[HN Gopher] CachyOS: Fast and Customizable Linux Distribution
___________________________________________________________________
CachyOS: Fast and Customizable Linux Distribution
Author : doener
Score : 242 points
Date : 2025-11-30 10:47 UTC (12 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (cachyos.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (cachyos.org)
| lousken wrote:
| Bazzite (Fedora atomic), CachyOS (Arch), PikaOS(Debian),
| Nobara(Fedora), (Pop_OS - Ubuntu), it's nice that there's a
| gaming version of pretty much all major distros at this point so
| everyone can have a familiar base, hopefully they all survive
| IshKebab wrote:
| 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?
| kokada wrote:
| At least for Bazzite, Nobara and CachyOS, there is the
| SteamOS desktop option that boots directly to Steam's Big
| Picture that is quite unconventional in some ways (e.g. this
| desktop mode kinda also acts as a display manager, so there
| is the option to boot to your desktop from Big Picture mode
| and this option is generally broken without specific
| integration with the session manager).
|
| Sure this could probably be a package in a more "traditional
| distro", but I'm almost sure most people don't expect their
| Display Manager to be replaced with Steam when they install a
| package.
| Epa095 wrote:
| No, but I would after e.g dpkg-reconfigure steam-bigwindow
| ac29 wrote:
| > Sure this could probably be a package in a more
| "traditional distro", but I'm almost sure most people don't
| expect their Display Manager to be replaced with Steam when
| they install a package.
|
| You can add steam big picture mode as a session type which
| would let you pick it from the login manager (the same as
| if you had both GNOME & KDE installed, for example). There
| would be no need to replace anything.
| Scion9066 wrote:
| There are some things regular distros can't/shouldn't do,
| like including codecs still under patents, matching
| proprietary Nvidia drivers with the correct kernel version,
| proprietary firmware for game controller adapters, the
| launching of Steam Big Picture mode as the default UI, etc.
| jamesbelchamber wrote:
| Trade-offs in the default load-out, essentially - some of the
| things you want for games can bloat out the standard build,
| compromise the "license integrity" of the base repositories,
| make system instability more likely etc etc.
|
| There is unlikely to be a time that "things stop moving"
| enough to make all these trade-offs go away, but you can
| pretty much just add all this stuff to the base distro
| yourself anyway if you want to (I still play games on vanilla
| Silverblue, for example).
| cosmic_cheese wrote:
| Target audience favors in for default load out, too. Gamers
| aren't likely to be *nix gurus and want something that will
| come configured correctly for their use case out of the
| box, including stuff like Nvidia drivers.
|
| For this group, needing to follow wiki guides and such and
| spending time on basic system functionality just isn't
| happening. If that's the only option, they're just going to
| reinstall Windows.
| embedding-shape wrote:
| PC gamers tend to be a bit more amendable on those
| things, even Windows ones. Especially if they have >0
| experience with modding, then they're pretty much primed
| for following "I don't know what this does" instructions.
|
| I think the group you're thinking about are console
| gamers, who never had to upgrade drivers, never dealt
| with mods and generally has a very different experience
| compared to PC gaming.
| cosmic_cheese wrote:
| Well, you also have those who are capable but not
| necessarily willing.
|
| I'm increasingly leaning that direction. Day job is
| software dev, have been using and/or tinkering with some
| form of *nix for almost 25 years, and have been using
| computers for even longer and sometimes I just don't have
| the patience for fiddling around with computers to coax
| them into doing what I want them to.
| tormeh wrote:
| Release-day Mesa updates is something that would be
| irrelevant for a normal distro, but important for a gaming
| one.
| Fnoord wrote:
| The proof is in the pudding:
|
| > PikaOS Linux is a Linux distribution based on Debian's
| cutting-edge "Unstable" branch [...] [1]
|
| Trademark and reach.
|
| Gaming distributions don't run a stable version of Linux
| distributions. They're always a spin-off from one of the
| popular Linux distributions (rebasing every once in a while),
| with additional changes tailored towards gaming.
|
| Now, you cannot just say I call my distribution Debian
| GNU/Linux Gaming Edition. If you would, you'd need to work
| under the umbrella of Debian. With a different name, you
| differentiate from Debian, while you can keep the advantages
| of their framework (hello Ubuntu).
|
| [1] https://distrowatch.com/pikaos
| ho_schi wrote:
| Because there is no need. It just the usual trend/hype.
| * Manjaro is Arch. * Cachy is a patched Arch (exactly
| what Arch avoids, heavy patching). * SteamOS is Arch.
| * Arch is Arch.
|
| Any useful and stable patch will be merged by upstream. That
| is why using CachyOS or ClearLinux isn't beneficial in long
| term. When the patch works it will finally land even in
| Debian Stable.
| jvanderbot wrote:
| It's about sane default packages and installers and desktop
| experience, as well as onboarding.
|
| It doesn't take a lot of work to get any distro to become a
| good gaming machine, but it does take some work to make it
| a seamless turnkey gaming machine for the masses.
| embedding-shape wrote:
| > Any useful and stable patch will be merged by upstream.
| That is why using CachyOS or ClearLinux isn't beneficial in
| long term.
|
| Seems like you're blinded by your own context, if CachyOS
| for example see patches, integrate them earlier than
| upstream, and let user use them today rather than "long
| term", how is that not useful or beneficial to the users
| who want/needs that?
|
| Besides, testing patches this way sounds like it'll have
| wider impact in the community than just the distro that
| integrated the patch, as it'll have a way wider testing
| userbase then. Isn't that also good long term?
| jcelerier wrote:
| > When the patch works it will finally land even in Debian
| Stable.
|
| Which is very pointless if it's three years late for e.g. a
| game release
| WD-42 wrote:
| I think the main selling point of Cachy is that the binary
| packages are compiled at a much higher optimization level.
| It simply won't run on older CPUs without modern
| extensions. Vanilla Arch definitely does not do this.
| Tajnymag wrote:
| Manjaro is not Arch. It uses custom repositories with
| patched packages, delayed version rollouts and custom
| kernels.
| lousken wrote:
| Of course there is a need - if you get a brand new PC don't
| you want it to perform as it should? Or do you want to wait
| another 2 years for that to happen?
|
| Also very few people want to tinker with every single
| little thing, they want a nice stable base that does what
| you expect and build upon it - that's why most people were
| fine with previous versions of windows. So if cachy fixes
| 95% of the issues for you, why not go for it? Saving time
| and headache is a reasonable thing for a focused distro.
| everdrive wrote:
| I had Manjaro previously, but it regularly had issues booting
| due to Plymouth. I'm not quite sure what the issue was, but
| Plymouth was deprecated. I switched to Fedora for a while,
| but finally got sick of Gnome 3. (yes, I could have just used
| KDE on Fedora but wanted to try out Cachy) Cachy has been
| pretty good, and I'm seeing much better performance in games
| than in Fedora, although I'm not sure how much of that is due
| to Fedora open-sourcing their kernel driver was responsible
| for the difference. (I still had the proprietary ones on
| Fedora)
|
| I hope some of these work out. Honestly from a strict
| compatibility and ease of use standpoint nothing has been as
| simple or reliable for me as Ubuntu used to be. I left it due
| to snaps and premium nagging, but I've had the usual little
| "linux" quirks ever since. As much as I love cachy, my
| current quirk with it is that heavy disk writes tank the
| system aggressively. A bit of brief research suggests this
| might be due to using BTRFS, but I'm comfortable enough with
| the system that I don't want to do a total reformat right
| now.
|
| I guess what I'm saying is that as much as I love linux there
| is still some refinement needed.
| jcelerier wrote:
| It's not necessarily broken, but for instance packages in
| cachy are compiled against x86-64-v3 iirc so they wouldn't
| work on older machines that don't support avx2
| IshKebab wrote:
| Can't you just add an x86-64-v3 arch to Debian if that
| really makes much of a difference? (I'd be surprised if
| it's really that significant because you can't recompile
| the game itself, and even when you can recompile things use
| -march=native doesn't make _that_ much difference in my
| experience).
| newsoftheday wrote:
| I use industry standard Ubuntu, I'm a gamer, I have no
| issues, and I have used nvidia cards going back 2 decades so
| I can dispel the nvidia myth too.
| hulitu wrote:
| > features the optimized linux-cachyos kernel utilizing the
| advanced BORE Scheduler for unparalleled performance.
|
| Never heard about BORE scheduler. It is an additional patch to
| the kernel ? How stable is this ?
| tosti wrote:
| 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.
| sylware wrote:
| The gaming version of cachy OS seems to come with default
| proton versions which seem to work around many windows kernel
| anti-cheat (valve proton being very limited as it seems).
| gutafoki wrote:
| Or they lower the bar for someone that wishes to pick up
| Linux for gaming but are not comfortable or able to massage
| the distro it is based on into something gaming-compatible.
| deno wrote:
| Bazzite is the opposite of that.
| viraptor wrote:
| It's only fps bragging rights if you go from something like
| 180 to 190 fps. But for other person on slower hardware that
| may mean for example hitting consistent 60+ fps and
| eliminating stutter.
| anthk wrote:
| Not even close. An -rt kernel, scheduler, up to date MESA
| drivers and the like can make a distro much faster for modern
| games than a server-balanced one which is often set to yield
| a high I/O thorughput but bad multimedia performance.
| kokada wrote:
| I don't think it is only for bragging rights, while in a
| vacuum the mainline kernel should be good enough for gaming,
| it is not really good when there are multiple tasks competing
| for the CPU attention (and this is especially bad for gaming
| because this can create a frame spike, ruining the game
| experience especially for multiplayer games). I think fixing
| this particular issue is one of the reasons Bore scheduler
| was created.
| newsoftheday wrote:
| Speaking as a long time gamer, at least on Ubuntu, I've
| never seen the issue you're describing.
| amlib wrote:
| Try running a long video conversion job that uses up all
| cores while running a game, no matter how much you fiddle
| with scheduling priority the performance in the game
| might drop by 50% and frame times will spike multiple
| times over. Even if you try reserving some cores for the
| game, performance will still be much lower.
| WD-42 wrote:
| This BORE scheduler is genuinely interesting and has little
| to do with FPS in games.
| komali2 wrote:
| 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
| LargoLasskhyfv wrote:
| 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"?
| embedding-shape wrote:
| > How stable is this ?
|
| As in? When I tried it, nothing crashed/segfaulted/appeared
| broken for the ~week I was using it, various workloads mostly
| programming with Rust, Python, PyTorch and Clojure.
| bblb wrote:
| Two years ago switched permanently from Win11 to Mint. It was ok,
| but craved something more bleeding edge. After two dozen distro
| hops landed on Cachy. Might try Gentoo at some point.
| Valodim wrote:
| When you are tired hopping between different but similar
| distros, give NixOS a shot. No way back from there :)
| vanviegen wrote:
| > No way back from there :)
|
| Presumably because it locks your bootloader or something,
| such that you are unable to wipe your PC once you're finally
| done pulling your hair out and ready to admit defeat? ;-)
| projektfu wrote:
| No, it's because when you finally get all your things to
| work you don't want to upset it. It gets very angry.
| vanviegen wrote:
| Yeah, I noticed that this is a beast you do not want to
| disturb. But what I did not anticipate, is that the beast
| was also prone to disturbance by evolving dependencies.
| exitb wrote:
| There's a sense of order and tidiness in running Nix on
| multiple machines with diverse uses and hardware, all based
| on single configuration, that's difficult to let go off
| once you've tried it.
|
| It's basically an elegant weapon, for a more civilized age.
| flowingfocus wrote:
| Careful though, you might end up like me and add more and
| more machines, because setting up new machine is very
| satisfying with nixos
| ndr wrote:
| For any nix-curious person out there check out Julia Evans
| posts [0]
|
| But also note that she eventually moved out of it > (note
| from 18 months later in August 2024: I've mostly switched
| back to Homebrew, nix was interesting but overall I think
| it's not worth the complexity for me)
|
| [0] https://jvns.ca/categories/nix/
| terhechte wrote:
| I wish they had a working ARM port
| arch1e wrote:
| I'm curious, what hardware would you run it on?
| perdomon wrote:
| M2 Ultra Mac Pro with 192GB RAM?
| terhechte wrote:
| I oftentimes run Linux Desktop fullscreen in a VM on macOS.
| macOS acts like a hardware abstraction layer in that case.
| Depending on the task and the tools, I sometimes prefer this
| option (I do like the macOS UI though (except for the current
| version), I just like to use the right tool for the job)
| nirv wrote:
| 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/
| hublio wrote:
| Tired: x86_64 Wired: arm64
| drcongo wrote:
| I'm using CachyOS on a Strix Halo machine. It's pretty good,
| certainly a lot easier to get on with than I found Ubuntu
| Desktop.
| rockyj wrote:
| Using CachyOS for all my work for around 18 months now. Super
| stable, fast and up-to-date always, highly recommend it.
| partomniscient wrote:
| 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.
| pacifika wrote:
| Interesting what's your hardware on the FreeBSD setup,
| thinkpad?
| kachapopopow wrote:
| Debian is not far behind, it's just on a really long release
| cycle because that is what it is designed to be. Debian
| trixie has mostly the latest and greatest from 6 months ago.
| forbiddenlake wrote:
| I can't vote, but calling real people "fucktards" was poor
| form.
| misiek08 wrote:
| Sometimes is the only form when you spend time, write
| really good report and get just ,,go f yourself, not a
| bug". He could call it "enshittification going in Fedora
| community", but went straight and honest.
| johnkizer wrote:
| Probably downvoted for resorting to juvenile name-calling
| when someone else didn't diagnose and fix a problem in your
| local installation of a free software project for you.
| irilesscent wrote:
| I've seen this be popular but I'm a little sceptical as to the
| effectiveness of their optimisations. Does anyone have some
| examples, anecdotes?
| bsagdiyev wrote:
| 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.
| fusl wrote:
| Sounds like you're using Bluetooth headphones and the game is
| attaching to the microphone which will automatically switch
| the audio codec from audio mode into headset mode. I'd
| suggest trying to completely disable the microphone of the
| headset so the game won't even try to attach to it.
| bsagdiyev wrote:
| Yep that's it! I ended up just buying a headset for gaming,
| since I use the other one for mostly music anyways. Solved
| the issue there. There were some workarounds I could try
| but I needed a new gaming headset anyways, the padding on
| my old one basically just fell apart after almost 7 years.
| Filligree wrote:
| I live in fear of the day that will happen to mine.
|
| I have an old Arctix RF headset, from back when they
| didn't use Bluetooth and the quality was actually good.
| I've yet to find anything equivalent being produced
| today.
| geraldhh wrote:
| sounds like an issue with bluetooth audio profiles having a
| hard time with bidirectional usage
| nirv wrote:
| 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
| ahoka wrote:
| So tuxracer runs better? And some other benchmarks showing
| how reducing latency decreases throughput in general.
| LargoLasskhyfv wrote:
| 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...
| FlyingSnake wrote:
| 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.
| embedding-shape wrote:
| 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.
| Perz1val wrote:
| 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.
| neverrroot wrote:
| How does it compare to DHH's Omarchy? Looking for opinions from
| those who tried both.
| PreHistoricPunk wrote:
| Omarchy is not a distribution; just a customized Arch setup.
| monooso wrote:
| This may be my ignorance, but aren't _most_ distributions [1]
| just an Arch / Fedora / Debian / whatever base with a
| desktop environment and a few opinionated choices (UI tweaks,
| installed applications, etc.)?
|
| [1] I realise CachyOS makes some kernel modifications, but is
| that typical?
| tmtvl wrote:
| I believe the difference is between Omarchy simply having
| some default configuration for certain applications
| compared to CachyOS having a repository with a larger
| amount of packages which are being maintained by the
| CachyOS devs.
| embedding-shape wrote:
| > [1] I realise CachyOS makes some kernel modifications,
| but is that typical?
|
| Yes, very common. I think not making modifications (like
| Arch) is the atypical case, as "unmodified from upstream"
| is one of the core value propositions for Arch and why we
| chose it in the first place.
|
| Still, CachyOS is probably an outlier in the amount of
| tweaks it does, and the amount of choices it surfaces to
| users about those tweaks.
| LargoLasskhyfv wrote:
| There is https://github.com/mroboff/omarchy-on-cachyos if one
| wanted it. I didn't, because I'm considering that a fad.
| BSDobelix wrote:
| You can just install Omarchy then switch the repos:
|
| https://wiki.cachyos.org/features/optimized_repos/#adding-ou...
| blueflow wrote:
| During CachyOS installation, select "i3" as desktop environment
| and look how many of the accessory programs die from linking
| errors. That should not happen with a package manager with
| dependency management.
| LargoLasskhyfv wrote:
| Yah well? Why would I when there is Plasma/KDE which never did
| that to me? :-)
| lionkor wrote:
| User choice
| s20n wrote:
| I used i3 for the longest time and I'd say a wayland based
| alternative like sway or miracle is a better choice
| nowadays. Even KDE Plasma recently dropped x11 support [1]
| so going forward, most apps will target wayland first.
|
| Migrating my i3 config to sway hardly took any effort. I
| was also able to get rid of a lot of xorg specific
| configurations from various x11 dotfiles and put them
| directly in the sway config (Such as Natural Scrolling)
|
| [1]: https://itsfoss.com/news/kde-plasma-to-
| drop-x11-support/.
| ahoka wrote:
| With all the unofficial patches and experimental compilers they
| use it must be full of subtle bugs.
| Hydraulix989 wrote:
| What are examples of packages that fail with linking errors?
| What are the errors?
| blueflow wrote:
| xob, whose binaries are taken from the AUR which hasn't been
| re-built since 2018.
| whatevaa wrote:
| Yeah, well, that is AUR for you.
| Hydraulix989 wrote:
| Vanilla Arch would fail in the same way with this package.
| Not sure I follow.
| blueflow wrote:
| CachyOS installs it when you pick the "i3" flavour at
| install. Arch doesn't.
| FlyingSnake wrote:
| 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.
| rainmaking wrote:
| No issues with sway here.
| serf wrote:
| almost every distro that offers an i3/sway/awesome install
| option seems to do a really poor job of it.
|
| I don't know why.
|
| Last time I started an endeavoros install with a default i3 it
| borked the login manager and set no system handlers of any
| kind. When I went to fix the handlers the entire package that
| set them was gone. When I went to install that (on the advice
| of the accompanying forum) I had to install _most_ of GNOME.
|
| If you're using something that isn't KDE or GNOME you're
| probably going to hit rough edges.
| PrayagS wrote:
| That used to be the case a few years ago as well, when
| Wayland/sway was still considered experimental.
|
| I had tried Manjaro i3, and XFCE's i3 variant but at the end
| it was actually more convenient to install the KDE version
| and then install i3 on top.
| WD-42 wrote:
| This isn't surprising. All of the X11 based WMs are slowly bit-
| rotting. Unless the people that care about them step up and
| start maintaining the stack instead of just endlessly
| complaining about Wayland it'll only get worse.
| embedding-shape wrote:
| > start maintaining the stack instead of just endlessly
| complaining about Wayland it'll only get worse.
|
| This is actually what forced me to migrate to Wayland, seeing
| lots of people complaining about Wayland but not seeing
| people stepping up to maintain X11. And those who used to
| maintain X11, built Wayland instead.
|
| Yes, Wayland isn't perfect, but for professionals who just
| want shit to continue working, you kind of have to move to
| the software that is being maintained, for better or worse.
| sprash wrote:
| Always the same lies. People "stepped up" in the and as a
| result were outright banned from the gitlab (instead of
| e.g. just rejecting pull requests). Current maintainers
| refuse to do any release management and instead treat every
| merge into master as a new release. This kind of sabotage
| makes development or contributing very difficult. Also the
| people that used to maintain X11 (e.g. Keith Packard) had
| nothing to do with building Wayland.
|
| Wayland on the other is just a insanely stupid API.
| Everybody advocating for Wayland should be forced to write
| a simple client at least once without relying on behemoths
| like GTK or Qt.
| bitwize wrote:
| > People "stepped up"
|
| If by "people" you mean a fascist who doesn't know how to
| program, then sure. But the sensible people who don't
| present a security threat with their politics or with
| shitty code are 100% in the Wayland camp.
|
| > Also the people that used to maintain X11 (e.g. Keith
| Packard) had nothing to do with building Wayland.
|
| Those people aren't maintaining X11 today, are they? The
| people who _are_ maintaining X11 today have put it in
| bugfix-only mode and have told you, _many times_ , that
| the future is Wayland. End of discussion.
|
| Look, you want to run a retro 90s desktop for shits and
| giggles, that's great. There's even an officially
| supported path for this use case: Ariadne Conill's
| Wayback. But the DEs and the toolkits are all removing
| X11 support within the next year or two. There is _no
| future there_. You want to keep running modern software,
| you will have to switch to Wayland eventually--and soon.
|
| > Wayland on the other is just a insanely stupid API.
| Everybody advocating for Wayland should be forced to
| write a simple client at least once without relying on
| behemoths like GTK or Qt.
|
| Nobody actually develops applications that way. They all
| use a toolkit, and the behemoths cover pretty much 90% of
| actual application development (modulo things like
| Electron). Both of those, by the way, are deprecating X11
| support.
| gf000 wrote:
| > outright banned from the gitlab
|
| Yeah, lies and then you come in with shit like this. You
| can surely show several proofs then, right?
|
| > Wayland on the other is just a insanely stupid API.
| Everybody advocating for Wayland should be forced to
| write a simple client at least once without relying on
| behemoths like GTK or Qt.
|
| Why would you do it outside of toying around? Btw, I have
| and it's nothing out of ordinary.
| kombine wrote:
| X11 is on the way out. Both major DEs will abandon X11
| backend within one year.
| darkwater wrote:
| So, what's stopping these rejected contributors to create
| their hard fork of XOrg, just like XOrg was a hard fork
| of XFree86?
| leephillips wrote:
| I use dwm. There is no bitrot.
| 3836293648 wrote:
| There's still bitrot on the X.org side even if your DM is
| maintained
| leephillips wrote:
| > _All of the X11 based WMs are slowly bit-rotting._
|
| was the statement I was replying to. In 10 years of using
| dwm I've not been aware of any bitrot that affects me.
| Certainly nome in the WM itself.
| ulfbert_inc wrote:
| There's X11libre for Linux and there's X on OpenBSD and
| FreeBSD. I am sure it will be fine.
| michaelmrose wrote:
| Define what problems you think exist please.
| blueflow wrote:
| Only on systemd/logind systems. Bitrot doesn't just
| happen, it caused by your dependencies considering your
| usecases obsolete.
| bitwize wrote:
| Oh, so only on systems running the standard stack that
| 90% of Linux systems run then. Nope, no bitrot here.
|
| Always the same lies...
| shrubble wrote:
| Reminder that Wayland is now older than X11R5 was, when
| Wayland started and claimed X11 was old and bad code.
| michaelmrose wrote:
| X11 is still in fact maintained to a degree insofar as
| minimally fixing bugs.
|
| Last activity 2 hours ago at time of writing.
|
| https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/groups/xorg/-/activity
|
| Most of the people complaining are users who don't write any
| software. There is no practical difficulty in using an x11 wm
| at this point nor expected to be until major software not
| only doesn't support x11 by default but cannot be built with
| support for same.
|
| Maybe it will be difficult to run X in 2030?
| sprash wrote:
| There is no X11 bitrot. Just a lack of funding. If funding
| for Wayland stopped today, Wayland would die much quicker
| than X11 because there is essentially zero community
| involvement whereas for X11 there are enough people that care
| to keep it alive for free.
| gf000 wrote:
| Desktop Linux is more of a love project, it has basically
| no real support. Compared to the kernel it's more like
| YouTube $5 comments.
|
| And given that Wayland has less moving pieces (it properly
| sits on top of kernel abstractions), your take is even less
| likely to be true.
| tapoxi wrote:
| Wayland is nothing but community involvement, arguably to
| its detriment, because it is implemented independently by
| community projects.
|
| There is no "Wayland" that can stop being developed. It is
| a protocol and a consensus, nothing more.
| gdevenyi wrote:
| Did you report this as a bug?
| blueflow wrote:
| No, i attempted to use CachyOS as ready-to-go distro to stop
| contributing. Instead of starting to contribute to CachyOS, i
| went back to my previous distro where i already do
| contribute.
| gosub100 wrote:
| I had a similar beef with FreeBSD ports. And to be fair,
| they specifically disclaim "liability" to what the package
| maintainers do because they are separate groups. But the
| one time I tried going off the beaten path from pkg (which
| installs binaries) and went to /usr/local/ports and
| actually tried to build something from scratch, it just
| choked on dependencies and quit.
|
| IIRC, I tried to build vim from scratch, but during the
| menuconfig, selected different "cflags" (or whatever they
| call them) to add additional features. When you do this, it
| pulls in more packages, and eventually something failed to
| compile the way I had configured it. I realize there's
| probably N! different combinations of packages /
| dependencies. But still it left me thinking "why bother
| releasing this crap/give me the option to customize at all
| if you don't even do basic tests on it?".
| popcar2 wrote:
| This was the one to finally stop getting me to distro hop. Cachy
| is very easy to use and very well maintained. The performance is
| usually the selling point people talk about, but it's also very
| customizable and beginner-friendly (especially for an arch-based
| distro).
|
| It uses an online installer that lets you choose the desktop
| environment, boot manager, file system, among other things. You
| can follow the defaults if you're new. Once you install it, it
| also comes with a few helper applications that can quickly set up
| things you'd want to use, like a one-click button that installs
| all the gaming packages you want to use and their flavor of
| Proton which is (allegedly) faster than the default.
|
| They also have a really good wiki which I contributed a bit to
| and a very active community if you need help. All around, 10/10
| would recommend to anyone. I managed to convince my friend who's
| new to Linux to use this instead of Zorin and he's had a great
| time.
| heresie-dabord wrote:
| > 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.
| exe34 wrote:
| nixos for me. broke it once 9 years ago, but I never figured
| out how.
| WD-42 wrote:
| I had not heard of labwc before, super cool that it's
| compatible with openbox themes! Openbox was one of the first
| "cool wm" I think I used back in the day, probably like 15
| years ago now when it supplanted Fluxbox as the dominant
| *box.
| tetris11 wrote:
| > labwc and Sway
|
| Is there an option to stay permanently in floating mode, and
| allow manual placement? I'm stuck on AwesomeWM using just
| floating windows with easy keybindings for moving them
| around/resizing, etc. and am looking to jump from X11 to
| Wayland
| klooney wrote:
| Why use Awesome with floating windows?
| KetoManx64 wrote:
| Because it makes no sense to do tiling on a 12" screen,
| especially when you have keyboard shortcuts to
| activate/start applications
| michaelmrose wrote:
| I prefer it still because it makes sense for every window
| to be maximized at startup. Also one layout that still
| makes sense is 1 window taking up 100% of the horizontal
| space and 95% of the vertical save for a small strip for
| a terminal.
| KetoManx64 wrote:
| I have - Meta + Z: Activate/iterate through terminal
| windows - Meta + W: Activate/iterate through browser
| windows
|
| And when on a laptop I maybe do a split view 2-3 times a
| day for a short term. 95% of the time it's full sized
| windows which I switch between using keyboard shortcuts.
| jorvi wrote:
| I really dislike that Linux proper doesn't by default have
| x.xx-server, x.xx-workstation, x.xx-laptop and x.xx-desktop
| kernel variants. Or just doesn't have defaults, requiring
| distros to think about what to set during compilation.
|
| A lot of the current defaults stem from the 90s, and often were
| eyeballed by the creator of said code. They're not good
| defaults for modern servers nor workstations nor laptops nor
| desktops. And all of those devices work best with different
| defaults.
|
| It doesn't seem (yes, appearances can be deceiving) to be that
| much work, because no extra code needs to be written. For each
| variant, just set different default parameter values for stuff
| like swappiness, lazy RCUs and what not. Make it a thing to
| revisit the defaults every 10 years.
|
| CachyOS and some other distros already do this, but a big chunk
| of distros doesn't because they think the defaults are well-
| thought out.
| bflesch wrote:
| I love the separation of concerns. It provides an amazing
| terminal-first kernel and everything graphical is maintained
| by various different organizations, and you can choose
| between many different options.
|
| Maintaining a large distro is extremely difficult and every
| decision has several trade-offs.
| embedding-shape wrote:
| > CachyOS and some other distros already do this, but a big
| chunk of distros doesn't because they think the defaults are
| well-thought out.
|
| Based on what I saw 1-2 years ago last time I looked at it,
| most distributions to customize and don't use the defaults
| straight up. From memory, so someone correct me if I'm wrong:
|
| - RHEL/SLES - Lots of patches to kernels
|
| - Arch - Closer to just using defaults, some config choices
| and downstream adjustments (so the opposite of CachyOS
| almost, which is why we have CachyOS in the first place)
|
| - Ubuntu - Probably the most patched distribution compared to
| upstream components, also includes a lot of Canonical-
| specific stuff on top of that.
|
| - Fedora - Has some bleeding edge bits and bobs
|
| - Debian - Bit more conservative than Ubuntu, but still has
| patches for stability, security and backports.
|
| In my experience, distributions changing the defaults and
| customizations seems to be the norm rather than the
| exception.
| malwrar wrote:
| Why would you want different kernels for different device
| types?
|
| Genuine question! I maintain my own Linux distro (upstream
| Linux + portage) for all my devices and haven't found much
| reason to go beyond kernel per arch. I'm curious if there's
| something I could be missing.
| jorvi wrote:
| Well, for the two examples I named:
|
| vm.swappiness defaults to 60, which is default from when
| everyone was still running spinning rust with a swap
| partition. Servers these days usually have very specific
| storage+memory configurations, whereas the usual desktop or
| laptop has an SSD and 16GB+ of RAM with RAM compression
| expanding it.
|
| Lazy RCU loading is good on a laptop because you only lose
| about 10% performance and only with specific workloads, but
| your idle and light load energy consumption improves. Most
| laptops spend like 95%+ in light or idle load scenarios.
| Conversely, on a desktop you don't care (much) about idle
| and light load energy consumption, you only care about
| keeping max load consumption low enough so that your fans
| stay quiet. And on a workstation you don't care about a
| system being whisper quiet so you can go nuts with the
| energy consumption.
| malwrar wrote:
| I totally missed that part of your comment, my bad.
| Thanks for elaborating on those, I feel inspired to
| experiment!
|
| So far my kernel journey has been about making my
| hardware work + enabling features, and that's mostly how
| I've been discovering config options. Do you have any
| suggestions on where one aught to read further on this
| sort of kernel tuning?
|
| EDIT: doing some further research, couldn't you just set
| those options via sysctl w/o needing to build a separate
| kernel?
| johnny22 wrote:
| Swappiness and many others can be changed by some sort of
| system preset rather built that way. I know not ALL
| options can be done that way, but I'd want to see changes
| start there where feasible.
| prmoustache wrote:
| > vm.swappiness defaults to 60, which is default from
| when everyone was still running spinning rust with a swap
| partition. Servers these days usually have very specific
| storage+memory configurations, whereas the usual desktop
| or laptop has an SSD and 16GB+ of RAM with RAM
| compression expanding it.
|
| You don't need to compile a specific kernel for that,
| this is setup via sysctl.
| jcalvinowens wrote:
| > Lazy RCU loading is good on a laptop
|
| Do you mean RCU_LAZY? Most distros will already enable
| that: it doesn't do anything without rcu_nocbs, so
| there's no negative impact on server workloads.
| [calvin@debian-trixie ~] grep RCU_LAZY
| /boot/config-6.12.57+deb13-amd64
| CONFIG_RCU_LAZY=y # CONFIG_RCU_LAZY_DEFAULT_OFF
| is not set [calvin@debian-trixie ~] grep
| RCU_NOCB_CPU /boot/config-6.12.57+deb13-amd64
| CONFIG_RCU_NOCB_CPU=y #
| CONFIG_RCU_NOCB_CPU_DEFAULT_ALL is not set
|
| https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/
| lin...
|
| You just have to set rcu_nocbs on the kernel cmdline.
| htamas wrote:
| Happy CachyOS user for more than a year now. I can highly
| recommend it! I use for gaming mostly.
| tex0 wrote:
| 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.
| bionsystem wrote:
| Funny I've been poking with the latest ISO last night in a VM.
| ZFS on root with mirroring and boot environment is seamless,
| which to me is a huge enabler for a rolling release with fast
| update cycle, so I want to try it deeper. Currently on fedora kde
| spin which has a lot of quircks, with Cosmic coming out soon I'll
| probably switch.
| pacifika wrote:
| What quirks did you encounter if I may ask? Was considering
| this setup.
| bionsystem wrote:
| Overall it works well and I like the defaults, the work done
| is remarkable, and it's been a huge relief considering the
| shitshow that's Windows 11, and even an improvement from
| Windows 10 which I enjoyed for years, but it lacks a bit of
| polish I feel, depending on what you use it for. I don't
| blame anybody it's really hard work to maintain something
| like that and a lot of things are nice, but here are some
| annoyances :
|
| - It doesn't shut down properly most of the time, I have to
| cut the power ; which I do anyway to go to sleep but
| sometimes I forget after I use it in the morning before going
| to work, and it stays with a black screen and the fan running
| all day
|
| - There are a lot of updates, a few Gbs per week, and I have
| to type my password several times a week (even when logged
| in), I can't find how to change that
|
| - Sometimes after an update I'll lose an icon or two, or some
| settings like scroll speed, etc ; not a huge deal but forces
| me to google around to get the setting back
|
| - Lots of apps are in flatpacks or snaps, I could try some
| other repos or maybe nix/guix/pkgsrc but I would lose the
| appstore anyway so I might as well look around for something
| else
|
| - Some things seem painful to setup, nvidia drivers,
| incus/lxc, zfs on root... NVidia was the most important and I
| managed to make it work well now but didn't bother with the
| rest
| constantcrying wrote:
| People need to stop making Meme distributions. There will be so
| much grief once people figure out that what they wanted is a
| good, stable operating system and what they got is a franken
| Arch, which will inevitably fail in unpredictable ways and for
| which there is miniscule support.
|
| The Arch forums rightfully warn against this and do not want
| users of these distros, since all these distros are inevitably
| broken in their own weird ways.
|
| There are multiple very reasonable distros. There is absolutely
| no need to make these forks.
| teekert wrote:
| 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.
| constantcrying wrote:
| >Having a great showcase distro can be a very nice way into
| Linux in general.
|
| By "nice" do you mean a distro which is fundamentally broken
| and far less supported then its parent distro?
|
| >It's alle achieved with these boutique distros which may
| display the best that's out there.
|
| It is displaying the worst that is out there, just with a
| nice interface. These niche distros are always the worst
| choices, because they lack in support and are all
| fundamentally broken.
|
| Running someone else's patch set of Arch is the easiest way
| to have a terrible Linux experience. Having a nice interface
| to lull people into believing what they are getting is a
| professional product and then handing them a fundamentally
| broken system, where some hobbyists have patched a proper
| Linux distro so bad, that you are not even allowed to ask for
| help on the Arch forum is down right devious and presents the
| worst of the Linux world.
|
| The truth is that Linux is mostly stable (even Arch), well
| supported and maintained. But this does not apply to these
| small hobby projects, which are just worse versions of their
| base distros with some ricing on top.
|
| >FOSS is about freedom, freedom works best with options to
| apply to. Nobody is forcing you to do anything with these
| options.
|
| At the same time I am free to warn people against this. These
| distros are a bad Idea and especially if you are new to Linux
| they will make you suffer far more than you should.
| acron0 wrote:
| > Running someone else's patch set of Arch is the easiest
| way to have a terrible Linux experience. Having a nice
| interface to lull people into believing what they are
| getting is a professional product and then handing them a
| fundamentally broken system, where some hobbyists have
| patched a proper Linux distro so bad, that you are not even
| allowed to ask for help on the Arch forum is down right
| devious and presents the worst of the Linux world.
|
| Except, this isn't the experience for the majority of users
| moving to Cachy, Bazzite, Zorin, whatever. What they're
| getting is a fresh, usable experience specifically in the
| "flavor" they care about.
|
| Linux, and especially Arch, has an image problem, and it's
| the reason, despite how good these base distros might be,
| that people aren't coming. It takes a clever bit of
| branding and a marginalisation of all the gatekeeping (just
| like you're trying to do right now) to let users finally
| think "actually, maybe this is something I can use".
| constantcrying wrote:
| >Except, this isn't the experience for the majority of
| users moving to Cachy, Bazzite, Zorin, whatever.
|
| Yes, but it will be experience they inevitably _will_
| have once these differences will result in their OS being
| fundamentally broken and nobody being there to help them.
|
| >It takes a clever bit of branding and a marginalisation
| of all the gatekeeping (just like you're trying to do
| right now) to let users finally think "actually, maybe
| this is something I can use".
|
| Hilariously giving people a fundamentally broken OS,
| which they use based on superficial criteria is the best
| gatekeeper imaginable. Once the inevitable happens and
| their distro is totally trashed, they will never use
| Linux for anything again.
|
| If you want people to have a good long term experience
| give them a well supported mainstream distro, instead of
| a fundamentally broken arch patchset.
|
| >"actually, maybe this is something I can use".
|
| Which is exactly the wrong thought. No, the fundamentally
| broken Arch derivative you are trying to use is _much,
| much harder_ to use than Fedora.
| acron0 wrote:
| But you won't get them to understand these points unless
| you're willing to fix the image problem and then invest
| in better branding. Telling people they're wrong doesn't
| sell things.
| constantcrying wrote:
| New users shouldn't understand these points. They just
| should be advised not to use any of these distros, they
| do not need to understand the reasons, besides that they
| are poorly supported projects and will break their OS.
| oivey wrote:
| What does "fundamentally broken" mean? Seemingly you're
| phrasing it as something to do with community forums and
| wikis? That's a strange definition.
| jamwil wrote:
| You keep saying it's fundamentally broken. That appears
| to be inconsistent with virtually all of the first hand
| accounts in this thread. You come across as intransigent.
| ilitirit wrote:
| > 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.
| embedding-shape wrote:
| > There is absolutely no need to make these forks.
|
| It's not a fork though. You can find out what a distribution is
| here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_distribution
|
| > since all these distros are inevitably broken in their own
| weird ways
|
| Absolute statements should probably have some absolute and
| undeniable proof, what exact "weird" ways are CachyOS broken
| today, since you apparently think yourself to be experienced
| enough to know this?
|
| Maybe it's time to stop crying, and try to see some positivity
| in the world rather than going into a dark hole constantly.
| rolymath wrote:
| Personally, I wanted Hyprland which is not supported on
| debian/Ubuntu and only partially supported on Fedora. But
| couldn't for the life of me figure out how to install Arch.
| constantcrying wrote:
| >Personally, I wanted Hyprland which is not supported on
| debian/Ubuntu and only partially supported on Fedora
|
| What? https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/hyprland
| https://packages.fedoraproject.org/pkgs/hyprland/hyprland/
|
| >But couldn't for the life of me figure out how to install
| Arch.
|
| I mean, come on. Sure, Arch is not for everybody, but if you
| are semi tech savy you could have done the internet searches
| I did and figured out which distros have hyprland packages.
| Both Fedora and Debian have them.
|
| Arch is also not much harder to install than debian. Insert
| the image and go through the steps in the installer, this
| isn't some magic ritual.
| https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Archinstall
| mindcrash wrote:
| For those of you who are a little bit more adventurous - The
| custom CachyOS kernel is also available within a Portage overlay:
|
| https://github.com/Szowisz/CachyOS-kernels
|
| Which enables you to run a Gentoo based system on the kernel
| modified by the CachyOS kernel team through a ebuild for the
| official sources on GitHub.
|
| When emerging it deals with all necessary dependency flags and
| configuration for you, just a little bit tinkering with USE flags
| required.
| ahoka wrote:
| Now that you mention Gentoo, the whole distro make me think of
| this: https://www.shlomifish.org/humour/by-others/funroll-
| loops/Ge...
| LargoLasskhyfv wrote:
| I prefer apt-shred dist chainsaw.
| temp0826 wrote:
| There is also a Fedora COPR with the CachyOS kernel and a few
| other packages, see https://github.com/CachyOS/copr-linux-
| cachyos
| sdwvit wrote:
| Made by russian unfortunately
| SquareWheel wrote:
| 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.
| Fnoord wrote:
| There was hardly any judgement, except 'unfortunately'.
|
| Regardless, there are people who want to avoid distributions
| made by Russians. Are builds reproducible? Where do these
| people reside? Could be important.
| einpoklum wrote:
| > there are people who want to avoid distributions made by
| Russians
|
| Well, racism / citizenship-based discrimination is a thing,
| yes.
|
| > Are builds reproducible?
|
| A valid question, but what does that have to do with the
| ethnic background or citizenship of the distro makers?
|
| > Where do these people reside?
|
| It seems their team is from all sorts of places, although
| it doesn't exactly say where in the world each of them is
| located:
|
| https://cachyos.org/about/
| Fnoord wrote:
| Of course it is a thing when the country of their
| nationality is committing genocide, and an authoritarian
| government.
|
| > A valid question, but what does that have to do with
| the ethnic background or citizenship of the distro
| makers?
|
| Allows security researchers to verify the binaries and/or
| find intentional backdoors.
|
| > It seems their team is from all sorts of places,
| although it doesn't exactly say where in the world each
| of them is located
|
| Lots of words for 'I don't know'. Me neither, that is why
| I am asking.
| embedding-shape wrote:
| > Of course it is a thing when the country of their
| nationality is committing genocide, and an authoritarian
| government.
|
| Bit ironic to continue posting comments here, isn't it?
|
| None the less, I agree with your worry and caution based
| on where software is produced, but I enact that by
| checking my OS/software before installing/updating it,
| not spreading FUD on internet forums.
| Filligree wrote:
| What's your procedure for checking it? How would you
| discover if the FSB has forced them to put a timebomb in?
| Fnoord wrote:
| This website is very liberal with regards to freedom of
| speech, and while hosted in USA it isn't part of FAMAG,
| and non-partisan. While the USA is under attack from
| radical right, it has been before (Dubya).
|
| The thing with citizens of Russia and China who reside in
| their respective authoritarian country is they cannot be
| held legally accountable.
| voxadam wrote:
| I've been using Linux since the mid-90s and Linux almost
| exclusively for the last couple decades and I have only one
| question, aren't most Linux distros fully customizable? I
| currently run Fedora on my desktop but I've run everything from
| Slackware to Red Hat to Debian to Knoppix to Corel to Suse to
| Arch, you get the idea, and I've found all of them nearly equal
| in the customizability department. Is there a distro out there
| that actively fights customization?
| sydon wrote:
| None that I know of, however I'd say certain distro's might
| attract people who want more/specific customization
| kouteiheika wrote:
| 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.
| einpoklum wrote:
| > fully customizable
|
| There are all sorts of customizable. CachyOS' use of that word
| is rather inspecific. I guess it means the compilation flags
| are better customized for your CPU, plus it is easier to choose
| a kernel with a different scheduler enabled. So, "more
| customizable" in that sense.
|
| Of course you could ask whether you could 'customize' your
| distribution not force you to use systemd. Most popular
| distributions fall flat on that one, I'm afraid...
| throwaway7356 wrote:
| Most distributions also don't allow to 'customize' any of the
| following:
|
| - compiler used for building the distribution, - libc
| implementation, - C++ standard library implementation, -
| coreutils implementation, - system shell, - kernel (e.g.,
| using Hurd), - PAM or equivalent, - util-linux, - package
| manager,
|
| and so on. systemd is just one more thing in that looong,
| looong list.
| WD-42 wrote:
| They are for you because you're a pro at it by now even if you
| don't realize it. You have to remember there are a ton of
| people installing Linux now for the first time ever. Some
| distros give a better out of the box experience. My guess is
| Cachy is popular with people that have heard Arch is great
| (because it is) but don't want to deal with a text mode
| installer, or enjoy the value add it brings to gamers.
| evilduck wrote:
| The immutable distros (Fedora Silverblue, Bazzite, etc) can be
| more challenging to customize, but that's kind of the point
| too.
| PhilipRoman wrote:
| You can customize anything, the problem is always how
| maintainable your customization is. People keep making
| FrankenDebians (https://wiki.debian.org/DontBreakDebian#Don.27t
| _make_a_Frank...) using curl|bash install scripts, alternate
| repositories or just plain brute force symlinking libraries
| with a hefty dose of chattr +i.
|
| A properly customizable distro allows organizing and tracking
| patches in layers, etc.
| thegaitlessgate wrote:
| Fedora has been rock solid for a few years (minus Zoom + Nvidia),
| as my primary work OS. I'm always nervous to jump to an Arch-
| based distro as my daily driver, for fear of having to regularly
| fix issues. Is this a legitimate concern in 2025? Would my
| experience (especially with graphics) be improved on something
| like Cachy?
| embedding-shape wrote:
| > 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.
| distances wrote:
| Yes, dist-upgrade was the biggest pain with the Ubuntu based
| KDE neon too. I'd wait for multiple months after a new
| version was published before I'd upgrade, and still would
| often encounter issues that broke the boot. I made sure to
| reserve at least half a day for each dist-upgrade -- multiple
| times I fixed issues with a bootable USB image and mounting
| the full-disk encrypted partition to fiddle something.
|
| I was always able to recover with some insights from random
| forum or Reddit posts, but I can't say this was the type
| hacking I wanted to do.
|
| I'm hoping a rolling release is easier in the long run, but
| we'll see. Also this time I used a separate SSD for /home so
| that at least I could do a full reinstall and still keep my
| data.
| vbezhenar wrote:
| I'm using ordinary Arch for the last year and I didn't have a
| single issue.
| jaapz wrote:
| 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.
| embedding-shape wrote:
| > Honestly, I've had more problems running windows than
| running arch.
|
| Worst thing with Windows isn't the occasional "wtf, how do I
| undo this change Microsoft forced upon me?" but more "Damn,
| it's that time of the month where Windows force me to do X",
| most recently being upgrades that you cannot shutdown or
| restart your computer without doing. Used to be you could run
| some command to avoid it, but literally all the hacks stopped
| working.
|
| So now I'm slightly afraid of booting Windows which I do
| sometimes, because I don't want to end up in the situation
| where I need to boot Linux for five seconds to do something
| quickly, but Windows is refusing to do so without first doing
| a 20 minute upgrade. Fucking disrespectful of people's time!
| WD-42 wrote:
| Arch being unstable is a myth. I've had far more issues with
| major upgrades between versions of Debian, fedora and Ubuntu
| than I ever had on arch. I think my install is almost 6 years
| old now.
| embedding-shape wrote:
| Same. My first Linux was Ubuntu 9.x, every time I upgraded
| the major version something broke. Eventually ignored the
| "Arch is unstable" as I saw my co-workers having zero issues,
| and been using Arch since 2017 now with zero breakages that I
| myself wasn't responsible for.
| bavell wrote:
| Same here as well, using arch as daily driver for 10+ years
| now. I think just twice I've had major headaches due to
| package/kernel upgrades which required a few hours
| troubleshooting. Otherwise, smooth sailing and a pleasure
| to work with. Love the AUR (w/ pikaur)!
| embedding-shape wrote:
| > Love the AUR (w/ pikaur)!
|
| Never heard about pikaur before (Rua gang here), but
| judging by the screenshots, does it not allow you to
| review the PKGBUILD before building the package? Seems to
| me like the most basic feature a AUR helper _has to_
| have, since AUR is all user-contributed without reviews.
| Is pikaur really letting you install packages blindly
| like that?
| theevilsharpie wrote:
| > Arch being unstable is a myth.
|
| Arch follows a rolling release model. It's inherently
| unstable, by design.
| WD-42 wrote:
| You are probably using some annoying pedantic definition of
| unstable. Most people mean it to mean "does stuff crash or
| break". Packages hang out in arch testing repos for a long
| time. In fact, Fedora often gets the latest GNOME release
| before Arch does, sometimes by months.
| theevilsharpie wrote:
| > You are probably using some annoying pedantic
| definition of unstable. Most people mean it to mean "does
| stuff crash or break".
|
| English has a specific word for that: reliable.
|
| Pedantry aside, having a complex system filled with
| hundreds (thousands?) of software packages whose versions
| are constantly changing, and whose updates may have
| breaking changes and/or regressions, is a quick way of
| ending up with software that crashes or breaks through no
| fault of the user (save for the decision to use a rolling
| release distro).
| WD-42 wrote:
| This isn't true in practice. It turns out incrementally
| updating with small changes is more stable in the long
| run than doing a large amount of significant upgrades all
| at once.
|
| Have you ever had to maintain a software project with
| many dependencies? If you have, then surely you have had
| the experience where picking up the project after a long
| period of inactivity makes updating dependencies much
| harder. Whereas an actively maintained or developed
| project, where dependencies are updated regularly, is
| much easier. You know what is changing and what is
| probably responsible if something breaks, etc. And it's
| much easier to revert.
| theevilsharpie wrote:
| > Have you ever had to maintain a software project with
| many dependencies? If you have, then surely you have had
| the experience where picking up the project after a long
| period of inactivity makes updating dependencies much
| harder. Whereas an actively maintained or developed
| project, where dependencies are updated regularly, is
| much easier. You know what is changing and what is
| probably responsible if something breaks, etc. And it's
| much easier to revert.
|
| Have you ever had situations where Foo has an urgent
| security or reliability update that you can't apply,
| because Bar only works with an earlier version of Foo,
| and updating or replacing Bar involves a significant
| amount of work because of breaking changes?
|
| I won't deny that there's value in having the latest
| versions of software applications, especially for things
| like GPU drivers or compatibility layers like Proton
| where updates frequently have major performance or
| compatibility improvements.
|
| But there's also value in having a stable base of
| software that you can depend on to be there when you wake
| up in the morning, and that has a dependable update
| schedule that you can plan around.
| deryilz wrote:
| As another commenter said, sometimes upgrades require manual
| intervention. You can fix this using a tool like informant
| which shows you all the interventions you have to do before you
| upgrade.
|
| Also, you can use a tool like snapper + btrfs-assistant (both
| of which come pre-installed on Cachy IIRC) which lets you fully
| revert your filesystem (snapper rollback) or partially (snapper
| undochange) if something breaks. Just make sure to use a btrfs
| filesystem for that.
| pacifika wrote:
| I set this up to reinvigorate my T2 MacBook Pro (with Cosmic) but
| it keeps restarting when the lid is closed, and keyboard and
| trackpad don't always resume on restore. I was impressed with the
| docs!
|
| I'm thinking of trying Ubuntu, but maybe T2 Linux will always be
| a compromise, hardly CachyOS fault I reckon.
| jvanderbot wrote:
| I've had fantastic experiences reinvigorating macs with Ubuntu.
| Highly recommended.
| chenzhekl wrote:
| It's my favorite distro so far. It works out of the box on my
| Zephyrus, with all the fixes needed for smooth performance,
| including, but not limited to, flawless iGPU/dGPU switching.
| hexbin010 wrote:
| Going against the grain here: we don't need so many / still more
| distros
| embedding-shape wrote:
| Going against whatever hole that perspective came from: We
| don't have nearly enough distributions, we need more
| distributions with strong opinions, new solutions and just "far
| out there" ideas.
| hexbin010 wrote:
| > whatever hole that perspective came from
|
| Rude
|
| (A perspective based on 25 years of using Linux fwiw)
| embedding-shape wrote:
| It's a hole because it's pessimistic, borderline
| antagonistic and against more user choices. I guess the
| hacker in me just feels weird reading someone wanting less
| choices on a forum for curious hackers.
| kachapopopow wrote:
| so we should just have 2-3 distros monopolize the world? hmm I
| think i'd rather keep having new distros pop out challenging
| the current quota.
| hexbin010 wrote:
| I didn't say that. Silly strawman
| kachapopopow wrote:
| That is the natural place it would end up at if new distros
| stopped being made as some would start dying off and you're
| basically just left with fedora, arch, debian while
| everything else fades with time.
|
| Not to mention that distros like catchy help to push these
| changes into mainline.
| synergy20 wrote:
| ubuntu user for almost 20 years,tried many distros in the
| past,now feel it's a solved problem for me: just use ubuntu lts.
|
| one reason is better sw support,e.g. Arduino, android,
| vivado,cuda,you name it,all are supported out of box, saves a lot
| of time for me
| forbiddenlake wrote:
| Sure, but lts often doesn't work for other use cases like
| gaming. For example the experience on lts with this year's AMD
| gpus will be extremely poor if it works at all.
|
| I run Arch and my 9070 xt experience was poor for several
| months after release. I can't imagine modern gaming on an lts
| release.
|
| Cachy being Arch based and recompiling with modern cpu flags
| doesn't seem to be targeting the users who want unchanging
| boring software.
| superkuh wrote:
| Being rolling doesn't fix the lack of upstream support for
| GPUs that AMD does for the first half year (and any years
| past 4~). LTS distros are great because they work pretty good
| "forever" instead of great for brief unknowable periods.
| newsoftheday wrote:
| > Sure, but lts often doesn't work for other use cases like
| gaming
|
| Bullship, I've used it since it came out in 2006 for
| everything including gaming (I'm a gamer). And that is on
| nvidia since then too. Not the same card, various nvidia
| cards over the years. All worked great. Ubuntu works great.
|
| Ubuntu is formally supported distro, probably the most common
| throughout all enterprises in the US (because Red Hat and all
| RPM based distos suck due to RPM has repo bugs still) while
| deb works great.
| jcelerier wrote:
| Just a couple weeks ago a bogus update was pushed to Ubuntu 24
| which completely broke Nvidia as they pushed a different
| version of the 580 drivers and user space libraries
| theoldgreybeard wrote:
| I ran CachyOS for a while and it's really good! These days I'm
| rolling on OpenSUSE Aeon for the immutability and because my
| homelab stuff is all Suse based.
|
| But if you're a gamer that also uses your PC for development or
| content creation you can't go wrong with CachyOS.
| robviren wrote:
| I have been unable to get anything other than Cachy to run
| Baldur's Gate 3 as well as Windows on my Lenovo Legion 2021. Best
| I have found for performance and so far stable on my relative new
| tower.
| ariejan wrote:
| Tried installing Cachyos yesterday, was playing Arc Raider like
| 15m later (mainly because I had to wait on the 30GB download).
| Zero issues so far. Next up is to see if Rocksmith 2014 wants
| to play ball.
| kachapopopow wrote:
| Here to say that cachyos is by no means just a gaming os it's a
| really nicely packaged distro and works much better than KDE
| neon, far better than manjaro.
|
| It also generally feels snappier for simple things like opening
| terminal, but I am pretty sure that was a kde neon issue.
|
| I only use KDE so your experience might be different than mine.
| embedding-shape wrote:
| Also barely use it for gaming/multimedia, already have Windows
| for that, I use it for work (software development/machine
| learning) with Gnome3 and haven't had any issues with it since
| I started using it in 2025. Don't notice much performance
| difference with normal Arch though either tbh.
| kachapopopow wrote:
| nvidia support seems to be better, but I have no idea if that
| is arch or catchyos.
| embedding-shape wrote:
| I've only used CachyOS for a couple of months, before that
| Arch since 2017, and never had any issues with nvidia cards
| on Linux, and I think I'm usually in the areas where people
| find them cumbersome (tiling WMs, gaming, machine learning,
| CUDA). Started with a 1080, then 2080ti, then 3090ti, and
| finally a RTX Pro 6000 Blackwell, don't remember any issue
| with any of them.
|
| I think both Arch and CachyOS would do fine with nvidia
| cards, but thanks to who I don't know.
| ulimn wrote:
| Regarding the KDE aspect: my preferred DE is KDE and I
| installed CachyOS with that. Everything seemed to go smoothly
| and using it was also a good experience.
|
| With that said, I ran into an age-old problem: sleep.
|
| (For reference, I have an AMD Ryzen CPU, RTX 4070 super GPU and
| some low-end motherboard and I am using the proprietary nvidia
| drivers.)
|
| I searched the web for hours and tried a lot of things,
| including different kernels, but nothing helped. In the end,
| after I couldn't find anything new on forums, reddit, blog
| posts, etc, I asked chatgpt for some ideas.
|
| It had me change BIOS settings, kernel params, nvidia module
| params (or something like that - I'm not well versed in this
| topic tbh), etc, but in some way waking up from sleep still did
| not work.
|
| After it suggested some undocumented kernel param with the
| nvidia kernel module, I said that's it, let's try something
| else and reinstalled with Gnome.
|
| To my surprise, it worked without issue. I've been using it
| like this for weeks now.
|
| I have no idea if the explanation is good or not but chatgpt
| said it's because my hardware + proprietary nvidia driver +
| plasma wayland was a bad combination.
| distances wrote:
| I'm another former long-term KDE neon user that switched to
| CachyOS. It's been very pleasant, so much so that I put it also
| on my laptop.
| friedtofu wrote:
| I've been daily driving CachyOS for ~3 years now. It was the
| first distro I could use "out of the box" with a Nvidia 1080 TI
| and later 3060 along with an old Intel i7-8700k without having
| to spend a significant amount of time tweaking and fiddling
| with config files just to get a working Plasma/Wayland setup.
|
| Though I definitely think the resources and guides Archwiki
| provided plus the fact that I had been distro hopping(Mint,
| Ubuntu, PopOS among others) the last couple years before I
| settled into CachyOS/Arch helped a lot.
|
| I will say though(at least in my experience) attempting to use
| a tiling/dynamic WM like hyprland, sway, river, anything that
| depends on wlroots did not work well, which is to be expected
| as i dont believe any of the desktop environments I listed
| support Nvidia.
|
| KDE Plasma(The default DE) and XFCE which I only used for a
| short while gave me the most stable and consistent environment.
| Generally I never promote CachyOS, but this is the first time
| I've seen it on the front page of HN, if you're willing to put
| in a little effort(i.e read through the CachyOS docs and maybe
| a couple pages of the Archwiki) I'm pretty sure CachyOS is the
| best experience "out of the box" for users with a Nvidia
| GPU/intel CPU/iGPU. Outside of straight up upstream Arch as
| long as youre willing to put in the time to configure it post
| install to optimize your system.
| ragazzina wrote:
| [I am sorry for the meta, if it's against the guidelines I hope
| this comment will be quickly deleted. But I am not criticizing
| anyone, I just find it interesting.]
|
| The discussion between supporters of these kind of distros and
| people against them are very similar to those between
| vegetarians.
|
| "I don't know why the community needs a veggie chicken nuggets
| honestly. We have delicious vegetables."
|
| "But veggie chicken nuggets have their place. They are quick and
| microwaveable, and they help bringing people in"
|
| "We bring them in with preservatives and chemicals? Sweet
| potatoes are also quickly microwaveable.."
|
| And so on.
| embedding-shape wrote:
| Welcome to every internet discussion ever, where people who
| don't understand or know each other's perspective and contexts
| unless they share them, so everyone is mostly talking past each
| other and in reality, to someone else.
| andmetoo wrote:
| Using daily with niri and it feels way faster compared to omarchy
| newsoftheday wrote:
| I'm sticking with Ubuntu, used it since 2006, works great with
| nvidia going back that far on several different nvidia cards over
| the years, great gaming performance. Make that Ubuntu with
| kubuntu desktop, since Gnome sucks.
| jmakov wrote:
| Seems to be a mixed bag regarding performance:
| https://www.phoronix.com/review/cachyos-ubuntu-2510-f43/6
| simgt wrote:
| Aren't you concerned about security on all these smaller distros?
| They look great, but I'm more and more worried about supply chain
| attacks. I _feel_ safer on something like Fedora.
| bluecalm wrote:
| I really like the idea of compiling both the kernel and packages
| for modern CPUs instructions. This seems to be around 5% free
| speed (googling various benchmarks) + better responsiveness for
| personal computer use.
|
| Any views how sustainable it is for the authors to keep working
| on it? Is it just donation based or is there a bigger supporter
| behind it?
| shmerl wrote:
| Approach of using all kind of non upstream or unfinished stuff to
| sell it as better performance is actually counter productive. It
| makes new users who are unaware of it, being unable to report
| bugs upstream which basically creates an isolation from the wider
| Linux community.
|
| It appears to be done for the sake of hyping themselves as
| superior, but it's causing problems. I totally wouldn't recommend
| anything with such approach to new users especially.
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