It is also first in the Distrowatch rank
https://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=cachyos
I distro hopped to it from Bazzite a couple of months ago, and I could not be happier.
If you try the installer, be careful when selecting multiples DE/WM as the conflicts were not listed anywhere for the installation process.
Picking a single environment and then adding the others later was what worked for me.
I’ve thought about making the switch but what holds me back is stability.
I don’t mean stability from a software perspective. But from a distro perspective. Distros come and go all the time. Four or Five have stable enough support through community developers and industry sponsorships that they’ve managed to become large enough and supported enough to be considered Evergreen Distros for lack of a better word. In other words, distros where the support base is large enough to be considered “too big to fail” (Ubuntu, Mainline Arch, Manjaro, Fedora, Gentoo, etc…)
The rest eventually just fade away. I’ve always avoided distros that are maintained by a small community of enthusiasts because enthusiasm goes away really quickly once the real work of maintaining a distro rolls around.
I won’t pull the trigger on any small community project until I’m reasonably sure I’m not going to have to jump to a new project a year from now when the developers get tired of it and move on to something else.
In other words, distros where the support base is large enough to be considered “too big to fail” (Ubuntu, Mainline Arch, Manjaro, Fedora, Gentoo, etc…)
bruh, no Debian?
Or Suse
Yggdrasil Plug and Play Linux!

Debian’s the grand-daddy from which the others all were born.
I mean , from the ones that are listed, it’s only ubuntu, but Debian has spawned A LOT of other distros; and is the literal granddaddy of mint.
True. But I was meaning more spiritually.
If Ubuntu, Arch, Fedora, Suse, etc… are the Greek Gods, then Debian and Slackware are the mythological Titans that preceded them.
Distros that come after the Greek Gods (Elementary, Manjaro, CachyOS, etc…) are basically the equivalent of every time Zeus or another god would go down to earth to have sex with a mortal and create a demigod (Hercules, Achilles, Aeneaus, etc…)
If Ubuntu, Arch, Fedora, Suse, etc… are the Greek Gods, then Debian and Slackware are the mythological Titans that preceded them.
Wow, I did not expect Fedora to be this much of a Johnny come lately. Debian is 93, Fedora 03! Even when you consider Red Hat, which is basically fedora , RH is STILL from 95.
Asking the real questions.
You can switch back to arch pretty easily and also just upgrade from arch. That’s the real benefit of cachy is standing on the shoulders of giants like Arch.
Does that mean moving from EndeavourOS to CachyOS is also easy?
Maybe I should first look into what the difference is between EndeavourOS and CachyOS. Is it even worth it to switch?
I would not consider Manjaro too big to fail considering what they’re currently going through. The distro has been stagnating the past few years tbh. The community wants collective ownership but the founder is stalling more time. If you’re curious they made a big post about it on their forum. Not a Manjaro hater btw its was my first distro that got me into Linux and now I just use mainline Arch. I liked the config, look and feel and polish it provided. If I started today I’d probably go Endeavor or Cachy probably.
agree. I used to have time to tinker and if things break, I distro hop. Dont have time for that now, I want things to work.
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The stability issue is why I am waiting for SteamOS Desktop. I don’t want to distro hop, I just want to install a single OS and never have to worry about it for the rest of my machine’s life.
I mean Linux Mint, Ubuntu, Fedora (or Arch if you’re technical) are all solid and proven base option.
I like CachyOS but I don’t see it’s worth it to reinstall the OS for 3-5 extra fps on an rtx 4070 laptop with ryzen 9 8945h with 32 gigs of ddr5. It probably might make sense on much older and/or weaker hardware. I mean I can just switch to the cachyos kernel on current Arch install if I want but I am just too comfortable with my current setup.
Must…resist…distro…hopping
I’ve been comfortable on Bazzite for a couple years now but this is giving me the itch.
Don’t worry.
It will simply be a live environment testing.
You will not be curious about the preconfigured openbox and wayfire DE options either.It will be a small partition to test bare metal.
You will not expand that partition later.It will be an equal dualboot.
You will not neglect updating your bazzite and feel guilty about it and finally distrohop fully.I’m old enough to know that’s a lie. I gave up dual booting years ago to save us all the embarrassment.
Me with a stick poking at LinuxMint : hey, wake up, do something, you have piled-up enough money under the bed already
What are you looking for? I just use Mint because it works for my old hardware.
Please don’t kill me. How does this fare against a riced out Gentoo?
I tried it on my old pc and pretty good ngl.
Has a custom kernel and bunch of preconfigured options to run games I could not setup myself.
Has a bunch of riced DE options including openbox, wayfire, sway, etc. And the rice are good.
Has its own wiki and documentation.
Using paru instead of yay initially put me off, but then I found latter is written in go and paru is written in rust :3
My current issue is KDE setup still uses a lot of ram, but by a lot I mean 2 gb while browsing web and steam open.
Overall a very, very good gentop setup would be better, but mainly because custom rice is more personal.
Fedora is pretty good
Also, the folks behind this are nice…
CachyOS originated in the Polish Arch community IIRC, but all the discussion I’ve seen from them is just… cool.
Nothing weird or dramatic like one tends to see in linux projects, just folks really into building this stuff.
I think they have a bunch of Arch veterans, right? Like the guy who started it is also some big time Arch maintainer. You can go to archlinux.org and search the repo for packages by maintainer and Peter Jung gives you 100+ results.
iirc it started as a spinoff since vanilla arch preferred to stay conservative in regards to compiling packages with “the new” cpu optimizations. They are not so new at all, but since it meant breaking support with old hardware… Hence, the dillema that called ina fork and here we are.
What’s the difference between this and a fresh install of Arch with a DE like KDE/Gnome?
I’ve been using Arch for so long now that if I bought a new machine I would find it hard to try anything else.
Arch gives you a bare bones DE, and you have to install/configure everything yourself.
CachyOS gives you a larger volume of default applications in a basic install, and lots of the stuff comes with useful configs out of the box. It also has hardware specific optimisations for multiple generations of CPU in its repos, but how much of a difference that makes in the real world is unclear
I did some Benchmarks and CachyOS claims of around 15% more performance seem to be true. Unigin Heavenbenchmark , Super Tuxkart and Furmark all got improved scores compared to PopOS. Additionally Fallout 4 now runs a lot smoother which is probably due to the BORE scheduler doing something better. My local LLMs also seem to be slightly faster and for some reason now need less V-Ram.
My local LLMs also seem to be slightly faster and for some reason now need less V-Ram.
This is likely due to zram being setup by default
Setup in what way? Will it only compress when running low?
The hell is zram?
The hell is zram
It something than claims to handle swapping better on low ram systems… I never noticed much difference on the lower spec machines I tried it on.
You know how you can compress files? It work for ram as well.
Downloaded more ram, got it
Oh god the meme is true
Basically it compresses your data in the RAM. Needs a little more work form the CPU but it is still faster than swap. fyi
They should have called it cram. Lost opportunity.
Interesting thank you!
I had zram setup on my previous OS as well and on cachy the LLM didn’t need to use it while on my old OS it did. My guess would be that the driver had a little less overhead.
It would still use zram if it’s setup, only way it wouldn’t is if you gone out of your way to disable it. Combine zram and the bore scheduler and it’s going to run better for sure.
But if the LLM stays in the V-RAM or even just stays in normal RAM does it still benefit from zram? I thought that only helped when the ram was not enough.
So I’d say it is more likely the bore scheduler + better drivers.
It’s all three! Cachy OS sets it up where it applies to both regular ram and vram. Even if just using a swap in ram, it will still be much faster than swapping to disk. Plus to the application, it looks like it has more ram/vram than there is physical ram/vram.
To add a tiny bit of technical detail here, vanilla Arch enforces support for x86_64 v1, meaning all software available in the Arch repos is built to not use any cpu feature that didn’t exist in v1. Not a bad thing since it allows for support of older (64 bit) hardware, but it does leave like 20 years of microarchitecture advancement on the table.
According to the CachyOS website, they have repos with software built for v3 and v4 which can apparently juice your rig for an extra 20% performance.
Pretty much everything. Seperate package repo shipping cpu modern optimized binaries, custom kernel, and a ton of gaming and preformance related patches applied ontop of various packages. As well as a gui installer.
I think it’s aimed more at newbies than seasoned veterans like yourself.
Yeah Arch exists for such a long time I will take base distros for reliability any day. Even if that means losing slight performance many things will go mainline in the future or if I cared enough I’d just patch them there. I honestly feel like baseline distros are really good long term and I think Archs barebones approach is perfect tbh
Everything.
Mostly, it’s just too convenient, but it’s way more than just a preset. I wouldn’t go back to vanilla Arch if you paid me.
Only different config, since it’s based on arch.
They have their own pacman-mirror, pacman is set up to download a lot more in parallel and they set the scheduler formerly known as “cachy”, which is supposedly really good for a snappy UX.
It’s a lot more than that. It doesn’t fork Arch like Manjaro, but they have tons of custom and extremely convenient and useful packages in their repos. It’s also a living “optimization experiment” in the vein of Intel’s Clear Linux (may it rest in peace).
Theoretically, you could replicate it in vanilla arch, but I can’t imagine how many man-hours it would take.
I am a CachyOS acolyte. It’s my end boss distro.
If you try the installer, be careful when selecting multiples DE/WM as the conflicts were not listed anywhere for the installation process.
Yeah, they do need to clean up the installer a bit. It’s also not quite turnkey for a Windows dual-boot.
Yeah, they do need to clean up the installer a bit. It’s also not quite turnkey for a Windows dual-boot.
Mind letting us know why or how? When I installed it almost a year ago on my desktop, I did install it as a dual boot option with no issues. Of course this doesn’t mean there aren’t issues I just didn’t run into. I’m also not new to Linux and didn’t pick a fully default install, if that makes a difference. So I could’ve probably fixed it if it did break, but it never gave me any issues.
The only thing that I dislike, and that could probably cause issues, is that for my installation the mount point for the efi/boot partition isn’t specified in fstab using a uuid, but using the device name (which isn’t fixed and can change with hardware changes). That is a very weird (and unnecessary) decision IMHO.
Mind letting us know why or how? When I installed it almost a year ago on my desktop, I did install it as a dual boot option with no issues. Of course this doesn’t mean there aren’t issues I just didn’t run into. I’m also not new to Linux and didn’t pick a fully default install, if that makes a difference. So I could’ve probably fixed it if it did break, but it never gave me any issues.
Well in my case, using systemd-boot:
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Window’s default EFI partition was too small to hold the kernel, but CachyOS setup didn’t check for this and just failed to boot linux. You wouldn’t run into this issue on a second disk I suppose, but I did on a single NVMe shared with Windows.
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Sometimes, if you do share an EFI partition between Windows/Linux, Windows Update will randomly nuke it and break your linux install.
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I also had an instance where systemd-boot just stopped detecting Windows after awhile, and it needed some manual fixing.
Basically, trying to install linux on the default EFI partition next to Windows is a risky default, and Windows users new to linux aren’t going to know anything about how to fix it.
The fix is to just make a second EFI partition on the drive, but the installer doesn’t do this by default. And I encountered this a long time ago, but noticed the issue was still present when testing Cachy on another PC, by chance.
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CachyOS is awesome. I just switched a few months ago after the praises from SomeOrdinaryGamer. I also wanted to use hyprland again after using plasma for sometime. It’s amazing that Cachy lets me use the hyprland DE, but also has libraries to let me run kde software without the need for plasma.
It’s amazing that Cachy lets me use the hyprland DE, but also has libraries to let me run kde software without the need for plasma.
Which distribution doesn’t allow to run KDE software on non-KDE desktops? How would this even be possible?
I originally used EndeavourOS with hyprland and I tried to us kdenlive, but it would never start. I then tried to install kde-plasma, but it would never boot into the plasma DE. I went and installed kubuntu to use the kde apps, but things just work better for me on arch, like Bluetooth connectivity. So I decided to switch back to arch through Cachy.
I originally used EndeavourOS with hyprland and I tried to us kdenlive, but it would never start.
Maybe an XWayland fuckup back then when Kdenlive didn’t yet transition to Wayland.
I’m not sure. It was strange that plasma would crash and not boot even after reinstalling it. I think there may have been some conflicts I wasn’t aware of. Either way, I have had no issues with things running properly on Cachy.
Dependencies…? I remember accidentally installing entire DEs back in the day because individual packages required their entire native environment. So external maintainers basically had to ‘extract’ some packages from the dependency bundle to make them available without installing the entire native DE. Isn’t that sort of how it still works?
I remember accidentally installing entire DEs back in the day because individual packages required their entire native environment.
Either packaging bug or user error.
So external maintainers basically had to ‘extract’ some packages from the dependency bundle to make them available without installing the entire native DE. Isn’t that sort of how it still works?
No.
I know this is an unpopular opinion at the moment but I currently think Bazzite is still my favorite for the ROG Ally
The RogAlly is not Cachy’s objective. It’s for regular desktop use.
I believe they have a handheld distro that they use too. I heard it got a big update or something recently.
They do in fact have a handheld edition. I use it for my steam deck and it’s great.
Totally fine, yeah I use fedora for laptop, the Ally is only for gaming as I don’t have a desktop setup
Edit: changed to laptop as desktop was confusing
I use Manjaro on my Ally X 😝
(Also to my fellow ally owners, fingerprint reader support is coming soon I think)
While I will most likely never switch from pure arch, I’m very happy that we’re getting more and more polished distros for everyday use.
JSYK the differences are marginal between a vanilla arch install and cachy. You have you dig really deep to see any difference in performance.
iMO cachy is a good marketing arch distro.
You skipped over the fact that getting vanilla Arch installed is often what trips people up, and also what makes people who run vanilla Arch feel like they accomplished something and truly built something - because they did.
You’re also glossing over the fact that a lot of people run the CachyOS kernel even on vanilla Arch because of the performance gains from having a kernel specifically compiled for instructions your CPU supports.
In other words; I don’t think the convenience of a proper installer, nor even just a 5% gain in performance, is just “marketing”.
Bias disclaimer; I run CachyOS btw
You will not see much difference in performance. This is from 2022 but should still be true?
https://www.phoronix.com/review/cachyos-linux-perf/5
I think it has some improvements in kernel settings but in day to day, you wont notice them.
Yeah very outdated, newer benchmarks show CachyOS performs even better now, but still not significantly better in day-to-day use
it looks like there’s a new generation of “I run cachyos BTW”. While you are free to choose whatever distro you wanr, the passion with which you defend cachy is adorable.
Cachy is nothing but hype, surrounded by fanboys without much experience, who are willing to believe a governor and a couple of tweaks gives them the best os on the planet - I know, cause I used it and went back to arch because I prefer something that is real and the result of hard work, not a hacky job,that looks like someone just had fun hyping the shit out of “performance gains”.
You can keep your 1% gain, and the bloat.
This performance gains myth sounds like exactly the same wishful thinking as we used to heard back when Gentoo Linux was The Cool Hotness™. Don’t get me wrong, Gentoo was great, but its added value was not in the compiler optimizations, but rather in the modularity, where you could select a feature set you wanted for your system, and not worry about useless dependencies, their associated support libraries and bugs or vulnerabilities in those.
And when it comes to the kernel, can compile your own on any distribution, including using or omitting any kernel patches you want.
You can use Endeavour OS instead just as well.
vanilla arch user here, the installation is a totally different experience but it just gets you into that „go, read / listen and just try to understand what you are doing“ mode… which, in a long run, is quite helpful. Third year now, still mostly no clue what I am doing most of the time, but plenty of fun has been had in the meantime.
with the direction that Wind®ow(n)s took some time ago, I am willing to even write 0s and 1s by hand on a wet toilet paper to just avoid it. Super happy to see CachyOS or SteamOS grow, actually any distro getting popular is a great thing, more users, more knowledge, more problems being pointed out.
I’m trying a conversion from endeavorOS with CachyOS repositories, it was pretty seamless, I can keep my settings and endeavorOS theming, and allegedly you can switch back at any time. The cachyOS wiki has a short script for converting vanilla arch or endeavorOS to use cachyOS binaries. Been running for about a week and haven’t noticed any problems.
Did you notice anything that would be worthwhile switching from EndeavourOS to CachyOS? Not having any problems is nice, but is there an actual reason and do you even notice it in real world usage (I don’t count benchmarks)?
This one is just a media box and also for light gaming, some games could be a bit smoother with just a bit more performance and switching to cachyOS binaries gave it that small bump it needed in most cases. If you don’t count benchmarks that are measureable and repeatable then I can offer an annecdote that it just feels better.
Landed on Cachy after Ubuntu> Mint > Bazzite. Wish I had just skipped Mint and Bazzite. A lot of DEs too, so it’s kind of however you like it.
Sometimes you gotta know what you don’t like to really understand what you do like.
What do you prefer about Catchy over Bazzite. I’m currently using Bazzite but not in love with it. I mean it’s just an OS that works for my gaming and browsing.
Immutable is good for you, torture for me.
I game, browse, and do audio production. Between all these things, I’ve had the least issues with Cachy. In fact, everything’s been shockingly easy.
The flexibility of Cachy has been great too. Very customisable if you want it to be and lots of DEs to choose from, so really it’s can be setup exactly how you want it. This is something I like in most things, a “do it once; do it right” or “set and forget” setup. I’ve also had the best performance from Cachy overall, but when you’re comparing that against something like Bazzite, the victor could literally just come down to the hardware, they’re so close.
Same here. Basically distro hopped and finally tried cachy. I am converting my main big gaming rig to it, but fell in love on a samsung slate from 2012ish. Runs great on anything
I’m also a user, it’s arch but more
ezintuitive, it also has some popular precomp aur pkg in the repo.





















