Fedora is pretty good
this post was submitted on 15 Mar 2026
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Me with a stick poking at LinuxMint : hey, wake up, do something, you have piled-up enough money under the bed already
What are you looking for? I just use Mint because it works for my old hardware.
I've thought about making the switch but what holds me back is stability.
I don't mean stability from a software perspective. But from a distro perspective. Distros come and go all the time. Four or Five have stable enough support through community developers and industry sponsorships that they've managed to become large enough and supported enough to be considered Evergreen Distros for lack of a better word. In other words, distros where the support base is large enough to be considered "too big to fail" (Ubuntu, Mainline Arch, Manjaro, Fedora, Gentoo, etc...)
The rest eventually just fade away. I've always avoided distros that are maintained by a small community of enthusiasts because enthusiasm goes away really quickly once the real work of maintaining a distro rolls around.
I won't pull the trigger on any small community project until I'm reasonably sure I'm not going to have to jump to a new project a year from now when the developers get tired of it and move on to something else.
All of the recent gaming focused distros felt this way to me, it's why I'm sticking with good old tried and tested vanilla Fedora with OpenSUSE as my backup option if RedHat ever fucks it up. I don't want a toy to play with but a tool that just works and that I don't have to think about and that's exactly what Fedora is.
In other words, distros where the support base is large enough to be considered “too big to fail” (Ubuntu, Mainline Arch, Manjaro, Fedora, Gentoo, etc…)
bruh, no Debian?
Debian's the grand-daddy from which the others all were born.
Asking the real questions.
Or Suse
Yggdrasil Plug and Play Linux!
I like CachyOS but I don’t see it’s worth it to reinstall the OS for 3-5 extra fps on an rtx 4070 laptop with ryzen 9 8945h with 32 gigs of ddr5. It probably might make sense on much older and/or weaker hardware. I mean I can just switch to the cachyos kernel on current Arch install if I want but I am just too comfortable with my current setup.
The stability issue is why I am waiting for SteamOS Desktop. I don't want to distro hop, I just want to install a single OS and never have to worry about it for the rest of my machine's life.
You can switch back to arch pretty easily and also just upgrade from arch. That's the real benefit of cachy is standing on the shoulders of giants like Arch.
Does that mean moving from EndeavourOS to CachyOS is also easy?
Maybe I should first look into what the difference is between EndeavourOS and CachyOS. Is it even worth it to switch?
Must...resist...distro...hopping
I've been comfortable on Bazzite for a couple years now but this is giving me the itch.
Don't worry.
It will simply be a live environment testing.
You will not be curious about the preconfigured openbox and wayfire DE options either.
It will be a small partition to test bare metal.
You will not expand that partition later.
It will be an equal dualboot.
You will not neglect updating your bazzite and feel guilty about it and finally distrohop fully.
I'm old enough to know that's a lie. I gave up dual booting years ago to save us all the embarrassment.
I recently switched to it because I wanted to finally have a good try at wayland with a distro made for it, and wow was I blown away, cachy is the closest I've ever been to a "it just works" OS (including every windows version I've used, from 98 up to 10), just a couple hardware specific issues that I have fixed (except for one). I also really like plasma, I'm mot committed to it but it was nice to come back to it after using mint for a while. I still wouldn't recommend it to a newcomer but damn, it's good.
My son recently switched to CachyOS after bad experiences with Windows, Bazzite, more Windows, Mint and Zorin. CachyOS was the first time he was happy since losing his love for Windows.
And he doesn't like command lines and configuring stuff, but he says for CachyOS everything was easy and there's tutorials simply telling you what to type, and that works.
He does need to remember that after yay you still need to answer a bunch of questions, because he was wondering why a Discord update didn't work while the update was waiting for his input. There's probably an option somewhere to tell it to always use the default.
The option is --noconfirm although its probably better tp get in the habit of manually reviewing those at first. The option is mainly used for automation where its helpful to allow the script to move along.
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Please don't kill me. How does this fare against a riced out Gentoo?
I tried it on my old pc and pretty good ngl.
Has a custom kernel and bunch of preconfigured options to run games I could not setup myself.
Has a bunch of riced DE options including openbox, wayfire, sway, etc. And the rice are good.
Has its own wiki and documentation.
Using paru instead of yay initially put me off, but then I found latter is written in go and paru is written in rust :3
My current issue is KDE setup still uses a lot of ram, but by a lot I mean 2 gb while browsing web and steam open.
Overall a very, very good gentop setup would be better, but mainly because custom rice is more personal.
What does CachyOS have over Bazzite?
The biggest difference, I think, is rolling releases. For gaming, I don't really understand why anyone would prefer slower update cycles since there are frequent updates that fix compatibility or increase performance.
CachyOS is set up to install everything needed for gaming from the main Hello app. Once the Winboat and Gaming one-click installs are run, it just works. I got an itch.io .exe game running by double clicking the .exe. For Steam, I just needed to choose a default Proton compatibility package to use in the app and after that it's been seamless.
CachyOS is apparently "optimized" for gaming performance—I don't pretend to know what that means or how much of an impact it has. I don't really care about eking out a tiny bit more performance, tbh. But I'm super impressed with how well everything just works and (as a bit of a power user) how completely customizable things are, so I can install just about anything I need easily.
"Frequent updates" sounds to me like "breaks frequently".
I'm using an Intel card, which is still seeing problems fixed with every update. But I've been on the road of bleeding edge before and it's been one messy problem after another.
If I can strike a balance between latest and stable, at the cost of a slightly slower update speed, I'd prefer that.
For gaming, I don’t really understand why anyone would prefer slower update cycles since there are frequent updates that fix compatibility or increase performance.
Which game uses host system libraries? I think you have a wrong impression how things work in Linux gaming outside of Tux Kart these days. Valve maintains their own set of Linux containers called Steam Linux Runtimes and their entire point is to be relatively slow moving. Just have a look at all the package dates at https://repo.steampowered.com/steamrt4/images/latest-public-stable/sources/
On top of that, almost every game is a proprietary Windows application. So it runs on top of Proton which sits on top of the latest Steam Linux Runtime.
It's similar with FOSS games where the foremost distribution outlet is Flathub and software published there relies on Flatpak Runtimes which are also relatively slow moving.
CachyOS is apparently “optimized” for gaming performance—I don’t pretend to know what that means or how much of an impact it has.
Barely any unless you're installing FOSS games from their own repository for the reasons I outlined initially.
I’m super impressed with how well everything just works
And that's what's important.
frequent updates that fix compatibility or increase performance
...and break things quite often. Considering the benchmarks Ive seen dont really show much difference between cachy and regular distros like Mint or Fedora for gaming performance, give me something stable any day over these 'bleeding edge' distros.
Any chance, have you ever used Garuda? I'm curious how CachyOS compares on the "ease of use" front. I've been on Garuda for like 3 or 4 years now as it is the only one (that I tried) that I've had "just work" for everything out of the box. My laptop had a lot of trouble with Bazzite and the nvidia drivers, but again, I don't have to do anything under Garuda besides install it, periodically run updates, and it plays games just fine with no headaches. I'm not a huge fan of the decoration choices in Garuda, and some of the stuff you mentioned like Winboat and Gaming one-click installs sound amazingly helpful... but everything is working right now so there's a hurdle to changing, lol.
Garuda "Dragonized" looks horrid, but personally I really enjoy "Mokka".
I only disabled one or two window effects, left everything else as is. I also added some System Monitor widgets. Here's my primary and secondary screen.
I think it looks great. Other than the unusual colour theme, nothing really gives off a "pr0 g4merzz" vibe, IMO.
"I am not a huge fan of the decoration choices in garuda"
May I recommend to you Yurihikari's Garuda Linux Dotfiles?
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There are supposedly reductions in "cruft" from legacy CPU instructions, but I've never seen actual data to prove it helps that much.
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Also, the folks behind this are nice..
CachyOS originated in the Polish Arch community IIRC, but all the discussion I've seen from them is just... cool.
Nothing weird or dramatic like one tends to see in linux projects, just folks really into building this stuff.
I think they have a bunch of Arch veterans, right? Like the guy who started it is also some big time Arch maintainer. You can go to archlinux.org and search the repo for packages by maintainer and Peter Jung gives you 100+ results.
JSYK the differences are marginal between a vanilla arch install and cachy. You have you dig really deep to see any difference in performance.
iMO cachy is a good marketing arch distro.
You skipped over the fact that getting vanilla Arch installed is often what trips people up, and also what makes people who run vanilla Arch feel like they accomplished something and truly built something - because they did.
You’re also glossing over the fact that a lot of people run the CachyOS kernel even on vanilla Arch because of the performance gains from having a kernel specifically compiled for instructions your CPU supports.
In other words; I don’t think the convenience of a proper installer, nor even just a 5% gain in performance, is just “marketing”.
Bias disclaimer; I run CachyOS btw
vanilla arch user here, the installation is a totally different experience but it just gets you into that „go, read / listen and just try to understand what you are doing“ mode.. which, in a long run, is quite helpful. Third year now, still mostly no clue what I am doing most of the time, but plenty of fun has been had in the meantime.
with the direction that Wind(r)ow(n)s took some time ago, I am willing to even write 0s and 1s by hand on a wet toilet paper to just avoid it. Super happy to see CachyOS or SteamOS grow, actually any distro getting popular is a great thing, more users, more knowledge, more problems being pointed out.
You will not see much difference in performance. This is from 2022 but should still be true?
https://www.phoronix.com/review/cachyos-linux-perf/5
I think it has some improvements in kernel settings but in day to day, you wont notice them.
Yeah very outdated, newer benchmarks show CachyOS performs even better now, but still not significantly better in day-to-day use
it looks like there's a new generation of "I run cachyos BTW". While you are free to choose whatever distro you wanr, the passion with which you defend cachy is adorable.
Cachy is nothing but hype, surrounded by fanboys without much experience, who are willing to believe a governor and a couple of tweaks gives them the best os on the planet - I know, cause I used it and went back to arch because I prefer something that is real and the result of hard work, not a hacky job,that looks like someone just had fun hyping the shit out of "performance gains".
You can keep your 1% gain, and the bloat.
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