Why?
The performance.
Garuda was good, excellent in fact, but Cachy just feels snappier, quicker and more responsive. I like feeling like I’m using high-performance software on my rig, tuned like a supercar.
tl;dr: Windows 11 and Microsoft sucks. Stumbled upon CachyOS while learning about gaming on Linux and never looked back.
The long story:
I had been considering to stop using Windows for quite some time since my 2017-gaming-laptop started having hiccups while starting up late last year. That, along with Microsoft’s participation in the current genocide in Gaza made me realize that I must make the jump soon.
I had a short experiment with Ubuntu back in 2009. What I remember from that was Linux sucked for gaming. I looked up about gaming on Linux to see how’s the condition now and I found that Proton exists. This sparked my curiosity and I spent about a month reading and watching reviews on YouTube.
I found about CachyOS early in my learning phase and as I learned more about Linux, I also dug deeper into the distro. Maybe because I was tunnel-visioned, or perhaps because I was too lazy to distrohop, I finalized my decision by installing CachyOS.
5 months (and 1 failed boot) later, I’m still here lol.
I had been on Arch for a couple of years before Cachy. I have done vanilla Arch a couple of times, I have used the Archinstall script. It used to be fun, tinkering and fixing, learning e.t.c.
I used to put a lot of time in configuring and optimizing for performance and gaming regardless of distro. Now, CachyOS does almost exactly what I have done before, and then some. Coming from the “competitive overclocking scene” it’s kind of become a part of me to constantly optimizing and pushing for more performance.
But I simply can’t be bothered with the manual config anymore. I want ease of use while still having some optimization done for me.
So for me, it’s about:
- Great base distro.
- Rolling release.
- Easy installation.
- Ease of you use.
- Packages and kernel comes precompiled with the right optimization for me.
- Prepackaged, it looks almost exactly the way it is when I’m done with a manual setup.
- Great community.
Before going Arch I have almost exclusively been on Xubuntu since 2005 on my main rigs, except a couple of short sidesteps. In the last couple of years using Xubuntu, my installs were almost completely manual, almost the way it’s done with Arch. I installed the absolute base server distro with no gui, without anything other than what’s needed to boot and have something to build on. And on top of that, I installed what I need, while trying to stay away from meta-packages. Compiling new kernel and applications I use often.
On my htpc I have mainly been using Debian, and fileservers mostly Fedora or back in the day Red Hat Linux.
So yeah, CachyOS feels like a great fit for me, it feels like I’m home.
I tried Bazzite, it was good but ‘Immutable. CachyOS was an easy install with Rolling updates and the Forum has helped with the Majority of my questions.
Most of all, it Works.
I like cachyOS a lot because its easy, very responsive and performant and can still be just as powerful as regular arch.
I also like the name and logo :>
Can’t promise undying loyalty, but Cachy offers a lot of measurable benefits to performance and usability. As well as that, it feels malleable and designed for people who don’t want to babysit their OS while still providing a very flexible and powerful Arch base.
- i distro-hopped since 2009-2010 (mostly
.deb), than 2018 come new hardware & have to switch to rolling-release & also distro-hopped the whole time. The longer time an OS remain healthy with/under me was 6 months. - 2024 find COS with ZFS o.o.t.b., very fast installation, start, operation & responds at my questions also on discord.
- The origin of weakness on all OS, even under Windoof are trying to solve problems by the user instead by coder & COS-coder-s make an excellent job.
- i have no open topics, wishes or blame to COS, i’m wish-less happy with it.
- The installed OS is more than 1 year old & still running perfect on all 6 PCs, also on SFFs works perfectly @ 24/7. Also Win-Users find everything they need without any question.
For us/me is COS the best OS in the world❗️Considering the small team taking care (code) about this OS… this’s a very impressive performance & excellent results❗️No other support team is faster to provide reliable solutions & satisfy wishes.
COS, the only distro that deserves a donation.
Fast benchmarks and update to date drivers and packages
If you know how to help yourself with bugs, you’ve made it.
I use CachyOS for a few main reasons: It’s easy to use and install, especially comparing it to Alpine Linux which was my latest OS, it has great up-to-date packages, and it is super customizable. Thank you for this great operating system!
I’d say a very strong and yet quite complex distribution (Arch) made as easy as possible to handle including very nice features included on top of it in regards to hardware handling, multimedia and gaming (CachyOS). It’s what I like about it.
CachyOS ended my distro hopping
Best HDR support. 
Hardly. But I say, because I can
I used Arch over a decade. Nowadays I want a good default desktop in less than an hour to a new machine, but I still like pacman and the Arch way of doing things.
The defaults are pretty good in CachyOS.
I’m reading it and getting a feeling that the vast majority of users are in IT in one way or another. For me it is different. I’m just another average casual button-pusher who’s playing games when he can. I was so tired of windows consuming ridiculous amount of resources for the thing I don’t need that I decided to give it a go with a linux. Back then all I knew was that there are Gentoo and Ubuntu, and Lime, and yes, we’re talking about my knowledge in June 2025. So here comes days of reading forums, watching YouTube videos that would be describing why author believes one or another distro is best. The main thing for me were tests in games that were showing that it is very often that PC with CachyOS may perform better in games than windows. Every website or video were saying that Arch is not recommended for the beginners but I got reinforcement aka ChatGPT and this community who helped me to conquer my day to day issues. A few weeks ago I’ve bought another SSD to install windows there for Battlefield 6, and it felt so weird. Windows doesn’t understand that I have a wifi, can’t automatically find my printer, every piece of a program I have to be downloading manually, and looking for it. I really appreciate the team that is working on this OS. There’s a long way to make it user friendly for people who are technophobes and/or not ready to google or use AI to be looking for answers for their question, but I do have a high hope it will happen.
I know next to nothing about Linux (for now). I’m just sick of windows being so bloated, so slow, adding more and more clicks to get things done, and shoving popups everywhere.
As for why I chose CachyOS specifically ? It sounded like a good starting point to Arch Linux, and I heard Arch Linux gives you incredible control over your system.
I’ve been enjoying CachyOS so far, looks like I made a good choice.
Arch to CachyOS conversion here. I said this in the forum intro thread but if I’m ever in the situation where I need to reinstall Linux, I’ll probably do CachyOS proper.
I’ve found Arch is my type of distro, it doesn’t get in my way if I need to do something a little weird. I’ve distro-hopped but I always keep crawling back to Arch so it’s also probably just what I’m used to. For CachyOS specifically, I wanna make the most out of my hardware with the optimisations. (CPU is a Ryzen 7950X FWIW)
I’d gotten used to using a Linux OS on my laptop with mint, so after also getting the steam os version of the Lenovo legion go s, I’d convinced myself I was happy to put my PC onto a Linux OS too. I’m definitely more of a computer user rather than a tinkerer though, so I didn’t really the fuss of sorting GPU issues, and didn’t want to have to do loads of tweaking to get decent performance.
I saw quite a few people talking about Cachy and it sounded like the simple life I wanted, so gave it a go. Got it installed, and within a short time had steam and cyberpunk downloaded, and set off for a quick play. I’d gone into it with low expectations from loads of comments about performance issues gaming on Linux Vs windows and how it was always going to be slower, but I was blown away by the quality and performance. I literally cannot tell the difference.
performance numbers seemed promising, I bought a new pc and decided to try it instead of going with endeavour which i have on my old pc. It was a good choice i think.