7 ms·

CachyOS June 2026 Release

142 points by simonpure 3mo ago

mrinterweb 3mo ago
I few months ago, I backed up my windows gaming machine and overwrote the partition with CachyOS. Haven't looked back. Gaming performance and compatibility has exceeded my expectations. Just a much better experience overall. I feel sorry anytime I see someone using Windows.
- bigmattystyles 3mo ago
  Same, games aside, it’s just so snappy. I knew windows was slow at a lot of things but I hadn’t quite realized how slow things as banal as locking/unlocking had become. The first week with cachyos was mind blowing on just that front.
- folkrav 3mo ago
  I feel sorry every time I'm stuck going back to Windows. And admittedly, the situation is not even comparable to how it was ~25 years ago when I first started playing around with Linux, most things I want to do with a computer just work on Linux nowadays. There are still such things that just are not there yet - but for most of them, it's not necessarily Linux's fault. If we limit the conversation to gaming specifically, one area where I don't see Linux taking over any time soon is competitive/esports oriented titles and their invasive ~rootkits~ anti-cheats. Another place I kind of have to live with Windows is simulation (in my case Elite: Dangerous and iRacing/Le Mans Ultimate) - the overlays and other third-party utilities either don't exist on Linux, or I couldn't get them to work and kind of abandoned the idea. Audio production is also kind of a no-go. The DAWs and hardware support are absolutely getting there - Bitwig studio is apparently very good for something Ableton-like, and my DAW of choice, Reaper, has native Linux support. But the plugins and virtual instruments for the most part just don't exist. Some work through a Wine bridge, if you're lucky. However, if you're not too deep in a niche with very specific pieces of software, or don't care about esports offerings, there isn't much tying one to Windows nowadays.
  - JasonSage 3mo ago
    I think the situation with anti-cheat on Linux is changing. Studios are putting resources into anti-cheat that will work on Linux. If I'm being a bit cynical, I could say this is "just" because of Steam Deck and Steam Machine, but I think the number of potential players switching to Linux right now outside of the Steam ecosystem is starting to be worth considering.
    - therein 3mo ago
      The only way they could even consider making it work would involve blessing certain kernel builds, and their integrity would need to be verified. If I am able to swap out the kernel, anti-cheat cannot be effective.
      - Bender 3mo ago
        Ubisoft added Easy Anti-Cheat support for Linux and Valve's Proton compatibility layer. I play Division 2 and it runs just fine. More of them are being added by the AAA studios. Missing is Vanguard / Riot Anti-Cheat, no idea when that will get added. Thus far games have not tried to dork with my kernel.
        therein 3mo ago
        EAC has supported Linux for a while now as far as I remember. The problem is, it is up to the game developers to enable support in their config for that or not, and most of them are choosing not to especially for games where any weakness would be abused like Rust. Someone had posted a proof of concept where they ported the Linux EAC to Windows, which allowed them to bypass checks that would be performed on a Windows machine.
  - gausswho 3mo ago
    A balanced take. You name several exceptions that don't work seamlessly on Linux. Recognizing that, I'll note: - Bitwig 5.x (haven't tried the latest 6.x) is working really nicely for me now across several NixOS machines (I'm using BitwigBox so that yabridge smoothes out VST integration). - Le Mans Ultimate is working for me now. It would hang on loading a track until a month or two ago (GE Proton recommended).
- xutopia 3mo ago
  Wait... what's gaming like? Can you describe it for someone who only ever could play Unreal Tournament back in the day on Linux? What games are available? Do you use emulators or stuff like Wine?
  - dminik 3mo ago
    Wine has evolved a lot, but there's an entire community dedicated to improving games specifically building Proton, essentially a Wine fork focused on games, including big contributions from Valve. This has made many old and modern games playable without issues. On Steam or Heroic Launcher, running a game has mostly become as simple clicking install and later play. That being said, it's not all peachy. There's not really been much progress on native Linux gaming outside of Flatpak/Steam Linux runtime. Many native games run worse or with issues. And Proton/Wine isn't perfect. Many games need tweaks or may not work without glitches. And games with anticheat don't work more often than they do, on purpose. Still, depending on what games you play and hardware you own it has become entirely possible to ditch Windows and not suffer for it.
  - kridsdale1 3mo ago
    In the last few years, Valve has made incredible progress with their equivalent set of API wrappers to what Wine does. Apparently (not experienced first hand) it’s like 97% of the way there, now.
  - sshagent 3mo ago
    if you have a steam account, and you open it on Linux most of your games will be present to be played. Most of them will just work. Those that don't you can look up details on protondb.com. as mentioned above if you play any competitive games that come with anti-cheat features, then you won't be able to join in the fun. So if you don't care about those games, you'll be fine.
    - frantathefranta 3mo ago
      > if you play any competitive games that come with anti-cheat features, then you won't be able to join in the fun. I'd say it's a majority of games that won't work if they require anti-cheat, but some will.
- pndy 3mo ago
  It's over a year for me with CachyOS now after endless issues with Manjaro after bigger updates, and after Mint getting hiccups-freezes randomly during operation. And it's also a return to KDE for me, after many years with Xfce and Gnome. The whole environment feels more stable and mature - tho, I miss title bar window shading that's not present under Wayland.
whalesalad 3mo ago
TIL you can run CachyOS kernels on Fedora: https://github.com/CachyOS/copr-linux-cachyos https://github.com/CachyOS/copr-linux-cachyos
- Sulfiore 3mo ago
  [dead]
cowmix 3mo ago
Running CachyOS has overall been great for me in the past year but the AUR supply chain attack (or whatever it was exactly) was a little unnerving.
- cr125rider 3mo ago
  How many packages are you using from AUR vs the official repos though? The official repos have almost everything I need
- jjice 3mo ago
  The AUR is very user managed and orphaned packages can be picked up I guess to continue maintenance. Obviously, this can lead to some issues. It's one of the tradeoffs for a heavily user supplied repository of packages. You get a lot of good stuff quickly, but I personally will stick with Debian. https://cybersecuritynews.com/arch-linux-aur-packages-compromised/ https://cybersecuritynews.com/arch-linux-aur-packages-compro...
- keeganj 3mo ago
  Yeah I really enjoyed Cachy but the model of using the AUR to install third party applications just seems broken. I don't want to have to trust some random install script maintainer in addition to the 3p app developer. And sadly I don't have the time and attention to spare to review the AUR scripts of apps every time I update. I switched to Kubuntu to keep KDE (which I really found I enjoyed from Cachy) while using a more stable and familiar ubuntu base. It's not one of the "gaming" distros but I haven't noticed any major drawbacks with the games I play.
  - Bender 3mo ago
    I have not needed AUR support for games. The only time I was tempted to install an AUR package was on my laptop for Zoom chat. My gaming machine will never see any of those packages.
  - docsaintly 3mo ago
    I also just moved from Linux Mint to Cachy and haven't had to use a single AUR package (yet). I use some relatively obscure programs too.
WD-42 3mo ago
Another era, another Arch based distribution. This one seems particularly attractive to Windows refugees especially gamers. The default desktop looks very much like Windows: even the wallpaper is one of those blue gradient 3d wave shapes. I tried it in a VM and I don't think I can deal with the jank. The default install comes with 3 different GUIs for installing software, all of them confusing and inconsistent. Apps with context menus that go 5 levels deep everywhere, confusing layouts, sometimes icons, sometimes not. I guess if you are coming from Windows this is the status quo so that's fine. Not for me but I'm glad this new wave of Linux users are finding success with it.
- whalesalad 3mo ago
  That's one way to look at it. At the end of the day though its just arch linux with a jetpack. So you can use and treat it like any other arch distro.
- tapoxi 3mo ago
  My newbie recommendation is https://bazzite.gg/ https://bazzite.gg/. It ships a very simple GUI package manager and the system silently updates in the background. It's also atomic, so rollbacks are easy and destroying the system is hard. It's not a separate distro per-se but a layer atop Fedora Silverblue/Kinoite (you can re-base to/from them without a reinstall). It's been my daily driver for ~2 years. The Cachy/Arch approach is more flexible, I'm fine with atomic since containerized workflows are my preference.
- LargoLasskhyfv 3mo ago
  Ahem! Even old unix-users can find success with it, by simply not using/deinstalling the yank and relying on pacman and/or yay in the terminal. Shouldn't be that difficult for someone from another era? The only things left installed are cachy-os-hello, and the kernel-manager. They are useful, and don't break things. Though one could do, without them too.
lenova 3mo ago
Former Windows 11 user here. Microsoft operating systems have been my primary desktop since DOS 6.0, but the embedding of advertisements in Win11 drove to me finally try out Linux distributions, and CachyOS was the only one that stuck for me in terms of familiarity and performance. It's been my daily driver for 1.5 years now, and I've been extremely grateful for it.
im_down_w_otp 3mo ago
I’m annoyed that games I play use BattleEye and the use of BattleEye prevents me from being able to switch over to CachyOS on our family gaming PC+TV setup in the play room. Doubly so because BattleEye appears to do absolutely nothing to prevent PC lobbies from becoming rife with cheaters anyway, so I don’t really get the point of it.
- folkrav 3mo ago
  Agreed, anti-cheat and DRM are the last things truly preventing Linux to be a true one to one replacement for gaming in most people's cases.
- s09dfhks 3mo ago
  This has been my experience as well. My main game right now is escape from Tarkov and battle eye wont let me into official servers. I’m able to manage my stash and buy from traders just fine. For other steam titles, popOS and proton were just fine
rythmshifter 3mo ago
I’ve been in love with cachy since I switched from windows but this past weekend has been extremely trying after experiencing metadata exhaustion probably due to the snapshots filling up my home drive. Learned a few things and I realize btrfs is not specific to cachy, but this was definitely the hardest thing I’ve worked through since switching from windows.
- wmedrano 3mo ago
  I'm surprised this is the default. How good are the snapshot management tools?
- sh0gg0the 3mo ago
  I almost ran into the metadata exhaustion problem myself. Thankfully I noticed before in btrfs assistant that the remaining metadata space is filling up dangerously fast. Before that I thought btrfs is as easy as ext4. Fire and forget, no adjustments necessary. Now I know that you have to limit the number of snapshots in some way or another. Wish there would be a more noob-friendly default configuration. Or two configuration options to choose from when installing: simplified, expert.
lordleft 3mo ago
I switched to Bazzite from CachyOS and while I really appreciate how accessible it is, the immutability of the core OS doesn't do enough to scratch my Linux tinkering fix. So I'll probably install this in a few days.
- thom 3mo ago
  I loved Bazzite for hardware compatibility out of the box but the necessity of flatpak made it enormously inconvenient as a general machine. CachyOS sounds worth checking out if I still want to game but also occasionally do real work.
- koolala 3mo ago
  I'm on SteamOS and like the immutability for tinkering with Distrobox. Lets me tinker worry free.
- speed_spread 3mo ago
  Ha, so true. Bazzite cured my tinkering obsession. I now have no choice but to get shit done or to... play actual video games.
goodburb 3mo ago
It's not just a gaming and performance distro, it includes QoL fixes on modern hardware. On my Lenovo laptop, fixes that would take over a day to enable and patch on most distros: - Wake from sleep - Nvidia GSP firmware workarounds and correct version OOTB (proprietary) - Mouse lag/jitter - External display hotplug - DDC/CI over type-c - Embedded controller power profiles from taskbar with correct TDP limits for CPU/GPU - Battery charge limiter support right from KDE settings - Working `switcherooctl` in hybrid graphics mode on AMD - Firefox with video decode acceleration (YouTube) on almost all GPU models Another gaming feature that is otherwise useful in workstations is the external scheduler support. Currently using BPFland which makes multitasking as responsive as idle while compiling Yocto/Chromium in the background. Windows, Mac (mini M1), and kernel built-in scheduler Linux jank and become almost unusable (Ryzen 5800H).
- rudedogg 3mo ago
  I tried CachyOS and Niri this weekend, and was pleasantly surprised hibernate/suspend actually worked with no customizations on my Desktop. I’ve tried like 5 other distros and usually when it goes into sleep/hibernate the monitor never wakes up so I have to force shutdown using the power button. I’m going to install this on an older machine and see how it goes. So far it’s been great!
- joe_mamba 3mo ago
  Question to the Arch Linux veterans out there. Is CachyOS better than EndeavourOS or vice versa? From what I read Cachy comes with a lot of proprietary repos and gaming stuff already installed along with a custom kernel tuned for gaming performance which makes it more bloated and less stable than vanilla Arch distros like Endeavour which just ships with the bare minimum quality of life tweaks over installing arch from scratch. What's your experience and what would you recommend for someone switching their laptop from Windows mostly for dev work but who doesn't play too many games. I see arch is the most popular community favorite now, but I was thinking maybe a Fedora based distro would be a better fire-and-forget daily driver after the Arch AUR malware attack conundrum, as I don't have the time to deal with stuff like that on a daily basis.
ElijahLynn 3mo ago
TIL about Shelly. https://github.com/Seafoam-Labs/Shelly-ALPM https://github.com/Seafoam-Labs/Shelly-ALPM In the release notes they said they removed Paru and are recommending Shelly instead. I like that I can manage Flatpack and AUR! Gonna give this a try!!
- Caboose8685 3mo ago
  Shelly also has static analysis for AUR packages that looks for all the common, shifty ways a pkgbuild might try to give you something bad.
LargoLasskhyfv 3mo ago
Two years. Same install. No problems at all. Fully succumbed to plasmonic thrall. Satisfied by being speedy. So boring. Almost snoring. (must not distrohop! must not distrohop! must not distrohop!)
JaceComix 3mo ago
I switched to Cachy in late February this year. First day was a bit rough, first week was still a little rough, but it's been pretty smooth since then, even when learning how to fix things and trying new software. I'm using Niri and Noctalia as my desktop setup, and it's been different than my Windows experience, but it feels fun and cool to just use a computer in a new way.
nickjj 3mo ago
If anyone is looking for a niri based opinionated set of configuration on top of CachyOS (or vanilla Arch) I put together: https://github.com/nickjj/dotfriedrice https://github.com/nickjj/dotfriedrice The goal is after installing the official ISO, you can get a developer focused desktop environment up and running in ~10 minutes with 1 command. It's quite configurable so you can change around anything you want ahead of time or after you install it. I use it with vanilla Arch but I know of quite a few people using it successfully with CachyOS. For CachyOS, the only manual adjustment you have to make before running the repo's install script is uninstalling `jack` since it conflicts with `pipewire-jack`. I could easily roll this into the script but so far no one has complained loud enough to automate this. I also wonder if CachyOS will eventually drop that AUR dependency in its official ISO. If it matters to you, 99.9% of the code is hand coded. The only time I use AI is when I'm 100% stone walled on something and it's a last resort move. Even then it's copy / pasting small snippets into web based AIs where I fully review and refactor its output so you could say the 0.1% is still human vetted. Moving away from Windows last year was so worth it. I've been wanting to switch since 2017 but always ran into hardware issues. The same hardware I had back then works beautifully with Arch today.
everdrive 3mo ago
Does anyone have any idea why Cachy is so hard on I/O? If I run it with disk encryption my entire system hangs intermittently when downloading large files. (eg steam updates, etc.) Even testing without disk encryption, I will get brief hangs when writing large files. Is Cachy just assuming that everyone's got a high-quality NVME? Is there something about newer OSes that cause a CPU bottleneck for large disk writes?
- Bender 3mo ago
  Which filesystem do you have on top of the encryption? If it's the default btrfs that might be one factor. Have you tested using ext4? What is the make/model of the physical storage?
  - everdrive 3mo ago
    I tried it with BTRFS and had really terrible performance. I ended up trying ext4 and it was not appreciably better. I don't know the make and model of my SSD, but I'm sure it's a not-very-impressive SSD. Unencrypted with EXT4 was the only thing that offered good performance. Mind you, I'm really happy with CachyOS, but I don't really understand why this is a problem and it doesn't seem to be an issue others are having.
    - Bender 3mo ago
      Maybe this is something you have already checked but first get your device with blkid or whatever you prefer, then sudo smartctl -x /dev/nvmeXXXX Look at the temperature when you are pushing the IO really hard. Some devices will throttle when hot. Is this on a laptop? Do you have any indoor pets that have fur? Yaks shed a lot this time of year.
      - everdrive 3mo ago
        I'll check that out. In my case I had moved straight from Fedora and was using LUKS + EXT4 -- with no issues whatsoever. Further, rather than losing some write speed, my system will actually hang quite aggressively. It seems to be CPU-related, but perhaps it's disk reads that are hanging? (or maybe both) My PC case is also not extra-hairy :)
derac 3mo ago
I switched from Windows a couple of months ago. I am loving it. I cloned my favorite Windows window management solution, WindowGrid to KDE, https://store.kde.org/p/2363952/ https://store.kde.org/p/2363952/ I haven't found anything on Linux like it.
5G_activated 3mo ago
I wouldn't recommend CachyOS personally. If you wish for a distribution with a traditional read and write filesystem and new features and package versions I'd recommend Fedora, which I always end up going back to. Personal preference, but I like my software to have as little patching or customisation done by my distribution as possible, and to be able to use it as upstream intended. This is a longstanding benefit of Arch Linux, but CachyOS goes beyond this to kit out a default install with garish themes and shell configurations to the point that the default user's login shell gets set to /bin/fish. Some fume was had because I really do not believe that Shelly is a good choice for the primary system package manager. It's written in C# and compiled with .NET AOT and I just cannot shake the sense that it is an incorrect choice for a core system program. The GUI needs a little bit of polish, but the command line user interface is terrible; there is a DNF/APT style subcommand interface which has no search subcommand, and other features are split into a Source->Action->modifier "shortcode", but that is very different from Pacman. The action letters differ between sources; for example to search repositories you use "-SQa" but to search the AUR it is "-AS", and I believe that it is like this for the sole reason that no thought has been put into it. I'd also suggest that the authors have little experience with Unix and so it isn't made with the same kind of attitude. There are other things like table wrapping at 80 columns making the output unreadable and lack of a package download counter. When I brought it up to the "community" I was relentlessly flamed for not being entirely positive about this change to the distribution. I'm of the opinion that the maintainer had her feelings hurt because I criticised her project, and lied about the issues I had raised. A pile on ensued. The final straw for me that made me dump another 24 hours in moving distribution again is that the attitude of the CachyOS project can be summed up as "script kiddie" and the "community" spaces are populated by and large by children. Despite having the same sort of audience Bazzite has a much more pleasant community. Fedora seems to avoid all of this kind of nonsense, I suppose by dint of being run by professionals, and avoiding Discord.
- LargoLasskhyfv 3mo ago
  There is no single 'upstream'. Furthermore I'd give a shit about intent. That's just their opinion. The garish themes can be ignored, deinstalled, avoided by choosing an appropriate environment. The fuming about Shelly? Yah, hrrm. Had some of that, too. Solution? yay -Rd shelly You are not forced to use it, and it can be deinstalled. The moment it's not optional anymore, I'm gone. Don't use the community spaces, if you can't handle spoiled brats chasing the latest fads. Bazzite is bloat (conceptually). Fedora no good. RedHat neither. Always felt sluggish to me. Haven't tried since years though, but don't intend to either. Not missing anything from 'there'. There is a TUI-client called concord for the terminal, where you can disable all the gifs, movies, memes, cat pics, avatars, whatever. That's making it much more bearable :-)
virajk_31 3mo ago
I hv been out of distro hopping for years now, apart from pkg build, what makes Cachy os standout? I don't really care about kernel optimizations if we don't have any significant benchmarks.

142 points by simonpure 3mo ago

I few months ago, I backed up my windows gaming machine and overwrote the partition with CachyOS. Haven't looked back. Gaming performance and compatibility has exceeded my expectations. Just a much better experience overall. I feel sorry anytime I see someone using Windows.

bigmattystyles 3mo ago
Same, games aside, it’s just so snappy. I knew windows was slow at a lot of things but I hadn’t quite realized how slow things as banal as locking/unlocking had become. The first week with cachyos was mind blowing on just that front.
folkrav 3mo ago
I feel sorry every time I'm stuck going back to Windows. And admittedly, the situation is not even comparable to how it was ~25 years ago when I first started playing around with Linux, most things I want to do with a computer just work on Linux nowadays. There are still such things that just are not there yet - but for most of them, it's not necessarily Linux's fault. If we limit the conversation to gaming specifically, one area where I don't see Linux taking over any time soon is competitive/esports oriented titles and their invasive ~rootkits~ anti-cheats. Another place I kind of have to live with Windows is simulation (in my case Elite: Dangerous and iRacing/Le Mans Ultimate) - the overlays and other third-party utilities either don't exist on Linux, or I couldn't get them to work and kind of abandoned the idea. Audio production is also kind of a no-go. The DAWs and hardware support are absolutely getting there - Bitwig studio is apparently very good for something Ableton-like, and my DAW of choice, Reaper, has native Linux support. But the plugins and virtual instruments for the most part just don't exist. Some work through a Wine bridge, if you're lucky. However, if you're not too deep in a niche with very specific pieces of software, or don't care about esports offerings, there isn't much tying one to Windows nowadays.
- JasonSage 3mo ago
  I think the situation with anti-cheat on Linux is changing. Studios are putting resources into anti-cheat that will work on Linux. If I'm being a bit cynical, I could say this is "just" because of Steam Deck and Steam Machine, but I think the number of potential players switching to Linux right now outside of the Steam ecosystem is starting to be worth considering.
  - therein 3mo ago
    The only way they could even consider making it work would involve blessing certain kernel builds, and their integrity would need to be verified. If I am able to swap out the kernel, anti-cheat cannot be effective.
    - Bender 3mo ago
      Ubisoft added Easy Anti-Cheat support for Linux and Valve's Proton compatibility layer. I play Division 2 and it runs just fine. More of them are being added by the AAA studios. Missing is Vanguard / Riot Anti-Cheat, no idea when that will get added. Thus far games have not tried to dork with my kernel.
      - therein 3mo ago
        EAC has supported Linux for a while now as far as I remember. The problem is, it is up to the game developers to enable support in their config for that or not, and most of them are choosing not to especially for games where any weakness would be abused like Rust. Someone had posted a proof of concept where they ported the Linux EAC to Windows, which allowed them to bypass checks that would be performed on a Windows machine.
- gausswho 3mo ago
  A balanced take. You name several exceptions that don't work seamlessly on Linux. Recognizing that, I'll note: - Bitwig 5.x (haven't tried the latest 6.x) is working really nicely for me now across several NixOS machines (I'm using BitwigBox so that yabridge smoothes out VST integration). - Le Mans Ultimate is working for me now. It would hang on loading a track until a month or two ago (GE Proton recommended).
xutopia 3mo ago
Wait... what's gaming like? Can you describe it for someone who only ever could play Unreal Tournament back in the day on Linux? What games are available? Do you use emulators or stuff like Wine?
- dminik 3mo ago
  Wine has evolved a lot, but there's an entire community dedicated to improving games specifically building Proton, essentially a Wine fork focused on games, including big contributions from Valve. This has made many old and modern games playable without issues. On Steam or Heroic Launcher, running a game has mostly become as simple clicking install and later play. That being said, it's not all peachy. There's not really been much progress on native Linux gaming outside of Flatpak/Steam Linux runtime. Many native games run worse or with issues. And Proton/Wine isn't perfect. Many games need tweaks or may not work without glitches. And games with anticheat don't work more often than they do, on purpose. Still, depending on what games you play and hardware you own it has become entirely possible to ditch Windows and not suffer for it.
- kridsdale1 3mo ago
  In the last few years, Valve has made incredible progress with their equivalent set of API wrappers to what Wine does. Apparently (not experienced first hand) it’s like 97% of the way there, now.
- sshagent 3mo ago
  if you have a steam account, and you open it on Linux most of your games will be present to be played. Most of them will just work. Those that don't you can look up details on protondb.com. as mentioned above if you play any competitive games that come with anti-cheat features, then you won't be able to join in the fun. So if you don't care about those games, you'll be fine.
  - frantathefranta 3mo ago
    > if you play any competitive games that come with anti-cheat features, then you won't be able to join in the fun. I'd say it's a majority of games that won't work if they require anti-cheat, but some will.
pndy 3mo ago
It's over a year for me with CachyOS now after endless issues with Manjaro after bigger updates, and after Mint getting hiccups-freezes randomly during operation. And it's also a return to KDE for me, after many years with Xfce and Gnome. The whole environment feels more stable and mature - tho, I miss title bar window shading that's not present under Wayland.

whalesalad 3mo ago

TIL you can run CachyOS kernels on Fedora: https://github.com/CachyOS/copr-linux-cachyos https://github.com/CachyOS/copr-linux-cachyos

Sulfiore 3mo ago
[dead]

cowmix 3mo ago

Running CachyOS has overall been great for me in the past year but the AUR supply chain attack (or whatever it was exactly) was a little unnerving.

cr125rider 3mo ago
How many packages are you using from AUR vs the official repos though? The official repos have almost everything I need
jjice 3mo ago
The AUR is very user managed and orphaned packages can be picked up I guess to continue maintenance. Obviously, this can lead to some issues. It's one of the tradeoffs for a heavily user supplied repository of packages. You get a lot of good stuff quickly, but I personally will stick with Debian. https://cybersecuritynews.com/arch-linux-aur-packages-compromised/ https://cybersecuritynews.com/arch-linux-aur-packages-compro...
keeganj 3mo ago
Yeah I really enjoyed Cachy but the model of using the AUR to install third party applications just seems broken. I don't want to have to trust some random install script maintainer in addition to the 3p app developer. And sadly I don't have the time and attention to spare to review the AUR scripts of apps every time I update. I switched to Kubuntu to keep KDE (which I really found I enjoyed from Cachy) while using a more stable and familiar ubuntu base. It's not one of the "gaming" distros but I haven't noticed any major drawbacks with the games I play.
- Bender 3mo ago
  I have not needed AUR support for games. The only time I was tempted to install an AUR package was on my laptop for Zoom chat. My gaming machine will never see any of those packages.
- docsaintly 3mo ago
  I also just moved from Linux Mint to Cachy and haven't had to use a single AUR package (yet). I use some relatively obscure programs too.

WD-42 3mo ago

Another era, another Arch based distribution. This one seems particularly attractive to Windows refugees especially gamers. The default desktop looks very much like Windows: even the wallpaper is one of those blue gradient 3d wave shapes. I tried it in a VM and I don't think I can deal with the jank. The default install comes with 3 different GUIs for installing software, all of them confusing and inconsistent. Apps with context menus that go 5 levels deep everywhere, confusing layouts, sometimes icons, sometimes not. I guess if you are coming from Windows this is the status quo so that's fine. Not for me but I'm glad this new wave of Linux users are finding success with it.

whalesalad 3mo ago
That's one way to look at it. At the end of the day though its just arch linux with a jetpack. So you can use and treat it like any other arch distro.
tapoxi 3mo ago
My newbie recommendation is https://bazzite.gg/ https://bazzite.gg/. It ships a very simple GUI package manager and the system silently updates in the background. It's also atomic, so rollbacks are easy and destroying the system is hard. It's not a separate distro per-se but a layer atop Fedora Silverblue/Kinoite (you can re-base to/from them without a reinstall). It's been my daily driver for ~2 years. The Cachy/Arch approach is more flexible, I'm fine with atomic since containerized workflows are my preference.
LargoLasskhyfv 3mo ago
Ahem! Even old unix-users can find success with it, by simply not using/deinstalling the yank and relying on pacman and/or yay in the terminal. Shouldn't be that difficult for someone from another era? The only things left installed are cachy-os-hello, and the kernel-manager. They are useful, and don't break things. Though one could do, without them too.

lenova 3mo ago

Former Windows 11 user here. Microsoft operating systems have been my primary desktop since DOS 6.0, but the embedding of advertisements in Win11 drove to me finally try out Linux distributions, and CachyOS was the only one that stuck for me in terms of familiarity and performance. It's been my daily driver for 1.5 years now, and I've been extremely grateful for it.

im_down_w_otp 3mo ago

I’m annoyed that games I play use BattleEye and the use of BattleEye prevents me from being able to switch over to CachyOS on our family gaming PC+TV setup in the play room. Doubly so because BattleEye appears to do absolutely nothing to prevent PC lobbies from becoming rife with cheaters anyway, so I don’t really get the point of it.

folkrav 3mo ago
Agreed, anti-cheat and DRM are the last things truly preventing Linux to be a true one to one replacement for gaming in most people's cases.
s09dfhks 3mo ago
This has been my experience as well. My main game right now is escape from Tarkov and battle eye wont let me into official servers. I’m able to manage my stash and buy from traders just fine. For other steam titles, popOS and proton were just fine

rythmshifter 3mo ago

I’ve been in love with cachy since I switched from windows but this past weekend has been extremely trying after experiencing metadata exhaustion probably due to the snapshots filling up my home drive. Learned a few things and I realize btrfs is not specific to cachy, but this was definitely the hardest thing I’ve worked through since switching from windows.

wmedrano 3mo ago
I'm surprised this is the default. How good are the snapshot management tools?
sh0gg0the 3mo ago
I almost ran into the metadata exhaustion problem myself. Thankfully I noticed before in btrfs assistant that the remaining metadata space is filling up dangerously fast. Before that I thought btrfs is as easy as ext4. Fire and forget, no adjustments necessary. Now I know that you have to limit the number of snapshots in some way or another. Wish there would be a more noob-friendly default configuration. Or two configuration options to choose from when installing: simplified, expert.

lordleft 3mo ago

I switched to Bazzite from CachyOS and while I really appreciate how accessible it is, the immutability of the core OS doesn't do enough to scratch my Linux tinkering fix. So I'll probably install this in a few days.

thom 3mo ago
I loved Bazzite for hardware compatibility out of the box but the necessity of flatpak made it enormously inconvenient as a general machine. CachyOS sounds worth checking out if I still want to game but also occasionally do real work.
koolala 3mo ago
I'm on SteamOS and like the immutability for tinkering with Distrobox. Lets me tinker worry free.
speed_spread 3mo ago
Ha, so true. Bazzite cured my tinkering obsession. I now have no choice but to get shit done or to... play actual video games.

goodburb 3mo ago

It's not just a gaming and performance distro, it includes QoL fixes on modern hardware. On my Lenovo laptop, fixes that would take over a day to enable and patch on most distros: - Wake from sleep - Nvidia GSP firmware workarounds and correct version OOTB (proprietary) - Mouse lag/jitter - External display hotplug - DDC/CI over type-c - Embedded controller power profiles from taskbar with correct TDP limits for CPU/GPU - Battery charge limiter support right from KDE settings - Working `switcherooctl` in hybrid graphics mode on AMD - Firefox with video decode acceleration (YouTube) on almost all GPU models Another gaming feature that is otherwise useful in workstations is the external scheduler support. Currently using BPFland which makes multitasking as responsive as idle while compiling Yocto/Chromium in the background. Windows, Mac (mini M1), and kernel built-in scheduler Linux jank and become almost unusable (Ryzen 5800H).

rudedogg 3mo ago
I tried CachyOS and Niri this weekend, and was pleasantly surprised hibernate/suspend actually worked with no customizations on my Desktop. I’ve tried like 5 other distros and usually when it goes into sleep/hibernate the monitor never wakes up so I have to force shutdown using the power button. I’m going to install this on an older machine and see how it goes. So far it’s been great!
joe_mamba 3mo ago
Question to the Arch Linux veterans out there. Is CachyOS better than EndeavourOS or vice versa? From what I read Cachy comes with a lot of proprietary repos and gaming stuff already installed along with a custom kernel tuned for gaming performance which makes it more bloated and less stable than vanilla Arch distros like Endeavour which just ships with the bare minimum quality of life tweaks over installing arch from scratch. What's your experience and what would you recommend for someone switching their laptop from Windows mostly for dev work but who doesn't play too many games. I see arch is the most popular community favorite now, but I was thinking maybe a Fedora based distro would be a better fire-and-forget daily driver after the Arch AUR malware attack conundrum, as I don't have the time to deal with stuff like that on a daily basis.

ElijahLynn 3mo ago

TIL about Shelly. https://github.com/Seafoam-Labs/Shelly-ALPM https://github.com/Seafoam-Labs/Shelly-ALPM In the release notes they said they removed Paru and are recommending Shelly instead. I like that I can manage Flatpack and AUR! Gonna give this a try!!

Caboose8685 3mo ago
Shelly also has static analysis for AUR packages that looks for all the common, shifty ways a pkgbuild might try to give you something bad.

LargoLasskhyfv 3mo ago

Two years. Same install. No problems at all. Fully succumbed to plasmonic thrall. Satisfied by being speedy. So boring. Almost snoring. (must not distrohop! must not distrohop! must not distrohop!)

JaceComix 3mo ago

I switched to Cachy in late February this year. First day was a bit rough, first week was still a little rough, but it's been pretty smooth since then, even when learning how to fix things and trying new software. I'm using Niri and Noctalia as my desktop setup, and it's been different than my Windows experience, but it feels fun and cool to just use a computer in a new way.

nickjj 3mo ago

If anyone is looking for a niri based opinionated set of configuration on top of CachyOS (or vanilla Arch) I put together: https://github.com/nickjj/dotfriedrice https://github.com/nickjj/dotfriedrice The goal is after installing the official ISO, you can get a developer focused desktop environment up and running in ~10 minutes with 1 command. It's quite configurable so you can change around anything you want ahead of time or after you install it. I use it with vanilla Arch but I know of quite a few people using it successfully with CachyOS. For CachyOS, the only manual adjustment you have to make before running the repo's install script is uninstalling `jack` since it conflicts with `pipewire-jack`. I could easily roll this into the script but so far no one has complained loud enough to automate this. I also wonder if CachyOS will eventually drop that AUR dependency in its official ISO. If it matters to you, 99.9% of the code is hand coded. The only time I use AI is when I'm 100% stone walled on something and it's a last resort move. Even then it's copy / pasting small snippets into web based AIs where I fully review and refactor its output so you could say the 0.1% is still human vetted. Moving away from Windows last year was so worth it. I've been wanting to switch since 2017 but always ran into hardware issues. The same hardware I had back then works beautifully with Arch today.

everdrive 3mo ago

Does anyone have any idea why Cachy is so hard on I/O? If I run it with disk encryption my entire system hangs intermittently when downloading large files. (eg steam updates, etc.) Even testing without disk encryption, I will get brief hangs when writing large files. Is Cachy just assuming that everyone's got a high-quality NVME? Is there something about newer OSes that cause a CPU bottleneck for large disk writes?

Bender 3mo ago
Which filesystem do you have on top of the encryption? If it's the default btrfs that might be one factor. Have you tested using ext4? What is the make/model of the physical storage?
- everdrive 3mo ago
  I tried it with BTRFS and had really terrible performance. I ended up trying ext4 and it was not appreciably better. I don't know the make and model of my SSD, but I'm sure it's a not-very-impressive SSD. Unencrypted with EXT4 was the only thing that offered good performance. Mind you, I'm really happy with CachyOS, but I don't really understand why this is a problem and it doesn't seem to be an issue others are having.
  - Bender 3mo ago
    Maybe this is something you have already checked but first get your device with blkid or whatever you prefer, then sudo smartctl -x /dev/nvmeXXXX Look at the temperature when you are pushing the IO really hard. Some devices will throttle when hot. Is this on a laptop? Do you have any indoor pets that have fur? Yaks shed a lot this time of year.
    - everdrive 3mo ago
      I'll check that out. In my case I had moved straight from Fedora and was using LUKS + EXT4 -- with no issues whatsoever. Further, rather than losing some write speed, my system will actually hang quite aggressively. It seems to be CPU-related, but perhaps it's disk reads that are hanging? (or maybe both) My PC case is also not extra-hairy :)

derac 3mo ago

I switched from Windows a couple of months ago. I am loving it. I cloned my favorite Windows window management solution, WindowGrid to KDE, https://store.kde.org/p/2363952/ https://store.kde.org/p/2363952/ I haven't found anything on Linux like it.

5G_activated 3mo ago

I wouldn't recommend CachyOS personally. If you wish for a distribution with a traditional read and write filesystem and new features and package versions I'd recommend Fedora, which I always end up going back to. Personal preference, but I like my software to have as little patching or customisation done by my distribution as possible, and to be able to use it as upstream intended. This is a longstanding benefit of Arch Linux, but CachyOS goes beyond this to kit out a default install with garish themes and shell configurations to the point that the default user's login shell gets set to /bin/fish. Some fume was had because I really do not believe that Shelly is a good choice for the primary system package manager. It's written in C# and compiled with .NET AOT and I just cannot shake the sense that it is an incorrect choice for a core system program. The GUI needs a little bit of polish, but the command line user interface is terrible; there is a DNF/APT style subcommand interface which has no search subcommand, and other features are split into a Source->Action->modifier "shortcode", but that is very different from Pacman. The action letters differ between sources; for example to search repositories you use "-SQa" but to search the AUR it is "-AS", and I believe that it is like this for the sole reason that no thought has been put into it. I'd also suggest that the authors have little experience with Unix and so it isn't made with the same kind of attitude. There are other things like table wrapping at 80 columns making the output unreadable and lack of a package download counter. When I brought it up to the "community" I was relentlessly flamed for not being entirely positive about this change to the distribution. I'm of the opinion that the maintainer had her feelings hurt because I criticised her project, and lied about the issues I had raised. A pile on ensued. The final straw for me that made me dump another 24 hours in moving distribution again is that the attitude of the CachyOS project can be summed up as "script kiddie" and the "community" spaces are populated by and large by children. Despite having the same sort of audience Bazzite has a much more pleasant community. Fedora seems to avoid all of this kind of nonsense, I suppose by dint of being run by professionals, and avoiding Discord.

LargoLasskhyfv 3mo ago
There is no single 'upstream'. Furthermore I'd give a shit about intent. That's just their opinion. The garish themes can be ignored, deinstalled, avoided by choosing an appropriate environment. The fuming about Shelly? Yah, hrrm. Had some of that, too. Solution? yay -Rd shelly You are not forced to use it, and it can be deinstalled. The moment it's not optional anymore, I'm gone. Don't use the community spaces, if you can't handle spoiled brats chasing the latest fads. Bazzite is bloat (conceptually). Fedora no good. RedHat neither. Always felt sluggish to me. Haven't tried since years though, but don't intend to either. Not missing anything from 'there'. There is a TUI-client called concord for the terminal, where you can disable all the gifs, movies, memes, cat pics, avatars, whatever. That's making it much more bearable :-)

virajk_31 3mo ago

I hv been out of distro hopping for years now, apart from pkg build, what makes Cachy os standout? I don't really care about kernel optimizations if we don't have any significant benchmarks.