It is also first in the Distrowatch rank
https://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=cachyos
I distro hopped to it from Bazzite a couple of months ago, and I could not be happier.
If you try the installer, be careful when selecting multiples DE/WM as the conflicts were not listed anywhere for the installation process.
Picking a single environment and then adding the others later was what worked for me.
Must…resist…distro…hopping
I’ve been comfortable on Bazzite for a couple years now but this is giving me the itch.
Please don’t kill me. How does this fare against a riced out Gentoo?
I recently switched to it because I wanted to finally have a good try at wayland with a distro made for it, and wow was I blown away, cachy is the closest I’ve ever been to a “it just works” OS (including every windows version I’ve used, from 98 up to 10), just a couple hardware specific issues that I have fixed (except for one). I also really like plasma, I’m mot committed to it but it was nice to come back to it after using mint for a while. I still wouldn’t recommend it to a newcomer but damn, it’s good.
What does CachyOS have over Bazzite?
There are supposedly reductions in “cruft” from legacy CPU instructions, but I’ve never seen actual data to prove it helps that much.
JSYK the differences are marginal between a vanilla arch install and cachy. You have you dig really deep to see any difference in performance.
iMO cachy is a good marketing arch distro.
You skipped over the fact that getting vanilla Arch installed is often what trips people up, and also what makes people who run vanilla Arch feel like they accomplished something and truly built something - because they did.
You’re also glossing over the fact that a lot of people run the CachyOS kernel even on vanilla Arch because of the performance gains from having a kernel specifically compiled for instructions your CPU supports.
In other words; I don’t think the convenience of a proper installer, nor even just a 5% gain in performance, is just “marketing”.
Bias disclaimer; I run CachyOS btw
You will not see much difference in performance. This is from 2022 but should still be true?
https://www.phoronix.com/review/cachyos-linux-perf/5
I think it has some improvements in kernel settings but in day to day, you wont notice them.
This performance gains myth sounds like exactly the same wishful thinking as we used to heard back when Gentoo Linux was The Cool Hotness™. Don’t get me wrong, Gentoo was great, but its added value was not in the compiler optimizations, but rather in the modularity, where you could select a feature set you wanted for your system, and not worry about useless dependencies, their associated support libraries and bugs or vulnerabilities in those.
And when it comes to the kernel, can compile your own on any distribution, including using or omitting any kernel patches you want.
You can use Endeavour OS instead just as well.
vanilla arch user here, the installation is a totally different experience but it just gets you into that „go, read / listen and just try to understand what you are doing“ mode… which, in a long run, is quite helpful. Third year now, still mostly no clue what I am doing most of the time, but plenty of fun has been had in the meantime.
with the direction that Wind®ow(n)s took some time ago, I am willing to even write 0s and 1s by hand on a wet toilet paper to just avoid it. Super happy to see CashyOS or SteamOS grow, actually any distro getting popular is a great thing, more users, more knowledge, more problems being pointed out.
I really liked CachyOS when I tried it on my spare Laptop, but when I tried to switch to it on my main Laptop I had a lot of issues with Limine (the default installer made the boot partition 2GB which filled up instantly, so I had to figure out how to manually partition something for the first time) and eventually gave up on it and went back to Bazzite.
Then I finally built a real PC and put Bazzite on it, but Bazzite absolutely shits the bed when I try to run any VR stuff on it. But Cachy handles VR really well, so now I’m dual-booting Bazzite and Cachy on my PC 🥹 I’m actually starting to get more comfortable with Cachy that way, so I might completely switch to it one day, but the prospect of having to keep up with updates and learn how to install and manage stuff the arch way still has me slightly nervous.Funny that Flatpack is one of the most popular distros.
It makes sense. Steam can be kind of a PITA to install natively on some distros with all of the ancient dependencies.
Hopefully, someone does a comparison of SteamOS Desktop vs CachyOS, when the time comes. The latter is what I am considering if SteamOS Desktop isn’t quite flexible enough or has a gotcha of some kind.
Also, the folks behind this are nice…
CachyOS originated in the Polish Arch community IIRC, but all the discussion I’ve seen from them is just… cool.
Nothing weird or dramatic like one tends to see in linux projects, just folks really into building this stuff.
I think they have a bunch of Arch veterans, right? Like the guy who started it is also some big time Arch maintainer. You can go to archlinux.org and search the repo for packages by maintainer and Peter Jung gives you 100+ results.
It’s still an unreal to me, as I remember CachyOS failing to install twice for various reasons. One related to being unable to install the kernel correctly and, the other failing to install the boot loader, leaving me with a dead install. I prefer Bazzite, openSUSE Tumbleweed, Ubuntu for gaming. They seem like nice people, having read the CachyOS forum…But the installer is scuffed AF in my experience.
While I will most likely never switch from pure arch, I’m very happy that we’re getting more and more polished distros for everyday use.
I’m also a user, it’s arch but more
ezintuitive, it also has some popular precomp aur pkg in the repo.What’s the difference between this and a fresh install of Arch with a DE like KDE/Gnome?
I’ve been using Arch for so long now that if I bought a new machine I would find it hard to try anything else.
Arch gives you a bare bones DE, and you have to install/configure everything yourself.
CachyOS gives you a larger volume of default applications in a basic install, and lots of the stuff comes with useful configs out of the box. It also has hardware specific optimisations for multiple generations of CPU in its repos, but how much of a difference that makes in the real world is unclear
I did some Benchmarks and CachyOS claims of around 15% more performance seem to be true. Unigin Heavenbenchmark , Super Tuxkart and Furmark all got improved scores compared to PopOS. Additionally Fallout 4 now runs a lot smoother which is probably due to the BORE scheduler doing something better. My local LLMs also seem to be slightly faster and for some reason now need less V-Ram.
My local LLMs also seem to be slightly faster and for some reason now need less V-Ram.
This is likely due to zram being setup by default
The hell is zram?
You know how you can compress files? It work for ram as well.
Downloaded more ram, got it
Oh god the meme is true
Basically it compresses your data in the RAM. Needs a little more work form the CPU but it is still faster than swap. fyi
Interesting thank you!
I had zram setup on my previous OS as well and on cachy the LLM didn’t need to use it while on my old OS it did. My guess would be that the driver had a little less overhead.
It would still use zram if it’s setup, only way it wouldn’t is if you gone out of your way to disable it. Combine zram and the bore scheduler and it’s going to run better for sure.
But if the LLM stays in the V-RAM or even just stays in normal RAM does it still benefit from zram? I thought that only helped when the ram was not enough.
So I’d say it is more likely the bore scheduler + better drivers.
It’s all three! Cachy OS sets it up where it applies to both regular ram and vram. Even if just using a swap in ram, it will still be much faster than swapping to disk. Plus to the application, it looks like it has more ram/vram than there is physical ram/vram.
To add a tiny bit of technical detail here, vanilla Arch enforces support for x86_64 v1, meaning all software available in the Arch repos is built to not use any cpu feature that didn’t exist in v1. Not a bad thing since it allows for support of older (64 bit) hardware, but it does leave like 20 years of microarchitecture advancement on the table.
According to the CachyOS website, they have repos with software built for v3 and v4 which can apparently juice your rig for an extra 20% performance.
Pretty much everything. Seperate package repo shipping cpu modern optimized binaries, custom kernel, and a ton of gaming and preformance related patches applied ontop of various packages. As well as a gui installer.
Everything.
Mostly, it’s just too convenient, but it’s way more than just a preset. I wouldn’t go back to vanilla Arch if you paid me.
I think it’s aimed more at newbies than seasoned veterans like yourself.
Only different config, since it’s based on arch.
They have their own pacman-mirror, pacman is set up to download a lot more in parallel and they set the scheduler formerly known as “cachy”, which is supposedly really good for a snappy UX.
It’s a lot more than that. It doesn’t fork Arch like Manjaro, but they have tons of custom and extremely convenient and useful packages in their repos. It’s also a living “optimization experiment” in the vein of Intel’s Clear Linux (may it rest in peace).
Theoretically, you could replicate it in vanilla arch, but I can’t imagine how many man-hours it would take.
I am a CachyOS acolyte. It’s my end boss distro.
If you try the installer, be careful when selecting multiples DE/WM as the conflicts were not listed anywhere for the installation process.
Yeah, they do need to clean up the installer a bit. It’s also not quite turnkey for a Windows dual-boot.
Yeah, they do need to clean up the installer a bit. It’s also not quite turnkey for a Windows dual-boot.
Mind letting us know why or how? When I installed it almost a year ago on my desktop, I did install it as a dual boot option with no issues. Of course this doesn’t mean there aren’t issues I just didn’t run into. I’m also not new to Linux and didn’t pick a fully default install, if that makes a difference. So I could’ve probably fixed it if it did break, but it never gave me any issues.
The only thing that I dislike, and that could probably cause issues, is that for my installation the mount point for the efi/boot partition isn’t specified in fstab using a uuid, but using the device name (which isn’t fixed and can change with hardware changes). That is a very weird (and unnecessary) decision IMHO.
Mind letting us know why or how? When I installed it almost a year ago on my desktop, I did install it as a dual boot option with no issues. Of course this doesn’t mean there aren’t issues I just didn’t run into. I’m also not new to Linux and didn’t pick a fully default install, if that makes a difference. So I could’ve probably fixed it if it did break, but it never gave me any issues.
Well in my case, using systemd-boot:
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Window’s default EFI partition was too small to hold the kernel, but CachyOS setup didn’t check for this and just failed to boot linux. You wouldn’t run into this issue on a second disk I suppose, but I did on a single NVMe shared with Windows.
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Sometimes, if you do share an EFI partition between Windows/Linux, Windows Update will randomly nuke it and break your linux install.
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I also had an instance where systemd-boot just stopped detecting Windows after awhile, and it needed some manual fixing.
Basically, trying to install linux on the default EFI partition next to Windows is a risky default, and Windows users new to linux aren’t going to know anything about how to fix it.
The fix is to just make a second EFI partition on the drive, but the installer doesn’t do this by default. And I encountered this a long time ago, but noticed the issue was still present when testing Cachy on another PC, by chance.
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I’m pretty happy with Nobara at the moment, but if I hopped at this point it’d probably be to CachyOS
Nobara user here too. Glorious Eggroll was defending Lutris dev for using AI & the Nobara exclusive wallpapers right now are AI generated by GE.
I personally plan to distro hop after reading GE’s post. AI bubble can’t pop if these people are actively supporting and using them.
I mean I don’t think he is wrong entirely, but wasn’t he Lutris guy also VERY hostile to criticism? And just AI generated wallpapers is where I absolutely will draw the line. Just don’t have any then, use the Fedora stock ones. Use a black screen. Everything is better than slop.
I get that AI could be a useful tool, but the never ending list of issues surrounding said tool is tough for me to ignore especially when these tech companies are paying off the government to relax on AI & data center regulation. Surely it isn’t that good of a tool to be shoving down our throats. A town not too far from me succeeded in shutting down a data center deal but I know of plenty more that are allowing them to be built.
Lutris dev did respond by removing the co-author by Claude so nobody will know what part is AI code.
