Reliable, I have nothing to fix and no unusual behaviors or settings on Cachyos. If I set something up the setting won’t change on its own.
Private, no telemetry. No NVIDIA service sending all the apps I launch to HQ.
No forced software. I can choose to remove most components I dont like and replace them.
Gaming works as well or better than Windows once its setup.
I can revert to a previous image of my system right at boot. Very reassuring to know it’s easy to revert to a previous state/version of my system.
More lightweight system, I use way less RAM on idle than on Windows. That’s more RAM to use for actual useful stuff like gaming.
it’s free. Doesn’t require an account to use.
it’s secure. Much less risk running a linux system than windows. You are a harder target and also a less attractive one for hackers.
Cons :
I can’t play games with kernel level anticheats.
I sometimes have to spend 10mn when installing a new game to set it up on proton.
You are still expected by most people to handle their proprietary files coming from Microslop. You have to be able to sign PDF files and return office files.
HDR support is not really good for games and it often is difficult to have working.
Overall, having switched 4 months ago, I have no regrets and honestly it was a great upgrade for me. Beside the money lost on a game like BF6 I’m very happy to be on linux.
I was really annoyed by my W10 setup anyway. I constantly had settings that would change on their own. I often had bad days where you feel the system struggling even though nothing changed. It was very frustrating. Linux solved that. I dont have bad days on my system. It runs exactly as I left it when it was shutdown. And this expected stability is very comfortable for users.
Highly recommend the switch to cachyos for all Windows gamers. And even for non-gamers it’s a very functional and reliable operating system.
hdr really doesnt work on most desktop enviroments. have you tried using gamescope though? you can just install gamescope-session-cachyos that will make it so you can select it from the login manager. gamescope automatically does sdr to hdr conversion which looks really good in most games. what still doesnt really work (for me at least) is games that output native hdr. they look very washed out and way too bright. but imo sdr to hdr, which gets way brighter, is still a win
I tried doing manually a gamescope command line arguments for Overwatch and it didn’t work.
I activated the necessary flags and took close attention to the resolution in game and of my display, made sur the game had HDR enabled etc and it never worked.
So if I can’t get HDR to work even with gamescope on a stable game like OW…
But your tip to setup gamescope for the session is interesting. I might try that out sometimes.
But honestly HDR is quite anecdotal for me. It’s not that visible. I much prefer to focus on optimizing FPS and input delay than tweaking for HDR.
I switched to Catchy from Manjaro a few months ago, no regrets. Been using Linux for +10 years and it’s the best distro so far.
I’m not a gamer but installed steam and lutris since it’s so easy to do and it was seamless, works out the box.
But for me as a developer the real gain was their AMD support. I can confirm that my laptop is genuinely faster now. If you have have AMD processor, just look up CatchyOs enhancements.
Less mentioned downside - digital rights management is significantly degraded in linux. Most commercial streaming apps/sites will work but but only at SD or 720p.
I never tried Garuda so I can’t help with the comparison.
Is Garuda debian based ?
Cachyos is the first time I touched an Arch based distro and I was very impressed by how stable and “fresh” it feels. I guess Arch deserves its good reputation.
I have been updating my cachyos like two times each week which is a quite high update rate and the only problem I had was this :
Steam stored his cache by default on my home partition and filled the disk completely. I then updated with pacman without noticing I had no space left and the process failed. The system wouldn’t boot which was scary. I took a bit of time to think about it and remembered that I can revert the system with BTRFS snapshot. So I checked the cachyos wiki on how to revert and in 2mn i was back to the exact state before my failed update. It broke once because of Steam and the system was very easy to fix.
A beginners could learn to use snapshots easily in the GUI for it and I think would succeed in restoring the system. Would the same be true if a Windows didn’t boot ? Honestly I don’t think so.
I even was able to setup in the GUI for how many snapshots I want to keep so i constantly have around 30 snaps ready to recover my system up to a month and a half ago.
Garuda is another easy arch like endeavor/cachy. I believe they even both provide kernel images with the cachy patches. But they aren’t the default. The really big negative with garuda is their default theme choice and setup. Endeavor/Cachy provide a much more vanilla setup out of the box. Making them a bit less problematic over all.
Actually depending on tasks it can be up to a 25℅ boost. Though in gaming tasks it tends to be a 2 to 5% boost. Which while more moderate can still be felt. Where catchy excels is it’s CPU optimization. So if you’re CPU bottlenecked it can make a big difference. That said garuda and endeavor both give you the option of installing a cachy patched kernel.
Pros :
Cons :
Overall, having switched 4 months ago, I have no regrets and honestly it was a great upgrade for me. Beside the money lost on a game like BF6 I’m very happy to be on linux.
I was really annoyed by my W10 setup anyway. I constantly had settings that would change on their own. I often had bad days where you feel the system struggling even though nothing changed. It was very frustrating. Linux solved that. I dont have bad days on my system. It runs exactly as I left it when it was shutdown. And this expected stability is very comfortable for users.
Highly recommend the switch to cachyos for all Windows gamers. And even for non-gamers it’s a very functional and reliable operating system.
hdr really doesnt work on most desktop enviroments. have you tried using gamescope though? you can just install gamescope-session-cachyos that will make it so you can select it from the login manager. gamescope automatically does sdr to hdr conversion which looks really good in most games. what still doesnt really work (for me at least) is games that output native hdr. they look very washed out and way too bright. but imo sdr to hdr, which gets way brighter, is still a win
I tried doing manually a gamescope command line arguments for Overwatch and it didn’t work.
I activated the necessary flags and took close attention to the resolution in game and of my display, made sur the game had HDR enabled etc and it never worked.
So if I can’t get HDR to work even with gamescope on a stable game like OW…
But your tip to setup gamescope for the session is interesting. I might try that out sometimes.
But honestly HDR is quite anecdotal for me. It’s not that visible. I much prefer to focus on optimizing FPS and input delay than tweaking for HDR.
I switched to Catchy from Manjaro a few months ago, no regrets. Been using Linux for +10 years and it’s the best distro so far.
I’m not a gamer but installed steam and lutris since it’s so easy to do and it was seamless, works out the box.
But for me as a developer the real gain was their AMD support. I can confirm that my laptop is genuinely faster now. If you have have AMD processor, just look up CatchyOs enhancements.
Yeah Cachy is the bomb.
Less mentioned downside - digital rights management is significantly degraded in linux. Most commercial streaming apps/sites will work but but only at SD or 720p.
Is cachyos much better than garuda? I’ve been on garuda for a few years now and dont know much about cachyos other than its another arch based distro.
I never tried Garuda so I can’t help with the comparison.
Is Garuda debian based ?
Cachyos is the first time I touched an Arch based distro and I was very impressed by how stable and “fresh” it feels. I guess Arch deserves its good reputation.
I have been updating my cachyos like two times each week which is a quite high update rate and the only problem I had was this :
Steam stored his cache by default on my home partition and filled the disk completely. I then updated with pacman without noticing I had no space left and the process failed. The system wouldn’t boot which was scary. I took a bit of time to think about it and remembered that I can revert the system with BTRFS snapshot. So I checked the cachyos wiki on how to revert and in 2mn i was back to the exact state before my failed update. It broke once because of Steam and the system was very easy to fix.
A beginners could learn to use snapshots easily in the GUI for it and I think would succeed in restoring the system. Would the same be true if a Windows didn’t boot ? Honestly I don’t think so.
I even was able to setup in the GUI for how many snapshots I want to keep so i constantly have around 30 snaps ready to recover my system up to a month and a half ago.
Garuda is another easy arch like endeavor/cachy. I believe they even both provide kernel images with the cachy patches. But they aren’t the default. The really big negative with garuda is their default theme choice and setup. Endeavor/Cachy provide a much more vanilla setup out of the box. Making them a bit less problematic over all.
No gaming distro outperforms any other distro by any measurable means a user would notice.
Actually depending on tasks it can be up to a 25℅ boost. Though in gaming tasks it tends to be a 2 to 5% boost. Which while more moderate can still be felt. Where catchy excels is it’s CPU optimization. So if you’re CPU bottlenecked it can make a big difference. That said garuda and endeavor both give you the option of installing a cachy patched kernel.