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.
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
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.
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.
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.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.
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.
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 know this is an unpopular opinion at the moment but I currently think Bazzite is still my favorite for the ROG Ally
The RogAlly is not Cachy’s objective. It’s for regular desktop use.
They do in fact have a handheld edition. I use it for my steam deck and it’s great.
I believe they have a handheld distro that they use too. I heard it got a big update or something recently.
Totally fine, yeah I use fedora for laptop, the Ally is only for gaming as I don’t have a desktop setup
Edit: changed to laptop as desktop was confusing
I use Manjaro on my Ally X 😝
(Also to my fellow ally owners, fingerprint reader support is coming soon I think)
CachyOS is awesome. I just switched a few months ago after the praises from SomeOrdinaryGamer. I also wanted to use hyprland again after using plasma for sometime. It’s amazing that Cachy lets me use the hyprland DE, but also has libraries to let me run kde software without the need for plasma.
It’s amazing that Cachy lets me use the hyprland DE, but also has libraries to let me run kde software without the need for plasma.
Which distribution doesn’t allow to run KDE software on non-KDE desktops? How would this even be possible?
Landed on Cachy after Ubuntu> Mint > Bazzite. Wish I had just skipped Mint and Bazzite. A lot of DEs too, so it’s kind of however you like it.
What do you prefer about Catchy over Bazzite. I’m currently using Bazzite but not in love with it. I mean it’s just an OS that works for my gaming and browsing.
I game, browse, and do audio production. Between all these things, I’ve had the least issues with Cachy. In fact, everything’s been shockingly easy.
The flexibility of Cachy has been great too. Very customisable if you want it to be and lots of DEs to choose from, so really it’s can be setup exactly how you want it. This is something I like in most things, a “do it once; do it right” or “set and forget” setup. I’ve also had the best performance from Cachy overall, but when you’re comparing that against something like Bazzite, the victor could literally just come down to the hardware, they’re so close.
Same here. Basically distro hopped and finally tried cachy. I am converting my main big gaming rig to it, but fell in love on a samsung slate from 2012ish. Runs great on anything
Sometimes you gotta know what you don’t like to really understand what you do like.
I’m trying a conversion from endeavorOS with CachyOS repositories, it was pretty seamless, I can keep my settings and endeavorOS theming, and allegedly you can switch back at any time. The cachyOS wiki has a short script for converting vanilla arch or endeavorOS to use cachyOS binaries. Been running for about a week and haven’t noticed any problems.
Did you notice anything that would be worthwhile switching from EndeavourOS to CachyOS? Not having any problems is nice, but is there an actual reason and do you even notice it in real world usage (I don’t count benchmarks)?
