Everything you say is spot on. I've chased the tail of the dragon in search of performance gentoo, custom kernels, over clocking, etc. The defaults are 99.99% that other .01 just isn't worth the effort.

This is the one true CachyOS description. The distro has been gaining so much traction based on naive interpretations of what performance is.

It’s not a bad distro, but its advantages are minimal over others. Whatever linux people pick, it will be fine.

It was the easiest experience I had installing and setting up different des/bootloaders to test out as a newcomer to linux. It has hella options. The wiki is also really nice and easy to use. And gaming wise, the useful part is all the packages it installs that i didn't know about and the documentation on the wiki related to it.

seems to be specific games, kingdom come deliverance (the original) stuttered & hitched badly on other distros, but cachy was 👌

CachyOS is a really good time to use.

Very sane defaults, no bloat, extremely easy snapper/btrfs/limine setup, a 1-click gaming setup button that gets everything you need ready to go.

I don't think it does much for gaming, as the video and article also point out, but even if it turns out to just be placebo - my old and creaking PC here feels more responsive than it did with Manjaro, Vanilla Arch and Garuda respectively.

I tried a few Linux distros and Cachy has been the most painless so far.

Why are people so crazy about it?

Looking at the chart, I guess it's just one of the destinations a bunch of Manjaro and Ubuntu users moved to and Ubuntu users are probably amazed how a Linux distro without Canonical BS feels like.

Imagine having a 40% market share and losing it all. Honestly, it's kind of incredible how far Ubuntu has fallen. Hopefully it serves as a lesson for anyone thinking about alienating their users.

It's just kind of annoying to not have your files where they normally are.

Flatpacks always break the moment you want to mod use community tools or need to do really much of anything.

They are great, but in a gaming or streamer context they are an annoying problem child.

The sandboxing sometimes breaks applications or requires additional configuration. And I don't like that it's a separate thing I need to maintain, although some package managers pair main package updates etc together.

And as a NixOS user, I prefer to use nix to handle as much of my system as possible, although flatpak at least is useful as a fallback in a pinch. Of course, this is a niche within a niche and mainstream users, particularly those using immutable distros can and do benefit from flatpak.

flapak when i was using it on arch always had issues getting gamescope to run as the flapak version doesn't match the version in steam. with wine adopting support for native Wayland and improvements to Vulcan layers i think flapak version may start to get more popular. but for now the main limiter is, "do i need gamescope to play?"

Plus, Bazzite doesn't have the same hardware requirements. I have a handheld device that can't install SteamOS because of an incompatible hard drive, but Bazzite works just fine.

Fwiw I was avoidant of arch for a long time and took the deep dive a few years back. I've really not had to do any more debugging work than I have to with Debian (which I'm also a fan of and use).

EndeavourOS helps a lot with smoothing over the possible gotchas and my machines with it tend to run steam games (proton or native) out of the box the majority of the time.

I finally switched from Windows to Linux and chose CachyOS. This was months ago. I never had to fix anything (so far). There was a fuck up by me once, but that wasn't the distros and could've happened on any distro. Honestly couldn't be happier with it being arch based, as it's really nice to basically get anything that is released instantly as a package update.

I haven't had to hunt for packages that aren't years old for anything as I was used to on Debian (used on most of my servers). And while the AUR is there, I think I got a total of two things installed from there, anything else was just there in the repos.

But if you've got a setup that already works, and you're happy with, why change anything? Having something that works for you is what makes the large amounts of choices in the Linux world so great.

Isn't SteamOS Arch-based?

I have found that with Arch I don't run out of troubleshooting before the problem is solved like I did with Debian. That said, the learning curve is a little steep so not switching makes sense, but I find it better personally. Just like in Windows things are out of your control I felt that Debian had strong defaults and I had trouble changing them too far. I am sure ignorance played a role but I have found the documentation on the Arch wiki was more useful in actually solving my problems.

Same. I tried arch many moons ago and heard all the stories and that was enough.

Maybe it's better by now but fedora has been stable and things like bazzite with immutability exist. Not sure why I'd pick cachy then. Especially if the gains are that minimal.

That is likely due to the RX9000 lineup needing the newer kernel for driver support. Kubuntu maybe didnt ship that 6.14 kernel at the time. Cachy is the best for new hardware because they have great tools for switching kernels and patching everything up to the bleeding edge. They make it easy to grab the latest kernel, mesa, nvidia driver or whatever you need for new hardware.