Opinion on CachyOS (Linux)?

Its speed is overhyped. People just love to brag. Especially Arch users. It's an OK distro otherwise, usable as long you're willing to risk a cutting edge rolling distro; they added a lot of QoL stuff, like easy NVIDIA drivers installation during setup and a bunch of user friendly GUI tools and utilities. The benefits over other distros are in single digits at best, if even.

Phoronix did a comparison of various benchmarks and Debian 13 came up on top as the fastest distro in 60% of the benchmarks while CachyOS was fastest in only 20%. Debian 13 is the king now. Debian team really nailed it with Trixie. If I ever switch, it'll be Debian. The only real difference Cachy made was in PHP performance where CachyOS was like 50% faster. So, if you run a large and busy Nextcloud instance, CachyOS may actually benefit you, but as a desktop not so much.

Software availability is an issue as Cachy devs encourage only the use of software they recompiled for Cachy. Flatpaks are discouraged. I could not get some of my apps to work on Cachy at all. And Cachy shares the common problem with all Arch distros: AUR (Arch User Repository) that gets increasingly often infected with malware since it's all user maintained.

For gaming, it doesn't matter as games are GPU bound, even considering that games on Linux run in a translation layer, that somewhat depends on the CPU, but the GPU will be a bottleneck in the end. There are people though who will switch just to get 5 more frames in a game that already runs at 100 fps. Makes little sense to me.

I have not found any reliable and unbiased tests between Cachy and Windows 11, but Cachy is likely to be a bit faster but again, not in games. It's a very low bar anyway, even vanilla Fedora or Debian feel a lot snappier than Windows 11 on the same hardware.

If I really wanted something Arch based, I'd rather get Manjaro or Garuda. But I think Debian or Fedora are better choices for people who just want to do stuff and not tinker with their OS all the time.

If it wasn't for lack of quality desktop apps and hardware compatibility issues (general Linux problems regardless of which distro), I'd have been on Debian by now. Fedora would be my second choice, it's quite solid, (Nobara is based on Fedora) but I dislike their ties to RedHat.
 
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Debian 13 works fine for games too, by the way, those Steam games that tun under Linux anyway. I saw no difference between Debian 13 and Fedora 42/43 and other distros. The same games ran fine under Debian: Cyberpunk 2077, Satisfactory, No Man's Sky, The Outer Worlds, few more. Installing NVIDIA drivers is a little complicated, but doable, though serious game modding is a problem still. But if I ever switch I'll get an AMD GPU. Linux life is much easier without NVIDIA :)

Sure, you get to wait two years for newer KDE Plasma and few other things, but Debian's stability is legendary and the kernel can be upgraded, if needed for newer hardware, and there are even high-performance kernels available but, other than better hardware compatibility, they don't really improve anything else.

It's pretty much a myth that you need a rolling distro like Fedora or Arch for games. People game fine even on Mint.
 
CodeBro said:
Pretty much title.

What are you guys thinking over https://cachyos.org/ and do you maybe even have experience on that new and shiny linux distro and if its useable?

Cheers
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I still enjoy windows cleaned out more so then Linux. It just works better honestly then jumping hoops on Linux. Also Linus doesn't have Atmos which is a important option for my movie watching.

There alternate ways are not nearly as good.

If I was a Linus developer I would try for unity then all these another distros
 
Necrosaro said:
I still enjoy windows cleaned out more so then Linux. It just works better honestly then jumping hoops on Linux. Also Linus doesn't have Atmos which is a important option for my movie watching.

There alternate ways are not nearly as good.

If I was a Linus developer I would try for unity then all these another distros
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Agreed. I can use Linux as my desktop if I have to, but I prefer to stick to Windows 11 for as long as possible. Thanks to NTLite I can enjoy clean, slim, fast, stable and calm Windows 11 and all my favorite apps and games that just work. I ran Linux servers for decades, I self-host a webserver, DIY NAS and my own Nextcloud but Linux as a desktop does not appeal to me beyond some occasional tinkering for curiosity sake.

There are lots of people out there who can't mod Windows the way we can though, they just don't know, and they're often have no choice but to leave Windows behind. Mint works fine for many if they have basic needs but I see many struggle with Linux and eventually go back to Windows.
 
Anonymous Internet User said:
Agreed. I can use Linux as my desktop if I have to, but I prefer to stick to Windows 11 for as long as possible. Thanks to NTLite I can enjoy clean, slim, fast, stable and calm Windows 11 and all my favorite apps and games that just work. I ran Linux servers for decades, I self-host a webserver, DIY NAS and my own Nextcloud but Linux as a desktop does not appeal to me beyond some occasional tinkering for curiosity sake.

There are lots of people out there who can't mod Windows the way we can though, they just don't know, and they're often have no choice but to leave Windows behind. Mint works fine for many if they have basic needs but I see many struggle with Linux and eventually go back to Windows.
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A cleaned out windows can work just as good as Linux can but with a lot more compatibility and less worry. Just don't go too far with the cleaning and you would be fine.
 
It looks nice, but I would prefer a distro with a little bigger team for a better overall support.
Till SteamOS will be available, I am considering Manjaro or pure ArchLinux, maybe Fedora.
A rolling distro is the only one that makes sense, no resources wasted on an old OS.
 
I would also prefer a larger, established distro. My #1 choice would be Debian with KDE, it is not a rolling distro but all my software and games worked on it. The only negative is that Plasma is very old and it's the version that had some annoying bugs that were fixed in later versions and I'd have to wait for Debian 14 to get that. But Debian support and stability are legendary. I run Debian on my servers.

So yeah, a rolling or semi-rolling distro may make more sense, maybe... so my second choice would be (semi-rolling) Fedora. It's noticeably not as stable as Debian, but it can be dealt with. The support is very good and they collaborate with KDE, even same devs work on both teams so it is the best distro for KDE. Though their ties to RedHat are both good and bad. Good, because they have access to RedHat's resources and engineers, bad because of the RedHat corporate influence. But if Debian gives me any trouble, I'll go with Fedora most likely.

I am not a big fan of anything Arch. Manjaro is probably the best derivative. Arch also has a growing problem with malware in AUR they can't seem to be able to curb; and it requires too much tinkering in general and I'm tired of tinkering with my OS, I just want to run apps and play games. I also dislike the snotty and elitist "I use Arch btw" Arch community. I would not want to be a part of that.

In my non-scientific testing I saw no speed benefit between any of the above. Debian feels more responsive though, but games ran the same. And all of them felt snappier and smoother than Windows 11 :(

So Debian first, if not, then Fedora.

Oh, and I have NVIDIA and that means pain on any Linux distro, even those with good NVIDIA drivers integrations like Cachy or Nobara. Considering current prices, I'm not buying any computer hardware this year and I would need a decent AMD GPU if I'm gonna do the switch. Or maybe NVIDIA cleans up their Linux act meantime.

PS. From what I see, Cachy's popularity does not really come from its claims of speed alone but to a large extent from the devs attitude and the OS design. Same as Nobara, they aim to make the OS friendly and easy for newcomers. They depart from the typical Linux "neckbeard attitude" that Linux must be hard and have a high barrier of entry. This is what Linux needs to become a viable desktop alternative to Windows and macOS. Along Valve, it's Nobara, Cachy and few other distros (Manjaro, Garuda, Zorin) that probably contributed to the noticeable uptick in Linux desktop adoption. Linux needs open minded devs like this. Sure, Microsoft's bullshit is probably the main reason, but these devs opened the doors to Linux for people who don't want to "have fun with their OS" and just want to do stuff and play games.

PS2. I finally found some Cachy OS vs. Windows 11 benchmarks. I don't know how reliable they are, I don't know any of these sites, so I'm not posting links. The general feel though is that if you have an AMD GPU then Cachy OS runs games at nearly Windows 11 speeds, but if you have NVIDIA GPU then Cachy OS performance is 20-30% worse than Windows 11. However, I saw someone run Nobara 42 (Fedora 42 derivative) against Windows 11 using NVIDIA GPU and they got similar 20-30% results. So not sure how much Cachy OS actually improves gaming.
 
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