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Comment by sumalamana | Hacker News Reader

Try CachyOS, it's based on Arch but with additional optimizations, better defaults, and is user friendly. The problems the author of the article had would not have happened if he spent some time using an user friendly distro before trying a hard distro.

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Do CachyOS optimizations actually make any difference whatsoever? I know they enable certain optimization flags whenever building software, but that doesn't directly equate to performance improvements unless you're actually benchmarking and testing it. I've seen some benchmarks in games and it seems there is literally zero performance difference (sometimes it loses to Fedora, even).

I'd always recommend upstream distributions with corporate backing for novice users: Ubuntu or Fedora. If they're coming from Windows: Linux Mint. There's also a clear upgrade path for users who enjoy Mint or Ubuntu: Debian testing.

Arch Linux is awesome, don't get me wrong. I just believe it's borderline unethical to recommend someone installing anything related to Arch on their workstation. It's just not what a beginner should choose at all. CachyOS included, it even makes you choose your bootloader at install (any user-friendly distro would simply never bother you with that and go with GRUB right away).

A user's first distro can make or break their Linux experience. Think hard before recommending new users the flavor of the month or an Arch derivative.

> Do CachyOS optimizations actually make any difference whatsoever? I know they enable certain optimization flags whenever building software, but that doesn't directly equate to performance improvements unless you're actually benchmarking and testing it.

I switched from Windows 11 to Kubuntu a year ago, and then gave CachyOS a shot after hearing praise for it. I'm on a laptop with an AMD iGPU, and CachyOS's `znver4` optimized repos gave a significant bump on my Geekbench results:

(Note: these results are from almost a year ago though)

Lenovo Thinkpad P14s Gen4 AMD

- Windows 11: 2366 Single-Core Score, 10717 Multi-Core Score

- Kubuntu: 2496 Single-Core Score, 9878 Multi-Core Score

- CachyOS: 2569 Single-Core Score, 11563 Multi-Core Score

Repeat tests were essentially the same (Win11 23xx/107xx, Kubuntu 24xx/98xx, Cachy 25xx/115xx)

That's actually pretty great!

Have you observed any changes in your day-to-day usage, such as faster compilation times? If it's actually decently faster I might try it instead of playing with Gentoo to get better-optimized compilation flags.

I haven't benchmarked anything other than the initial tests with Geekbench. That said, it subjectively felt "snappier"/faster in terms of UI speed with KDE Plasma than Kubuntu. I've been a happy CachyOS user since.

I love Cachy, but please don't recommend it as a reasonable first step into Linux.

It's a lot more polished than Arch, but it's not for someone who hasn't used Linux before and wants a reliably rock solid and predictable experience 365 days a year, with no fiddling.

It's rolling release, and there are inevitably bugs when updating immediately to every minor version of every part of the OS stack. Arch/Cachy/Endeavour are for experts, and those who enjoy tinkering. (If you want to recommend something Arch-flavored, just recommend Manjaro, and don't listen to the memers who parrot some youtuber's list of ancient and silly engagement-bait grievances.)

A user friendly distribution would be something like Fedora or Ubuntu, not "Arch but with some optimizations that probably won't matter much"

Or Mint? Works flawlessly for me when I need a Linux, which is not so often these days, but if I was still doing cross-platform software development it's what I'd use. Minimal fuss.

Mint is one of the greatest distributions to get started with for users coming from Windows. I've been using Fedora full-time for more than four years now, but before that I used Linux Mint for about a year. It's a great, seamless experience.

Only problem I believe is the lack of customization options in Cinnamon compared to KDE and even Gnome with extensions. I guess that makes the user miss out on some of the cool parts of owning your software. Also, being stuck in X11 will start to become a problem in the next few years: I'm waiting to see what they come up with on that front.

CachyOS? That distro asking you to pick one out of 5 bootloaders and one out of 13 desktop environments? That is rolling and so comes with the implicit contract that you would have your eyeballs liking every package's release notes for any one of them that you ever update?

Don't get me wrong, I've got nothing against CachyOS (I really couldn't care less), but if this is where we collectively set the bar for what is "user friendly", we are doing it wrong.

This is hilarious. Recommendations like this are exactly why nobody takes desktop Linux seriously (aside from gamers who yearn to dick-measure about something). A rolling release distro? Let alone Arch? You may as well recommend Gentoo.

That's one of the biggest pain points of convincing someone to switch to linux: the bazillions distributions

Yeah, it can quickly lead to analysis paralysis. I've set up three laptops with a Linux on them for non-tech friends and family members and deliberately went with distros that "just work" (Debian and Fedora specifically).

In general I'd recommend sticking to the simple options and not going into niches unless you/the user actually wants or needs to.

I find this comment funny given it reminded me of a very similar recent thread.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46567586

That's what I first thought of too. The author picks CatchyOS as their first Linux distro, only to find it's more complicated to set up, and then the mouse buttons don't work.

For the Linux newcomer, the biggest advantage of Ubuntu (or Ubuntu derivatives like Mint) is the wealth of guides, tutorials, and Q&As online, allowing you to google most common problems. You can always switch to another distro once you become more confident with Linux.

Maybe don't tell beginners to use something that will so easily break because you didn't read a wiki post. CachyOS is for the kind of gamer who'd de-bloat Windows, etc. to squeeze 1 fps more out of their hardware. If this isn't you then use something else.

If you wanted to recommend a distro which is a bit more 'out there' (so not just the quadfecta of Debian, Fedora, Ubuntu, Mint), I'd much sooner go with Mageia or OpenSUSE than an Arch derivative.

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