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Comment by goodburb | Hacker News Reader

It's not just a gaming and performance distro, it includes QoL fixes on modern hardware.

On my Lenovo laptop, fixes that would take over a day to enable and patch on most distros:

  - Wake from sleep

  - Nvidia GSP firmware workarounds and correct version OOTB (proprietary)

    - Mouse lag/jitter
    - External display hotplug
    - DDC/CI over type-c

 - Embedded controller power profiles from taskbar with correct TDP limits for CPU/GPU

 - Battery charge limiter support right from KDE settings

 - Working `switcherooctl` in hybrid graphics mode on AMD

 - Firefox with video decode acceleration (YouTube) on almost all GPU models

Another gaming feature that is otherwise useful in workstations is the external scheduler support.

Currently using BPFland which makes multitasking as responsive as idle while compiling Yocto/Chromium in the background.

Windows, Mac (mini M1), and kernel built-in scheduler Linux jank and become almost unusable (Ryzen 5800H).

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I tried CachyOS and Niri this weekend, and was pleasantly surprised hibernate/suspend actually worked with no customizations on my Desktop.

I’ve tried like 5 other distros and usually when it goes into sleep/hibernate the monitor never wakes up so I have to force shutdown using the power button.

I’m going to install this on an older machine and see how it goes. So far it’s been great!

Question to the Arch Linux veterans out there. Is CachyOS better than EndeavourOS or vice versa?

From what I read Cachy comes with a lot of proprietary repos and gaming stuff already installed along with a custom kernel tuned for gaming performance which makes it more bloated and less stable than vanilla Arch distros like Endeavour which just ships with the bare minimum quality of life tweaks over installing arch from scratch.

What's your experience and what would you recommend for someone switching their laptop from Windows mostly for dev work but who doesn't play too many games. I see arch is the most popular community favorite now, but I was thinking maybe a Fedora based distro would be a better fire-and-forget daily driver after the Arch AUR malware attack conundrum, as I don't have the time to deal with stuff like that on a daily basis.

I've used Cachy for about 2 months, having used Arch for a long time prior to that.

It just feels a lot faster (anecdotally) than Arch. I don't tend to play a lot of games either, but for tasks like web browsing and watching YouTube, it feels smoother. I don't think I'd go back to Arch unless Cachy did something really stupid to mess up which I hope they won't. No point in leaving free performance on the table with little downside.

Also you should never need the AUR. I've never needed it for anything in years, so the malware attack wasn't a concern at all. Yes, absolutely do switch away from Windows.

CachyOS takes the default arch repos and re-builds packages targeting CPU generations and their instruction sets. There are no proprietary repos. Cachy has their own personal repo where some packages not in arch repos are built.

Gaming stuff is NOT installed by default, but there is a button in the Hello app new users can click that installs 2 meta packages that install almost everything one might want for gaming. Take a look at it in a VM and see for yourself.

The performance increases from their kernel + optimized packages are small but noticeable to me. Give their wiki a read-through: https://wiki.cachyos.org/

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