Small sample set aside, the performance differences here are much bigger than I've seen in previous linux comparisons. Something has to be off right? Curious if anyone is able to reproduce these results.
30min video, 10mins of promotions... nope
this post was submitted on 28 May 2026
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Good thing SponsorBlock will automatically skip the segments for you so you can enjoy the 20 minutes long video!
Bro you literally already have sponsorblock installed, nothing for you to worry about. Let a man earn his living
I hate to keep being in these threads saying the same thing, but new people need to know:
THERE IS NO APPRECIABLE PERFORMANCE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN ANY LINUX DISTRO FOR GAMING
Doesn't matter if it calls itself a "gaming" distro, or it wins by 10% in some benchmarks here and there. Any distro can be tuned like any other distro in every single way. No distro has any proprietary bits that make it better than another, and even if they did, you'd see devblogs or GitHub scripts you can one-shot to tune whatever you're running to perform similarly.
Save yourself from falling for the hype, and save yourself the time of sitting through videos like this.
You can tune any distro to any degree you want and replace everything including a custom built kernel to get performance. But you know not everyone can/wants to do that, I have a toddler so I'm not going to take a whatever Debian and install a new scheduler and whatever just cause.
You might forget that Linux desktop is growing super fast and fiddling with stuff under the hood is not that common and noobs and people with experience end up fucking things up constantly. Having something that's performant, optimised for your use case, whatever optimisations baked in won't break with updates and you can just install it and forget is a really big deal. This is just not something that was available.
I think you should stop the hate and allow people to be happy with the distro they like for whatever reason.
Lolol.
Your last line. Saying exactly what I'm saying, dawg.
No it's not. Not even remotely. Words have meanings. Your and his are not the same.
He's right and your wrong on this one chief.
Yeah but I'm dumb and I need distro maintainers to tune it for Me
#facts
Any distro can be tuned
Yeah but people are too lazy to do this lol
I would not recommend CachyOS to any beginners because after installation it still behaves like regular Arch. Just from today's update:
Replace vlc-plugin-kwallet with cachyos-extra-v3/vlc-plugin-libsecret? [Y/n]
That said, I don't agree with your claims. CachyOS puts a lot of effort into optimizing performance (at the cost of other things, e.g. disk space, server load, support for older hardware, ...), especially for gaming workloads. There have been many benchmarks that consistently show it performing better than other distros out-of-the-box. Generally, the advantage seems to be in the 0 to 15% range. Does that matter? That probably depends on who's asking.
You are correct that all the optimizations are open for everybody to see and copy. However, the mainstream distros don't seem to be interested in doing that for now. And applying the CachyOS optimizations (different kernel, scheduler, optimized packages for Zen 4, ...) to other distros (say Ubuntu) is not really feasible or advisable for most users.
PS: I had to look it up, and of course people tried xD.
I'm a Linux casual. Could you go into some more detail on what you're communicating with that update quote? Why is that bad?
It's a type of question that Arch/Cachy often ask during regular updates. Here it's about replacing a package. Sometimes you also need to make a choice between multiple packages or even perform some manual actions (see https://archlinux.org/). This requires you to possibly look it up, understand the change, and make a decision. If you screw it up, you can break your system.
My point was not that this is bad. Arch Linux is intentionally and explicitly targeted at proficient users. This is part of the deal. It can even be nice, because it gives you more insight into and control over what goes on under the hood in your system. However, I don't think this is a good experience for (most) new users.
Man, you got me SWEATING. "Did I miss an archannounce regarding VLC? Why tf would there be an arch-announce for VLC?!?!"
Due to the VLC updates taking up too many lines in our terminal, we have decided to drop VLC from the extra repository. Users who wish to play back videos can install them from the AUR.
jk
It's not bad. It's just assumes you know what you're doing. That y/n option there, is one of them. I'm not a power user or anything, I know my way around a computer.
I've been using CachyOS Linux since last October as my one and only OS on my laptop. It going great. There are some annoying stuff as well but that's because of Linux in general and not CachyOS specific. Laptops have many Linux unfriendly hardware in them so, you don't get full support out of the box if yours is brand new, however if you have a 1 or 2 year old laptop than it will most likely work out of the box. As for other examples of annoying stuff, I had problem with making my gaming mouse work and map the buttons, I went and asked AI to how to fix it and I've got it done. Because I couldn't find anything specific in the forums. Or just the other day I was having problems with my gamepad button mapping and had to ask AI again to fix it and it did.
As for what I'm doing when I'm asked a y/n question like the example given I do a quick search and 9/10 times the first link would be the answer I'm looking for and I choose accordingly. Or you can go the ignorant way and just chose yes to everything (which I did before) and you'll be alright 99.9% of the time. I don't remember having problems because of it...
So, it's not that mysterious or hard to understand and as a side effect you learn new stuff. Which is fun for me.
Yeah, 'y' every time should be pretty safe for updates, right? Like, the reason it's suggested is because it's the suggested alternative for the package it's replacing and the change has been tested by the CachyOS/Arch team(s) already.
And worst case, something big breaks when you reboot, so you roll back to before the update, wait like a week, and try again (lol).
Small sample set aside, the performance differences here are much bigger than I’ve seen in previous linux comparisons. Something has to be off right? Curious if anyone is able to reproduce these results.
Unfortunately the reviewer doesn't seem to mention a bunch of details about how the games were actually played such as, critically, which version of Proton he used. CachyOS ships its own version of Proton which pulls in a bunch of bleeding-edge features with significant performance impacts. I'm not sure if that Proton is used by default or not though; it may depend on the specific launcher used and configuration. Without knowing that, it's going to be difficult to attempt to reproduce his results.
Yeah, I like Nick but benchmarking isn't his forte. In all the articles and videos I've come across, most distros perform similarly, usually within the margin of error for most games. I can't imagine any set of optimizations that would lead to a performance increase on the level of a gpu upgrade. It doesn't make sense.
Wendell talks about cachy quite a bit, I wish he'd do some testing but I'm sure he's already busy enough.
Yeahs it's very very rare that cachy performs THAT much better. Its normal for it to be 1-3% faster then other distros since it's pretuned and all.
But beyond that... Iv only seen it have larger jumps like once or twice.
It's running through Proton, he mentioned that in the benchmarks it shows up "as playing on windows" because of Proton.
Other than that Nick is pretty transparent about what he does, if something is not mentioned it's likely whatever is default on the distro when running steam through flatpak (flatpak was mentioned).
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