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.

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.

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.

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:

• 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.

Or Suse

Asking the real questions.

Debian's the grand-daddy from which the others all were born.

Does that mean moving from EndeavourOS to CachyOS is also easy?

Maybe I should first look into what the difference is between EndeavourOS and CachyOS. Is it even worth it to switch?

This one is just a media box and also for light gaming, some games could be a bit smoother with just a bit more performance and switching to cachyOS binaries gave it that small bump it needed in most cases. If you don't count benchmarks that are measureable and repeatable then I can offer an annecdote that it just feels better.

I'm old enough to know that's a lie. I gave up dual booting years ago to save us all the embarrassment.

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.

Immutable is good for you, torture for me.

For gaming, I don’t really understand why anyone would prefer slower update cycles since there are frequent updates that fix compatibility or increase performance.

Which game uses host system libraries? I think you have a wrong impression how things work in Linux gaming outside of Tux Kart these days. Valve maintains their own set of Linux containers called Steam Linux Runtimes and their entire point is to be relatively slow moving. Just have a look at all the package dates at https://repo.steampowered.com/steamrt4/images/latest-public-stable/sources/

On top of that, almost every game is a proprietary Windows application. So it runs on top of Proton which sits on top of the latest Steam Linux Runtime.

It's similar with FOSS games where the foremost distribution outlet is Flathub and software published there relies on Flatpak Runtimes which are also relatively slow moving.

CachyOS is apparently “optimized” for gaming performance—I don’t pretend to know what that means or how much of an impact it has.

Barely any unless you're installing FOSS games from their own repository for the reasons I outlined initially.

I’m super impressed with how well everything just works

And that's what's important.

"Frequent updates" sounds to me like "breaks frequently".

I'm using an Intel card, which is still seeing problems fixed with every update. But I've been on the road of bleeding edge before and it's been one messy problem after another.

If I can strike a balance between latest and stable, at the cost of a slightly slower update speed, I'd prefer that.

Any chance, have you ever used Garuda? I'm curious how CachyOS compares on the "ease of use" front. I've been on Garuda for like 3 or 4 years now as it is the only one (that I tried) that I've had "just work" for everything out of the box. My laptop had a lot of trouble with Bazzite and the nvidia drivers, but again, I don't have to do anything under Garuda besides install it, periodically run updates, and it plays games just fine with no headaches. I'm not a huge fan of the decoration choices in Garuda, and some of the stuff you mentioned like Winboat and Gaming one-click installs sound amazingly helpful... but everything is working right now so there's a hurdle to changing, lol.

yeah last week I tried Nobara again after not using it for several months. wanted the KDE Plasma 6.6 update. nope. GE hadn't done the monthly sync yet. when is the monthly sync? whenever he feels like it. Sorry I can't use a distro that's based on the whims of one guy. don't get me wrong I like GE, I like his Protons, but Nobara needs a team behind it.

I believe they have a handheld distro that they use too. I heard it got a big update or something recently.

They do in fact have a handheld edition. I use it for my steam deck and it's great.

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 originally used EndeavourOS with hyprland and I tried to us kdenlive, but it would never start. I then tried to install kde-plasma, but it would never boot into the plasma DE. I went and installed kubuntu to use the kde apps, but things just work better for me on arch, like Bluetooth connectivity. So I decided to switch back to arch through Cachy.

Dependencies..? I remember accidentally installing entire DEs back in the day because individual packages required their entire native environment. So external maintainers basically had to 'extract' some packages from the dependency bundle to make them available without installing the entire native DE. Isn't that sort of how it still works?