Hello, current Manjaro user here. I’ve been using Manjaro stable since 2022, and I’m quite happy with it mostly. I mainly use manjaro because it is a rolling release distro like Arch, has access to the AUR, but they hold some essential packages back if there are any problems that were introduced, making it more stable to use (at least in theory). It is also simple and easy to install unlike Arch.
I’ve recently ordered a new laptop and I was thinking of switching of CachyOS. I like the idea of a more “optimized” arch-based distro.. and I do intend to play games on my new laptop (though it’s not a “gaming” laptop)… but I am also wary of losing the “stability” of Manjaro. I’d like to hear from former Manjaro users here.. what’s CachyOS like? In terms of stability and "getting-out-of-the-way"ness, is it a good alternative to Manjaro? Is there anything you’re missing from Manjaro after switching to CachyOS, and anything that you do not miss? Is there something in CachyOS that particularly appeals to you as a former Manjaro user?
Note: I realize Manjaro doesn’t have the best management right now, and has its share of drama and history. I don’t really care about that. I am just trying to compare objectively between the two distros in terms of everyday use, so that I can make an inform decision before deciding to distro hop or not.
I also realize that by asking in this forum, I’m going to get a lot of biased answers. But it’s better than asking in the Manjaro forum, because that forum has manjaro users, not CachyOS users!
I recently switched to CachyOS from Manjaro. I had used Manjaro for a few years. The community support is quite good. Since there are so many active posters, there are often answers, or at least good suggestions, to most questions. I found Manjaro to be stable and reliable. In fact, it is the distro that ensured I am a convert from Windows.
Recently though, and as you eluded to, the management is a bit chaotic. For me though, I find that quite unsettling. There is no distro that cannot collapse under the weight of its own chaos.
That was too unsettling for me to ignore. Manjaro is also too closely attached or aligned with commercial interests for my liking.
The combination of leadership woes (it always starts at the top in any organization) and the increasing focus on the commercial interests of the top leadership became too much for my taste.
I read several reviews and watched many videos about CachyOS. Since I already had learned to appreciate the freedom from Windows, the knowledge that I could benefit from countless contributors who voluntarily provide such outstanding software, I immediately fell in love the rolling release model.
I switched to CachyOS and have not looked back. Purely anecdotal for certain, but I have had zero stability issues with CachyOS. This distro is incredibly smooth, buttery smooth, and its devs and contributors have a remarkable devotion to pure Linux freedom without other interests at play.
I don’t really know how “leadership” is structured, but I do sense that there is no lack of direction from one person at the top, which seems to be the case with Manjaro. I am no Manjaro hater, not be a light year. It’s an amazing and smart choice for those of us who do want stability and being current. But the uncertainty that is fed by the lack of communication from the very top, and the devs and contributors having to take a strong and meaningful stance to preserve what so many value about it, well, it reminds me of why I chose to leave a job that I loved so much. I left because there was uncertainty when a merger was rumored, I didn’t know what that would mean for my job. As it turned out, my position was eliminated, as were hundreds of others, just as soon as those rumors became reality.
CachyOS isn’t an alternative, it is what we all cherish about Arch and freedom. It is fast, smooth, stable, and gives us that freedom that is what drives people to Linux.
It isn’t all sunshine and roses. There are some things that you may be accustomed to that were convenient. So, there is a short learning curve involved adapting to how CachyOS does things. The biggest for me is with updates. You can install pamac, but I think it is best for seeing what is out there, not for installing or updating software. I’m not properly representing how updates are accomplished in CachyOS with that statement. But just be aware there are some differences. If you use pacman to do your updates, then you are golden.
I found fish a little challenging in a few cases, but bash and zsh are right there if you need or prefer.
I’m sure there are a few other things. The bottom line for me is I really like what CachyOS really is. Arch Linux for anyone who wants it, made usable by the masses.
Hi and welcome. I switched after 8 years or so from Manjaro to CachyOS and have zero regrets. It’s faster, at least as stable with no issues to mention in the past 6 months. And way before Manjaro I ran Ubuntu for many years with lots of issues. Linux is much more mature and stable these days, even rolling distro’s and anything you throw against it just works. At least for me. I use it mostly for programming, recording my guitar stuff and the obvious browsing and what not. Enjoy you CachyOS (do it)!
My story is similar to Bow_W’s. I switched from Manjaro to CachyOS after 7 years. Before that, I used Ubuntu/Kubuntu/KDE Neon for 10 years. I liked the stability and freshness of Manjaro — it was a positive journey. But after buying a new PC, I felt like Manjaro couldn’t handle it properly (especially my RX 9060 XT). So I decided to try something new. CachyOS feels much faster and more tuned. I think CachyOS is the best choice for gaming. Manjaro is better for daily work, and I still have it on my PC as a backup.
The only thing I missed was Pamac, but after a few days I got used to yay and cachy-update. Also, I haven’t had a single issue with mirrors on Manjaro, but on CachyOS I have to use sudo cachyos-rate-mirrors to fix them quite often. Apart from that, I haven’t had any crucial issues with CachyOS for 6 months, but the recent updates (KDE 6.7 and Linux 7.1) caused some — like microstutters and broken HDR support. I hope that gets fixed eventually.
I’m ever so technically a former Manjaro user - for my purposes (I don’t use GUI package manager) I guess they were equally out of the way with cachy bringing additional and better “just works” for things like zfs. I think Manjaro defaulted to install a couple of additional optional KDE dependencies.
IMO you can’t just opt out of that - particularly with Manjaro and the hands-on repo management. If cachy were to make a theoretical heel-turn and become dysfunctional overnight I could just comment a couple of config file lines, update, and be on arch. Cachy’s more transparent integration with upstream arch allows for it to “stay out of the way” more than manjaro does. No breaking incompatibility with AUR packages etc.
You can still choose to upgrade on a manjaro-esque frequency and encounter very few chances of breaking issues. And with a snapshot setup as provided by default with btrfs and limine or grub if you do encounter a rare hiccup just roll it back.
TL;DR: They’re same-old-same-old. When I first started trying other Arch-based distros after Manjaro, it was really a disappointment how much the same they all are. Don’t sweat it.
Longer: I came from Ubuntuland a couple of years ago, so I had a start on moving to other distros.
I currently run two computers each on Manjaro (one Unstable, one Testing), CachyOS (one v3, one znver4), and plain vanilla Arch with the Zen kernel (both with Testing and KDE-Unstable repos).
Manjaro and CachyOS both use the Calamares installer. As for Arch, while archinstall may not be THE Arch Way, it’s included on the ISO so it is legitimately AN Arch way. You just have to push keys instead of click a mouse. Big whoop.
Once installed, the differences between all of them are mainly aesthetic, with the exception of CachyOS’s hardware-optimized repos. There are details here and there that, really, only fanbois care about.
I’ve found there to be no “stability” issues in any of the six—even Arch with Testing and KDE-Unstable. Then again, I don’t use Nvidia… I just don’t know what the fuss is all about with all that “instability” stuff. A bunch of woowoo if you ask me.
I don’t game, so I can’t speak to that. The CachyOS optimizations initially seemed faster, but on my laptops (all the same make, model and spec), the Arch Zen kernel actually benchmarks higher, so I’m thinking it might be placebo effect—again, for my usage. Your mileage may vary.
If you use pacman and yay or paru, there are zero differences. If you’re a pamac user, shelly does the same thing, just looks and clicks differently.
I found I like the aesthetic of CachyOS’s alacritty/fish terminal and made that my standard across all three OSs. But that’s just personal preference for the eye-candy.
On your Manjaro machine, I suggest you run pacman -Qnq > pkglist-repos.txt and pacman -Qmq > pkglist-aur.txt to get full listings of what you have installed so you can replicate your software load more quickly and easily here. (You can feed the lists directly to pacman and yay or paru to automate the process.)
Although I’ve not used it, @cscs (also a former Manjaro user) has written a script that backs-up all your KDE settings into a file, that you then restore to another PC to quickly replicate your desktop environment. See https://discuss.cachyos.org/t/transfuse-a-script-to-backup-and-restore-kde-plasma-configs/8029 I also use his maclean script for routine cleaning and sera to update KDE eye candy that pacman, yay, paru, pamac, and shelly don’t handle.
I don’t use any of the new-user stuff from either Manjaro or CachyOS (the stuff on the Hello screens). Just gets in my way.
Most other differences you’ll find speak to edge cases and user preferences.
So, don’t bother sticking-in a toe to test the waters. Dive right in. It’s just a different part of the same pool.
Thank you everyone for your opinions! Sorry for the large reply!
Based on your comments, I think I’ll give CachyOS a dive for sure.
How long have you been using CachyOS for? Stability is very hard to judge from just a few months of usage. Also, smoothness is something I’m really interested in. I always felt that Linux distros can get a little unresponsive in some cases as a desktop user when compared to other OS’s. At the same time, I always felt that the “smoothness” that CachyOS users talk about might just be placebo. Only one way to find out: try it for myself. But since I’m planning to install it on a new laptop, any gains in smoothness might also just be due to better hardware.. so who knows.
I see.. not sure why pamac wouldn’t work on cachyOS. And I’m not sure what you mean by updates being different on CachyOS, isn’t it basically similar to Arch and Manjaro? I personally use both pacman and pamac on Manjaro. Pacman for the repo packages cause it’s faster and less broken, pamac for the flatpak and AUR stuff because it’s convenient. I am not a huge fan of pamac however, it tends to have quirks and can be buggy sometimes. Ideally i’d like to use Discover on KDE, but I don’t think it’s properly supported on arch-based distros yet.
Manjaro used zsh by default, I manually switched back to bash, it was really easy. I would probably do the same on CachyOS. I’m sure zsh and fish are superior shells but old habits die hard.
It really is, I used to use Linux since around 2006, hopping between different distros. It was good but nowhere near as good as it is now. The year of the linux desktop is already here since a couple of years now.
In what sense?
This sort of thing doesn’t happen on Manjaro because they would keep those packages back. It’s the reason I’m hesitant to switch. My computer isn’t just for gaming, it’s also for day-to-day use, work, leisure, etc. My new computer will have a nice HDR OLED screen, so HDR is important for me too. hmmm..
Would you use ZFS over btrfs? To me, what interests me the most about these filesystems is the snapshotting support for timeshift. But ZFS AFAIK is an out-of-tree package. So I’m not sure how well timeshift works with it.
The mismanagement really hasn’t affected me much till now, as a user. A few stable updates took longer than usual, but this isn’t uncommon on Manjaro, and I could tolerate it. Packages were still getting updated. While the AUR isn’t exactly supposed to be compatible with Manjaro, in practice the AUR packages never really broke for me. But I am careful with what I install from the AUR (no system packages, etc.)
You know, I haven’t really considered that… I could just hold back the updates manually! Something to think about I guess.
If you’re running unstable and testing, you might as well just use arch, no?
I think it’s important to distinguish between “responsiveness” and “performance”. My impression is that the CachyOS kernels prioritizes responsiveness, not performance/throughput. This would reduce stutters etc but not necessarily give you better raw performance. Is my understanding correct?
I’d rather just start fresh. My manjaro install has been the same for 4 years and probably accumulated a lot of unnecessary packages. I am also wary of using a script to transfer my KDE settings.. I dunno, I just feel that there will be problems, and would rather do everything from a fresh slate. But thank you for the link, I’ll still check it out.
As much as I find fully customizeable tiling window managers to be interesting, I’m sticking to KDE.
Part of the reason I’m using Manjaro instead of Arch is because I just want a work out of the box experience with sane defaults. KDE is great for that.
cachy integrates Snapper rather than Timeshift and I’d tend to use that - Cachy doesn’t use the subvolume layout timeshift expects for btrfs.
I do personally. That doesn’t mean I recommend it unconditionally or for you.
I’ve trusted my data to zfs for almost 20 years after a bitrot incident in another filesystem. I know it and its tools pretty well and have an infrastructure that works well for me. On some systems I depend on functionality that is not trustworthy in btrfs (parity) and I choose to standardize on one COW filesystem.
I recommend cachy for people who know ZFS and want a distro that supports it well. And I recommend ZFS for all of the things it is great for. For a single disk, stripe, or mirror that you want to use familiar GUI tools with and don’t otherwise care about zfs btrfs is probably a better choice and more peole can answer any questions that arise.
Yes, and cachy builds kernels with it which is super convenient.
AFAIK it doesn’t (and also doesn’t with cachy’s default btrfs layout)
Just don’t do partial ugrades (i.e. pacman -Sy) ti make this happen - simply just don’t chase every upgrade and set a schedule that is comfortable to you.
It works. It just has a tendency to cause keychain breakages because it’s not an actual pacman wrapper, but directly interacts with libalpm. This is fine for Manjaro’s independent package system but works less well for distros that more directly descend from Arch Linux and pacman.
This is what snapshots are for, which are automatically configured upon installation of CachyOS. You get the benefits of up-to-date software while often fully mitigating the risk of using bleeding edge software.
“Stable” means different things to different people, but to me a pacman based setup with snapshots is exceptionally stable for desktop usage. I rarely use them but I recognize how useful it is to have them around.
As @mattsteg noted above, purposely not updating for a week or two when a major update like KDE Plasma 6.7 is released is a viable strategy as well.
Yes, in part. There are two major components to what CachyOS does to optimize “performance”.
Repositories with rebuilt packages built for the features that you processor supports. This would be a throughput optimization. In my experience, the benefit is sometimes high, often minimal, and rarely of no benefit at all. However, the benefit comes at no cost to the user so there’s no reason not to take advantage of the gains that you can find here(as long as you find a distro willing to compile software in this way of course).
Kernel scheduling. This performance benefit, as you noted, benefits task responsiveness and is essentially unbenchmarkable. It is, in my opinion, a much more impactful benefit to user experience. Many people get this part wrong about CachyOS, though many people(like opportunistic YouTubers) are aware of it and make content about it anyway to capitalize on CachyOS’s surging mindshare to drive their engagement. A little part of me dies inside every time I see a video titled something like “CachyOS Benchmarked! Does it live up to the INSANE hYpE?!?!” You can find some good insights in the comment section of this weird article of Phoronix trying to benchmark a scheduler, which doesn’t make any sense at all.
Thanks, i think I got all my questions answered. Looks like CachyOS it is. Meanwhile on my desktop computer, I’ll stick to Manjaro for now, because formatting/reinstalling is a pain.
Guess I’ll stick to btrfs then. I’m not running a NAS or a RAID or anything like that, I mostly just want snapshots
I personally think btrfs is a bit overkill even for snapshots. Ideally, what I really want is basically something like ext4 with snapshots.. I believe that’s how NTFS works. None of the pervasive CoW or subvolume complexity of btrfs. Don’t think that exists for Linux though. Maybe bcachefs? But that’s not ready yet for primetime.
Sounds good to me. I’ve been avoiding partial upgrades on Manjaro anyway.
Well there needs to be an objective way to evaluate a scheduler. “Responsiveness” seems like something that might be hard to measure objectively. I now wonder if there has been any objective test of the responsiveness of CachyOS’s scheduler.
I’ve dabbled in Manjaro, many years ago and i kind of liked the GUI-setup of it. Like a kernel manager and so forth, CachyOS has taken that a much-longer-step further by adding default-gaming-packages and whatnot. Also added their own optimizations, which i very much like.
CachyOS is the set-and-forget Arch distro. You simply set-it-up, then youre ready-to-go. Better defaults than EndeviourOS for example. Getting things actually done, takes way shorter time and youre easier set-and-done.
Welcome You are really lucky, I just finished this Newbie’s Guide to Cachy. You will probably not learn much from it as you seem to be a well-versed Linux person already, I still wanted to mention it.
COW is intrinsic to how performant snapshots work. It’s why zfs and btrfs offer routine snapshot capability. NTFS shadow copies are just CoW sometimes which is kinda complicated and hacky.
subvolumes are very much useful and good - even if btrfs biases more toward flexibility than simplicity in implementation.
it’s easy to measure throughput so everyone does it. As they should - even it it’s not the primary objective you should know where you stand.
Measuring something like “responsiveness” objectively depends on defining what it means - i.e. a worst-case latency under load. Schedulers can have those benchmarks internally and optimize to them, but much of the objective is perceptive and at the “user” end the apps that you want to be responsive would need to be instrumented for that.
Something I just realized.. I haven’t considered using LVM + ext4. LVM supports snapshots. I don’t know if timeshift supports LVM snapshots though. How does that work in comparison?
Subvolumes just feel like a complication in my experience. I’ve had a few cases where my system could not boot because my btrfs volume ran out of space, so figuring out how to mount the volume to clear up some space was really not a fun experience. Snapshots are nice but at the time I really wished I used ext4 instead.
The CoW approach also means that things are slower and heavier in my experience, particularly if you have something that is constantly writing or modifying a file. I think if you look at benchmarks, btrfs clearly gives worse throughput overall when compared to ext4 because of the amount of overhead it introduces.
For a simple desktop user like myself, I don’t need most of the features that btrfs offers. I just want a nice stable fast easy to use simple filesystem with snapshots (and encryption, but that’s a separate topic). So I’m reconsidering ext4 + maybe LVM for my next install.
LVM snapshots are just hacked-on, non-performant CoW.
grafting on a worse COW solution that brings it’s own overhead isn’t necessarily going to change that.
Ultimately either choose a filesystem with real native snapshot capabilities with tooling that uses it or just use rsync mode in timeshift.
The real issue here is running out of space (plus the tools being somewhat different).
In principle you could just choose to use a bunch of btrfs partitions without breaking into subvolumes…but because that gives a worse experience people don’t generally do it.
Manjaro was my first Arch-based distro and an introduction to the rolling release model. Prior to it I used a variety of apt-based distros: Ubuntu, Mint, LMDE etc. I also used Endeavor OS for a bit.
I actually found both Manjaro and Endeavor to be LESS stable than CachyOS. I like to “tinker” with stuff and I routinely had breaking changes with both Manjaro and EndeavourOS that necessitated a rebuild about every 6-9 months. I have not had anything similar to that on Cachy OS over the 3+ years I’ve been on it.
Pamac’s equivalent in CachyOS is shelly which is just as good GUI package manager as pamac. I tend to use pacman and cachy-update in the terminal however, and only use GUI package manager on occasion to search for a specific package because it integrates official repos, AUR, flatpak, and AppImage packages into one GUI.
Like others said here, other than Pamac and leadership drama, you will not miss anything on Manjaro by switching to Cachy. In fact, you may find it faster, more responsive and more stable.
The exact choice of filesystem is not that crucial, right? Except of course for the support of snapshots, but I believe OP will have figured that out by now.
So true! I used Manjaro on and off for nearly 10 years and had to witness all the rumors circulating in the community. When EndeavourOS launched, I switched over—driven more by frustration with the “Green Menace” than anything else. Now I’m here and simply enjoying it. Unfortunately, during my first attempt with CachyOS, I was still running an old Sandy Bridge processor that just wouldn’t play nice with Cachy at all. Now everything is fine … . NEVER ever Manjaro, sorry folks!
You are really lucky, I just 