[Information] Experimental CachyOS Handheld Edition

FAQ and Tutorials
41

Just a sudo pacman -Syu / Octopi is enough

42

Can’t install on ROG ALLY with encrypted storage (error on “pacman pre post” after a lot of umount, i didn’t have time to pastebin it sorry).

And install of the normal isos is broken since yesterday it seems, on all my devices (calamares online is in a dependencies hell).

43
  • one really cool option could be to add tpm - luks2 decryption option on install (bazziteos propose it after install in a just script and it works perfectly).

On cachyos normal edition i have to mod the mkinitcpio Hooks to make it works : HOOKS=(base systemd autodetect microcode modconf kms keyboard plymouth sd-vconsole sd-encrypt block filesystems fsck)

then systemd-cryptenroll etc.

44

Could you share the log?

There was an issue with the handheld package and got fixed around 15 minutes ago.

45

Installation successful on luks2, seems fixed ! Thanks :smiley:

It was previously crashing on “Running pacman -S …(a lot of packages) linux-cachyos-deckify-headers chwd”

1 Like
46

Is it normal that we have no scaling option for steam interface ? (go it on chimera and bazzite)

47

Everything works great but screen color calibration didn’t works and no have scaling option in Steam gaming mode,hope you will fix that,thank you

48

Same here. I tried to adjust grey/black levels, since my ROG Ally Display looks kind of washed out.

Regarding Scaling in Gaming Mode:

Make sure to have Decky Loader installed. To do so follow the instructions here: GitHub - SteamDeckHomebrew/decky-loader: A plugin loader for the Steam Deck.

After that reboot and return to Game Mode:

1.) Enable Decky Developer Mode
Press Quickaccess Menu Button (open the right menu) → Open Decky (icon with the Plug) → Now open Decky Settings (Cog Icon) → Developer → Scroll down and “Enable Valve Internal”

2.) Enable Steams’ Developer Mode
Press Steam button (open left menu) → Settings → System → Scroll down and Enable Developer Mode

3.) Enable Internal scaling
You should be able to access a new Menu called “Valve Internal” now which is under Home, Library and Developer. Open Valve Internal, Scroll down and now you should be able to see “Show display scaling settings for Internal Display” under Display

After enabling that you should be able to Scale your display in your Quickaccess Menu and in the Display Settings.

I hope it helps. I try to provide Screenshots if needed.

3 Likes
49

Installed the distributive on my Rog Ally. For the most part everything worked well, but there are a couple issues you need to adjust:

  1. My SD card wouldn’t mount automatically in game mode until I go to desktop mode even with KDE settings set to auto mount
  2. Framelimiter works weird. Sometimes it works, sometimes does not and when it works it doesn’t keep the frame rate stable. Also no idea if VRR actually works.

Keep up the good work and hope you can make it a stable linux system for the Ally which Ally desperately needs.

50
  1. You need to enable automount in the KDE Settings, see Imgur: The magic of the Internet
  2. Which framelimiter is it using? You can see in the Display Tab if VRR is enabled.
51

Thank you for the feedback. Regarding automount I have yet to add that functionality in so currently that is normal
Regarding the scaling option I will look into making it enabled by default.
For the framerate limiter. Could you be more specific?
Does it allow frame rates to go much higher than the limiter? Or does it only allow a variation of 1-2 fps higher.

52

It’s kinda fluctating when working. I set 60 fps limit and the fps will be staying 59-65 fps often going beyond 60. Something that I never saw when I used LCD Steam Deck before buying the Ally. Tested that in Dying Light.

I hope that you do add auto mount feature for game mode, because I use 500 GB SD card with my Ally and cannot afford a new SSD for the time being, so need that memory for small games and emulator roms. Thanks for your hard work.

53

In my case, also on Rog Ally, frame limiter doesn’t work when V-Sync set to Off in-game.

On the other hand, when V-Sync is set to On, frame limiter does work, but fluctuate between 1-6 frames depending on game, always on positive side. So, if I set it to 60 fps, it can be 61-66 FPS, but feels relatively stable.

So, tbh my only issue is that it doesn’t work when V-Sync set to Off. I do want this combo (V-Sync Off + Frame Limiter) to work because of additional V-Sync input lag.

54

Yes I will be working on adding the auto mount within the next few days most likely

55

For the framerate limiter, this could be due to a number of issues but most likely the gamescope fork being used (gamescope-plus) which is maintained mainly by Chimera. One thing you can try is to install regular gamescope (gamescope) instead of gamescope-plus. However keep in mind regular gamescope doesn’t have things like scaling without a decky plugin

56

Hi, been using cahcy on ally and so far it works better than other linux os I’ve tried, just a couple of problem. First I can’t change steam beta option, I join steam family beta so I can share games but every time I try to change my steam app to family beta it doesn’t work. Is there anyway so I can use family beta? And second is the sleep feature draining my battery pretty bad, but at least sleep and awake is working without my game crashing like in windows. Also sometimes my back button doesn’t work. But afterall its really good experience so far, thanks.

57

since last update theres been a bug with controller support in the steam deck lcd. had no controller problems until recent and its driving me crazy. please help with this as i dont want to have to go back to nobara or bazzite…

58

We did not rolled out any update. This is likely due a recent update from Steam.
@nekoh Could you PTAL?

59

Apologies if this isn’t in the correct area. I’m new to Linux, and CachyOS but I have to say - I’m quite enjoying it :slight_smile: Breaking away from Windows is a great feeling.

My question is this, will this version (handheld) work on a desktop computer? I like the idea of being able to switch between game mode, like SteamOS does, and back to the desktop for everything else.

Alternatively, is there a way to implement the Steam OS-style game mode into an already existing CachyOS install?

Thanks

60

We will provide a wiki entry for this in the future, but right now we want to focus on handheld devices.

You can also just install the normal cachyos version and then install the cachyos-handheld package. But this is not tested or equal.

1 Like