Bazzite (Fedora atomic), CachyOS (Arch), PikaOS(Debian), Nobara(Fedora), (Pop_OS - Ubuntu), it's nice that there's a gaming version of pretty much all major distros at this point so everyone can have a familiar base, hopefully they all survive
I hope all distros go down the microos/bazzite/atomic path of immutable base state. It is by far the largest simplification I have had in my desktop experience since about 2010, but then I started on some kind of red hat version (7.2?) when you still had to configure X and dhcp yourself.
Sure, for some things you need to do base system configuration, but that is not impossible on something like microOs.
Two years ago switched permanently from Win11 to Mint. It was ok, but craved something more bleeding edge. After two dozen distro hops landed on Cachy. Might try Gentoo at some point.
During CachyOS installation, select "i3" as desktop environment and look how many of the accessory programs die from linking errors. That should not happen with a package manager with dependency management.
This was the one to finally stop getting me to distro hop. Cachy is very easy to use and very well maintained. The performance is usually the selling point people talk about, but it's also very customizable and beginner-friendly (especially for an arch-based distro).
It uses an online installer that lets you choose the desktop environment, boot manager, file system, among other things. You can follow the defaults if you're new. Once you install it, it also comes with a few helper applications that can quickly set up things you'd want to use, like a one-click button that installs all the gaming packages you want to use and their flavor of Proton which is (allegedly) faster than the default.
They also have a really good wiki which I contributed a bit to and a very active community if you need help. All around, 10/10 would recommend to anyone. I managed to convince my friend who's new to Linux to use this instead of Zorin and he's had a great time.
Funny I've been poking with the latest ISO last night in a VM. ZFS on root with mirroring and boot environment is seamless, which to me is a huge enabler for a rolling release with fast update cycle, so I want to try it deeper. Currently on fedora kde spin which has a lot of quircks, with Cosmic coming out soon I'll probably switch.
People need to stop making Meme distributions. There will be so much grief once people figure out that what they wanted is a good, stable operating system and what they got is a franken Arch, which will inevitably fail in unpredictable ways and for which there is miniscule support.
The Arch forums rightfully warn against this and do not want users of these distros, since all these distros are inevitably broken in their own weird ways.
There are multiple very reasonable distros. There is absolutely no need to make these forks.
I've been using Linux since the mid-90s and Linux almost exclusively for the last couple decades and I have only one question, aren't most Linux distros fully customizable? I currently run Fedora on my desktop but I've run everything from Slackware to Red Hat to Debian to Knoppix to Corel to Suse to Arch, you get the idea, and I've found all of them nearly equal in the customizability department. Is there a distro out there that actively fights customization?
You can customize anything, the problem is always how maintainable your customization is. People keep making FrankenDebians (https://wiki.debian.org/DontBreakDebian#Don.27t_make_a_Frank...) using curl|bash install scripts, alternate repositories or just plain brute force symlinking libraries with a hefty dose of chattr +i.
A properly customizable distro allows organizing and tracking patches in layers, etc.
Fedora has been rock solid for a few years (minus Zoom + Nvidia), as my primary work OS. I'm always nervous to jump to an Arch-based distro as my daily driver, for fear of having to regularly fix issues. Is this a legitimate concern in 2025? Would my experience (especially with graphics) be improved on something like Cachy?
I set this up to reinvigorate my T2 MacBook Pro (with Cosmic) but it keeps restarting when the lid is closed, and keyboard and trackpad don’t always resume on restore. I was impressed with the docs!
I’m thinking of trying Ubuntu, but maybe T2 Linux will always be a compromise, hardly CachyOS fault I reckon.
It's my favorite distro so far. It works out of the box on my Zephyrus, with all the fixes needed for smooth performance, including, but not limited to, flawless iGPU/dGPU switching.
I ran CachyOS for a while and it’s really good! These days I’m rolling on OpenSUSE Aeon for the immutability and because my homelab stuff is all Suse based.
But if you’re a gamer that also uses your PC for development or content creation you can’t go wrong with CachyOS.
I have been unable to get anything other than Cachy to run Baldur's Gate 3 as well as Windows on my Lenovo Legion 2021. Best I have found for performance and so far stable on my relative new tower.
Here to say that cachyos is by no means just a gaming os it's a really nicely packaged distro and works much better than KDE neon, far better than manjaro.
It also generally feels snappier for simple things like opening terminal, but I am pretty sure that was a kde neon issue.
I only use KDE so your experience might be different than mine.
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[ 2.1 ms ] story [ 57.0 ms ] threadSure, for some things you need to do base system configuration, but that is not impossible on something like microOs.
Never heard about BORE scheduler. It is an additional patch to the kernel ? How stable is this ?
It uses an online installer that lets you choose the desktop environment, boot manager, file system, among other things. You can follow the defaults if you're new. Once you install it, it also comes with a few helper applications that can quickly set up things you'd want to use, like a one-click button that installs all the gaming packages you want to use and their flavor of Proton which is (allegedly) faster than the default.
They also have a really good wiki which I contributed a bit to and a very active community if you need help. All around, 10/10 would recommend to anyone. I managed to convince my friend who's new to Linux to use this instead of Zorin and he's had a great time.
The Arch forums rightfully warn against this and do not want users of these distros, since all these distros are inevitably broken in their own weird ways.
There are multiple very reasonable distros. There is absolutely no need to make these forks.
https://github.com/Szowisz/CachyOS-kernels
Which enables you to run a Gentoo based system on the kernel modified by the CachyOS kernel team through a ebuild for the official sources on GitHub.
When emerging it deals with all necessary dependency flags and configuration for you, just a little bit tinkering with USE flags required.
A properly customizable distro allows organizing and tracking patches in layers, etc.
https://discuss.cachyos.org/t/qt6-upgrade-to-6-10-1-breaks-s...
I’m thinking of trying Ubuntu, but maybe T2 Linux will always be a compromise, hardly CachyOS fault I reckon.
one reason is better sw support,e.g. Arduino, android, vivado,cuda,you name it,all are supported out of box, saves a lot of time for me
But if you’re a gamer that also uses your PC for development or content creation you can’t go wrong with CachyOS.
It also generally feels snappier for simple things like opening terminal, but I am pretty sure that was a kde neon issue.
I only use KDE so your experience might be different than mine.