this post was submitted on 02 Jun 2025
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I've not heard of CachyOS, but to capture 2.54% of the steam linux market feels significant. It jumped right past other established Arch-based distros like Endeavor and Manjaro.
A lot of gamers want better performance, so a performance oriented distro with gaming quality of life features fills that gap. And ultimately there are a lot of YouTube channels promoting it and it kind of turned into a cool distro to use. This might explain the phenomenon.
Is Nobara still a thing? That was the gaming distro a couple years back, last I checked.
I've been using it for a while now, and it's genuinely so good. Before this I was using EndeavourOS which was also a great distro, but I realized that I was basically putting in work to do things CachyOS does out of the box, so I switched and it's been great.
What kind of out of the box things?
Well, I started using their repos for their x86-64-v3 optimized packages and builds of popular packages from the AUR. Later I started using their kernel because it pulls in upcoming features and is compiled with optimizations like ThinLTO and AutoFDO and has a more advanced scheduler. I also like how Cachyos comes with things like zram pre-enabled and scripts for things like zink and NGX. It's basically just a ton of small things like that, some that I don't even know about yet, that makes CachyOS really nice and easy to use.
https://wiki.cachyos.org/cachyos_basic/why_cachyos/
A big one IMO is it defaults to building aur packages for the native CPU, which base arch and endeavorOS do not. There isn’t really any benefit to not doing so, as aur packages are going to be installed locally anyway.
Also fish is the default shell and I love fish
they offer some optimisations to the kernel and the packages that are supposed to yield a tiny bit better performance.
an incredibly small thing that rubs me the wrong way more than it probably should about their setup is that they set Plasma animation speeds to much higher values than the stock Plasma desktop uses. sure, it could be just a part of their customisation tweaks the same way using
fishas the default shell is, but it feels like a cheap trick to reel in the "I installed it on my desktop and it's soooo much snappier" review kind of people. like, if your work is as good as you claim, you shouldn't need to artificially make the improvements seem bigger than they really are.I'm not familiar with it, but I think that that could be a reasonable UI tweak. I disable virtually all animation in software where possible because I want it to be as responsive as possible and don't care about the animation. Simply reducing the time in animation is a middle ground---one still gets animations, but cuts out some of the time.
I set plasma animations to instant every arch install anyway so personally I don’t care 😎 thanks for asking
If it feels snappier, it is snappier.
It's like saying it's cheating to use instanced rendering to display millions of asteroids when it's not even real draw calls
it's like making the car audio play wind whooshing noises when accelerating to make it feel faster.
If the goal is to make it feel faster, yeah.
I started using linux full time about a year ago. I started with Arch, but moved to Cachy really quickly when I discovered it. All of the advantages of Arch, but repos optimised for modern hardware, and a whole heap of useful pre-configured tools, like Wine/Proton, fish, snapper etc. Arch is a bare bones, pick and configure your own setup rolling release distro. Cachy is a pre-optimised, rolling release distro with lots of useful stuff right out of the box.
I use the cachyos kernel on an otherwise plain arch setup. I don't game much, but I tried it out and just stuck with it.
It has a dedicated steam deck ISO, is the most well put together preset up arch distro there is for gamers. Period, there are no real good faith arguments here. It's like if someone took an endevour install and spent over 50 hours doing nothing but making every possiable part of it as easy as possible for gamers to just play games.
Its what Bazzite is functionally a knock off of. Anyone whos using Bazzite is litterally using an objectively worse option then cachy is their first and only goal is gaming. Which is bazzites entire gimmick basically.
I agreed with everything in your first paragraph but your second one just seems like needless 'holier than though' drivel. Bazzite has it's own unique pros, and both are great options for gamers.* However, when it comes to having a OEM-like experience on a Legion Go under Linux, Bazzite, Nobara or Chimera are a better fit. That's my usecase and why I chose Bazzite, I wanted a Steam Deck experience with a better screen and more powerful chip. It was also well before SteamOS had any support for other devices.
Yeah, that's not Bazzite's "only gimmick"
How's Cachy for NVIDIA support?
Excellent, although any distro that packages the latest driver version these days is going to be, NVIDIA has improved their linux driver integration a lot fairly recently. (no esoteric kernel cmdline args, and KMS/SimpleDRM support, woot!)
I just installed cachyOS last weekend after getting an RTX 5070 Ti and chose the open driver during the installation and everything is working perfectly, including resume from sleep