Be respectful
Explanation and article: https://boilingsteam.com/cachy-os-is-now-the-most-popular-distro-on-proton-db/
If you're considering CachyOS, I would recommend reading this:
https://medium.com/@yalovoy/cachyos-why-i-dont-recommend-it-for-daily-use-7fd62ced70b2
Thanks for posting this blog post. It was a very interesting read. Didn't know that CachyOS was using BTRFS with bootable snapshots like OpenSUSE does with snapper.
Who is this person? Why does their opinion matter? Why are they writing about FOSS on a Billionaire’s Typewriter? Who is their audience? Why are they so concerned about recommending a corporate backed distros over a hobby distro made for hobby users?
The linked author also has account-gated articles such as The Senior Engineer’s Job in 2026 Is Code Review, Not Code Writing There is nothing in their About page and a cursory online search can’t confirm there’s a real person writing this blog.
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Me personally, I use CachyOS on my gaming computer after bouncing from popOS to Fedora to Arch to Bazzite. Cachy provides a familiar foundation while more of my games work without issues, it provides nice quality of life Arch utilities, and gives me a mutable distro to tinker with when I need to.
Is it perfect for everyone? No. Is it going through a hype-cycle? Yes. If Cachy ends up becoming unstable or insecure on my system, can I switch? Easily.
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It’s really weird to me to see a hot-dropped random blog post heavily upvoted with no discussion. Even if the blog matches the poster’s opinion, we should be careful in 2026 that we’re sharing genuine information with each other and not corporate propaganda or LLM slop posts.
It's some kind of click-farming. That's a negative knowledge article, you feel less informed after reading it.
I think you're overreacting.
I see CachyOS as useful for those overclocker types wanting to get that extra percent performance gain, for their gaming PC, but would not suggest it for the newcomer Linux user as a daily driver. I think this article has this kind of message. Choose CachyOS if you want potentially unstable but performance optimized state of the art OS.
Today we really can't be sure, and I hate all the AI slop articles, so I'm hoping this one isn't that. At least it convinced me that it has an expert behind it.
This was a good read, thanks for posting. I'm on vanilla arch and I looked into switching to Cachy but the size of the team and the direct replacement of Arch specific packages stopped me. I don't know if I trust a small team, in already the niche OS of today, to maintain everything indefinitely and without issue.
This is one of those scenarios that id wish for those optimizations to come to trunk in a meaningful way than for a separate branch to exist.
I think the only reason to switch would be the optimizations, right? For new users, the installer is probably nice.
You can get all the optimizations they made in Arch, too. It's very easy to get their custom kernel, just install linux-cachyos from AUR.
For other system settings, see: https://github.com/CachyOS/CachyOS-Settings
For those like me who hadn't heard of it:
CachyOS ships every package optimized for your CPU - compiled with x86-64-v3/v4 and Zen4 instructions, LTO, and PGO - on top of a custom kernel with the tuned EEVDF scheduler. The result: a noticeably faster Arch Linux experience with the same rolling-release flexibility you expect.
Me? Oh, Flatpak Linux, of course.
They include a note about that on the page
Flatpak is NOT a distro, but that’s what Steam reports when it’s running on Flatpak, and Flatpak being distro independent we report it as a separate environment, if that makes sense. Feel free to ignore it if you wish.
Doesn't steam run as a flatpak on bazzite?
No, it actually does not run the flatpak version.
Steam is essentially treated as part of the core Bazzite OS.
Bazzite runs more or less the latest Fedora version of Steam, and then has a ton of custom scripts, as well as accompanying core-Fedora library utilities to accomodate integrating Steam more fully into Fedora, so that things like Gaming Mode/Desktop Mode, various other under-the-hood things basically work as they do in SteamOS.
Doing it the way they do it, this makes it so you can use the various u-just terminal commands and pre-packaged flatpak apps to tweak things that basically affect or touch or may touch Steam.
So uh, right now, on my Bazzite Steam Deck, if I do:
rpm -qa | grep "steam"
(which is basically Fedora-speak for 'show me all installed libraries that have "steam" in them)
I get:
steam-1.0.0.85-3.fc43.i686
So that would be the current, Fedora 43 version of Steam, from the Terra repo, I think... its not the 44/Rawhide version.
Where the Terra repo is the community repo, sort of roughly analagous to the AUR, compared to mainline Arch libraries.
https://fedora.pkgs.org/43/terra/steam-0:1.0.0.85-3.fc43.i686.rpm.html
That command also lists out a number of steam-related utility libraries, which comprise parts of the core, 'no touchy', atomic part of Bazzite.
Yes, as a pre-bundled system Flatpak baked into the OS image.
Nope. Wrong.
Its not a pre bundled flatpak, that runs on top of the core, atomic OS.
Its part of the core, atomic OS, an integral part of it, installed as an rpm package at basically a lower level.
Thanks for the note, I don't mean to be too snarky--I do actually run the Steam flatpak.
Interesting write-up about Bazzite. I had Bazzite on one of my kid's PCs just because it had an Nvidia card but last week reinstalled Fedora Silverblue. Bazzite has some rough edges and some choices I don't really understand, like using Topgrade and Bazaar. Everyone seems to like it though, maybe I'm in the minority preferring Fedora.
I'm a Linux noob and ended up with Bazzite a bit ago and really like how straightforward Bazaar is, typically what are the shortcomings or downside of Bazaar?
As far as I can tell (I am use Bazzite), the main problem with Bazaar was basically that it was kind of undercooked, had some bugs, both surface level and under the hood, when they first pushed it as the bundled app store for Bazzite.
But its been some months now, and they seem to have been ironed out?
I guess possibly a 'downside' could be that it only handles flatpaks, as opposed to also allowing other kinds of direct package installs, but the whole idea of Bazzite is 'no touchy core os, use flatpak'.
Or, ok, Bazaar is either GNOME only, or GNOME first, whereas Flathub pretty well supports KDE and GNOME, so, if you prefer KDE, I can see the reasoning there for preferring Flathub.
I’m afraid that last sentence makes very little sense. How could it be GNOME only when Bazzite ships KDE and Bazaar? Regardless of toolkit and UI, Bazaar is simply a DE agnostic front end for flatpak repos.
According to the github page for Bazaar (which I may not be fully understanding correctly), it seems like Bazaar is designed for GNOME primarily, and then there is essentially a seperate thing, basically a kind of plugin or sort of like a patch, that is layered over top of the main Bazaar, which enables it to work with/in KDE.
Bazaar proper:
https://github.com/kolunmi/bazaar
Bazaar is fast and highly multi-threaded, guaranteeing a smooth experience in the user interface. You can queue as many downloads as you wish and run them while perusing Flathub's latest releases. This is due to the UI being completely decoupled from all backend operations.
It runs as a service, meaning state will be maintained even if you close all windows, and implements the gnome-shell search provider dbus interface. A krunner plugin is available for use on the KDE Plasma desktop.
The krunner plugin:
https://github.com/ublue-os/krunner-bazaar
A KRunner plugin for searching and installing Flatpak applications through the Bazaar store.
Sorry, I'm not a fequent KDE user, I may be misunderstanding something here.
Thanks for the explanation, that all makes sense.
What is this actually measuring? It's not the same as the Steam Hardware Survey, right?
Surely this represents the subset of users that like doing things like tinkering with their OS and contributing to ProtonDB, not all Linux gamers. Normal people don't go switching distros every month.
When you do a compatibility report on ProtonDB you attach your specs including distro, so yeah this will be biased towards tinkerers. However, HW survey tells a similar story:
I wish they'd merge the non-rolling-release distros by version (as well as by distro "family" in the case of e.g. Ubuntu vs. Kubuntu), so that they wouldn't look underrepresented compared to Arch. For example, Arch isn't actually more popular than Mint; it's just that some of the Mint users are slower to update than others.
That’s correct! There are a few caveats at the beginning of the article.
I thought this one was most interesting:
This may not be completely representative of all Linux gamers either. But I’d wage this is actually a good predictor where the market is going to shift. We saw first that Manjaro was getting the boot here first, before going under pretty much everywhere.
These two correlate more directly to what you mean:
This may not be representative of all types of Linux users. I’m sure this is not what your AWS architect uses on EC2.
There may be some additional biases, due to whoever used ProtonDB.
I mostly pick my distro based on how nice the name sounds. That's why I'll never use Ubuntu.
Does it make it sound better that it means humanity in bantu languages, and also designates a philosophy of interconnectedness in a "I am because we are" sense, according to wikipedia?
Yuck, worst species ever.
Is this just racist? It's a beautiful word
Is Ubuntu a race?
Some basic bitch life choices.