I few months ago, I backed up my windows gaming machine and overwrote the partition with CachyOS. Haven't looked back. Gaming performance and compatibility has exceeded my expectations. Just a much better experience overall. I feel sorry anytime I see someone using Windows.
This one seems particularly attractive to Windows refugees especially gamers. The default desktop looks very much like Windows: even the wallpaper is one of those blue gradient 3d wave shapes.
I tried it in a VM and I don't think I can deal with the jank. The default install comes with 3 different GUIs for installing software, all of them confusing and inconsistent. Apps with context menus that go 5 levels deep everywhere, confusing layouts, sometimes icons, sometimes not. I guess if you are coming from Windows this is the status quo so that's fine.
Not for me but I'm glad this new wave of Linux users are finding success with it.
Ahem! Even old unix-users can find success with it, by simply not using/deinstalling the yank and relying on pacman and/or yay in the terminal. Shouldn't be that difficult for someone from another era?
The only things left installed are cachy-os-hello, and the kernel-manager. They are useful, and don't break things. Though one could do, without them too.
Former Windows 11 user here. Microsoft operating systems have been my primary desktop since DOS 6.0, but the embedding of advertisements in Win11 drove to me finally try out Linux distributions, and CachyOS was the only one that stuck for me in terms of familiarity and performance. It's been my daily driver for 1.5 years now, and I've been extremely grateful for it.
I’m annoyed that games I play use BattleEye and the use of BattleEye prevents me from being able to switch over to CachyOS on our family gaming PC+TV setup in the play room. Doubly so because BattleEye appears to do absolutely nothing to prevent PC lobbies from becoming rife with cheaters anyway, so I don’t really get the point of it.
I’ve been in love with cachy since I switched from windows but this past weekend has been extremely trying after experiencing metadata exhaustion probably due to the snapshots filling up my home drive. Learned a few things and I realize btrfs is not specific to cachy, but this was definitely the hardest thing I’ve worked through since switching from windows.
I almost ran into the metadata exhaustion problem myself. Thankfully I noticed before in btrfs assistant that the remaining metadata space is filling up dangerously fast. Before that I thought btrfs is as easy as ext4. Fire and forget, no adjustments necessary. Now I know that you have to limit the number of snapshots in some way or another. Wish there would be a more noob-friendly default configuration. Or two configuration options to choose from when installing: simplified, expert.
I switched to Bazzite from CachyOS and while I really appreciate how accessible it is, the immutability of the core OS doesn't do enough to scratch my Linux tinkering fix. So I'll probably install this in a few days.
It's not just a gaming and performance distro, it includes QoL fixes on modern hardware.
On my Lenovo laptop, fixes that would take over a day to enable and patch on most distros:
- Wake from sleep
- Nvidia GSP firmware workarounds and correct version OOTB (proprietary)
- Mouse lag/jitter
- External display hotplug
- DDC/CI over type-c
- Embedded controller power profiles from taskbar with correct TDP limits for CPU/GPU
- Battery charge limiter support right from KDE settings
- Working `switcherooctl` in hybrid graphics mode on AMD
- Firefox with video decode acceleration (YouTube) on almost all GPU models
Another gaming feature that is otherwise useful in workstations is the external scheduler support.
Currently using BPFland which makes multitasking as responsive as idle while compiling Yocto/Chromium in the background.
Windows, Mac (mini M1), and kernel built-in scheduler Linux jank and become almost unusable (Ryzen 5800H).
First day was a bit rough, first week was still a little rough, but it's been pretty smooth since then, even when learning how to fix things and trying new software.
I'm using Niri and Noctalia as my desktop setup, and it's been different than my Windows experience, but it feels fun and cool to just use a computer in a new way.
If anyone is looking for a niri based opinionated set of configuration on top of CachyOS (or vanilla Arch) I put together: https://github.com/nickjj/dotfriedrice
The goal is after installing the official ISO, you can get a developer focused desktop environment up and running in ~10 minutes with 1 command. It's quite configurable so you can change around anything you want ahead of time or after you install it. I use it with vanilla Arch but I know of quite a few people using it successfully with CachyOS.
For CachyOS, the only manual adjustment you have to make before running the repo's install script is uninstalling `jack` since it conflicts with `pipewire-jack`. I could easily roll this into the script but so far no one has complained loud enough to automate this. I also wonder if CachyOS will eventually drop that AUR dependency in its official ISO.
If it matters to you, 99.9% of the code is hand coded. The only time I use AI is when I'm 100% stone walled on something and it's a last resort move. Even then it's copy / pasting small snippets into web based AIs where I fully review and refactor its output so you could say the 0.1% is still human vetted.
Moving away from Windows last year was so worth it. I've been wanting to switch since 2017 but always ran into hardware issues. The same hardware I had back then works beautifully with Arch today.
Does anyone have any idea why Cachy is so hard on I/O? If I run it with disk encryption my entire system hangs intermittently when downloading large files. (eg steam updates, etc.) Even testing without disk encryption, I will get brief hangs when writing large files.
Is Cachy just assuming that everyone's got a high-quality NVME? Is there something about newer OSes that cause a CPU bottleneck for large disk writes?
I switched from Windows a couple of months ago. I am loving it. I cloned my favorite Windows window management solution, WindowGrid to KDE, https://store.kde.org/p/2363952/
I wouldn't recommend CachyOS personally. If you wish for a distribution with a traditional read and write filesystem and new features and package versions I'd recommend Fedora, which I always end up going back to.
Personal preference, but I like my software to have as little patching or customisation done by my distribution as possible, and to be able to use it as upstream intended. This is a longstanding benefit of Arch Linux, but CachyOS goes beyond this to kit out a default install with garish themes and shell configurations to the point that the default user's login shell gets set to /bin/fish.
Some fume was had because I really do not believe that Shelly is a good choice for the primary system package manager. It's written in C# and compiled with .NET AOT and I just cannot shake the sense that it is an incorrect choice for a core system program.
The GUI needs a little bit of polish, but the command line user interface is terrible; there is a DNF/APT style subcommand interface which has no search subcommand, and other features are split into a Source->Action->modifier "shortcode", but that is very different from Pacman. The action letters differ between sources; for example to search repositories you use "-SQa" but to search the AUR it is "-AS", and I believe that it is like this for the sole reason that no thought has been put into it. I'd also suggest that the authors have little experience with Unix and so it isn't made with the same kind of attitude. There are other things like table wrapping at 80 columns making the output unreadable and lack of a package download counter.
When I brought it up to the "community" I was relentlessly flamed for not being entirely positive about this change to the distribution. I'm of the opinion that the maintainer had her feelings hurt because I criticised her project, and lied about the issues I had raised. A pile on ensued.
The final straw for me that made me dump another 24 hours in moving distribution again is that the attitude of the CachyOS project can be summed up as "script kiddie" and the "community" spaces are populated by and large by children. Despite having the same sort of audience Bazzite has a much more pleasant community. Fedora seems to avoid all of this kind of nonsense, I suppose by dint of being run by professionals, and avoiding Discord.
There is no single 'upstream'. Furthermore I'd give a shit about intent. That's just their opinion.
The garish themes can be ignored, deinstalled, avoided by choosing an appropriate environment.
The fuming about Shelly? Yah, hrrm. Had some of that, too.
Solution? yay -Rd shelly You are not forced to use it, and it can be deinstalled.
The moment it's not optional anymore, I'm gone.
Don't use the community spaces, if you can't handle spoiled brats chasing the latest fads.
Bazzite is bloat (conceptually). Fedora no good. RedHat neither.
Always felt sluggish to me. Haven't tried since years though, but don't intend to either.
Not missing anything from 'there'.
There is a TUI-client called concord for the terminal, where you can disable all the gifs, movies, memes, cat pics, avatars, whatever. That's making it much more bearable :-)
Im with you with the Shelly thing. Tried to use for 2 days and although I like the GUI for things I don’t want to read in the terminal, I really dislike the cli. It’s just awful. But then again I just don’t use it. The other optimizations looks better though to not use cachyos entirely because of it. I’ll see how it goes in the future. To change it to pure arch isn’t that hard anyway.
I hv been out of distro hopping for years now, apart from pkg build, what makes Cachy os standout? I don't really care about kernel optimizations if we don't have any significant benchmarks.
22 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 48.9 ms ] threadThis one seems particularly attractive to Windows refugees especially gamers. The default desktop looks very much like Windows: even the wallpaper is one of those blue gradient 3d wave shapes.
I tried it in a VM and I don't think I can deal with the jank. The default install comes with 3 different GUIs for installing software, all of them confusing and inconsistent. Apps with context menus that go 5 levels deep everywhere, confusing layouts, sometimes icons, sometimes not. I guess if you are coming from Windows this is the status quo so that's fine.
Not for me but I'm glad this new wave of Linux users are finding success with it.
The only things left installed are cachy-os-hello, and the kernel-manager. They are useful, and don't break things. Though one could do, without them too.
On my Lenovo laptop, fixes that would take over a day to enable and patch on most distros:
Another gaming feature that is otherwise useful in workstations is the external scheduler support.Currently using BPFland which makes multitasking as responsive as idle while compiling Yocto/Chromium in the background.
Windows, Mac (mini M1), and kernel built-in scheduler Linux jank and become almost unusable (Ryzen 5800H).
In the release notes they said they removed Paru and are recommending Shelly instead.
I like that I can manage Flatpack and AUR!
Gonna give this a try!!
Same install.
No problems at all.
Fully succumbed to plasmonic thrall.
Satisfied by being speedy.
So boring. Almost snoring.
(must not distrohop! must not distrohop! must not distrohop!)
First day was a bit rough, first week was still a little rough, but it's been pretty smooth since then, even when learning how to fix things and trying new software.
I'm using Niri and Noctalia as my desktop setup, and it's been different than my Windows experience, but it feels fun and cool to just use a computer in a new way.
The goal is after installing the official ISO, you can get a developer focused desktop environment up and running in ~10 minutes with 1 command. It's quite configurable so you can change around anything you want ahead of time or after you install it. I use it with vanilla Arch but I know of quite a few people using it successfully with CachyOS.
For CachyOS, the only manual adjustment you have to make before running the repo's install script is uninstalling `jack` since it conflicts with `pipewire-jack`. I could easily roll this into the script but so far no one has complained loud enough to automate this. I also wonder if CachyOS will eventually drop that AUR dependency in its official ISO.
If it matters to you, 99.9% of the code is hand coded. The only time I use AI is when I'm 100% stone walled on something and it's a last resort move. Even then it's copy / pasting small snippets into web based AIs where I fully review and refactor its output so you could say the 0.1% is still human vetted.
Moving away from Windows last year was so worth it. I've been wanting to switch since 2017 but always ran into hardware issues. The same hardware I had back then works beautifully with Arch today.
Is Cachy just assuming that everyone's got a high-quality NVME? Is there something about newer OSes that cause a CPU bottleneck for large disk writes?
I haven't found anything on Linux like it.
Personal preference, but I like my software to have as little patching or customisation done by my distribution as possible, and to be able to use it as upstream intended. This is a longstanding benefit of Arch Linux, but CachyOS goes beyond this to kit out a default install with garish themes and shell configurations to the point that the default user's login shell gets set to /bin/fish.
Some fume was had because I really do not believe that Shelly is a good choice for the primary system package manager. It's written in C# and compiled with .NET AOT and I just cannot shake the sense that it is an incorrect choice for a core system program.
The GUI needs a little bit of polish, but the command line user interface is terrible; there is a DNF/APT style subcommand interface which has no search subcommand, and other features are split into a Source->Action->modifier "shortcode", but that is very different from Pacman. The action letters differ between sources; for example to search repositories you use "-SQa" but to search the AUR it is "-AS", and I believe that it is like this for the sole reason that no thought has been put into it. I'd also suggest that the authors have little experience with Unix and so it isn't made with the same kind of attitude. There are other things like table wrapping at 80 columns making the output unreadable and lack of a package download counter.
When I brought it up to the "community" I was relentlessly flamed for not being entirely positive about this change to the distribution. I'm of the opinion that the maintainer had her feelings hurt because I criticised her project, and lied about the issues I had raised. A pile on ensued.
The final straw for me that made me dump another 24 hours in moving distribution again is that the attitude of the CachyOS project can be summed up as "script kiddie" and the "community" spaces are populated by and large by children. Despite having the same sort of audience Bazzite has a much more pleasant community. Fedora seems to avoid all of this kind of nonsense, I suppose by dint of being run by professionals, and avoiding Discord.
The garish themes can be ignored, deinstalled, avoided by choosing an appropriate environment.
The fuming about Shelly? Yah, hrrm. Had some of that, too.
Solution? yay -Rd shelly You are not forced to use it, and it can be deinstalled. The moment it's not optional anymore, I'm gone.
Don't use the community spaces, if you can't handle spoiled brats chasing the latest fads.
Bazzite is bloat (conceptually). Fedora no good. RedHat neither.
Always felt sluggish to me. Haven't tried since years though, but don't intend to either.
Not missing anything from 'there'.
There is a TUI-client called concord for the terminal, where you can disable all the gifs, movies, memes, cat pics, avatars, whatever. That's making it much more bearable :-)