Hi, Iām Mikael, and Iām a Windows addict.
Just got my new Framework Desktop (128GB Strix Halo) and struggle daily with the temptation of just installing Windows on it.
Iāve been using Windows since 95 and have some professional experience with Linux as a server OS, but also several failed attempts over the years, at adopting Linux as my daily desktop driver.
This time is the one!
Hello all! Long time lurker. Just decided to sign up. Been using Linux in some form for a very long time. Got started on SuSE linux back when it was still a community distro. Then used Slackware as that was the āadvanced distroā back then. Arch and Gentoo werenāt really a thing yet. I distro hopped a bunch. When Ubuntu came out and was ālinux made easy for n00bsā I got into that side of things and bounced between various *buntus. CrunchBang (#!) was my favorite when it was Ubuntu based. When it was Debian based was as youād expect. Old AF packages lol. I like when things are easier but Iām also a tinkerer and always went back to Slackware until I finally gave Arch a go and fell in love with it. I did the Manjaro thing first for a bit and that was OK but it seem to break more often and more catastrophically than vanilla arch (I think they are better now). Anyways when Cachy came out I heard it was āEasy Archā and that didnāt interest me at first cus of my experience with Manjaro, but then I kept seeing a bunch of linux creators that I respect singing itās praises. So I looked into it and discovered the optimized packages and all that and gave it a go. Installed it on my old MacBook Air and it was fantastic! Though I still donāt know why the keyboard backlight doesnāt work with the Cachy Kernelā¦ works with the Arch kernel. I liked it so much that now I have it on my main system and have been using it for like half a year. CachyOS+Hyprland. Had to uninstall cachyos-hyprland-settings cus some of the sway apps are dependencies of it and I wanted to replace them with the hypr-ecosystem ones. Itās OK as I guess they arenāt maintained anymore anyways. And I can build my own skel based on my dotfiles if I want. Been forcing myself to use fish as thatās a first for me. Used zsh on vanilla arch before. Just gotta remember that Iām using it when I try to test lines for bash scripts in a terminal. They donāt always work the same! 
Anywhooā¦ there is my linux life story.
tl;dr: Im old and I love CachyOS now. Cheers!
Hi, Iām currently testing CachyOS on my test laptop to see for myself what all the Linux users are raving about. Iāve been using Linux for a little over 10 years, and before that, about 20 years of Windows. My Linux journey started with Ubuntu / Mint, later followed by SUSE, Fedora, Manjaro, Arch, and EndeavourOS. The latter is currently my main system. Iāll probably never warm to SUSE, and for some reason Iām not entirely sure about, I donāt like Fedora either.
Hey! I am Andre from Berlin (Germany). I spend a lot of time (and money) on computers since late 1980s. Due to gaming I am using Windows most of the time 
. From time to time I tried to switch over to Linux, but it did not work (for me). And so I am still in dual boot because of Lightroom, Photoshop, MediaMonkey, World of Tanks, MS-Flightsim and Videoconferencing (for work/home office).
Hopefully some of those topics can be solved. 
Read U soon Andre
Have you tried darktable? I played with photography for a hot minute and I really liked it as a raw editor. Iām by no means a pro though so Iām not sure what advanced workflows I might have been missing out on. For Photoshop, many people find themselves moving to workflow using multiple tools to replace their workflow. Krita, GIMP, Photopea are a few. I think youāll find the same thing for MediaMonkey. A common Linux philosophy is that itās better to have individual apps that do one thing well rather than one app that does multiple things. I can recommend Strawberry for a good music player if you need a GUI. I personally prefer using mpd with rmpc as a frontend. Video players I donāt have much recommendation as Iām not very precious about them. There are a million ways to convert different types of media too so thatās a whole different rabbit hole. Your games are both rated pretty well on ProtonDB (MSFS a little less so, but looks like others have it running very well) so Iām not too sure what the snag is there for you. Video conferencing for work can be a dealbreaker depending on what your work requires. Thankfully (kindof) mine uses Zoom which works as well as Zoom does on Linux. Does feel gross having to taint my system with it though.
Hopefully you find ways to break your chains! Especially from Adobeā¦ it is very freeing when it happens! Good luck and welcome!
Thanks Moongoat,
Yepp, I knowabout Darktable an will surely go for it. But I manage more than 100K (>400GB) of images in Lightroom, a lot of them are tagged and taggs are saved in a data baseā¦ Darktable tags each image separtly, so I got to transform Lightroom data base / taggs to sperate filesā¦ thatās holding me back.
MediaMonkey works quite fast and I am used to it for years. I got ca. 200 K of mp3-files (1 TB). Strawberry seems an equvalent program.. but I think itās slower. But I will learn to use that
Main problem is in fact to use my Logi C922 camera in conferences via browser (probably Webex bases) . in OBS (as PipeWire) a picture is streamed, but V4L2 does not work (so it should not be USB2-problem as I read in another thread ā¦ at the moment I cant bring the stream into that conference app/web
But thanks a lot for fastyour fast answer and good hints
ātill soon Andre
Hello !
I do play daily with Linux since 1993 ( yes, really ) and I saw too many distros.
CachyOS is the among the few ones which pleased me.
My servers mostly run Debian which is a very good distribution. Ubuntu studio is not as stable but its pipewire integration makes me chose it as my main remote and control distro ( yes, I do maintain a lot of penguins ). But now that I tested CachyOS on two very low power PCs, I must say that you really did a very good job. Sooner or later, youāll have to refine the OS and expurge the old but good Xorg and focus on Wayland + pipewire. CachyOS should also provide something like sunshine/moonlight natively. Maybe Kyber. I wish a bright future to this OS.
Hi, my name is David or Dave, take your pick, from the Wild West Coast of NZ. I have run Linux Mint for safety and a test distro hop through the years. This one Linux Cachy, running KDE on a 16gb Intel NUC is now all I need. A big thank you, to the devs who created a streamlined beast of a distro 
Hi, my name is IvĆ”n from Spain and Iām an archlinux and KDE lover. I spent last 3 years and after using cachyOS repositories I decided to try the full experience. Thanks a lot for your great distro
Currently using win11 because windows jumped over my settings and forced update from 10(surprise, surprise). I have been frustrated with Microsuck since vista. Iām ready to leave windows event horizon for good. Everyone says mint for first time users but i donāt wanna. Iāve been doing some research for the last 1.5 months and Iām leaning heavily towards CachyOS. Although, rolling distro seems a little scary, and I still canāt find anything on if flutter and dart are supported (i donāt see why they wouldnāt be). But Iām extremely excited to switch hopefully today or tomorrow. Any tips for optimal hardening configs?
Mint is great but arch/cachy just has the newest, I couldnāt resist at all 
If I reinstall no biggy, I have backups.
Flutter and Dart are fully supported since CachyOS is Arch-based. The official flutter package is in the AUR (Arch User Repository), and dart is in the main repos. Install with something like yay -S flutter dart
Make sure everything works then work on Hardening.
New user here on a new PC build, just wanted to say Thank You. Cachy is fast and have enjoyed tinkering with the PC more! Going to read up on Cachy here.
Running Bazzite for past several months. Gaming, worked great. But installation of apps could be challenging with the OS being immutable. Great for security and redundancy but as a home gaming OS, little too picky. That is when I found CachyOS and switched. Performance is better and is now my OS of choice.
Hello Everyone,
I am Jukka currently living somewhere not too far from Helsinki. I have been a linux user since late 2011 meaning that i havenāt had a Windows installation at home since.
I went straigt to the deep end and used Manjaro from 2012 onwards when it was still in beta. After some years i went to Antergos, then Arch and the last two years of my old system I was on tumbleweed which gave me a great experience. I bought a new fancy gaming system late summer and I installed Nobara on it. It was not bad, but I felt it is more opinionated on stuff that I dont want my OS to be. If i would not be such a tinkerer, Iād still be happily on Nobara.
So then came christmas season and holidays 2025 and i went for Cachy. I managed to make the system my own without the OS revolting. So far it looks like Iāll be donating for Cachy next christmas 
Hi, Iām Pete, Peter, PJ or occasionally Oy You, (not my preferred option, lol).
Iām a software developer, mostly in the .NET space and at the time of writing this, Iām currently in the process of my 3rd attempt at installing CachyOS with Limine, in a dual boot configuration on my laptop. The first 2 attempts failed due to insufficient efi boot partition space, (first attempt 512MB, then 1024MB and am now attempting 2048MB).
Oooā¦ Well colour me happy, installation has just successfully completed and itās time to reboot. Hang on, Iāll be back in a mo.
Okay, Iām back and am now first time booted into CachyOS.
So, the reason Iām dual booting currently, as I suspect with most who do, is because I REALLY want to kick Windows to the kerb, but there are currently applications that I need on Windows and I want a way to gradually get used to the linux/ cachy environment and hopefully work out how to do without the small amount of Windows application that I need, that currently wonāt run in linux and that there arenāt suitable alternatives to, (Visual Studio and OneNote being the main 2).
My choice of test hardware isnāt ideal, but I figured that if I can get everything running the way I want on my laptop, then my main desktop should be a doddle.
Iāve only had a tiny bit of linux experience before, mostly with Ubuntu and also a bit of Mint, but both of those were many years ago and I ended up back in Windows because at that time, there were just too many Windows applications that I needed and I just couldnāt get Wine to run them properly. Obviously a lot of progress has been made in that regard now and Iām hopeful that at the very least, for any Windows applications I canāt run in CachyOS via Wine/ Proton or Bottles etc, I should be able to use either Winboat or a full VM and run them in there, although that might be rather sluggish on a HDD, but worth a shot.
For reference, my laptop is an Acer Predator Helios 300, with built in intel graphics and a GTX 1050ti. It has 2 drives. An ssd which is the C drive and the D drive, (where CachyOS and the bootloader exist), is unfortunately a HDD. If I can get evertthing working as I want, Iāll just wipe the lot and install CachyOS on the C drive, but weāll see.
If anyone has any experience and helpful pointers in relation to anything regarding running CachyOS on my particular laptop, then Iād definitely appreciate it.
Oh and Iām also into D&D, (mostly as a DM) and Warhammer 40k, (Iāve been playing since the start of 10th edition and am yet to win a game, lol) and a bit of PC and console gaming, when the mood takes me.
Anyway, thatās a bit about me and where Iām at in my linux journey and I hope youāre all having an awesome day.
Hi, Marco from Sweden, There is not enough space(maybe there is, but not enough time to have a bio) in short Iām been working and been a hobbyist in the computer space since 1985. My first real computer was a Compaq with built in 10ā monochrome screen, Intel 8086 with 128k ram.
So guys no complaining about enough space. 
First contact with Linux was in 1993 on floppy disk(lookup if you donāt know what this is) and first contact with SCO Unix was 1986.
Changed from PopOS recently(2024-until yesterday), haventā been running that much on desktop as a daily driver due to work, but a arch server automatic newsfeeds since 2004 or so.
CachyOS was a an easy choice because of the āendlessā windows manager choices to be able to switch and try out if something is not working the way you want.
Have an awesome day. 
Hi there,
Been toying with the idea of dumping Windows 11 for a few months now, but have been reluctant to do it. Was concerned things would go wrong and I would have to switch back to Windows, so held off, until this weekend. I primarily use my laptop for gaming, and dev work. After research, CachyOS seemed like the best option, given I have experience with Arch from my Steam Deck (mostly use ubuntu, and linux mint).
Anyway, Friday, another copilot thing popped up out of nowhere and it was the last straw. I nuked windows 11 (after backing up all my important stuff to NAS,) and jumped in with a fresh CachyOS install. I had to re-install a few times because:
Anyway, just wanted to say hi, and thanks for this gaming-centric very well optimized linux distribution!
Hello and welcome all,
This is somewhat of a common misconception.
Cachy is about optimizations.
While this may be appropriate for gaming and there has been a certain popularity among āgamerā content producers (for better or worse) that is not actually Cachyās central focus.
In fact āgameā, āgamerā, or āgamingā does not even appear anywhere on the official website until you get to the wiki like with sections on how to install gaming oriented packages.
Fair enough! I stand corrected.
How do you do, fellow humans!
My name is Pandu, though on the intertubes I usually use the name pepoluan, as I am using here.
I come from the great land of Indonesia, my timezone is UTC+7. No DST. (And if you ask me, DST is a great big nonsense that needs to stop.)
Had been planning on fully migrating to Linux since 2024 actually, a decision sealed by Microsoftās insistence on ending support for Windows 10. But only took the plunge as the world transitions from 2025 to 2026. I purposefully waited to let Proton ācook some moreā to ensure that as many games as possible can run.
I am not a Linux newbie; Iāve been using Linux since 2001. I even once used KDE Neon as an exclusive daily driver for almost one whole year back in 2022. Regressed to Windows for several years because that laptop got returned to my (former) employer and I had to buy another laptop ā¦ and the new laptop came with Windows 10 Pro pre-installed and I was too lazy.
And in my line of work, I interact with a bunch of RHEL servers. And has become kind of the āgo to guyā for Linux-related difficult problems. Plus I always have a Gentoo system ever since I happened upon that distro. If not in physical form, then in virtual form.
I chose CachyOS because my laptop is ā¦ letās just say, quite far from ātop of the lineā so an optimized Linux ā that doesnāt require compilation all the time ā would be really swell. The cherry on top is the way CachyOS maintainers acknowledg gaming as a totally valid use case, and hence went above and beyond to help CachyOS users to have a good gaming experience.
That said, I am kind of a newbie with Arch and Arch-based systems, though. So Iāll be in your care