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Comment by nan60 | Hacker News Reader

Based on benchmarks[1], CachyOS is slightly faster than other distros, only behind Clear Linux (RIP), but I would be extremely curious to see why this would warrant a whole who distro being created. These optimizations can (and probably will) be upstreamed into Arch Linux at some point in the future. Compiler optimizations are one thing, but enabling newer instruction sets doesn't improve performance sans some very specific workloads. This all seems like marketing hype to me with very little substance.

[1] https://www.phoronix.com/review/cachyos-linux-perf

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The small performance boost isn't the main reason most people install these distros instead of Arch, they rather have to spend hours reading the Arch wiki and instead want a GUI live boot installer, preconfigured desktop environments that just work with NVIDIA, built-in gaming-meta-packages that make gaming on Linux more bearable.

I just recently made to switch to base Arch from Cachy so I can run Omarchy without any issues and it did take several hours of extra setup just to have a working system but it is nice knowing how to do it now.

I understand, but this distro doesn't bill itself as an "arch but for noobs" or something of the like like EndeavorOS does. It puts performance first and foremost, and I'm also making the (dangerous) assumption that Arch was chosen as the base for its reputation of being fast, up to date, and light, and not for any other reason(s). See also: constantcrying's comment

Gentoo exists, and has been popular with those that simply enjoy the idea of their systems being slightly better optimized. There's really not much else to it.

I dunno how many people stick around with gentoo for the speed. It's main strength is extreme flexibility and customisability.

The main reason for CachyOS to exist is that it can take bigger risks and ship defaults more mature distros wouldn't be comfortable with.

In terms of benchmarks, gamers tend to care more about consistent responsiveness (and worstcase performance) than raw throughput. Phoronix benchmarks are probably not the best way to compare CachyOS against other distros. E.g., look at the game benchmarks you linked: all tested games were already running above 500 frames per second in the worst performing game.

Fwiw, I recently switched from manjaro to devuan for gaming and haven’t regretted it at all.

Steam doesn’t need weekly rolling updates, and I got sick of diagnosing random regressions in basic functionality.

Also, since basic stuff doesn’t require multiple app stores and a byzantine systemd stack, it’s much easier to understand and debug.

I certainly wouldn’t give that up for a 6% improvement in mean frame rates.

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