I’m very curious in trying CachyOS as my main OS, but there are a couple of things that are bothering me:
continuous support: cachy team seems rather on a small side and I wonder if I could end with the distro that is abandoned (apologies if that’s not true, just my speculations)
bleeding edge and custom kernels / patches: I used to have only one OS that I’m using daily for games and productivity (currently on bazzite) and it’s important that it would be relatively stable - what’s the stand on that
performance gains vs others: sorry if that was stated somewhere else, but are the performance gains very visible comparing to other gaming distros?
Partially answered here: What ensures that Cachyos will continue as a project, and what is the roadmap? - #2 by ptr1337
the CachyOS Team is bigger then most other gaming distros like “Nobara” and “Garuda”, also. Be aware, that CachyOS is not a “Gaming” Distro. We care a bit about it, and also offer customized protons, easy installation of all packages, but its not our focus.
I do not want to blame users - but often if anything “heavy” breaks this was and is user introduced. Of course you are contributing at testing newer releases then others, but with that you are also helping the Open Source Community. There can regressions come in upstream packages, but these commonly get quite fast fixed.
Actually, the Graphics Translation layer at Proton/wine is the most bottleneck in terms of optimizing. Native Games, like CS2 paired with Steam Native you see bigger uplifts, windows games it is lower.
I’m very new but based on what I’ve seen of the CachyOS devs, the way they reply etc, it gives me confidence.
btw the apparent size of different Linux teams is very misleading. e.g. I was surprised to find out EndeavourOS team is very tiny, and based on how much its mentioned I’d have thought they were a huge group. e.g. Void Linux is far bigger.
Just goes to show how much work these dedicated people put in, for free, for us users. And the value of a good community.
I have been testing gaming distros like Nobara and Garuda. Still have it on my system, to monitor em. Garuda is pretty much the closest you can come, that can compete with Cachy. But Garuda cant offer what CachyOs has, the optimization that is on a different level. You can experience somewhat same experience the same performance, due its arch linux. But it does not have any advantage over Cachy, other then you have a GUI for more game related stuff to download. But what I saw as a heavy gamer. I did not need any of it, and for me it was just bloat in a way. I want my system clean. Nobara is a fork from Fedora. Then maintained by GE. But what you get there is what you get on cachy. I had major problems from october to december with Nobara. It broke constant on updates by it self. 3 updates, whent from stable, unstable, not bootable. That was fixed after a while. But to be fair here. Arch linux distros are the way to go, when it comes to gaming. You want the latest releadet to game and hardware optimization. I know, most other distros with experienced linux users are still struggling with performance and games working. So pretty safe here, by this distro, devs and community.
We have gamers that has played for world titles, streamers, benchmark nerds on a high level. Then people that test and compare at all times when it comes to games.
If we are not satisfied, why cry to Peter and Vlad, and its pretty much fixed the next day
I’d have to agree with you Vexy: in fact, I owe the developers here an apology! I tried to install Cachy on the laptop I’m typing on right now (which is running Cachy). It failed three times, so I left it a terrible review on Distrowatch (1 / 10). In my journey to find the ideal distro for me, I narrowed it down to anything arch-based. I have two games that just don’t run right, even on Nobara! And yet, those games were flawless on Endeavour OS. I’m not a huge fan of the theming on Garuda, so I thought… “why not try installing Cachy one more time?”
I did one thing differently - I did NOT select ZFS during the install. And I wiped both of the SSDs by going into fdisk and just hitting “g” to make a new partition table. That did the trick this time!
So now, I am going to try on the “big beast” in the basement to see what luck I have.
EDIT: You may ask why I didn’t just stay on Endeavour if I know it works well. I like endeavour, but it’s just a touch too minimal for me. That’s what led me to try this one more time.