Nobara and CachyOS is my current dual boot. Right now I’m favouring Cachy but I hold both as equal in all things. At best I’d say they each have battling quirks at the desktop level. I’ve noticed no difference at all in terms of game performance, they both share the top slot for the Linux general use desktop with gaming focus distro IMO.
I liked Nobara but it uses rpm packages and I always ended up in RPM hell, that’s a circular dependency loop…most time forcing an rpm would fix it but after 6-8 months I would have to reinstall…I switched to Cachyos and it has just updated…until KDE 6.60…lol… I fixed that without reloading. Cachyos has been better for updating.
What? I have never ran into an issue with RPMs provided by the default repositories. If you have ever had an issue, it was with 3rd party RPMs that did not list the full dependencies. But if you know what you are doing, you can install those before the RPM in question and it should work. For example, I had a Brother scanner RPM that did not list its dependencies and would install, but not work. But after installing a few extra packages, that it required, I fixed that.
You can’t blame Fedora or any RPM distro for 3rd parties doing shit packaging. Even Arch runs into this time-to-time.
One thing you need to understand about Fedora, and by extension, Nobara, is that they are point-releases. That is, any package made for that version should work for it, but an RPM targeting another version may not work. This is because core dependencies change with each point release. That said, I have used ancient RPMs for printers and scanners (over 10+ years old) on the latest versions of Fedora and they just worked.
I only run from official packages, the problem would be with the point release nature, one or two packages left behind…I would do the system point upgrade at the right time, but a fresh install would be needed in a short while. I ran KDE and of course Nobara/Fedora is more gnome/gtk based.
Fair enough, any upgrade of a point-release distro can be dangrous, especially if big enough changes happen where a package or group of packages are depreciated and dropped from the official repositories. And this, unfortunately, is a QA issue that the distro didn’t address before release.
Well, DEs aren’t set in stone for any distro. It’s just that KDE or GNOME will usually be installed by default depending on which ISO you chose to download. Workstation defaults to GNOME, but Fedora offers a default KDE ISO too. I always installed Niri with my GNOME setup, since I like both. Its not straight forward to switch DEs (but package groups help with this), and you should always do a test run in VM before committing to doing it on a working setup. At least that’s how I roll. VMs are a great tool to figure out if you are going to be making a huge mistake when messing around with your setup.
I can’t comment on performance or technical aspects, but I’ll say that from a normie perspective Cachy has been much less of a hassle. Once you get the hang of the package manager, everything is so much simpler. Also the community is more welcoming.
For someone who is completely new to Linux, I would recommend Mint or something like that anyway. I used to recommend Bazzite but, given the bizarre drama that has unfolded recently, it’s probably no longer a good idea to put your eggs in that basket.
The whole “rolling distro can explode and kill your family at any moment” meme’ is overblown
I’ll second @Vikk 's comments above as they are spot on
Who’s the Nobora team? It’s GE doing everything basically, they now use the cachy kernel (without even asking or getting the cachy teams blessing) and then Lion does the grunt work without getting any credit for it.
I do agree their discord channel is a cesspool though.
Bazzite is and always was a bloatware with ingame FPS much lower compared to every other handheld distro. It’s like Windows in Linux world being user-friendlier with more features included in exchange to higher CPU/RAM usage.
this is an outrageous take, do you have any benchmarks to back this up?
Having switched my daily OS from Bazzite (1 month of use) to CachyOS (2 months now) I can say that Bazzite shined for stability, but for latency and fps performance CachyOS has outperformed Bazzite by large amounts… I seem to recall seeing 15-50% fps increases in performance in Megabonk, Fallout4, and other 3d games.
The CachyOS kernel and gpu driver update in early January did make my system soft-brick necessitating that I have to pull the CMOS battery though to get it to boot again.
As mentioned previously, I am not familiar with the whole performance aspect of various Linux distros and no longer recommend Bazzite anyway. What made it shine was that it’s really noob-friendly, has a gaming component to it, and is really hard to break. 10% extra performance is meaningless if you’re trying to help a normie switch away from Windows and they’re already giving up at the first hurdle. With uncertainty around its development, these strengths are now lost.
I’m not talking about specific games or specific devices, it’s just Bazzite always gives less FPS in any game compared to other SteamOS-like arch/fedora forks. I have Win600, SD LCD, SD OLED and Ally X 2024 on hands and tested quite a lot of games to be quite sure it’s not me doing something wrong.
I really liked Bazzite until I needed two apps to interact with each other, like by dragging a file from the file manager to a messaging client. 
Not what I want to be dealing with on my work desktop, but for a media center or purely gaming system (or even web browsing system) used or shared with non-technical people, I will definitely consider Bazzite to just be able to set it and forget it at the cost of some performance.
Is Bazzite using Flatpak for their apps? System installed apps should drag-and-drop just fine, but Flatpak uses sandboxing and requires adding permissions through Flatseal to fix things like this.
In general, I don’t like Flatpak as it adds bloat but, ironically, it is a useful and stable environment for certain apps when using a rolling distro like Arch / CachyOS. But anything remotely technical becomes quite annoying to deal with when working with Flapak.
yes,
yes, using the Bazaar app, users are steered to use Flatpak apps in the official guides and getting started info
I love the security granularity and may put it on my laptop, but not for my primary dev workstation. Also there are all kinds of tweaks and modifications (flatseal, permissions, command line arguments amended to the app launching icons) that need to be done to get system tray icons to appear for apps (because the flatpak apps don’t integrate with the wm)
FWIW: I wiped Windows and installed CachyOS two weeks ago. I did that after a lot of research. I spent many hours reading reviews, watching vids, checking benchmarks, and looking at the total ecosystem (forum, wiki, etc.) of each distro. I quickly rejected Nobara - just not ticking all the boxes. Same for Bazzite.
I ended up with a shortlist of Fedora KDE vs CachyOS. I decided to ‘risk’ the rolling updates and go for CachyOS. Could not be happier. Coming from Windows, this OS / Linux ecosystem is incredible.
The only thing I got wrong: I hugely underestimated how long it would take to get my head around the ‘Linux way of doing things’. Yeah, that takes a minute. 
What I find cool about Cachy as a Linux semi-noob is that it’s Arch without the hassle + a community that’s not psychologically rigid, and what’s cool about Arch is that you can just do anything, which is distinct from the it just works that characterized Windows before the recent Microslop decline. Anything you can imagine[1] already has an official package, a well-documented wiki to help you, a wide range of skilled people committed to maintaining things, and a shockingly abundant AUR[2].
So it can take some work, and as you’ve mentioned it takes a while to come to grips with the Linux method, but with LLMs it has never been as accessible as it is now as long as you understand how to use them effectively.
hes gonna be a future maintainer of an OS i bet
I use CachyOs on my internal Nvme and Nobara on an external USB- SSD, with a discrete Nvidia 5070 (laptop Lenovo LOQ).
On boths runs Steam on an external WD Elements 5 TB.
From my point of view, after a few months with boths, the update fron CachyOS runs quicker, no problems until now. This is really my personal opinion, but I don‘t like at all the update procedure of Nobara.
For Backups I use only Timeshift: in CachyOS I disabled the snapshots at all (I think this is going back to my long time with Ubuntu / Debian). I always back-up the hole system: Root and Home, so I newer had isues in case of boot problems or incompatibilities.
During gaming, I don‘t see any differnces between the two systems.
I know it falls slightly off-topic, but in my case, I came to Cachy from Mint. I tested it on a free drive before realizing it was so fast that it was definitely worth the hop. Ubuntu for me felt like it lacked in areas. The nvidia graphics drivers were very screen tear prone, and games had a very noticeable performance gain post hop. As far as the contrast of the two you have in mind, I think just go with what your taste in preference is. The gains are probably less drastic. I have no further hopping plans unless I’m too dumb to salvage my PC from a bad update.