I’ve been using Arch for like 20 years and I think CachyOS is neat.
I use EndeavorOS btw
Meanwhile, Garuda is quietly working away in the corner watching the drama.
It’s always interesting to see what gets included in these comparisons. I started on Bazzite and didn’t like it and found Garuda was Arch based, gaming focused, worked with Nvidia already, and had a few preconfigured desktop environment choices. It was easy to set up, works great, and I’ve been very happy.
I’ve been curious about cachy but have been too satisfied to switch. I’d love to hear a critique if anyone has tried both. What am I missing?
If you’re satified you’re probably not missing much.
Most of the Arch-based distros have found a niche of their own and most of them try to offer varying levels of help to the user to sweeten the Spartan experience of vanilla Arch.
Some of them like Endeavour try to keep the interference minimal, they offer some presets and some theming and an installer and stop there.
Distros like Cachy and Garuda are somewhere in the middle, with some quality of life stuff such as graphical package installers, and some custom packages, and streamlined driver install.
A distro like Manjaro or SteamOS takes it to the extreme with a “mommy knows best” setup that only bears a tenuous resemblance to vanilla Arch anymore, and you have to leave it alone to work as intended.
Garuda is very, VERY similar to CachyOS. They are both gaming focused, Arch rolling releases, have their own modified kernel, have their own repos, both set up proprietary Nvidia drivers by default.
I haven’t spent a lot of time with Garuda, but I’ve found CachyOS to be an improved version of what it is trying to do. It has a bigger community, better gaming performance in every benchmark I’ve seen (they’ve also had a few bugs lately that have made Fedora benchmark better than Garuda), better general Ui responsiveness (and if you use Garuda’s Dragonized Desktop it’s even heavier than GNOME). I also don’t like that Garuda enables Chaotic AUR out of thr box. This allows random third parties to compile binaries for you, instead of building from source. This takes a lot less time to update if you have limited hardware, but you’re also probably not using a bleeding edge OS if you have old hardware. AUR is already dangerous, no need to add Chaotic AUR where you can’t even be sure that what code is being executed on your system is what is described in the package. Lastly I like Shelly a lot more than Pamac, I couldn’t even get Pamac to manage Flatpak last time I tried it, and Shelly easily manages every possible package type with ease and matches KDE’s theming better.
That being said, Linux is Linux for the most part. I did make this meme making fun of other CachyOS users for thinking the performance boosts are so mega important.
I’m on xfce, so the dragonized desktop isn’t an issue for me. Thanks for the thoughtful response. If I start running into any issues at some point I’ll look into switching over.
CachyOS
Arch
More like
Arch: Actually you took most of who you are from me.
I am inevitable
I don’t care one bit about all of the supposed performance optimizations in CachyOS.
It is SO DANG EASY. It just works.
Yeah this is the real reason I prefer it. A sane installer, auto installing Nvidia drivers, auto setting up Snapper, a good GUI package manager that actually manages everything.
The customized kernel, and performance boosts that may or may not actually exist are just a bonus.
It has a GUI package manager? :-O
it has something called “Shelly” which is funny because months ago when the dev of Shelly released the thing I said “you should honestly get in contact with the CachyOS folks” and now it does have Shelly.
It’s a pretty great GUI for installing AUR stuff, packages, and flatpaks.
Ok, thanks, didn’t know.
Shelly yes and they actively develop it with integrations of flatpak aur appimage and native packages
It is also a command line package manager (like pacman), meaning it integrated with the system better than anything, even YaST on openSUSE. It doesn’t require a reboot for updates the way KDE Discover would for example (though occasionally I run into bugs if I don’t reboot), and also seems to manage proprietary Nvidia drivers that CachyOS downloaded for me.
It doesn’t require a reboot for updates the way KDE Discover would for example
it does not require that. turn that off in the system settings, and enjoy the consequences
the consequences:
(though occasionally I run into bugs if I don’t reboot)
I thought it was Octopi?
Changed to Shelly in a recent update.
They also have one own graphical package manager. I didn’t install Shelly because I personally hate GTK+, but I installed that one because it uses Qt (I’m in KDE Plasma). I don’t remember the name rn though.
Easy is dangerous. It gave us abusable defaults. It gives us windows and macOS. And turned into a hostage situation.
Linux works because the second someone gets bitchy, you can migrate. Even the components can’t tie you down. Bcachefs was so cool and really promising, but Kent had a psychotic break and we just moved away and didn’t get sucked into his gravity well. Imagine that situation on windows. “Well, copilot is is everything and NVMe drives can explode randomly now.”
Nothing you just said was an argument against user friendly software. The Windows and Mac hostage situation was created by familiarity and walled gardens, and is solved by Linux becoming easier to use.
Easy is really not the issue. Abstraction layers are great. C is there to help you get around assembler. You can still bypass that layer and go crazy with assembler. Same thing with cachy. They don’t take away anything but add a way to achivr something that they focus on.
OS tribalism again 🙄
Spoken like a (insert your distro) user. Stone them!
Splitter!
Blasphemer!
Passes them a joint
Boooo throws rocks
Not really, I use CachyOS, but it is funny how much people hype the performance boosts. I notice it, but not by a ton or anything. It’s mostly just Arch but easier to use and with built in tools that are helpful.
So I’m actually making fun of the tribalism.
When I switched to Linux, I thought more distros means more good-er. More choices for people doesn’t hurt.
Now I’m slowling becoming part of the ‘old men yelling at cloud’ team. Arch and Purple Arch (endevourOS) is all you need. (At least for me).
Wait until you try NixOS
Choices ARE good! It helped you find the niche that suits you best. After a while we forget that other people value different things, so there is no one best choice.
When I used Arch on my laptop, my computer would randomly refuse to boot up at random and I had to manually fix it by booting into the installation media. After switching to Cachy I’ve never had to do that. I don’t know what black magic Cachy had to fix that problem, but I’ve never switched back, lol
tbf since you have to set up more stuff by yourself in arch it is more susceptible to human failure
before i learned of archinstall, i would install arch and after around a month the timezone would stop working
though cachy did break for me and i couldn’t update for like a month before i switched back to arch because the login manager in cachy would load forever (thankfully, it did have snapper set up so that wasn’t a big issue. i even put snapper in my next arch installation)
… Yeah? It is. It’s susceptible to the exact same issues Arch can
I use CachyOS BTW 🚀
I use Mint btw.
Telling people what distro you use is cringe
I use arch btw
Ah yes, I remember the days I used Arch. I was a younger man back then, I was so thin and heterosexual. Then one day I did an update and boofed my bootloader. I made the repairs, but I grew tired of this. I stopped liking it when my computer broke because of my own incompetence and just wanted something stable.
Now I use Mint and I’m fat and gay.
You were straighter when you used Arch? That can’t be right, isn’t that against the rules?
I’m autistic and have ADHD, so things often work backwards for me. Like how I drink coffee to help me sleep.
Unfortunately, if I had to list every distro I use it would be longer than this comment.
If I want a Linux box that can function as a home server but also fire up Steam and play using my old 970 if I want to, does cachy fit?
Depends on what you’re hosting on the home server and how often you’ll use the device for gaming/other stuff. Most people prefer stable distros for servers, because if you go too long without updating you may be missing dependencies. But if you’re going to update regularly and use it every week, it’s probably fine. Some people do use Arch based distros for servers. CachyOS is my favorite and easiest to use Arch based distros despite making fun of it in the meme.
I’m using lmde now for it but I’ve had a few headaches and I get harassed by a lot of updates anyway. Getting the Nvidia970 video card to work was a a bit of a pain but it seems to be ok for now. Hosting yams with plex on it now but kinda scared to go much further with immich or an audiobook library until I’m confident I have the right base.
You may have to experiment a little. Cachy is good at auto finding drivers for you, but sometimes rolling releases can break compatibility with older drivers or stop supporting them faster. Then again, 970 isn’t THAT old so you might be OK. If you don’t like being harassed for updates, rolling release is probably not what you’re looking for.
If you have the drivers working, you may want to just leave it. People like CachyOS for gaming because it has up to date features and improves compatibility. You won’t get up to date features if thr GPU doesn’t support it though. The faster wait time for Proton compatibility will still help.
If you are still looking to switch, maybe something a bit in between. Tuxedo OS uses KDE, Wayland, and is good at auto detecting/downloading proprietary Nvidia drivers too. It’s based on Ubuntu LTS so it won’t update all the time. They are transitioning to being based on Debian Testing and further testing those updates, which will probably roughly feel like Fedora’s level of updates. Pop!_OS says that they support older Nvidia cards in their standard LTS version too, which is also based km Ubuntu. They just switched to their brand new DE though, which I like but has some bugs last I checked.
Also maybe consider using Docker for the server stuff, that way it doesn’t matter as much what distro you use.
Thanks for the input and your time. I’m actually using docker for the yams setup and totally forgot that makes the underlying tech fairly irrelevant
No, get a SBC or old laptop or something for your server.
Yes.
Any popular Linux distro fits. I’d go with mint
Out of the box Mint is terrible for gaming.
I thought gaming on Linux is literally just installing steam and you’re good to go?
“depends”.
When I first switched to linux I used Mint and it was a horrible experience with my laptop at the time for gaming. the laptop itself was a hybrid Nvidia/AMD GPU so…I mean…Not a great experience for most distros but it was REALLY bad on Mint.
on other Distros it was better but I was regulated to Wayland only as hybrids on X11 are just a no go.
So depending on your setup gaming on linux can potentially just be as easy as installing steam or it can turn into a chore.
I think it is. Again, I game on Mint and have had 0 issues with any of my games so far. Maybe he is just using older hardware or something?
Is it? I game on Mint and have had no issues so far.
I like CachyOS and it’s my go to if I want to use Arch. Everytime I install Arch I always forget something, always. so then it’s trying to remember what I did the last time to get something to work correctly. With CachyOS it’s just good to go for me. and they’ve really improved the install process and cut out A LOT of bloat. Before it would take forever to install Cachy but now it’s quick and the only thing I really have to remove when it’s done is alacritty and firefox. Paired with KDE it’s smooth sailing and great performance.
Yes, I think it may have cured my distro hopping. I was on Fedora KDE the longest besides Cachy, but there’s a lot of little things that I like better.
I’ve installed arch a couple times. I think it’s helpful do a few times at least so you know how things work.
Now I just use endeavoros though.
It is a good educational experience, especially if you want to do sysadmin adjacent stuff.
It’s up to you, do you want to make your pizza from scratch or do you want it made for you? Since I’m so bad at making my own pizza (often burn it), I choose to have it made for me.
But sometimes, it’s nice to slap a few extra slices of something on that pre-made frozen pizza. 🫳🧅🧄🥓
Oh, absolutely. The more merrier.
I like Cachy. It runs on my AMD Framework 13. Arch runs on my desktop, and I have reached an equilibrium where it’s stable enough to for me to ignore the occasional crash or complete freeze up (which is audio related and rare enough that I just don’t care to try to fix atm).
Actually now that I think about it, I haven’t had a audio lockup since I swapped to using my video card’s audio. So maybe I have a defective audio chip on my motherboard. 🤷
which is audio related
flaskbacks intensify
I’ve never has freezes, but I fought my pipewire for a long time over chopped-up audio. I believe some kernel flag for real-time interrupt handling solved the issue at last, which I found on some audio forum after three evenings’ worth of tinkering and fiddling and eventually scouring the internet when I accepted I wouldn’t figure it out on my own. IDK if it’s of any use to you, but I can dig it out if you’d like.
Oh man thanks that would actually be delightful. Whenever you got time, I’d appreciate whatever fix helped. Even if it doesn’t solve the problem directly, it might put me on the right path.
I think this was the one:
https://wiki.linuxaudio.org/wiki/system_configuration
I added
threadirqto the launch options as described under “Using the threadirqs kernel option”, which solved it for me, but you’ll probably want to read the whole page anyway.I will study this page like my entire academic career hinges on it and I’m a ritalin-addled undergrad.
Despite the fact that I graduated 18 years ago. Thank you.
Glad to restore some memory of youth to you ;-)
Hope it helps, or is at least an interesting read
Sometimes the Linux community is pretty cool, love you guys.
If you look closely at almost any large community, you’ll find both lovely and awful people and interactions. I try to be part of the former, but I confess that I sometimes fall in with the letter. I think that’s just human nature, but we tend to notice the negative more than the positive.
I’m not even sure what kind of distro cachy is, some kind of gaming optimised?
It has a customized kernel that supposedly improves performance. Well that, and it actually has a better installer than arch-install imo
It also uses optimization flags for their repositories, which results in better performance as well but drops support for CPUs older than i4?
No, it is separated repos:
- generic which works everywhere and
- v3
- v4
Does it auto detect your architecture to know which to install?
