Cachyos is a gaming linux distro made in Germany🇩🇪
CachyOS — Blazingly Fast OS based on Arch Linux
🚀 CachyOS is a performance-optimized Arch Linux distribution with CPU-specific package builds, advanced kernel scheduling, and an effortless installation — delivering measurable speed gains without sacrificing simplicity.
Windows forced me to upgrade to 11 so I went for cachyos instead and I’m blown away by how great it is.
It’s great - but, to be fair, if you hated updates and restarts in Windows, you are not going to like cachyos :)
Huh? They’re a thousand times better in Cachy. Why wouldn’t anyone like them if they hated windows updates?
The argument is that “Oh, Windows updates once a month and you hate it? Well, CachyOS has several updates every day which makes it much worse”.
But the real issue with Windows updates is how distruptive, forced, slow, and broken they are. Microsoft gives you some freedom to choose when to update, but sooner or later it’ll say “Oh you’re doing something important? Nope, time to restart right now” if you delay it too long.
I actually update my CachyOS system far more often than I did Windows, but I am in full control of it. But the truth is, while I would recommend people on CachyOS or any rolling release distro to update at least every 1-2 weeks, you can easily go a couple of months without doing so.
Yeah I update once a month max, and it’s like 5 minutes… a windows update I did on my work computer the other day was an hour and a half of unusable computer.
Windows is just another level of horrible updates. CachyOS might have lots of updates, but you don’t have to do them and they’re also a hundred times faster AND you can use your computer while the update happens. It’s just nothing alike.
It’s the forced upgrade, boatware, and lack of lack of privacy that drove me to swap. I blindly picked hyprland as my DE because the preview looked cool without knowing what a tiling DE was, It took me 3 days but I finally got it configured and everything is so snappy and fast. I’m never looking back
Don’t really notice.
Just
sudo yay -Syuwhenever something doesn’t work anymore. 3-4 mins of unnoticeable background updating later, done. It’s not even a thing.I just type
yayand it updates.-Syuis for pacman.Had to lookup what yay was. Does pacman not do the job?
pacman is Arch Linux’s package manager. yay is a wrapper around pacman that uses the AUR.
Metal Gear Solid Ground Zero runs like a dream on it.
I was blown away by how much faster BG3 loads. The last time I had used Linux was when I was in college in 2008 and I kept running into incompatibility issues and after a while i swapped back to windows. I was half expecting a battle when I installed cachy but everything worked right out of the box (ignoring the fact that I picked hyprland without knowing wtf I was doing)
CachyOS is also great for gaming, but calling it “a gaming distro” is underselling it for people who do not care much for gaming. It’s a highly optimized general-use distro that is also great for gaming.
But by default it does not install any gaming-related packages, so calling it a gaming distro is wrong. It has a shortcut to install everything most people would want for gaming, and the team also tunes it in ways that benefits gaming, and they also have their own Proton fork called Proton-CachyOS that is in my opinion the best one. Right now it is still based on a relatively old Experimental version because the main dev behind it is taking a break, but it’s normally very up-to-date on everything including new features and fixes.
Plenty of people do not want the “bloat” that actual gaming distros include by default and CachyOS is the best of both worlds. Pretty clean by default, with easy access to gaming tools if you want that.
I’m using it for a few months now. Coming from Kubuntu, I noticed that everything seems much faster/more responsive.Love it. Its not a pure gaming distro though. It’s arch-based, but with easy install and configuration, you have access to the whole Arch repo.
And of course as a bonus I can now unironically say "I use arch by the way*
I am gatekeeping this from you (¬`‸´¬)
Started on Garuda, it was okay.
Went to Bazzite, made me mad constantly.
Now I am on CachyOS for ages and couldn’t be happier. I only dislike the daily 4726 updates.
How do you manage the updates? I do them once every two weeks, but even though I work in tech I have no desire to manually check each repo/kernel/update info. Last month or two there was an alert saying something among the lines of “we’re working on removing malware from the latest updates” and that made me wary. Still a better experience than running Windows, but I miss the flatpacks from other distros.
I do the updates when I feel like it, roughly once every couple days. I don’t check anything at all to be honest, because I use CachyOS on my private computer and I honestly do not care so much about getting malware. I know, probably not the answer you expected, I just learned to live with the risk. Besides that, I try to install flatpacks or via npm. pacman is just used for the things where no other option exists. AUR is a huge mess and will always be full of malware, so don’t ever use Arch on any important devices. This is why on my servers I have Debian 13. CachyOS has own repositories, but as far as I know they just mirror AUR and add/modify some build flags
What is the problem that prevents you from using as many flatpaks as you wish?
Welp, I guess I should’ve looked for it a little more, it does seem like you can you flatpaks with Arch/CachyOS! 🤦‍♂️
This was the reason to switch to OpenSuse Slowroll. I still get updates nearly everyday but not nearly as much. The big updates are bundled once a month. Love it so far.
Bonus: also a German distro.
OpenSuse is actually my personal preference, as I basically grew up with SLES. Will be my choice as soon as CachyOS starts to act funny
Oh, the 4726 updates whose failure I have to acknowledge one by one? Yes, I hated those when I was testing CachyOS a while ago. 🤬
cachyos:
hmm
bazzite is the best and easiest distro out there and getting better all the time with new tools to make it even easier to use
also you can pin versions of the OS at any time so if an update doesn’t work as well for you, you can boot the previous version any time you like
this is the one that made you mad constantly
lol
Yeah my way of using linux is just not suitable for immutable systems. While it is good for most people, and while I love the philosophy of having immutable systems, I ended up using rpmtree constantly for the most simple things. And honestly, the only thing missing for it to be a very usable working OS is something like Homebrew.
So yes. It made me mad. I’d rather have a bit more freedom in my terminal emulator.
I agree fully, same experience.
Its still weird to me how tribal some in the linux community are, when the whole reason there is such a range of distros is to provide options so people can run their own computers however they want.
Like, I hate gnome, but if other people like it then its great that it exists etc
It is weird, but also nice to see. We need the simple minded people. We need those that just want to have a working OS so that they can play a game or edit a document. That’s the beauty and curse of Linux. It will eventually make some people angry, because open source projects will come and go. Bazzite might be maintained now, but maybe not tomorrow. And the simple minded people don’t want to switch to something different. So I really hope the popularity is motivating current and future maintainers to make their userbase happy, even if I am not part of that one.
Worth noting: “simple people” is in no way meant as a derogatory term, I honestly even envy them.
I had this problem the first time using it, but once I learned about how to use homebrew with it (included by default now, by the way!) and distrobox with universal installer, I got a lot more comfortable with it!
Yeah I tried all that. While homebrew is awesome for macos, for linux you are missing a lot of packages. I used distrobox, too. The amount of extra steps needed to just have a binary running is just not justifiable for my type of work. While I was able to do everything with Bazzite, I felt super inefficient and slow.
Wait until they hear about BTRFS snapshots
Use the distro on a libreboot computer 🇬🇧 to visit peertube.wtf 🇩🇰
It’s awesome! Totally! Not just for gaming though. It’s a “normal” Linux too.
But a yr ago I tried it on a 2ND nvme and left winblows there for “when nothing works”. I am a massive nerd, with many self written tools and I have a very precise demand of my machine and how it behaves.
Never tried Linux desktops. Only ever uses it for servers.
Well, the windows drive is still there, but I never ever booted it again. Even made a VM of it for super-quick emergencies. Never started it.
Everything works the same or better. Most of my tools were basically fixing windows, don’t need them anymore. And except destiny2 I can game every game with basically zero problems.
And I game at least 5hrs a day. Sometimes a but of tinkering is helpful (rarely needed). Especially if you want to run a side-app like cheatengine or some map-tools or whatever else.
Long story short: cachy is awesome! Being a German adds a nice bonus flavour.
I switched to cachyos from bazzite. I am quite happy with it and it’s indeed quite fast.
Im on bazzite right now. Why did you switch and what are the differences you experiencing with cachyos?
I wanted to try dank linux and couldn’t layer it in bazzite, so I started digging and settled on cachyos. And I stayed. Which is ironic, because I then reinstalled it to kde lol. I still keep bazzite on dual boot, but I daily drive cachyos.
Is it good on Tablets?
GUI-wise, when you go to install Cachyos it'll ask you to select a Desktop environment. Gnome and KDE both can understand tablet/convertible/2-in-1 devices. I have a Thinkpad Yoga and Arch with Gnome at least is fine in tablet mode. Haven't tried KDE.
Actual driver support may depend on your specific device in terms of driver support. My Lenovo worked perfectly fine after install with nothing special and gets updates through fwupd, and I know that the Microsoft Surface tablets have a special kernel you've gotta install with some Surface specific stuff in it in order for everything to work.
KDE should have a far superior tablet mode on Wayland compared to Gnome
disagree. while KDE has a Tablet mode it still depends on the device. Gnome with a few Extensions is far superior as a tablet imo. „TouchUp“ and „Gjs OSK“ are needed. With those installed, gnome will feel like a tablet and be easier to navigate than KDE. Especially if you want to switch on the fly between touch navigation and mouse/keyboard
In my experience (Surface 7 using first the linux-surface kernel and then Nobara), KDE is way behind Gnome in touch support. OSK is way worse, general GUI design is not touch friendly, worse pen support… And that is before extensions like gjs oak for gnome.
Happy “costumer” here.
Been using boring old Arch for 4 years on a desktop. But I have a second hand 8 year old laptop that I didn’t want to spend to much time setting up and installed CachyOS on it. Everything just works.
After using it for a while I decided to add the CachyOS repo on my desktop, with instructions from the CachyOS wiki, and I’m now running the CachyOS kernel.
Not just a gaming distro. This works great for everyday use, as well. If you have an older system, it will breathe a little life back into it, as well.
i get fomo seeing linux distros being loved by people. unfortunately with intel macbook, i have little options for using linux.
On an Intel Macbook can use literally any x64 distro…
If you had an M series macbook, you’d be limited to Asahi and it’s sort of janky.
there’s a chance they have a newer intel “T2” macbook, they have a security chip that the boot process depends on and you need a special T2-patched kernel for it to boot properly. very limited choice in T2-patched distros, i think it’s just ubuntu and a couple others. feel free to correct me
Yeah. The same.
When i get a new mac i shall make my intel mint/cahyos/ubuntu for sure
Is your Linux distro running?