updates
- How is your steam library currently installed?
- Is it part of your home directory?
- Is it a seperate partition?
- M.2 SSDs should provide sufficient speeds, it shouldn’t matter in the grand scheme of things whether you run a RAMdisk or from NVMe storage.
- Are you re-using your home directory from Kubuntu or will you be starting ‘fresh’ with the exception of your Steam library?
- currently in /home default directory. Should I copy the apps to somewhere global for this test (1 game will suffice with steamvr? I didn’t bother with any encryption or anything so I figured I could just go straight to that directory
- I have a 2nd m.2 ready to use, it’s just not installed in the machine atm
- I don’t have much in my /home except steam+library, obs, and lutris with sims3 installed
In general I was thinking; If you keep your steam library to a seperate partition you can easily mount that in the same matter as you would now, making the Steam migration very easy, while making your root and home partition(s) fresh otherwise
I’m not sure about migrating a single game, Steam is keeping a database (VDF-something if I recall correctly) of what you have installed, so it might get a bit confused if it suddenly only finds a single game.
If you have sufficient space on your drive(s) you could:
- Create a new partition
- Copy over all of Steam related files
- Move your home/.steam folder to a backup folder
- Mount your new partition on your Kubuntu install
- If that works, you can keep that partition on your CachyOS install
I think this blog covers the topic
EDIT: ArchWiki on sharing drive with Windows
I’m not sure about migrating
I didn’t think of launching the kubuntu installed steam but to install fresh in the ram, I have a second m.2 2tb that just needs to be installed in my pc if I am going to install Cachy, but since I took 0 security precautions on my install I didn’t think there would be an issue seeing the .steam folder.
I’ll check that link
I didn’t bother with windows on this machine, my last was dual boot
Thank you
The mounting the partition with the current Kubuntu install was just to ensure that the data migration was working as-is, i.e. a sanity check.
And the ArchWiki link was more for the general concept of sharing drive between OSes, you can ignore the Windows specifics
Good luck with the setup, it should be doable :)
Thank you
- How is your steam library currently installed?
