> This was the one to finally stop getting me to distro hop.

For me it was Debian 12 with Sway (Wayland) followed by Debian 13 with labwc and Sway.

Now I can switch from a tiling window manager (WM) to a floating WM depending on the work task.

With all the unofficial patches and experimental compilers they use it must be full of subtle bugs.

I use CachyOS as my daily driver and I gave up on i3 after few tries. It just doesn’t work.

I’m happy with XFCE now and it is very performant.

What are examples of packages that fail with linking errors? What are the errors?

Yah well? Why would I when there is Plasma/KDE which never did that to me? :-)

I have been running arch for about 5 years now, and I think there were about 3 or 4 instances where I'd have to do some manual intervention to fix an update, but those interventions were generally all fixable by commands posted on arch linux's blog (which, for some weird reason, the arch devs expect you to check every time you run `sudo pacman -Syu`)

Arch devs know how much friction manual intervention updates cause, so they try to keep them to a minimum.

Honestly, I've had more problems running windows than running arch.

I'm using ordinary Arch for the last year and I didn't have a single issue.

> Is this a legitimate concern in 2025?

I've used Arch Linux (always with a nvidia GPU no less!) since 2017 sometime, moved over to CachyOS just this year, and had no issues that weren't caused by myself in all this time.

I initially moved away from Ubuntu at that time, as I got so tired of dist-upgrade breaking my system every single time I tried to upgrade, so figured I'll at least understand the breakages better when they happen with Arch. But I never got Arch to break something by itself, it always end up being my fault.

I don't understand why we need "gaming versions" for distros. I've never used them but if there's stuff that's broken for gaming in the base distros, shouldn't that just be fixed?

I've had fantastic experiences reinvigorating macs with Ubuntu. Highly recommended.

I've setup cachyos repos on arch and it does indeed feel snappier. I've not measured any performance, but I'd imagine it's negligible on my pretty new ryzen 9. Nonetheless, the process was fairly easy and so far nothing has broken because of that. If I were to actually care enough to test it, I'd also try just swapping the scheduler on the normal Arch kernel.

As shared elsewhere, I've used Arch Linux since 2017 sometime, and this year I replaced it with CachyOS as I was changing disks anyways and wanted to see what all the noise was about.

It's like a Arch brother that holds your hand slightly more, and have some "defaults" they nudge you towards in the docs, and some number-heavy software is slightly faster, maybe 10-15%, but overall it feels and works just like Arch Linux. To be honest, I don't notice a lot of difference and I think I'm as fine with Arch as with CachyOS, that's how little different there is between them.

Here are benchmark rounds of CachyOS against current Ubuntu and Fedora workstations as fresh as early November:

https://www.phoronix.com/review/cachyos-ubuntu-2510-f43

Just an anecdote but I've been running it for a few months now and at least for gaming it works well. Arc Raiders plays fantastically. There is an issue with one of my headsets that when you get in game the audio quality drops to dogshit but I think that's a bigger issue with the headset on Linux and not particular to Cachy.

I’m running CachyOS for a year now as my daily driver (non-work) on my ancient desktop from 2019 and ancient Nvidia card. It is very fast and smooth. I mainly use it to development using LLM sidekicks and it doesn’t break sweat. I use XFCE and just love how fast the experience is.

Anecdotically I'm using it since about 2 years on obsolete Kaby Lake Core i5 7500T & Core i7 7700T @35Watts in 1 liter Lenovo Thinkcentres (M910q tiny). Which have integrated HD630 Graphics.

Under Plasma/KDE. I just followed their defaults in the installer, which at the time were BTRFS for the filesystem, whith systemd-boot, and everything wen't well. The only thing which I would have done differently in hindsight would be the boot partition at 2GB, which seems wasteful when only about 50MB are ever used. But shrug?

What else, hrrm, the stuff is mostly clocked down to 800Mhz, because of the chosen scheduler, in spite of this nothing ever lags. Though the systems have 32GB RAM, that should help with that.

It's really smooth, even on that old 'crap', even mostly clocked down.

I also had it never crash on me with anything, neither single applications, or system hangs.

After upgrading with pacman -Syu I immediately clear the package cache with pacman -Scc, because I never ever needed that.

At the moment I'm considering to remove the pacman hooks into btrfs-snapshots, because I never needed them either. Seems like cargo-cult to me :-)

I also let it bitrot for up to 150 days, meaning no updates whatsover, and then lifting it up in one accumulated rush. Effortlessly. In the past, because I've been lazy and couldn't be bothered. Lately more often :-)

I didn't reboot in these long phases without updates. Just suspend to RAM. Which works every single time. And the system stayed always responsive.

Their ZRAM setup is usable by default. No fiddling necessary.

With this stability I dared to activate https://github.com/graysky2/profile-sync-daemon / https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Profile-sync-daemon and never had any trouble with it so far.

At the moment I'm having fun discovering a new world of audio experience with https://github.com/wwmm/easyeffects

How could I live without that?!

(Don't worry, cores stay at 800Mhz with that playing YT in FF, or watching a movie with MPV)

At least on my hardware it's the DREAM.

Oh. Did I mention I don't game at all? With the exception of maybe some Freeciv in the browser...

They are all customizable, but you have to remember - not everyone is a Linux expert, and not everyone has the time or the will to tinker.

None that I know of, however I'd say certain distro's might attract people who want more/specific customization

Now that you mention Gentoo, the whole distro make me think of this: https://www.shlomifish.org/humour/by-others/funroll-loops/Ge...

What quirks did you encounter if I may ask? Was considering this setup.

Same here. Pretty amazing. Almost every game in my (large) Steam libarary runs out of the box. Performance is on par with Windows. This finally allowed me to ditch Windows.

And no, I don't bother with crap that needs a kernel level anti-cheat. Simply not for me.

I still haven't found a stable Linux distribution. I used to like Debian years ago. Dependable, reliable.

Now none of them seem to be. Went distribution hopping and trying to find something. I'm a FreeBSD guy mostly - and in my experience its still not year of the desktop for Linux despite me wanting to ditch Windows 10. FreeBSD is way behind as a desktop OS, although it doesn't have the ridiculous baggage of Linux's audio subsystem.

Had CachyOS lock up on me tonight, but its still been the least problematic most dependable variant of Linux I've tried so far, even if its sproriadic in failing to correctly mount shares. Pop-OS has been the next-best, but they're falling behind some of the other distro's.

The fucktards at Fedora(/Redhat) closed a "I can't boot because of an error in fstab" in Fedora as won't fix. I couldn't even get to a superuser shell - so the system is in an unrecoverable state even from console. Rescued it via a livedisk and manually mounting filesystems, but the response was inexcusable given the time I put into the bug submission. Trying to mount network drives and failing to boot, as a result of not checking there's a valid network connection first is not something I'd expect in 2025...

Tried Ubuntu and its a complete mess compared to its former self, and Debian is so far behind, I may as well use FreeBSD as a desktop.

And the fact they've ditched ifconfig for a more painful user experience is just dumb. It's still the least problematic of distro's I've tried though. Gaming (somewhat usable on Linux) and audio (still a mess) are what keep me on Win10 even though I want to ditch it. Apple can go get fucked, but their TV shows are kind of impressive.

The BSD's just keeps working (yes, there's less hardware support) and you don't have to keep learning a new 'dialect' because the kernel and OS stay relatively consistent over time. I still think the sudo command on Linux is dumb. Let me explictly su, get stuff done and log out. None of this type your own password to get to do superuser stuff. I mean seriously...?

Edited: Downvoted because they can't handle my personal experience? With no rebuttal? Even HN isn't what it used to be.

CachyOS would require Arch Linux to implement the support first. Progress is slow but steady:

- https://lists.archlinux.org/archives/list/arch-dev-public@li...

- https://rfc.archlinux.page/0032-arch-linux-ports/

I'm curious, what hardware would you run it on?

When you are tired hopping between different but similar distros, give NixOS a shot. No way back from there :)

I have no idea how stable it is but it seems it's a scheduler that weighs processes based on burstiness?

https://github.com/firelzrd/bore-scheduler

Gaming distros trade stability and security for performance. IMHO they're only useful for FPS bragging rights. Most popular distros should already be performant enough for gaming purposes.

You could go into their wiki. It's linked from the page, and skim/skip over that installation stuff, until the chapters where they explain what they did to the kernel(s), how they compile and link optimized, schedulers, and stuff. It's not ultra-thourough, but gives a good overview.

I've settled on sched_ext: BPF scheduler "bpfland_1.0.18_g5bff813c_dirty_x86_64_unknown_linux_gnu" -powersave for processes, and let mq-deadline handle internal storage, and bfq anything connected via USB.

What do you mean by "stable"?

Having a great showcase distro can be a very nice way into Linux in general. Don’t be so negative. IMHO the Linux life style also means exploring, being more aware of data/OS separation, a deeper understanding of computing in general. It’s alle achieved with these boutique distros which may display the best that’s out there.

FOSS is about freedom, freedom works best with options to apply to. Nobody is forcing you to do anything with these options.

> People need to stop making Meme distributions.

Heh. I've been saying that since I was on Mandrake in the early 2000s. This is just what the Linux landscape is like.

That said, I'm generally not easily impressed, especially by random *nix distro 347, but CachyOS is surprisingly good. I've finally switched full time from Windows. I don't even need VS anymore because Rider is x-platform.

You can just install Omarchy then switch the repos:

https://wiki.cachyos.org/features/optimized_repos/#adding-ou...

Omarchy is not a distribution; just a customized Arch setup.

There is https://github.com/mroboff/omarchy-on-cachyos if one wanted it. I didn't, because I'm considering that a fad.

It's one thing to judge somebody for supporting an unjust and illegal war. It's another thing entirely to judge them for where they were born. None of us chooses our nationality.