Birbla

Join the discussion

Write your take first — we'll ask for email only when you're ready to publish.

Sign in
  • Hacker News
  • Does anyone have any idea why Cachy is so hard on I/O? If I run it with disk encryption my entire system hangs intermittently when downloading large files. (eg steam updates, etc.) Even testing without disk encryption, I will get brief hangs when writing large files.

    Is Cachy just assuming that everyone's got a high-quality NVME? Is there something about newer OSes that cause a CPU bottleneck for large disk writes?

    by everdrive
  • Which filesystem do you have on top of the encryption? If it's the default btrfs that might be one factor. Have you tested using ext4? What is the make/model of the physical storage?
    by Bender
  • I switched to Bazzite from CachyOS and while I really appreciate how accessible it is, the immutability of the core OS doesn't do enough to scratch my Linux tinkering fix. So I'll probably install this in a few days.
    by lordleft
  • I'm on SteamOS and like the immutability for tinkering with Distrobox. Lets me tinker worry free.
    by koolala
  • Ha, so true. Bazzite cured my tinkering obsession. I now have no choice but to get shit done or to... play actual video games.
    by speed_spread
  • I loved Bazzite for hardware compatibility out of the box but the necessity of flatpak made it enormously inconvenient as a general machine. CachyOS sounds worth checking out if I still want to game but also occasionally do real work.
    by thom
  • Two years.

    Same install.

    No problems at all.

    Fully succumbed to plasmonic thrall.

    Satisfied by being speedy.

    So boring. Almost snoring.

    (must not distrohop! must not distrohop! must not distrohop!)

    by LargoLasskhyfv
  • I switched from Windows a couple of months ago. I am loving it. I cloned my favorite Windows window management solution, WindowGrid to KDE, https://store.kde.org/p/2363952/

    I haven't found anything on Linux like it.

    by derac
  • I’ve been in love with cachy since I switched from windows but this past weekend has been extremely trying after experiencing metadata exhaustion probably due to the snapshots filling up my home drive. Learned a few things and I realize btrfs is not specific to cachy, but this was definitely the hardest thing I’ve worked through since switching from windows.
    by rythmshifter
  • I'm surprised this is the default. How good are the snapshot management tools?
    by wmedrano
  • I almost ran into the metadata exhaustion problem myself. Thankfully I noticed before in btrfs assistant that the remaining metadata space is filling up dangerously fast. Before that I thought btrfs is as easy as ext4. Fire and forget, no adjustments necessary. Now I know that you have to limit the number of snapshots in some way or another. Wish there would be a more noob-friendly default configuration. Or two configuration options to choose from when installing: simplified, expert.
    by sh0gg0the
  • TIL you can run CachyOS kernels on Fedora: https://github.com/CachyOS/copr-linux-cachyos
    by whalesalad
  • TIL about Shelly. https://github.com/Seafoam-Labs/Shelly-ALPM

    In the release notes they said they removed Paru and are recommending Shelly instead.

    I like that I can manage Flatpack and AUR!

    Gonna give this a try!!

    by ElijahLynn
  • Shelly also has static analysis for AUR packages that looks for all the common, shifty ways a pkgbuild might try to give you something bad.
    by Caboose8685
  • Running CachyOS has overall been great for me in the past year but the AUR supply chain attack (or whatever it was exactly) was a little unnerving.
    by cowmix
  • How many packages are you using from AUR vs the official repos though? The official repos have almost everything I need
    by cr125rider
  • I was nervous about this too - but it's "just" the AUR. That means it's only unofficial packages, which we should always take great care when installing anyway.
    by docsaintly
  • I've been CatchyOS curious, but AUR is exactly what's been keeping me using Fedora.

    I hope official, veted Arch repositories grow over time.

    by code-blooded
  • The AUR is very user managed and orphaned packages can be picked up I guess to continue maintenance. Obviously, this can lead to some issues. It's one of the tradeoffs for a heavily user supplied repository of packages. You get a lot of good stuff quickly, but I personally will stick with Debian.

    https://cybersecuritynews.com/arch-linux-aur-packages-compro...

    by jjice
  • Yeah I really enjoyed Cachy but the model of using the AUR to install third party applications just seems broken. I don't want to have to trust some random install script maintainer in addition to the 3p app developer. And sadly I don't have the time and attention to spare to review the AUR scripts of apps every time I update.

    I switched to Kubuntu to keep KDE (which I really found I enjoyed from Cachy) while using a more stable and familiar ubuntu base. It's not one of the "gaming" distros but I haven't noticed any major drawbacks with the games I play.

    by keeganj
  • Former Windows 11 user here. Microsoft operating systems have been my primary desktop since DOS 6.0, but the embedding of advertisements in Win11 drove to me finally try out Linux distributions, and CachyOS was the only one that stuck for me in terms of familiarity and performance. It's been my daily driver for 1.5 years now, and I've been extremely grateful for it.
    by lenova
  • I few months ago, I backed up my windows gaming machine and overwrote the partition with CachyOS. Haven't looked back. Gaming performance and compatibility has exceeded my expectations. Just a much better experience overall. I feel sorry anytime I see someone using Windows.
    by mrinterweb
  • Wait... what's gaming like? Can you describe it for someone who only ever could play Unreal Tournament back in the day on Linux?

    What games are available? Do you use emulators or stuff like Wine?

    by xutopia
  • It's over a year for me with CachyOS now after endless issues with Manjaro after bigger updates, and after Mint getting hiccups-freezes randomly during operation.

    And it's also a return to KDE for me, after many years with Xfce and Gnome. The whole environment feels more stable and mature - tho, I miss title bar window shading that's not present under Wayland.

    by pndy
  • Same, games aside, it’s just so snappy. I knew windows was slow at a lot of things but I hadn’t quite realized how slow things as banal as locking/unlocking had become. The first week with cachyos was mind blowing on just that front.
    by bigmattystyles
  • I feel sorry every time I'm stuck going back to Windows. And admittedly, the situation is not even comparable to how it was ~25 years ago when I first started playing around with Linux, most things I want to do with a computer just work on Linux nowadays. There are still such things that just are not there yet - but for most of them, it's not necessarily Linux's fault.

    If we limit the conversation to gaming specifically, one area where I don't see Linux taking over any time soon is competitive/esports oriented titles and their invasive ~rootkits~ anti-cheats. Another place I kind of have to live with Windows is simulation (in my case Elite: Dangerous and iRacing/Le Mans Ultimate) - the overlays and other third-party utilities either don't exist on Linux, or I couldn't get them to work and kind of abandoned the idea.

    Audio production is also kind of a no-go. The DAWs and hardware support are absolutely getting there - Bitwig studio is apparently very good for something Ableton-like, and my DAW of choice, Reaper, has native Linux support. But the plugins and virtual instruments for the most part just don't exist. Some work through a Wine bridge, if you're lucky.

    However, if you're not too deep in a niche with very specific pieces of software, or don't care about esports offerings, there isn't much tying one to Windows nowadays.

    by folkrav
  • It's not just a gaming and performance distro, it includes QoL fixes on modern hardware.

    On my Lenovo laptop, fixes that would take over a day to enable and patch on most distros:

      - Wake from sleep

  - Nvidia GSP firmware workarounds and correct version OOTB (proprietary)

    - Mouse lag/jitter
    - External display hotplug
    - DDC/CI over type-c

 - Embedded controller power profiles from taskbar with correct TDP limits for CPU/GPU

 - Battery charge limiter support right from KDE settings

 - Working `switcherooctl` in hybrid graphics mode on AMD

 - Firefox with video decode acceleration (YouTube) on almost all GPU models
    Another gaming feature that is otherwise useful in workstations is the external scheduler support.

    Currently using BPFland which makes multitasking as responsive as idle while compiling Yocto/Chromium in the background.

    Windows, Mac (mini M1), and kernel built-in scheduler Linux jank and become almost unusable (Ryzen 5800H).

    by goodburb
  • Question to the Arch Linux veterans out there. Is CachyOS better than EndeavourOS or vice versa?

    From what I read Cachy comes with a lot of proprietary repos and gaming stuff already installed along with a custom kernel tuned for gaming performance which makes it more bloated and less stable than vanilla Arch distros like Endeavour which just ships with the bare minimum quality of life tweaks over installing arch from scratch.

    What's your experience and what would you recommend for someone switching their laptop from Windows mostly for dev work but who doesn't play too many games. I see arch is the most popular community favorite now, but I was thinking maybe a Fedora based distro would be a better fire-and-forget daily driver after the Arch AUR malware attack conundrum, as I don't have the time to deal with stuff like that on a daily basis.

    by joe_mamba
  • I tried CachyOS and Niri this weekend, and was pleasantly surprised hibernate/suspend actually worked with no customizations on my Desktop.

    I’ve tried like 5 other distros and usually when it goes into sleep/hibernate the monitor never wakes up so I have to force shutdown using the power button.

    I’m going to install this on an older machine and see how it goes. So far it’s been great!

    by rudedogg
  • If anyone is looking for a niri based opinionated set of configuration on top of CachyOS (or vanilla Arch) I put together: https://github.com/nickjj/dotfriedrice

    The goal is after installing the official ISO, you can get a developer focused desktop environment up and running in ~10 minutes with 1 command. It's quite configurable so you can change around anything you want ahead of time or after you install it. I use it with vanilla Arch but I know of quite a few people using it successfully with CachyOS.

    For CachyOS, the only manual adjustment you have to make before running the repo's install script is uninstalling `jack` since it conflicts with `pipewire-jack`. I could easily roll this into the script but so far no one has complained loud enough to automate this. I also wonder if CachyOS will eventually drop that AUR dependency in its official ISO.

    If it matters to you, 99.9% of the code is hand coded. The only time I use AI is when I'm 100% stone walled on something and it's a last resort move. Even then it's copy / pasting small snippets into web based AIs where I fully review and refactor its output so you could say the 0.1% is still human vetted.

    Moving away from Windows last year was so worth it. I've been wanting to switch since 2017 but always ran into hardware issues. The same hardware I had back then works beautifully with Arch today.

    by nickjj