Graph
Still on Mint. Tried catchy recently when I nuked my Mint install. (I told myself I’d never remember to remove kisak-mesa before updating the kernal, and yup).
Was only on catchy for half a day, but did really like it. KDE and some of the preinstalled tools were nicer than Mint. Only issue is I could only access my old NTFS windows drives as read only. In the process of getting more storage so I can backup and format everything as ext4, and might try catchy again. But Mint has been treating me well, and has no issues handling the windows drives.
I’m among those. When switching to Linux last year, I tried a few distros. I went with arch based because I wanted cutting edge. Cachy just works.
NixOS went from not being visible to… beating Manjaro!
Whatever that’s supposed to tell
jesus look how many people were tricked into using manjaro, the majority gone for a reason
It had its place in 2015. It was my introduction to Arch-based distros. Nowadays, I use EndeavourOS.
Hehe manjaroty
I’m not familiar with Manjaro, what was wrong with it?
I used it 5-6 years ago, and it broke itself within a month of using, and I dropped it. Just doing normal updates, no tinkering.
Currently imploding due to internal conflict
Never used it myself, but every year or two I see an article about how one of their SSL certs expired and they have to tell all their users to set their clocks back until they can fix it.
I made the bad decision to try it instead of arch for one machine because installing was easier. And it was just constantly broken from out of date repos and all their built in shit just not being very good. And now they just released some manifest or something to try get the project back on track. I haven’t looked at it in like 5+ years but this graph makes me think nothing really changed.
That’s my experience of a couple months with it as well.
Went back to my usual OpenSuSE or Fedora.
Anyone want to ELI5 what’s so slick about Cachy?
I likes my Debian. Look at that graph. Steady as rock.
You can also look into PikaOS if you want gaming features and drivers baked into Debian.
It’s essentially Arch with a custom kernel and repos. That being said the Kernel and repos are REALLY good. very optimized. I use the CachyOS Kernel on my NixOS system and I use the repos as well as the kernel on a regular Arch system. If you’re a gamer then you’ll notice a definite increase in performance. the devs/maintainers of CachyOS are also very transparent and provide constant updates.
Now you’ll probably ask “well why not just use CachyOS itself?” to which I’ll say they pack A LOT of stuff into the distro most of which I just don’t need. It can result in a long install time, much longer than most distros. But if you want a solid easy to install distro right out of the box you can’t go wrong. They also support just about every DE and WM under the sun. Seriously when you install it they provide you with options for everything AND also provide you with custom configs for everything so you can say use Niri or Hyprland or whatever right away without having to do much if any further configuration. They also have configurations for shells too. They also have their own version of Proton which is quite good, I also use that. They also provide you with the option to have snapper/timeshift set up for you right off the bat so you don’t have to worry about rolling back if something goes wrong.
They also have a fairly new updating feature which I love. Basically it’s a version of pacman where anyone can use it/figure it out. Like other distros like Fedora or Debian it’ll notify you when there are updates and will walk you through the process of updating, providing you with recent Arch News while you update, then clear out orphaned dependencies and clear your cache for you. it’s really a very good updater.
Overall it’s a very solid and easy to use Arch based distro and a fantastic introduction to Arch.
From what I understand, it is the arch approach but with package binaries compiled to target newer hardware instead of the largest set of hardware. Their homepage claims they enable several performance-type optimizations in both the kernel and common system libraries. It’s not surprising to me that protondb, a repository of “how well can I get this game to run on Linux through proton?” reports, is studying an outsized proportion of users on CachyOS.
gotta try it out. how do you guys like it over endeavour?
Based on the experiences I have seen with others, it looks like CachyOS has more software installed out-of-the-box (compared to EndeavourOS being more minimal). Both look similarly easy to install and offer many different DEs (I think CachyOS has a few more though, but you could manually install others)
I personally use EndeavourOS as I like that it’s more minimal and don’t really care about the gaming optimisations of CachyOS. It seems pretty neat though, so I might try it out one day if I get a newer computer that would benefit from those bits.
I’ve been running Cachy for a few months - it just works.
I picked it because it appeared to be easy to install Arch (which I’ve run before, btw) with sane defaults.
But that’s exactly what Endeavour is from what I just read.
I don’t know if the purported optimisations provide any real world benefit, but the major reason I went Cachy is it being the flavour of the month.
For the time being, it’s where a lot of focus is for new development in the gaming space.Limine is also a good reason for people who want the benefits of Arch but are worried about bad updates. Being able to rollback to an earlier snapshot in the boot menu is nice for new users
Interesting, thank you.
Was checking it out and will leave the link here in case someone else wants to read about it: https://wiki.cachyos.org/installation/boot_managers/
I’ve been running cachy for about 9 months. It’s great. Just works with my older hardware and allows me to game. Updates are easy, rollbacks can save your life (I’ve rolled back once after I fucked up).
I run KDE with nvidia (gtx 1070 ti) and it’s all just … great.
I previously ran debian then mint.
What is Flatpak the distro? 🤔
From the article:
Flatpak is NOT a distro, but that’s what Steam reports when it’s running on Flatpak, and Flatpak being distro independent we report it as a separate environment, if that makes sense. Feel free to ignore it if you wish.
Thanks for digging it for me! My bad, it seems obvious now.
