I’ve not heard of CachyOS, but to capture 2.54% of the steam linux market feels significant. It jumped right past other established Arch-based distros like Endeavor and Manjaro.
A lot of gamers want better performance, so a performance oriented distro with gaming quality of life features fills that gap. And ultimately there are a lot of YouTube channels promoting it and it kind of turned into a cool distro to use. This might explain the phenomenon.
Is Nobara still a thing? That was the gaming distro a couple years back, last I checked.
I’ve been using it for a while now, and it’s genuinely so good. Before this I was using EndeavourOS which was also a great distro, but I realized that I was basically putting in work to do things CachyOS does out of the box, so I switched and it’s been great.
What kind of out of the box things?
Well, I started using their repos for their x86-64-v3 optimized packages and builds of popular packages from the AUR. Later I started using their kernel because it pulls in upcoming features and is compiled with optimizations like ThinLTO and AutoFDO and has a more advanced scheduler. I also like how Cachyos comes with things like zram pre-enabled and scripts for things like zink and NGX. It’s basically just a ton of small things like that, some that I don’t even know about yet, that makes CachyOS really nice and easy to use.
A big one IMO is it defaults to building aur packages for the native CPU, which base arch and endeavorOS do not. There isn’t really any benefit to not doing so, as aur packages are going to be installed locally anyway.
Also fish is the default shell and I love fish
they offer some optimisations to the kernel and the packages that are supposed to yield a tiny bit better performance.
an incredibly small thing that rubs me the wrong way more than it probably should about their setup is that they set Plasma animation speeds to much higher values than the stock Plasma desktop uses. sure, it could be just a part of their customisation tweaks the same way using
fishas the default shell is, but it feels like a cheap trick to reel in the “I installed it on my desktop and it’s soooo much snappier” review kind of people. like, if your work is as good as you claim, you shouldn’t need to artificially make the improvements seem bigger than they really are.I’m not familiar with it, but I think that that could be a reasonable UI tweak. I disable virtually all animation in software where possible because I want it to be as responsive as possible and don’t care about the animation. Simply reducing the time in animation is a middle ground—one still gets animations, but cuts out some of the time.
I set plasma animations to instant every arch install anyway so personally I don’t care 😎 thanks for asking
If it feels snappier, it is snappier.
It’s like saying it’s cheating to use instanced rendering to display millions of asteroids when it’s not even real draw calls
it’s like making the car audio play wind whooshing noises when accelerating to make it feel faster.
If the goal is to make it feel faster, yeah.
I started using linux full time about a year ago. I started with Arch, but moved to Cachy really quickly when I discovered it. All of the advantages of Arch, but repos optimised for modern hardware, and a whole heap of useful pre-configured tools, like Wine/Proton, fish, snapper etc. Arch is a bare bones, pick and configure your own setup rolling release distro. Cachy is a pre-optimised, rolling release distro with lots of useful stuff right out of the box.
I use the cachyos kernel on an otherwise plain arch setup. I don’t game much, but I tried it out and just stuck with it.
It has a dedicated steam deck ISO, is the most well put together preset up arch distro there is for gamers. Period, there are no real good faith arguments here. It’s like if someone took an endevour install and spent over 50 hours doing nothing but making every possiable part of it as easy as possible for gamers to just play games.
Its what Bazzite is functionally a knock off of. Anyone whos using Bazzite is litterally using an objectively worse option then cachy is their first and only goal is gaming. Which is bazzites entire gimmick basically.
I agreed with everything in your first paragraph but your second one just seems like needless ‘holier than though’ drivel. Bazzite has it’s own unique pros, and both are great options for gamers.* However, when it comes to having a OEM-like experience on a Legion Go under Linux, Bazzite, Nobara or Chimera are a better fit. That’s my usecase and why I chose Bazzite, I wanted a Steam Deck experience with a better screen and more powerful chip. It was also well before SteamOS had any support for other devices.
Yeah, that’s not Bazzite’s “only gimmick”
How’s Cachy for NVIDIA support?
Excellent, although any distro that packages the latest driver version these days is going to be, NVIDIA has improved their linux driver integration a lot fairly recently. (no esoteric kernel cmdline args, and KMS/SimpleDRM support, woot!)
I just installed cachyOS last weekend after getting an RTX 5070 Ti and chose the open driver during the installation and everything is working perfectly, including resume from sleep
Tumbleweed users RISE UP!
I’m doing my part
There are dozens of us, dozens!
I’m even running it on my Steam Deck.
<3
I’m on Slowroll though.
We’ll count you next month. 😉
Hahaha good one!
I’m here, and I’m proud! :-]
T U M B L E W E E D Master Race
Man, if only Linux would be adopted by the masses for gaming…
Android uses the Linux kernel but none of the familiar “Linux” stack: GNU, X or Wayland, GTK or Qt, GNOME or KDE or other DEs, PulseAudio or PipeWire, APT or YUM or other package managers, and many others that define the Linux experience. Google could replace the Linux kernel with something else tomorrow without touching the rest of Android and most users won’t tell, and many apps will run as-is.
Google tried that once, they developed Fuchsia with the intention of replacing Android and ChromeOS and realized the investment to develop a replacement is not worth it and decided to layoff all the secondary development team to find the budget for the AI people that they pay to not work in competitors.
Hoping for the AI bubble to burst any time now. I’m fucking tired of the management stuffing AI everywhere. Heck even the CEO now outsources Slack replies from ChatGPT.
Isn’t that why pedants call it “GNU/Linux” for those? Lol. (I was being facetious btw, I would marry GNU/Linux if I could.)
Yes, there are even some distros that use the Hurd kernel instead of Linux.
Yeah, it is the most popular consumer OS
Then VR games will work at better than min specs. Trying hard to get off windows, mostly there. Except when streaming VR games, Kubuntu is my daily driver. All my flat games (like 8 of them) work flawlessly now that cloud is syncing. Just need drivers for one device and software for another but may just have to deal with the loss of a left hand kb, and 2 buttons on trackball.
I did get some useful looking apps recommended not long ago, not 1 will compile on my os and I am way to tired at the end of the work day to read read and read some more(I used to do more complex stuff 20 yrs ago but, well, I forgot most of what I knew. Why is “make” looking to github instead of the directory I am in?
Proton is is coming along great, I used to support Cedega to play win games before.
I would be shocked if Linux VR support isn’t massively improved prior to Valve releasing the Deckard.
So far, with the 2 games I have had a chance to try, other than having to lower the settings to bottom, they load and play if a little stuttery. With how Proton has improved by leaps and bounds I have no reason to believe it won’t keep improving at near the same pace. It is just that darn translation layer combined with the very high requirements of VR that needs to be overcome. If enough linux users go on the vr games and lament there is no linux native option we may get movement on that end. The flat games run so smooth right now I forget which OS I am using, compared to 2 years ago. I even have the disadvantage of an Nvidia card, at least the official driver is better meeting our requirements, shoulda gone AMD…
I’m using NVIDIA also, the only real problem I had was that HDR was annoying to get work because gamescope doesn’t play too well with NVIDIA. Now that I can just use native Wayland HDR I don’t have any real problems with my graphics card.
I don’t expect NVIDIA to improve anytime soon since they still have a chokehold on the data center market. IIRC the reason NVIDIA became quite stable relatively is because Valve assigned several of their engineers to work on NVIDIA drivers full time.
have you tried envision? it usually runs better than steamvr
I just saw that suggestion from someone else, will try that if wlx doesn’t work out, ty
I don’t think Linux VR is particularly bad if you’re using steamvr things. Unfortunately WMR on the other hand is much worse (they have to write custom drivers for tracking, and especially controllers are not that far along yet)
Steam/SteamVR is where all my games are located, I like to have 1 launcher. Tho I cannot interact with the monitors from inside steamvr, yet, if i click on the window it closes unlike in windows where I control OBS and other stuff, also only shows 1 of my 2 monitors. BUT, when I get a chance the creator of Desktop+ that I use on windows suggested a linux app that does most of what his app does so that may give me the pc control I need since I do most everything in vr for streaming.
edit: I think some of my issue may be the poor old Ryzen 7 3800 I am using vs the RTX 4070ti super. The Ryzen 7 is having issues with a few games now, especially the VR mod ones like Satisfactory
you should try envision and wlx-overlay-s
Wlx, that’s the one he suggested. I have it in a folder in steam and will be testing sometime soon. Will check out envision as well, ty
You have vr games working on linux? Im surprised
Yeah, make sure you get steam from the steam site not flat pack and if you use Nvidia, use the official Nvidia driver, also make sure you select compatibility in steam. Sometimes you need a different Proton version. Turn settings down and the fps will normalize.
Awesome. Will be interesting to see the November December numbers with unpaid Win10 support ending.
My prediction: Ten percent increase for Windows 11 with 25 percent still on 10 and barely an increase for Linux.
I hope I’m wrong.
I don’t know. Most of the increase above appears to be win 10 users. Win 10 lost 1.09% and the percentage gain was close to evenly split between linux and win11 with a little going to MacOS.
I could see a bunch of people paying $15 to keep win 10 going , but not that much.
I’m not expecting anyone to pay to keep getting updates. Most of them will just keep using Windows 10. There are still people refusing to leave Windows 7.
Phone is Android, PC is now Linux Mint, for gaming I use a Steam deck, and my NAS is now TrueNAS.
Where are all the Ubuntu Core 22 installs coming from? Is there some large device or distro that uses it?
AFAIK, this corresponds to the snap package of Steam.
I feel like Ubuntu has the greatest exposure among non-Linux folks. It’s the only OS any place I’ve ever worked used on WSL back when I was still on windows. Probably a lot of corporate nerds want to stick to what’s comfortable?
I have no idea if that’s the reason, but Ubuntu and Mint are the only two distros I’ve tried for basically that reason. Heard good things about PopOS. Might try it some time if I wind up with an extra computer.
Regular Ubuntu I get; it’s specifically the separation in the list between core and the standard 24.04 distro that I don’t get. I can’t imagine that droves of nerds are installing straight Ubuntu Core unprompted. I’d absolutely buy though that some distro or some handheld is based on one.
I think PopOS was made especially for the System76 hardware, no? While it can still work on other hardware, System76 hardware is the one it was meant for.
Honestly, Ubuntu is great. It’s not bleeding edge where you can encounter yet unfixed bugs or other problems, and it’s not old enough that you can run into problems where the software is so old it doesn’t support the latest gaming stuff. It has great support from the community, it’s widespread, and comes with tons of quality of life things like tools to install 3rd party drivers, like graphical drivers for NVidia. Why change?
I worked with a guy who ran PopOS and loved it. He said the UI was really good. I’ve seen it get some love in social places. Figured I’d give it a shot some time.
I’m pretty happy with Mint. It’s comfortable and the conventions feel more familiar than even my work MacBook—like I don’t even know what the desktop is for except my screenshots show up there for some reason. I don’t think corporate would let me run Linux, but if they would I’d be happy with Mint or Ubuntu. They probably don’t want to support a million flavors of Linux desktop.
Personally I prefer Kubuntu.
I find Mint’s or Cinnamon’s look and feel a little too outdated. Reminds me too much of Gnome 2.
And Gnome changed their whole desktop paradigm since Gnome 3. I find Gnome 4 more suitable for a tablet. I feel too constrained and limited by it on a desktop PC. It’s awesome on my Surface Pro tablet though!
KDE Plasma kept the classic desktop paradigm like Windows, with a fresh modern look and tons of customizations. (Though I try to limit those as much as possible) You can configure it to your liking and add tons of really practical shortcuts. Its applications are also very powerful. Much more so than Gnome’s I find, which are more minimalistic.
Kubuntu is the way to go. KDE Plasma is such a great desktop. Just be sure to do the “Minimal” install so you can avoid Snaps like the disease they are.
Snaps aren’t as bad as people make them out to be. The only problem in Kubuntu is thflathead. Independent app to manage Snap security and access like flatseal. There is one, but you gotta install so much dependencies that you almost end up with the whole Gnome desktop. Otherwise it’s a great solution for use in Ubuntu Core for example.
I do prefer Flatpaks though.
the problem with snap is that it’s centralized around canonical’s server
TF2 bots
Yeah I was asking myself the same question. But it looks like they’ve started doing an Ubuntu Core setup for the Steam Deck.
what if it’s dedicated game servers?
Yay!
Nearly a third are coming from the Steam Deck and other Steam OS handhelds. Impressive.
Doing my part
o7 linux mint since april
i use mint btw
the memes flow even trough the lowliest of Tuxii
Mint is pretty much the best distro. It’s what I recommend to everyone.
Not sure wtf those 97% are thinking
They did not use their brains enough.
Just use linux, it can do literally everything (via VMs) windows can; but better, faster and more customizable.
Just use linux, it can do literally everything (via VMs) linux can
Hmm, Linux is better than Linux? What a world!
Fixed it
I use Debian. Does this mean I’m in the top 0.05% of Steam users?
yes
More people should use EndeavourOS. It’s fantastic for gaming.
I mean, that’s basically the same as Arch.
Yeah, just much easier to install, which is what I want from it, I never got the argument that by installing arch manually you “learn” what’s on your pc, idgaf, even as a software developer let alone a normie, I want a working system, that just works
I think that once one goes into software development professionally, mucking about with Linux configuration stops being something one does as a fun learning hobby and becomes something one does for work and hence can’t be arsed to also do at home during one’s free time.
Certainly that’s how it goes for me: all I want from my Linux machine at home is that it delivers the least hindrance possible to my web-browsing, gaming, 3D printing and so on, whilst still protecting my privacy and letting me to a little bit of playing around with its more powerful features but only when I feel like it, not as a requirement to use it.
The same also applies to other techie stuff, by the way: I’m no early adopted of latest and greatest because I don’t want to be somebody’s beta tester, since I have enough hassle already testing and fixing my own code (were I can actually deploy good practices to reduce the amounts of bugs and hence frustration, unlike the vast amounts of amateur-hour crap out there being shipped as final products that are just beta tests that never end).
/RANT
You could still wonder why endeavour in particular is so great though, in the end it’s all linux.
I just installed Mint and picked the nvidia drivers in the manager. Am I doing something wrong?
Sounds fine to me. What i meant to say was that since it’s all linux, the distro you pick is just customized for a certain usecase, but you can pretty much do whatever you want to do with any distro, but if you don’t want to bother setting it up yourself, a distro that is already configured a certain way is more convenient, but which one is “best” in that case purely depends on what you want to do with it, but there isn’t really an absolute “best” distro that everyone should use.
As I just migrated from windows this year it’s just wild to me that “comes with x pre-packaged” is an argument at all. That sounds like having a windows version that already has, say, steam preinstalled, which takes 2-5 minutes to do myself (in Windows or Linux). I wouldn’t specifically pick that to save the 2-5 minutes. Researching it would take longer.
Now, if we’re talking about things that are actually hard to integrate into some distros that’s a different question, but I clearly am not informed enough to imagine what that could be.
I wouldn’t say so, for most people what you have done is good enough. However there may come a time where you have to do something janky, at that point you’ll probably wish you were on a different distro, but for 95% of people, they will never run into any issues with mint.
Then arch is not a good choice. If you don’t know how your arch distro works, it will break at some point and you won’t know how to fix it. That’s the issue.
Seems a little extreme. If you’re new to Linux every distro is going to have a learning curve and you’ll start at first boot not understanding it.
If you’re not new to Linux, then it’s just another distro. For me, the only “new” thing was learning pacman’s option flags since I’d only ever used yum/dnf and apt. And of course, finding out the joy that is yay and the AUR.
Not everyone wants to spend a bunch of time tuning the install just so, and just want to be up and running fast with the bare essentials they need. For me, Endeavour is a clean and fast, has rapid kernel updates, and includes most of the things I need right out of the gate.
Cachy is just endeavour but with like 20 hours + of all the extra stuff you do after an install already done if you are only focused on gaming.
Endeavour is fantastic but it’s a general purpose project. Cachy IS first and foremost gamer/performance focused.
So if you love endeavour but want to only game then cachy saves endless time and effort and for new users or gamers wanting to be lazy it’s just a no brainer to go cachy
I’ve already used Cachy, but went back to Endeavour. I found Cachy’s “optimizations” to be a bit janky. At the time they enabled some items for ntsync that were clearly not ready for primetime.
Performance-wise, I compared the two head to head and found Cachy and Endeavor to be equally performant for gaming. Cachy just didn’t offer anything for me that Endeavor didn’t already do.
On top of this, I found Cachy’s packages to lag a bit behind the Arch and Endeavor repos, particularly in the Cachy-extras repository, and it ended up causing me issues with things I used from the AUR due to packaging conflicts (the old Manjaro type crap).
Cachy isn’t for me, though I get why people like it.
And if you like Manjaro your better off using another Distro in my opinion
It is. The switch last year, coming from windows, was a bit rough but that’s also partly due to the nvidia drivers. They got way better in the mean time. And then it’s just learning how things work and how to troubleshoot if I do something stupid.
I’ve been thinking of switching back to Arch. Currently using Nobara, and its moved to rolling release anyway.
personally any Arch based distro is not great for beginners its alright for intermediate Linux users and great for advanced Linux users
but Arch based distros are the best for gaming cause newest packages and its quite easy to get game packages (especially when you put repos like Chaotic-AUR
I’m somewhat surprised there isn’t a Fedora there, it’s a pretty great and up-to-date distro. And pretty popular.
I’m also surprised Flatpak isn’t higher!
Fedora or Bazzite (Fedora-based) are my top recommendations for new Linux users. I’m constantly surprised at Mint’s general popularity, especially for gaming. Even openSUSE Tumbleweed is a better option when it comes to gaming.
I’m not a new Linux user but am a new Linux gamer. I landed on endeavorOS a few months ago and like it enough I converted my other two desktops over. Whether it’s just dumb luck or not it has been noticeably more snappy on all three of the workstations I put it on than anything else I was using. It’s honestly kind of eerie, after putting my work laptop (windows11) away for the day and jumping on one of my systems they are so responsive now that sometimes it feels like it’s predicting what I want to do before I do it.
Endeavor is pretty great. I haven’t tried Cachy yet, but I hear it’s like “Endeavor with less setup”, which sounds good to me. That’s one of things I love about Linux - no matter what your priorities are, there is likely an ideal distro for you.
Wanted to try bazzite but on my 13 year old cpu and mobo it wouldn’t boot. Mint ran perfectly.
There’s a reason it’s not up there and cachy is, bazzite is in basically just a worse version of what cachy is setting out to do.
Also surprised about that. I use Nobara and that too is based Off Fedora.
Yeah, it seems there’s something going on with what’s listed here. It doesn’t match any other measurement.
bazzite bitches
No thanks. I’d like to keep full control over my operating system and only accidentally ruin it every few years.
This is a nonsense talking point, what exactly can’t you do with root access on bazzite that you can do on a non-immutable?
the answer: nothing
Accidentally ruin the OS by running random commands?
I’d love to try Bazzite properly, but it doesn’t work well in my VM (possible host issues), and I couldn’t find a live image to try.
You could see if it’s on DistroSea? Then you can try it through your browser.
It isn’t, but that’s still a great website.
Thanks for the recommendation!
On the contrary. Bazzite sports up to 25% more cryptic commands beyond your comprehension to fumble with on the terminal, than the typical distro.
Now, if you really want to ruin you OS experience forever, I have some NixOS to offer to you.
No, you still can, it’ll just be much easier to recover from.
15 years ago installed Ubuntu to run as a server and had to reinstall and config everything like 10 times to get it to work and since then have been very vary of Linux but had to return since said installation broke like 2 years ago, installed Mint and my eyes opened how easy everything is now compared to then. I got tired of Microsoft bullshit so I switched to bazzite about 2 months ago and I have no problems. There have been a couple of times that it said “you can do this but it is probably not a good idea” but otherwise everything just works. I appreciate this because from my earliest experiences with Linux I wasn’t happy. I use my computer for gaming and web stuff and that’s pretty much it. What do you guys who feel you can’t do what you want really do with your computer?
You still have full control. It’s just that you need to use ostree to create layers since the underlying system is immutable. It’s a different way of thinking about Linux, but means you can easily roll-back when you break something.
But i heard you should use that as a final resort
This is true. But it’s the only option for certain things.
Lol someone hasn’t actually worked with immutable distros. What precisely can’t be layered on bazzite with rpm-ostree?
