David Dyess .com

I installed CachyOS yesterday and it went extremely well. Having been a longtime openSUSE Tumbleweed user, I wanted to set it up with Snapper and bootable snapshots in Grub. The first part of that is extremely easy. From the CachyOS Hello window on the desktop, just click "Apps/Tweaks" then click "Install Snapper Support". The prerequisite is you have to be using the default Btrfs file system. Clicking that single button will add Snapper support, which means if there is ever an issue with something you install or a system upgrade, there will be a Pre snapshot created to allow you to roll back to the moment before it was broken.

There is only one slight issue though, if you chose Grub as your bootloader. It doesn't install Snapper support for Grub automatically. According to the forums, this is because it is not easily determined which bootloader you are using. I wasn't aware of this earlier today, so when I was having boot issues, I was surprised to not find the Snapper entries available to boot from. Luckily, the issue mysteriously solved itself, after a couple of tries, and I was able to boot.

To enable Snapper support in Grub, you need to install the grub-btrfs-support package. I used Octopi to install it, but you can install from the terminal if you prefer. This package will configure everything else you need to be able to boot from Grub into Snapper snapshots, from which you can then run snapper rollback in a terminal to restore from that snapshot.

Just for an extra sense of security, I also installed the Cachy LTS kernel and the Arch LTS kernel using the Kernel Manager. Those will also show up in the Grub bootloader, so you, potentially, have more options than just rolling back if something goes wrong.

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?

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...

I've been admiring CachyOS from afar for a while now. My thinking has been if I ever change distros, that would probably be the only one I'm interested in trying. I don't have any reason to change distros, so the only way I'm going to get to try it is to just install it on another drive...so that's what I'm doing. I read docs earlier, it looks impressive. I've decided to try to mirror my Tumbleweed setup, so I'm doing KDE with Btrfs, Snapper, and Grub. There are so many other options that Cachy offers, but just for this comparison, I decided to stay the same.

I like that it has a live disk with the installer, so I can write this while it installs :) Tumbleweed doesn't recommend installing from the live disk, but I haven't had to install that too many times anyway. Maybe the last live disk I ran was Garuda? Or maybe one of the 20.04 *buntu versions, when I was doing reviews on those. Possibly the last Debian. I haven't done many installs since moving to Tumbleweed.

Alright. So. It's done installing already. Since I'm dual booting, I'll probably try to work it into my work flow for a while and see how it goes. Not all at once, but over time, however long that may be. I'm not opposed to buying a new NVME just for Cachy, as I'm currently just installing it on an old 2.5" SSD (a really old one), but it has some work to do before I'd be willing to do that.

I'll try to do some blogs about it and I'll probably document my set up in a Page here, for reference. I'm looking to try it for at least a month or maybe longer and just see how well I like it. I'm curious about gaming performance, which is why I picked the same file system, overall system stability, and if it is as unbreakable as Tumbleweed. If it goes well enough, maybe I'll consider making it more permanent and giving it a better home in my system (along side Tumbleweed).