I've been distro hopping for about 4 years now. Nevertheless, I discovered CachyOS, and switched to it with the KDE desktop.
I like the fact that it has the Nvidia 555 drivers preinstalled, and because I heard good things about it (it's really fast!). For those don't know much about this distribution, CachyOS is primarily used by those who want a fast, customizable, and stable operating system based on Arch Linux. It is designed to deliver high performance and is particularly popular among users who are looking to optimize their system for speed and efficiency.
This Linux distribution is considered gaming-ready, with optimizations that can enhance gaming performance. After enabling the performance tweaks right after the installation, the desktop felt much smoother and the GPU Utilization while gaming was much higher so I got a smoother experience. Also the animations were not laggy anymore.
Following are few positive observations:
I'll just say everything in CachyOs is optional and a very easy to switch, they literally document all of it, their repos are optimized and can be used on any Arch.
To be honest, compared to many other distros, it has more polish and care. In fact, it is extremely similar to EOS (EndeavourOS) in spirit, and they are not rivals.
- Plymouth was set up beforehand. utilizes mkinitcpio, which was created by the Arch team, although I think Dracut is superior.
- A one to two second boot time was lowered with the Linux-CacheOS kernel. It was once 12 seconds, but the Linux Cachyos Bore LTO kernel cut it down to 8 seconds. Well done, on their part. Although I might install it, I don't think it's necessary when the normal kernel functions well.
- Fish (terminal) by default. ZSH is set up using the powerlevel10k theme.
- Comes with pre-added repos with certain performance flags from the Arch repos containing precompiled applications.
- By default, Octopi, BTRFS Assistant, and a few Cachy tools are installed.
I'll just say everything in CachyOs is optional and a very easy to switch, they literally document all of it, their repos are optimized and can be used on any Arch.
To be honest, compared to many other distros, it has more polish and care. In fact, it is extremely similar to EOS (EndeavourOS) in spirit, and they are not rivals.
The Negatives:
On the terrible side of things tho, it ships X11 with plasma 6, hyprland, and sddm. And it takes a bit of work to get any of it working on wayland, with sddm being completely broken under wayland.
The Hyperland Spin's default configuration is garbage, but it can be mainly fixed with a few dotfiles. However, in my experience, getting it to resemble what I would call "stock" Hyperland required just as much work as installing and configuring it from scratch on EOS.
I will still use it every day and have it installed on my other devices. I don't really see the need to go back to eOS at this time because I've already made the necessary changes to the default configurations, but I doubt I would do so in the future.
Have you tried CachyOs? Leave a comment to let me know.
Have you tried CachyOs? Leave a comment to let me know.