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.
I am a CachyOS acolyte. It’s my end boss distro.
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.
Well in my case, using systemd-boot:
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.
Sometimes, if you do share an EFI partition between Windows/Linux, Windows Update will randomly nuke it and break your linux install.
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.