Fedora, Ubuntu, Debian, and Mint remain great recommendations; good stability, community support, etc. (even for Ubuntu, a regular user might not actually care that much about snaps so long as everything works)

I just moved to CachyOS, (from Fedora, and earlier from Ubuntu -- I've been on Linux for a while) and I've been very, very happy. The gaming performance is legitimately better than what I was getting on Fedora, and I've just enjoyed the OS and KDE much more than Gnome Shell. I haven't had any real showstoppers with CachyOS, and it really has felt like a user-friendly version of Arch finally exists.

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tapoxi 8 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I think a lot of cachy performance is placebo, because Steam games use the container runtime's Debian 11 libraries, it doesn't use the native CachyOS ones at all.

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everdrive 6 hours ago | parent [-]

I'm CPU-bound on one of the games I play, and cachy's scheduler may have made a difference for me. I was also fully on the closed-source NVIDIA drivers in Fedora, and had been totally out of the loop that that the kernel driver had been open sourced. And, cachy had me on a more recent version of the driver.

None of these things are truly unique to CachyOS, but nonetheless I do think I experienced a boost when I switched.

	▲	everdrive an hour ago \| parent [-]
		To expand a little bit, I think it might clearer to say that CachyOS does out of the box what many other distros could also do with manual configuration. So, in that sense (default) CachyOS probably is faster than (default) [mainstream distro].

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GordonS 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Are you able to quantify the performance improvement, e.g. in FPS on particular games?

Curious as to how CachyOS does it.

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troupo 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I've yet to have a day when CachyOS can come out of sleep: hangs at various steps and requires a hard reboot that somehow relaunches apps on login that I explicitly closed hours ago.

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everdrive 6 hours ago | parent [-]

I had the same problem with Fedora which is part of what prompted me to switch. It works great for me in Cachy. I assume either way it was an Nvidia problem.

	▲	troupo 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Yup, I have Nvidia :) Interestingly enough, I didn't have the same issue with Omarchy/Hyprland. Hyprland doesn't have even the most rudimentary ability to restore windows but it was almost rock solid when it came to coming out of sleep. Still searching for that one true Linux distribution :) Will stay on Cachy for now because gaming is so much better.