Short comparison of CachyOS and Bazzite

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Hey there!

I am running CachyOS for some weeks now on my gaming PC and it runs fine, so I no longer use the windows on the machine.

Now I wanted to have a look at bazzite as it could be an alternative for this scenario. I don’t want to tinker on my gaming pc, just run games, so having an immutable system could have advantages over a rolling release. But let’s not discuss about this. It was just a test out of curiosity.

It is just a short test running TombRaider and TombRaider2 (most settings at maximum) benchmarks and having a short gaming experience.

What I found is that those two distributions bring comparable average fps (well it’s the same hardware), but bazzite has some stuttering that bring the fps down for half a second. In the benchmark you see the minimum fps is a bit lower than it is in cachy but the worst is it really hits the gaming experience.

The hardware is:

  • CPU: Intel(R) Core™ i5-8600K (6) @ 4.40 GHz
  • GPU: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 Ti Lite Hash Rate
  • Memory: 16 GiB
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I tried Bazzite before switching to CachyOS.

Bazzite was often not able to shutdown my PC and I had to long-press the power button to make to turn off…

I then switched to CachyOS and it has been a lot better, though a recent update broke suspend and the PC cannot resume. As a workaround I have changed the power settings to never suspend, which is not ideal.

I prefer the way programs are installed on CachyOS via pacman and the AUR and how they are included in arch-update. Installing software was much slower on Bazzite.

Games run well enough compared to Windows but there is a noticeable frame drop in some games, though not more than I can live with.

At one point it was not possible to invite friends to a convoy in Forza Horizon 5 which is probably a Steam / Proton issue (using Proton Experimental). That kind of issue could force me back on Windows, tbh.