I decided I needed to go ahead and write about it while it's fresh in my memory. Overall, there is a slightly noticeable stability difference between playing Splitgate 2 using CachyOS versus playing using Tumbleweed. On Tumbleweed, there are seemingly random times when FPS drops suddenly and takes some time to recover, along with some short FPS dips here and there. It doesn't even happen in every match, but it's happened at least once every time I've played the game with Tumbleweed. I had none of that tonight on CachyOS, zero issues whatsoever. The FPS wasn't always constant, but it was steady enough that the overall game play felt more stable.

I'm not using any launch options with the game, so far. This is just CachyOS and Cachy Proton, that's the only difference. I'm running the Cachy kernel and Steam (Native) from the Cachy repos, but no manual optimizations. There are some other slight differences too. My fans aren't roaring quite as loud, my temps are a little lower, and CPU usage seems to be steadier, maybe even a little lower CPU usage.

I'm a little stunned. None of the micro-optimizations I've ever tried have ever made any noticeable difference for me in any game, not even with the kernel. This isn't micro-optimization, it's much more intensive, but I was expecting it to be pretty much the same as Tumbleweed. Let's be honest, I'm a lot stunned. I was not expecting to be questioning if I still want to use Tumbleweed as my daily driver on the very first night of testing Cachy, it hasn't even been a full day yet lol. I will admit my gaming performance on vanilla Arch was a little better than Tumbleweed, like a minuscule amount, so I should have expected some gain, but nothing as obvious as what I've seen tonight.

Beyond Splitgate 2, there are more tests to do. I still have other games I play and want to see how they perform. I'll also use some of the settings on the Cachy wiki and try those with Splitgate 2 as well, hence this is Part 1. There are things beyond even gaming, but so far it looks like there probably wont be any show stoppers there; I use a fairly simple and standard workflow for software development. The next month or so of testing CachyOS will be interesting. I doubt I would be willing to remove Tumbleweed, but I'm already wondering if I like Cachy better.

Tumbleweed isn't difficult to maintain from a user perspective 90% of the time, it's actually quite boring, it just works and if it doesn't you rollback. The challenge I'm facing is that 10%, like if you made Tumbleweed 10% better, would it be CachyOS? No worrying about codecs, I didn't have to install a single one. No need to add 3rd party repositories to watch videos or get proprietary packages. I can't even use Snapper as a reason, Cachy has it and it worked from pressing a button. The KDE experience is really good on Cachy. Dependency management has been great. Nothing I tried didn't work or even slowed me down at all. The installer is very solid. Up until this point, 90% has been great, like they don't make a better distro than that? Right?