Recap

I'm trying out CachyOS. I'm using the same base setup that I use on Tumbleweed: KDE, Btrfs, Snapper, Grub.

I'll just be coming back and editing this over time, so sorry if it's not entirely cohesive...

• Very first impression: it doesn't come with Akonadi installed! Freaking +1 for Cachy. There's also a CachyOS Hello window that actually seems to be more than just informative, so I'm going to use it to setup Snapper and...whatever else looks good.

• Snapper set up took about 15 seconds, including clicking into it from CachyOS Hello > Tweaks, reading the message, and typing "y".

• Decided to see if I needed to do a system update, I mean it's Arch, ya know? Nope...already up to date. Nice.

• It has KDE 6.4.3, but it definitely adheres more to the Arch philosophy for defaults, it's very slim and very default. In fact, the only thing I'd consider to be a normal user application that came preinstalled is just Firefox. Everything else is just utilities, including the HP print stuff, which was an option in the installer, so I added that.

• KDE may be less than default? It doesn't include the Discover store and the Settings look either configured differently or lighter than I'm used to from Tumbleweed.

• I like the CachyOS Kernel Manager. It shows all kernels available, which includes quite a list. Aside from various optimized, stable, or LTS options, you can also install the RC for the next kernel, which is 6.16 at the moment. That's pretty cool. For me, it came with the cachyos-v3/linux-cachyos 6.15.6 kernel. That v3 means it's optimized specifically for my type of CPU, if I'm not mistaken, which is also cool. If none of that matters to you, there are also options for standard kernels and even the zen kernel. A wide range of options.

• Gaming...one of the test requirements - Part 1. The CachyOS Hello window has a button to install Gaming Packages. When you run this, you get a lot of stuff: Heroic Launcher, goverlay, mangohud, steam, wine, winetricks, and a ton of other stuff. It's 4593 MiB of stuff (installed size), 228 packages added to your fastfetch or whatever it's called these days.

Cut it off here because I scared myself. There was a download error for a package in the Gaming Packages install option, so I was copying it to save for later, just in case. Well, I assume the installer got to the end and auto-focused, I'm not sure, but I was copying out of the clipboard and pasting into a text file and konsole intercepted my CTRL + C keypress. Everything seems to have installed and CachyOS Hello seems to think so, because it wont let me run it again. Luckily, I already set up Snapper, so if there's a problem we'll get to see how well that works on CachyOS :D

• I'm beginning to remember why I started getting pleasantly bored with Tumbleweed. There's so much to set up on a fresh Linux install! Yes, I may be slightly contradicting my liking of a slim OS installation, but at least I didn't have to remove a bunch of stuff.

• Steam is working, so I'm assuming I didn't accidentally cancel the Game Packages installation. Whew! I'm currently installing Splitgate 2 with the Cachy Proton selected for compatibility. I plan to also test it with plain Proton Experimental, just for a comparison, but I'm too curious not to try the Cachy version first.

• Installed Overwatch 2, using Proton 8 (which is the same I use on Tumbleweed) in Steam. Pretty sure a newer Proton wont work, but I'll still try it later.

• Installed Zed, Node.js, Discord using Octopi

• Btrfs Assistant is the Snapper GUI that comes with Cachy - I confirmed it's creating Pre and Post snapshots each time I use pacman. Nice. Octopi is the Package Manager UI; it's simple, but useful.

• Flatpaks seem to be discouraged for use in Cachy, which is messing with me a little. I had become accustomed to using more Flatpaks and keeping my system install simpler. It uses less space, so I'm sure my old SSD appreciates it.

I think that's enough for Day 1. I'm going to play a couple of games and see how it goes. Not using Flatpaks is making it not exactly mirror my Tumbleweed install, but that's not the end of the world. Smooth so far, other than my self jump scare. I don't want to install anything else until I have time to do some more testing and give myself room for a rollback if needed.

Honestly, if this was the only OS on my computer, I'd be pretty happy with the experience so far. We'll see how it goes playing some games...