CachyOS: Fast and Customizable Linux Distribution
(cachyos.org)303 points by doener 3 days ago
303 points by doener 3 days ago
I really dislike that Linux proper doesn't by default have x.xx-server, x.xx-workstation, x.xx-laptop and x.xx-desktop kernel variants. Or just doesn't have defaults, requiring distros to think about what to set during compilation.
A lot of the current defaults stem from the 90s, and often were eyeballed by the creator of said code. They're not good defaults for modern servers nor workstations nor laptops nor desktops. And all of those devices work best with different defaults.
It doesn't seem (yes, appearances can be deceiving) to be that much work, because no extra code needs to be written. For each variant, just set different default parameter values for stuff like swappiness, lazy RCUs and what not. Make it a thing to revisit the defaults every 10 years.
CachyOS and some other distros already do this, but a big chunk of distros doesn't because they think the defaults are well-thought out.
> CachyOS and some other distros already do this, but a big chunk of distros doesn't because they think the defaults are well-thought out.
Based on what I saw 1-2 years ago last time I looked at it, most distributions to customize and don't use the defaults straight up. From memory, so someone correct me if I'm wrong:
- RHEL/SLES - Lots of patches to kernels
- Arch - Closer to just using defaults, some config choices and downstream adjustments (so the opposite of CachyOS almost, which is why we have CachyOS in the first place)
- Ubuntu - Probably the most patched distribution compared to upstream components, also includes a lot of Canonical-specific stuff on top of that.
- Fedora - Has some bleeding edge bits and bobs
- Debian - Bit more conservative than Ubuntu, but still has patches for stability, security and backports.
In my experience, distributions changing the defaults and customizations seems to be the norm rather than the exception.
> In my experience, distributions changing the defaults and customizations seems to be the norm rather than the exception.
Which makes each and every one of those totally different operating systems that can run similar code to each other. We need to stop thinking of these as Linux "distros" and start thinking of these as totally separate and distinct operating systems that are based around the Linux kernel. Sort of like a business cooperative model.
yes. i use rhel+derivatives in the datacenter and ubuntu+derivatives outside it. in general. theres an OS for every purpose..or something like that...
I love the separation of concerns. It provides an amazing terminal-first kernel and everything graphical is maintained by various different organizations, and you can choose between many different options.
Maintaining a large distro is extremely difficult and every decision has several trade-offs.
Why would you want different kernels for different device types?
Genuine question! I maintain my own Linux distro (upstream Linux + portage) for all my devices and haven’t found much reason to go beyond kernel per arch. I’m curious if there’s something I could be missing.
Well, for the two examples I named:
vm.swappiness defaults to 60, which is default from when everyone was still running spinning rust with a swap partition. Servers these days usually have very specific storage+memory configurations, whereas the usual desktop or laptop has an SSD and 16GB+ of RAM with RAM compression expanding it.
Lazy RCU loading is good on a laptop because you only lose about 10% performance and only with specific workloads, but your idle and light load energy consumption improves. Most laptops spend like 95%+ in light or idle load scenarios. Conversely, on a desktop you don't care (much) about idle and light load energy consumption, you only care about keeping max load consumption low enough so that your fans stay quiet. And on a workstation you don't care about a system being whisper quiet so you can go nuts with the energy consumption.
I generally have three types of Linux devices I typically use. My desktop, servers locally/remotely, and "mobile" devices (more like tablets I guess).
For the first, I want the lowest latency for everything I do, together with the highest burstable speed whenever possible, for pretty much all the components.
For the servers, I basically have two types, one which does storage, they just need large disks that can be slow, and one which users actually connect to, that one needs focus on throughput, latency and performance isn't as important as "can serve all requests in a reasonable timeframe, even under load".
Finally, many of the portable devices run on batteries, so on those the focus is power-saving, even if it compromises on performance.
I'm sure others out there have more device types, like ultraweight watches, security devices, monitors, radios and much more. Each one of these have different tradeoffs, and tuning the kernel and OS for each use case makes it a lot better usually. Personally I use NixOS for everything except my desktop (CachyOS right now!), and it makes it really trivial to create profiles based on the same configuration, deployed to all devices, and today they're are tuned for exactly their purpose, as Linus intended :)
> This was the one to finally stop getting me to distro hop.
For me it was Debian 12 with Sway (Wayland) followed by Debian 13 with labwc and Sway.
Now I can switch from a tiling window manager (WM) to a floating WM depending on the work task.
During CachyOS installation, select "i3" as desktop environment and look how many of the accessory programs die from linking errors. That should not happen with a package manager with dependency management.
This isn't surprising. All of the X11 based WMs are slowly bit-rotting. Unless the people that care about them step up and start maintaining the stack instead of just endlessly complaining about Wayland it'll only get worse.
> start maintaining the stack instead of just endlessly complaining about Wayland it'll only get worse.
This is actually what forced me to migrate to Wayland, seeing lots of people complaining about Wayland but not seeing people stepping up to maintain X11. And those who used to maintain X11, built Wayland instead.
Yes, Wayland isn't perfect, but for professionals who just want shit to continue working, you kind of have to move to the software that is being maintained, for better or worse.
Always the same lies. People "stepped up" in the and as a result were outright banned from the gitlab (instead of e.g. just rejecting pull requests). Current maintainers refuse to do any release management and instead treat every merge into master as a new release. This kind of sabotage makes development or contributing very difficult. Also the people that used to maintain X11 (e.g. Keith Packard) had nothing to do with building Wayland.
Wayland on the other is just a insanely stupid API. Everybody advocating for Wayland should be forced to write a simple client at least once without relying on behemoths like GTK or Qt.
X11 is still in fact maintained to a degree insofar as minimally fixing bugs.
Last activity 2 hours ago at time of writing.
https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/groups/xorg/-/activity
Most of the people complaining are users who don't write any software. There is no practical difficulty in using an x11 wm at this point nor expected to be until major software not only doesn't support x11 by default but cannot be built with support for same.
Maybe it will be difficult to run X in 2030?
> All of the X11 based WMs are slowly bit-rotting.
An absolute metric TON of code in general that is/was largely dependent on free $0 volunteer labor has been bit rotting for the past 5 years. The COVID pandemic and the ongoing tech layoffs have really opened our eyes to just how much tech got built for free by firms pushing "always be coding" down our throats in the 2010s. It's why the only truly stable Linux OSes right now are largely Ubuntu and RHEL (even more RHEL lately) - you get what you pay for if no one else is footing the bill.
I know what you mean, but there is bitrot. I'm currently trying dwm. Zero out of the three patches I downloaded from the website applied successfully. I'd call that bitrot.
Not sure how much I like "hand-write your own code from snippets" as a way to configure software.
One advantage of the patches not working is that manually applying a patch (usually quite simple) brings you some familiarity with the code. In my case this let me make my own modifications that were not available as patches. Altering window manager code is fun!
And while you have a good point, I don’t think this is what most people have in mind when they use the term “bitrot” (but I could be wrong). I say this because dwm as supplied continues to work perfectly without modification. The patches are enhancements contributed by third parties (as far as I know) and, as you’ve discovered, are not maintained.
(Also, once you have a working, patched dwm, it should continue to work forever, even if the patches that you used may no apply automatically to future versions of the base dwm.)
There's still bitrot on the X.org side even if your DM is maintained
There is no X11 bitrot. Just a lack of funding. If funding for Wayland stopped today, Wayland would die much quicker than X11 because there is essentially zero community involvement whereas for X11 there are enough people that care to keep it alive for free.
Desktop Linux is more of a love project, it has basically no real support. Compared to the kernel it's more like YouTube $5 comments.
And given that Wayland has less moving pieces (it properly sits on top of kernel abstractions), your take is even less likely to be true.
almost every distro that offers an i3/sway/awesome install option seems to do a really poor job of it.
I don't know why.
Last time I started an endeavoros install with a default i3 it borked the login manager and set no system handlers of any kind. When I went to fix the handlers the entire package that set them was gone. When I went to install that (on the advice of the accompanying forum) I had to install most of GNOME.
If you're using something that isn't KDE or GNOME you're probably going to hit rough edges.
> If you're using something that isn't KDE or GNOME you're probably going to hit rough edges.
Anymore it's literally anything that isn't GNOME. Red Hat is basically keeping that project going.
I use CachyOS as my daily driver and I gave up on i3 after few tries. It just doesn’t work.
I’m happy with XFCE now and it is very performant.
What are examples of packages that fail with linking errors? What are the errors?
Vanilla Arch would fail in the same way with this package. Not sure I follow.
I had a similar beef with FreeBSD ports. And to be fair, they specifically disclaim "liability" to what the package maintainers do because they are separate groups. But the one time I tried going off the beaten path from pkg (which installs binaries) and went to /usr/local/ports and actually tried to build something from scratch, it just choked on dependencies and quit.
IIRC, I tried to build vim from scratch, but during the menuconfig, selected different "cflags" (or whatever they call them) to add additional features. When you do this, it pulls in more packages, and eventually something failed to compile the way I had configured it. I realize there's probably N! different combinations of packages / dependencies. But still it left me thinking "why bother releasing this crap/give me the option to customize at all if you don't even do basic tests on it?".
This kind of bug shouldn't happen in the first place. Totally unacceptable move by the CachyOS team.
Yah well? Why would I when there is Plasma/KDE which never did that to me? :-)
I used i3 for the longest time and I'd say a wayland based alternative like sway or miracle is a better choice nowadays. Even KDE Plasma recently dropped x11 support [1] so going forward, most apps will target wayland first.
Migrating my i3 config to sway hardly took any effort. I was also able to get rid of a lot of xorg specific configurations from various x11 dotfiles and put them directly in the sway config (Such as Natural Scrolling)
[1]: https://itsfoss.com/news/kde-plasma-to-drop-x11-support/.
I've been using Linux since the mid-90s and Linux almost exclusively for the last couple decades and I have only one question, aren't most Linux distros fully customizable? I currently run Fedora on my desktop but I've run everything from Slackware to Red Hat to Debian to Knoppix to Corel to Suse to Arch, you get the idea, and I've found all of them nearly equal in the customizability department. Is there a distro out there that actively fights customization?
They are for you because you're a pro at it by now even if you don't realize it. You have to remember there are a ton of people installing Linux now for the first time ever. Some distros give a better out of the box experience. My guess is Cachy is popular with people that have heard Arch is great (because it is) but don't want to deal with a text mode installer, or enjoy the value add it brings to gamers.
> Arch is great (because it is)
It's good as a cutting edge OS but I don't consider it the most stable.
As someone who started using Ubuntu around 9.x sometime, basically had breakages every time I ran dist-upgrade, gave Debian (both stable, unstable and testing) a chance, hit more snags and finally moved to Arch Linux and been using it since 2017 without a single Arch-induced issue, I do consider Arch Linux the single most stable distribution, probably mainly because of the rolling release schedule if nothing else.
They are all customizable, but you have to remember - not everyone is a Linux expert, and not everyone has the time or the will to tinker.
> not everyone has the time or the will to tinker
And the more RTFM style talk I hear about getting Linux to work, the more I want to buy a bunch of Mac Minis instead. I have actual work to do.
> I have actual work to do.
Me too. That's why I use Linux.
If you decide to delve deeper into Linux then it pretty much becomes a high investment -> high reward thing. There's a learning curve, but you can customize everything to be exactly how you want, and there are no black boxes whatsoever.
What does this mean in practice? You set it up once, exactly the way you like it, and it runs stable forever. It has no misfeatures constantly shoved down your throat (like with e.g. Windows, with AI, ads, telemetry and bloat). Your UI doesn't go through pointless redesigns every few years (like with Windows and macOS) if you don't want to. If you don't like something you can peek under the hood and change it.
The total amount of time I've spent maintaining my Linux system (or in your parlance: "getting it to work") over the last decade is, I don't know, maybe a dozen hours? But yes, if you're a beginner this is indeed unrealistic.
You can customize anything, the problem is always how maintainable your customization is. People keep making FrankenDebians (https://wiki.debian.org/DontBreakDebian#Don.27t_make_a_Frank...) using curl|bash install scripts, alternate repositories or just plain brute force symlinking libraries with a hefty dose of chattr +i.
A properly customizable distro allows organizing and tracking patches in layers, etc.
> fully customizable
There are all sorts of customizable. CachyOS' use of that word is rather inspecific. I guess it means the compilation flags are better customized for your CPU, plus it is easier to choose a kernel with a different scheduler enabled. So, "more customizable" in that sense.
Of course you could ask whether you could 'customize' your distribution not force you to use systemd. Most popular distributions fall flat on that one, I'm afraid...
Most distributions also don't allow to 'customize' any of the following:
- compiler used for building the distribution, - libc implementation, - C++ standard library implementation, - coreutils implementation, - system shell, - kernel (e.g., using Hurd), - PAM or equivalent, - util-linux, - package manager,
and so on. systemd is just one more thing in that looong, looong list.
What you’re thinking of is called Bedrock Linux: https://bedrocklinux.org/
Here to say that cachyos is by no means just a gaming os it's a really nicely packaged distro and works much better than KDE neon, far better than manjaro.
It also generally feels snappier for simple things like opening terminal, but I am pretty sure that was a kde neon issue.
I only use KDE so your experience might be different than mine.
Regarding the KDE aspect: my preferred DE is KDE and I installed CachyOS with that. Everything seemed to go smoothly and using it was also a good experience.
With that said, I ran into an age-old problem: sleep.
(For reference, I have an AMD Ryzen CPU, RTX 4070 super GPU and some low-end motherboard and I am using the proprietary nvidia drivers.)
I searched the web for hours and tried a lot of things, including different kernels, but nothing helped. In the end, after I couldn't find anything new on forums, reddit, blog posts, etc, I asked chatgpt for some ideas.
It had me change BIOS settings, kernel params, nvidia module params (or something like that - I'm not well versed in this topic tbh), etc, but in some way waking up from sleep still did not work.
After it suggested some undocumented kernel param with the nvidia kernel module, I said that's it, let's try something else and reinstalled with Gnome.
To my surprise, it worked without issue. I've been using it like this for weeks now.
I have no idea if the explanation is good or not but chatgpt said it's because my hardware + proprietary nvidia driver + plasma wayland was a bad combination.
> After it suggested some undocumented kernel param with the nvidia kernel module, I said that's it, let's try something else and reinstalled with Gnome.
> To my surprise, it worked without issue. I've been using it like this for weeks now.
> I have no idea if the explanation is good or not but chatgpt said it's because my hardware + proprietary nvidia driver + plasma wayland was a bad combination.
GNOME has more paid devs than KDE and therefore has better quality overall. It sucks as I love KDE's UX but I had rough patches using it as well.
funny you say that, I had so many problems with sleep (not exclusive to linux) that I just let my pc idle. 100w is also a nice heat source during winter.
I've been daily driving CachyOS for ~3 years now. It was the first distro I could use "out of the box" with a Nvidia 1080 TI and later 3060 along with an old Intel i7-8700k without having to spend a significant amount of time tweaking and fiddling with config files just to get a working Plasma/Wayland setup.
Though I definitely think the resources and guides Archwiki provided plus the fact that I had been distro hopping(Mint, Ubuntu, PopOS among others) the last couple years before I settled into CachyOS/Arch helped a lot.
I will say though(at least in my experience) attempting to use a tiling/dynamic WM like hyprland, sway, river, anything that depends on wlroots did not work well, which is to be expected as i dont believe any of the desktop environments I listed support Nvidia.
KDE Plasma(The default DE) and XFCE which I only used for a short while gave me the most stable and consistent environment. Generally I never promote CachyOS, but this is the first time I've seen it on the front page of HN, if you're willing to put in a little effort(i.e read through the CachyOS docs and maybe a couple pages of the Archwiki) I'm pretty sure CachyOS is the best experience "out of the box" for users with a Nvidia GPU/intel CPU/iGPU. Outside of straight up upstream Arch as long as youre willing to put in the time to configure it post install to optimize your system.
Also barely use it for gaming/multimedia, already have Windows for that, I use it for work (software development/machine learning) with Gnome3 and haven't had any issues with it since I started using it in 2025. Don't notice much performance difference with normal Arch though either tbh.
nvidia support seems to be better, but I have no idea if that is arch or catchyos.
I've only used CachyOS for a couple of months, before that Arch since 2017, and never had any issues with nvidia cards on Linux, and I think I'm usually in the areas where people find them cumbersome (tiling WMs, gaming, machine learning, CUDA). Started with a 1080, then 2080ti, then 3090ti, and finally a RTX Pro 6000 Blackwell, don't remember any issue with any of them.
I think both Arch and CachyOS would do fine with nvidia cards, but thanks to who I don't know.
Bazzite (Fedora atomic), CachyOS (Arch), PikaOS(Debian), Nobara(Fedora), (Pop_OS - Ubuntu), it's nice that there's a gaming version of pretty much all major distros at this point so everyone can have a familiar base, hopefully they all survive
I don't understand why we need "gaming versions" for distros. I've never used them but if there's stuff that's broken for gaming in the base distros, shouldn't that just be fixed?
Trade-offs in the default load-out, essentially - some of the things you want for games can bloat out the standard build, compromise the "license integrity" of the base repositories, make system instability more likely etc etc.
There is unlikely to be a time that "things stop moving" enough to make all these trade-offs go away, but you can pretty much just add all this stuff to the base distro yourself anyway if you want to (I still play games on vanilla Silverblue, for example).
Target audience favors in for default load out, too. Gamers aren’t likely to be *nix gurus and want something that will come configured correctly for their use case out of the box, including stuff like Nvidia drivers.
For this group, needing to follow wiki guides and such and spending time on basic system functionality just isn’t happening. If that’s the only option, they’re just going to reinstall Windows.
At least for Bazzite, Nobara and CachyOS, there is the SteamOS desktop option that boots directly to Steam's Big Picture that is quite unconventional in some ways (e.g. this desktop mode kinda also acts as a display manager, so there is the option to boot to your desktop from Big Picture mode and this option is generally broken without specific integration with the session manager).
Sure this could probably be a package in a more "traditional distro", but I'm almost sure most people don't expect their Display Manager to be replaced with Steam when they install a package.
> Sure this could probably be a package in a more "traditional distro", but I'm almost sure most people don't expect their Display Manager to be replaced with Steam when they install a package.
You can add steam big picture mode as a session type which would let you pick it from the login manager (the same as if you had both GNOME & KDE installed, for example). There would be no need to replace anything.
Doesn't work as seamless, NixOS has this option but you can't quit the session unless you go to TTY and type `steam --kill` (the button for `Switch to desktop` exists but doesn't work). For it to work AFAIK you need to give SteamOS kind like a Display Manager permission (and also have some shims that does the actual work for switching sessions).
I had Manjaro previously, but it regularly had issues booting due to Plymouth. I'm not quite sure what the issue was, but Plymouth was deprecated. I switched to Fedora for a while, but finally got sick of Gnome 3. (yes, I could have just used KDE on Fedora but wanted to try out Cachy) Cachy has been pretty good, and I'm seeing much better performance in games than in Fedora, although I'm not sure how much of that is due to Fedora open-sourcing their kernel driver was responsible for the difference. (I still had the proprietary ones on Fedora)
I hope some of these work out. Honestly from a strict compatibility and ease of use standpoint nothing has been as simple or reliable for me as Ubuntu used to be. I left it due to snaps and premium nagging, but I've had the usual little "linux" quirks ever since. As much as I love cachy, my current quirk with it is that heavy disk writes tank the system aggressively. A bit of brief research suggests this might be due to using BTRFS, but I'm comfortable enough with the system that I don't want to do a total reformat right now.
I guess what I'm saying is that as much as I love linux there is still some refinement needed.
I use industry standard Ubuntu, I'm a gamer, I have no issues, and I have used nvidia cards going back 2 decades so I can dispel the nvidia myth too.
The proof is in the pudding:
> PikaOS Linux is a Linux distribution based on Debian's cutting-edge "Unstable" branch [...] [1]
Trademark and reach.
Gaming distributions don't run a stable version of Linux distributions. They're always a spin-off from one of the popular Linux distributions (rebasing every once in a while), with additional changes tailored towards gaming.
Now, you cannot just say I call my distribution Debian GNU/Linux Gaming Edition. If you would, you'd need to work under the umbrella of Debian. With a different name, you differentiate from Debian, while you can keep the advantages of their framework (hello Ubuntu).
I used Garuda linux, which was somewhat popular a few years ago (not sure what happened to it), and it was absolutely noticeably faster in the UI/UX. I think it's a combination of kernel parameters and other choices all tuned to reduce latency, that add up. sure you could do the same thing on a Fedora install but that would require knowing what all of them were. I'm talking settings like scheduling algorithm for threads, or polling rates. Whatever they did, it definitely seemed faster.
Can't you just add an x86-64-v3 arch to Debian if that really makes much of a difference? (I'd be surprised if it's really that significant because you can't recompile the game itself, and even when you can recompile things use -march=native doesn't make that much difference in my experience).
Because there is no need. It just the usual trend/hype.
* Manjaro is Arch.
* Cachy is a patched Arch (exactly what Arch avoids, heavy patching).
* SteamOS is Arch.
* Arch is Arch.
> Any useful and stable patch will be merged by upstream. That is why using CachyOS or ClearLinux isn’t beneficial in long term.
Seems like you're blinded by your own context, if CachyOS for example see patches, integrate them earlier than upstream, and let user use them today rather than "long term", how is that not useful or beneficial to the users who want/needs that?
Besides, testing patches this way sounds like it'll have wider impact in the community than just the distro that integrated the patch, as it'll have a way wider testing userbase then. Isn't that also good long term?
It's about sane default packages and installers and desktop experience, as well as onboarding.
It doesn't take a lot of work to get any distro to become a good gaming machine, but it does take some work to make it a seamless turnkey gaming machine for the masses.
Of course there is a need - if you get a brand new PC don't you want it to perform as it should? Or do you want to wait another 2 years for that to happen?
Also very few people want to tinker with every single little thing, they want a nice stable base that does what you expect and build upon it - that's why most people were fine with previous versions of windows. So if cachy fixes 95% of the issues for you, why not go for it? Saving time and headache is a reasonable thing for a focused distro.
There are some things regular distros can't/shouldn't do, like including codecs still under patents, matching proprietary Nvidia drivers with the correct kernel version, proprietary firmware for game controller adapters, the launching of Steam Big Picture mode as the default UI, etc.
I hope all distros go down the microos/bazzite/atomic path of immutable base state. It is by far the largest simplification I have had in my desktop experience since about 2010, but then I started on some kind of red hat version (7.2?) when you still had to configure X and dhcp yourself.
Sure, for some things you need to do base system configuration, but that is not impossible on something like microOs.
[I am sorry for the meta, if it's against the guidelines I hope this comment will be quickly deleted. But I am not criticizing anyone, I just find it interesting.]
The discussion between supporters of these kind of distros and people against them are very similar to those between vegetarians.
"I don't know why the community needs a veggie chicken nuggets honestly. We have delicious vegetables."
"But veggie chicken nuggets have their place. They are quick and microwaveable, and they help bringing people in"
"We bring them in with preservatives and chemicals? Sweet potatoes are also quickly microwaveable.."
And so on.
Welcome to every internet discussion ever, where people who don't understand or know each other's perspective and contexts unless they share them, so everyone is mostly talking past each other and in reality, to someone else.
Fedora has been rock solid for a few years (minus Zoom + Nvidia), as my primary work OS. I'm always nervous to jump to an Arch-based distro as my daily driver, for fear of having to regularly fix issues. Is this a legitimate concern in 2025? Would my experience (especially with graphics) be improved on something like Cachy?
Same. My first Linux was Ubuntu 9.x, every time I upgraded the major version something broke. Eventually ignored the "Arch is unstable" as I saw my co-workers having zero issues, and been using Arch since 2017 now with zero breakages that I myself wasn't responsible for.
Same here as well, using arch as daily driver for 10+ years now. I think just twice I've had major headaches due to package/kernel upgrades which required a few hours troubleshooting. Otherwise, smooth sailing and a pleasure to work with. Love the AUR (w/ pikaur)!
> Love the AUR (w/ pikaur)!
Never heard about pikaur before (Rua gang here), but judging by the screenshots, does it not allow you to review the PKGBUILD before building the package? Seems to me like the most basic feature a AUR helper has to have, since AUR is all user-contributed without reviews. Is pikaur really letting you install packages blindly like that?
> Arch being unstable is a myth.
Arch follows a rolling release model. It's inherently unstable, by design.
You are probably using some annoying pedantic definition of unstable. Most people mean it to mean “does stuff crash or break”. Packages hang out in arch testing repos for a long time. In fact, Fedora often gets the latest GNOME release before Arch does, sometimes by months.
I have been running arch for about 5 years now, and I think there were about 3 or 4 instances where I'd have to do some manual intervention to fix an update, but those interventions were generally all fixable by commands posted on arch linux's blog (which, for some weird reason, the arch devs expect you to check every time you run `sudo pacman -Syu`)
Arch devs know how much friction manual intervention updates cause, so they try to keep them to a minimum.
Honestly, I've had more problems running windows than running arch.
> Honestly, I've had more problems running windows than running arch.
Worst thing with Windows isn't the occasional "wtf, how do I undo this change Microsoft forced upon me?" but more "Damn, it's that time of the month where Windows force me to do X", most recently being upgrades that you cannot shutdown or restart your computer without doing. Used to be you could run some command to avoid it, but literally all the hacks stopped working.
So now I'm slightly afraid of booting Windows which I do sometimes, because I don't want to end up in the situation where I need to boot Linux for five seconds to do something quickly, but Windows is refusing to do so without first doing a 20 minute upgrade. Fucking disrespectful of people's time!
For example. Last week there was a time period where updating CachyOS led to unbootable system.
https://discuss.cachyos.org/t/qt6-upgrade-to-6-10-1-breaks-s...
As another commenter said, sometimes upgrades require manual intervention. You can fix this using a tool like informant which shows you all the interventions you have to do before you upgrade.
Also, you can use a tool like snapper + btrfs-assistant (both of which come pre-installed on Cachy IIRC) which lets you fully revert your filesystem (snapper rollback) or partially (snapper undochange) if something breaks. Just make sure to use a btrfs filesystem for that.
> Is this a legitimate concern in 2025?
I've used Arch Linux (always with a nvidia GPU no less!) since 2017 sometime, moved over to CachyOS just this year, and had no issues that weren't caused by myself in all this time.
I initially moved away from Ubuntu at that time, as I got so tired of dist-upgrade breaking my system every single time I tried to upgrade, so figured I'll at least understand the breakages better when they happen with Arch. But I never got Arch to break something by itself, it always end up being my fault.
Yes, dist-upgrade was the biggest pain with the Ubuntu based KDE neon too. I'd wait for multiple months after a new version was published before I'd upgrade, and still would often encounter issues that broke the boot. I made sure to reserve at least half a day for each dist-upgrade -- multiple times I fixed issues with a bootable USB image and mounting the full-disk encrypted partition to fiddle something.
I was always able to recover with some insights from random forum or Reddit posts, but I can't say this was the type hacking I wanted to do.
I'm hoping a rolling release is easier in the long run, but we'll see. Also this time I used a separate SSD for /home so that at least I could do a full reinstall and still keep my data.
> features the optimized linux-cachyos kernel utilizing the advanced BORE Scheduler for unparalleled performance.
Never heard about BORE scheduler. It is an additional patch to the kernel ? How stable is this ?
I have no idea how stable it is but it seems it's a scheduler that weighs processes based on burstiness?
You could go into their wiki. It's linked from the page, and skim/skip over that installation stuff, until the chapters where they explain what they did to the kernel(s), how they compile and link optimized, schedulers, and stuff. It's not ultra-thourough, but gives a good overview.
I've settled on sched_ext: BPF scheduler "bpfland_1.0.18_g5bff813c_dirty_x86_64_unknown_linux_gnu" -powersave for processes, and let mq-deadline handle internal storage, and bfq anything connected via USB.
What do you mean by "stable"?
Gaming distros trade stability and security for performance. IMHO they're only useful for FPS bragging rights. Most popular distros should already be performant enough for gaming purposes.
I don't think it is only for bragging rights, while in a vacuum the mainline kernel should be good enough for gaming, it is not really good when there are multiple tasks competing for the CPU attention (and this is especially bad for gaming because this can create a frame spike, ruining the game experience especially for multiplayer games). I think fixing this particular issue is one of the reasons Bore scheduler was created.
Speaking as a long time gamer, at least on Ubuntu, I've never seen the issue you're describing.
Try running a long video conversion job that uses up all cores while running a game, no matter how much you fiddle with scheduling priority the performance in the game might drop by 50% and frame times will spike multiple times over. Even if you try reserving some cores for the game, performance will still be much lower.
Thats a weird and rather baseless assumption for you to make. They dont trade stability nor security, their tradeoff is package compatibility between x86 versions and focusing on execution latency rather than total throughput.
> How stable is this ?
As in? When I tried it, nothing crashed/segfaulted/appeared broken for the ~week I was using it, various workloads mostly programming with Rust, Python, PyTorch and Clojure.
I've seen this be popular but I'm a little sceptical as to the effectiveness of their optimisations. Does anyone have some examples, anecdotes?
As shared elsewhere, I've used Arch Linux since 2017 sometime, and this year I replaced it with CachyOS as I was changing disks anyways and wanted to see what all the noise was about.
It's like a Arch brother that holds your hand slightly more, and have some "defaults" they nudge you towards in the docs, and some number-heavy software is slightly faster, maybe 10-15%, but overall it feels and works just like Arch Linux. To be honest, I don't notice a lot of difference and I think I'm as fine with Arch as with CachyOS, that's how little different there is between them.
Just an anecdote but I've been running it for a few months now and at least for gaming it works well. Arc Raiders plays fantastically. There is an issue with one of my headsets that when you get in game the audio quality drops to dogshit but I think that's a bigger issue with the headset on Linux and not particular to Cachy.
Sounds like you're using Bluetooth headphones and the game is attaching to the microphone which will automatically switch the audio codec from audio mode into headset mode. I'd suggest trying to completely disable the microphone of the headset so the game won't even try to attach to it.
Yep that's it! I ended up just buying a headset for gaming, since I use the other one for mostly music anyways. Solved the issue there. There were some workarounds I could try but I needed a new gaming headset anyways, the padding on my old one basically just fell apart after almost 7 years.
Here are benchmark rounds of CachyOS against current Ubuntu and Fedora workstations as fresh as early November:
I've setup cachyos repos on arch and it does indeed feel snappier. I've not measured any performance, but I'd imagine it's negligible on my pretty new ryzen 9. Nonetheless, the process was fairly easy and so far nothing has broken because of that. If I were to actually care enough to test it, I'd also try just swapping the scheduler on the normal Arch kernel.
I’m running CachyOS for a year now as my daily driver (non-work) on my ancient desktop from 2019 and ancient Nvidia card. It is very fast and smooth. I mainly use it to development using LLM sidekicks and it doesn’t break sweat. I use XFCE and just love how fast the experience is.
Anecdotically I'm using it since about 2 years on obsolete Kaby Lake Core i5 7500T & Core i7 7700T @35Watts in 1 liter Lenovo Thinkcentres (M910q tiny). Which have integrated HD630 Graphics.
Under Plasma/KDE. I just followed their defaults in the installer, which at the time were BTRFS for the filesystem, whith systemd-boot, and everything wen't well. The only thing which I would have done differently in hindsight would be the boot partition at 2GB, which seems wasteful when only about 50MB are ever used. But shrug?
What else, hrrm, the stuff is mostly clocked down to 800Mhz, because of the chosen scheduler, in spite of this nothing ever lags. Though the systems have 32GB RAM, that should help with that.
It's really smooth, even on that old 'crap', even mostly clocked down.
I also had it never crash on me with anything, neither single applications, or system hangs.
After upgrading with pacman -Syu I immediately clear the package cache with pacman -Scc, because I never ever needed that.
At the moment I'm considering to remove the pacman hooks into btrfs-snapshots, because I never needed them either. Seems like cargo-cult to me :-)
I also let it bitrot for up to 150 days, meaning no updates whatsover, and then lifting it up in one accumulated rush. Effortlessly. In the past, because I've been lazy and couldn't be bothered. Lately more often :-)
I didn't reboot in these long phases without updates. Just suspend to RAM. Which works every single time. And the system stayed always responsive.
Their ZRAM setup is usable by default. No fiddling necessary.
With this stability I dared to activate https://github.com/graysky2/profile-sync-daemon / https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Profile-sync-daemon and never had any trouble with it so far.
At the moment I'm having fun discovering a new world of audio experience with https://github.com/wwmm/easyeffects
How could I live without that?!
(Don't worry, cores stay at 800Mhz with that playing YT in FF, or watching a movie with MPV)
At least on my hardware it's the DREAM.
Oh. Did I mention I don't game at all? With the exception of maybe some Freeciv in the browser...
Debian is not far behind, it's just on a really long release cycle because that is what it is designed to be. Debian trixie has mostly the latest and greatest from 6 months ago.
I can't vote, but calling real people "fucktards" was poor form.
I spent ages submitting the bug report with various log files, /etc/fstab that worked vs. the one that didn't. Detailed steps to reproduce, specific kernel versions, snapshots of /etc/ /usr/share/etc and so on. What the problem was, how I resolved it.
Also found someone else that had experienced the same: https://old.reddit.com/r/linuxquestions/comments/t6795f/emer...
Created an account to submit it all to Fedora(/Redhat/IBM). And it just got marked wont fix. Apparently the filesystem guy didn't think it was a filesystem problem (despite being caused by fstab) and just closed it.
Apparently getting stuck in the below loop is an acceptable response due to a typo in /etc/fstab.
--
Reloading system manager configuration. Starting default target. You are in emergency mode. After logging in, type "journalctl -xb" to view system logs, "systemctl reboot" to reboot, or “exit” to continue booting.
Cannot open access to console, the root account is locked. See sulogin(8) to continue.
Press Enter to continue.
Reloading system manager configuration. Starting default target. You are in emergency mode. After logging in, type "journalctl -xb" to view system logs, "systemctl reboot" to reboot, or “exit” to continue booting.
Cannot open access to console, the root account is locked. See sulogin(8) to continue.
Press Enter to continue.
etc.
A few things - they're custom builds - my main server has ECC ram in a Gigabyte gaming motherboard, and does mail/files (now just ripped DVD's & Blu-rays), its had ZFS for ages. Ran low on space and bought a Beelink ME mini, and moved stuff across. That was the smoothest build ever. Booted off a USB stick, it detected all 6 nvme drives and was up and transferring stuff onto it in record time. Not the cheapest way to go about things for $/TB, but I could afford it. Store audio and general backup on these (mostly read, rarely write) with the movies on the spinning rust server. Both raidz1-0.
Plus an offsite virtual web server/backup mail server.
Not using jails or anything fancy. Just leave them alone aside from running freebsd-update and pkg update commands occasionally. Stable as.
The only complicated part is that on a couple of systems the motherboards the realtek network card isn't detected and so to bootstrap the install process the easiest way is to tether a phone via USB in order to get a network connection to then pkg install the driver for it.
Can dual boot my main PC into FreeBSD desktop mode - trying to wean myself of Windows 10, but as I said gaming/audio just works, so its the default boot device. Gaming on FreeBSD is problematic, I did manage to play Factorio for 15 minutes, but then it locks up complaining about a missing ALSA file, its acknowledged that its suboptimal and gaming Linux is just easier than continually messing around trying to get all the bits working consistently. Some people insist on it, but it still seems too precarious for me.
Hence considering Cachy OS. Wanted to triple boot my desktop machine, but turns out the motherboard despite having four slots for drives, doesn't actually support more than 2 of them. Uh, thanks Gigabyte...
The media PC is a ASUS NUC 14 Pro Mini running CachyOS, mostly happy with it compared to other distro's but they all have their quirks. Plus it hard locks occasionally when streaming (e.g. Netflix). Just remembering which package manager and how to use it is a minor challenge. I remember the era where there was basically just .deb and .rpm
I haven't used a laptop in ages, and dislike using a smartphone. I want my multi-monitor setup. I still remember thinking how dumb it was we had 1600x1200 and 1920x1200 and then they standardised on 1920x1080.
Ironically, Apple's Cinema Displays which cost a lot back in the day - mid 2000's did do 1920x1200 via DVI and we've got a few that still work to this day. My wife was in Apple-land because of her profession (graphic design), and I couldn't resist, Apple wasn't quite as evil back then. I think they have Sanyo displays in them. So props to those designing hardware that just keeps going.
I ran CachyOS for a while and it’s really good! These days I’m rolling on OpenSUSE Aeon for the immutability and because my homelab stuff is all Suse based.
But if you’re a gamer that also uses your PC for development or content creation you can’t go wrong with CachyOS.
For those of you who are a little bit more adventurous - The custom CachyOS kernel is also available within a Portage overlay:
https://github.com/Szowisz/CachyOS-kernels
Which enables you to run a Gentoo based system on the kernel modified by the CachyOS kernel team through a ebuild for the official sources on GitHub.
When emerging it deals with all necessary dependency flags and configuration for you, just a little bit tinkering with USE flags required.
Now that you mention Gentoo, the whole distro make me think of this: https://www.shlomifish.org/humour/by-others/funroll-loops/Ge...
There is also a Fedora COPR with the CachyOS kernel and a few other packages, see https://github.com/CachyOS/copr-linux-cachyos
For any nix-curious person out there check out Julia Evans posts [0]
But also note that she eventually moved out of it > (note from 18 months later in August 2024: I’ve mostly switched back to Homebrew, nix was interesting but overall I think it’s not worth the complexity for me)
Careful though, you might end up like me and add more and more machines, because setting up new machine is very satisfying with nixos
Approach of using all kind of non upstream or unfinished stuff to sell it as better performance is actually counter productive. It makes new users who are unaware of it, being unable to report bugs upstream which basically creates an isolation from the wider Linux community.
It appears to be done for the sake of hyping themselves as superior, but it's causing problems. I totally wouldn't recommend anything with such approach to new users especially.
I really like the idea of compiling both the kernel and packages for modern CPUs instructions. This seems to be around 5% free speed (googling various benchmarks) + better responsiveness for personal computer use.
Any views how sustainable it is for the authors to keep working on it? Is it just donation based or is there a bigger supporter behind it?
Used cachy for a while but still fedora suits me well. It's something that makes my laptop more stable with fedora compared to any other distro. No hanging just work perfectly
Funny I've been poking with the latest ISO last night in a VM. ZFS on root with mirroring and boot environment is seamless, which to me is a huge enabler for a rolling release with fast update cycle, so I want to try it deeper. Currently on fedora kde spin which has a lot of quircks, with Cosmic coming out soon I'll probably switch.
Overall it works well and I like the defaults, the work done is remarkable, and it's been a huge relief considering the shitshow that's Windows 11, and even an improvement from Windows 10 which I enjoyed for years, but it lacks a bit of polish I feel, depending on what you use it for. I don't blame anybody it's really hard work to maintain something like that and a lot of things are nice, but here are some annoyances :
- It doesn't shut down properly most of the time, I have to cut the power ; which I do anyway to go to sleep but sometimes I forget after I use it in the morning before going to work, and it stays with a black screen and the fan running all day
- There are a lot of updates, a few Gbs per week, and I have to type my password several times a week (even when logged in), I can't find how to change that
- Sometimes after an update I'll lose an icon or two, or some settings like scroll speed, etc ; not a huge deal but forces me to google around to get the setting back
- Lots of apps are in flatpacks or snaps, I could try some other repos or maybe nix/guix/pkgsrc but I would lose the appstore anyway so I might as well look around for something else
- Some things seem painful to setup, nvidia drivers, incus/lxc, zfs on root... NVidia was the most important and I managed to make it work well now but didn't bother with the rest
I set this up to reinvigorate my T2 MacBook Pro (with Cosmic) but it keeps restarting when the lid is closed, and keyboard and trackpad don’t always resume on restore. I was impressed with the docs!
I’m thinking of trying Ubuntu, but maybe T2 Linux will always be a compromise, hardly CachyOS fault I reckon.
I've had fantastic experiences reinvigorating macs with Ubuntu. Highly recommended.
Seems to be a mixed bag regarding performance: https://www.phoronix.com/review/cachyos-ubuntu-2510-f43/6
Same here. Pretty amazing. Almost every game in my (large) Steam libarary runs out of the box. Performance is on par with Windows. This finally allowed me to ditch Windows.
And no, I don't bother with crap that needs a kernel level anti-cheat. Simply not for me.
I'm sticking with Ubuntu, used it since 2006, works great with nvidia going back that far on several different nvidia cards over the years, great gaming performance. Make that Ubuntu with kubuntu desktop, since Gnome sucks.
CachyOS would require Arch Linux to implement the support first. Progress is slow but steady:
- https://lists.archlinux.org/archives/list/arch-dev-public@li...
Adding onto this, progress is moving faster thanks to Valve contributing to efforts such as buildbtw for arch.
Not out of the goodness of valve's heart either, they want it for arm based steamOS devices like the frame. A win win for many though.
I oftentimes run Linux Desktop fullscreen in a VM on macOS. macOS acts like a hardware abstraction layer in that case. Depending on the task and the tools, I sometimes prefer this option (I do like the macOS UI though (except for the current version), I just like to use the right tool for the job)
I ended up using Linux Mint, because things just work out of the box for my old Thinkpad, but with Cachy it ran into more problems.
People need to stop making Meme distributions. There will be so much grief once people figure out that what they wanted is a good, stable operating system and what they got is a franken Arch, which will inevitably fail in unpredictable ways and for which there is miniscule support.
The Arch forums rightfully warn against this and do not want users of these distros, since all these distros are inevitably broken in their own weird ways.
There are multiple very reasonable distros. There is absolutely no need to make these forks.
> There is absolutely no need to make these forks.
It's not a fork though. You can find out what a distribution is here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_distribution
> since all these distros are inevitably broken in their own weird ways
Absolute statements should probably have some absolute and undeniable proof, what exact "weird" ways are CachyOS broken today, since you apparently think yourself to be experienced enough to know this?
Maybe it's time to stop crying, and try to see some positivity in the world rather than going into a dark hole constantly.
Having a great showcase distro can be a very nice way into Linux in general. Don’t be so negative. IMHO the Linux life style also means exploring, being more aware of data/OS separation, a deeper understanding of computing in general. It’s alle achieved with these boutique distros which may display the best that’s out there.
FOSS is about freedom, freedom works best with options to apply to. Nobody is forcing you to do anything with these options.
>Having a great showcase distro can be a very nice way into Linux in general.
By "nice" do you mean a distro which is fundamentally broken and far less supported then its parent distro?
>It’s alle achieved with these boutique distros which may display the best that’s out there.
It is displaying the worst that is out there, just with a nice interface. These niche distros are always the worst choices, because they lack in support and are all fundamentally broken.
Running someone else's patch set of Arch is the easiest way to have a terrible Linux experience. Having a nice interface to lull people into believing what they are getting is a professional product and then handing them a fundamentally broken system, where some hobbyists have patched a proper Linux distro so bad, that you are not even allowed to ask for help on the Arch forum is down right devious and presents the worst of the Linux world.
The truth is that Linux is mostly stable (even Arch), well supported and maintained. But this does not apply to these small hobby projects, which are just worse versions of their base distros with some ricing on top.
>FOSS is about freedom, freedom works best with options to apply to. Nobody is forcing you to do anything with these options.
At the same time I am free to warn people against this. These distros are a bad Idea and especially if you are new to Linux they will make you suffer far more than you should.
> Running someone else's patch set of Arch is the easiest way to have a terrible Linux experience. Having a nice interface to lull people into believing what they are getting is a professional product and then handing them a fundamentally broken system, where some hobbyists have patched a proper Linux distro so bad, that you are not even allowed to ask for help on the Arch forum is down right devious and presents the worst of the Linux world.
Except, this isn't the experience for the majority of users moving to Cachy, Bazzite, Zorin, whatever. What they're getting is a fresh, usable experience specifically in the "flavor" they care about.
Linux, and especially Arch, has an image problem, and it's the reason, despite how good these base distros might be, that people aren't coming. It takes a clever bit of branding and a marginalisation of all the gatekeeping (just like you're trying to do right now) to let users finally think "actually, maybe this is something I can use".
> People need to stop making Meme distributions.
Heh. I've been saying that since I was on Mandrake in the early 2000s. This is just what the Linux landscape is like.
That said, I'm generally not easily impressed, especially by random *nix distro 347, but CachyOS is surprisingly good. I've finally switched full time from Windows. I don't even need VS anymore because Rider is x-platform.
Easy arch install https://garudalinux.org/installation?edition=hyprland
>Personally, I wanted Hyprland which is not supported on debian/Ubuntu and only partially supported on Fedora
What? https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/hyprland https://packages.fedoraproject.org/pkgs/hyprland/hyprland/
>But couldn't for the life of me figure out how to install Arch.
I mean, come on. Sure, Arch is not for everybody, but if you are semi tech savy you could have done the internet searches I did and figured out which distros have hyprland packages. Both Fedora and Debian have them.
Arch is also not much harder to install than debian. Insert the image and go through the steps in the installer, this isn't some magic ritual. https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Archinstall
Try setting up in Debian and let me know how it goes.
I'll even help you. JaKool is the most popular option.
While you're at it, check how many versions the debian package is behind arch/upstream.
It blows my mind how confident people are about knowing something just because they read it somewhere without verifying it themselves.
Vanilla arch is missing so much niceties that take too long to setup.
When your line of thinking there shouldn't be any distros. Just mainline Linux kernel.
> Arch based
Lately, I've been going the opposite route and using RHEL more and more. I've had a couple breaking changes lately that have been caused by software under rolling release practices, which has made me begin to appreciate operating systems where their APIs and stuff get sort of frozen in time for up to a decade. In fact, this is still a big feature of Microsoft Windows.
I mean, if a server distro can be made to be "LTS" for 5-10 years, then why can't we have a decent desktop Linux OS be like that as well (besides Ubuntu)?
How does it compare to DHH’s Omarchy? Looking for opinions from those who tried both.
Omarchy is not a distribution; just a customized Arch setup.
This may be my ignorance, but aren't most distributions [1] just an Arch / Fedora / Debian / whatever base with a desktop environment and a few opinionated choices (UI tweaks, installed applications, etc.)?
[1] I realise CachyOS makes some kernel modifications, but is that typical?
> [1] I realise CachyOS makes some kernel modifications, but is that typical?
Yes, very common. I think not making modifications (like Arch) is the atypical case, as "unmodified from upstream" is one of the core value propositions for Arch and why we chose it in the first place.
Still, CachyOS is probably an outlier in the amount of tweaks it does, and the amount of choices it surfaces to users about those tweaks.
There is https://github.com/mroboff/omarchy-on-cachyos if one wanted it. I didn't, because I'm considering that a fad.
You can just install Omarchy then switch the repos:
https://wiki.cachyos.org/features/optimized_repos/#adding-ou...
It's one thing to judge somebody for supporting an unjust and illegal war. It's another thing entirely to judge them for where they were born. None of us chooses our nationality.
> there are people who want to avoid distributions made by Russians
Well, racism / citizenship-based discrimination is a thing, yes.
> Are builds reproducible?
A valid question, but what does that have to do with the ethnic background or citizenship of the distro makers?
> Where do these people reside?
It seems their team is from all sorts of places, although it doesn't exactly say where in the world each of them is located:
Going against whatever hole that perspective came from: We don't have nearly enough distributions, we need more distributions with strong opinions, new solutions and just "far out there" ideas.
It's a hole because it's pessimistic, borderline antagonistic and against more user choices. I guess the hacker in me just feels weird reading someone wanting less choices on a forum for curious hackers.
so we should just have 2-3 distros monopolize the world? hmm I think i'd rather keep having new distros pop out challenging the current quota.
That is the natural place it would end up at if new distros stopped being made as some would start dying off and you're basically just left with fedora, arch, debian while everything else fades with time.
Not to mention that distros like catchy help to push these changes into mainline.
ubuntu user for almost 20 years,tried many distros in the past,now feel it's a solved problem for me: just use ubuntu lts.
one reason is better sw support,e.g. Arduino, android, vivado,cuda,you name it,all are supported out of box, saves a lot of time for me
Sure, but lts often doesn't work for other use cases like gaming. For example the experience on lts with this year's AMD gpus will be extremely poor if it works at all.
I run Arch and my 9070 xt experience was poor for several months after release. I can't imagine modern gaming on an lts release.
Cachy being Arch based and recompiling with modern cpu flags doesn't seem to be targeting the users who want unchanging boring software.
> Sure, but lts often doesn't work for other use cases like gaming
Bullship, I've used it since it came out in 2006 for everything including gaming (I'm a gamer). And that is on nvidia since then too. Not the same card, various nvidia cards over the years. All worked great. Ubuntu works great.
Ubuntu is formally supported distro, probably the most common throughout all enterprises in the US (because Red Hat and all RPM based distos suck due to RPM has repo bugs still) while deb works great.
> Sure, but lts often doesn't work for other use cases like gaming. For example the experience on lts with this year's AMD gpus will be extremely poor if it works at all.
I'm using Ubuntu 24.04 LTS with a Radeon RX 9070 XT (currently the most recent and highest-end discrete GPU that AMD makes), and it works fine, both functionally and in terms of performance.
> I run Arch and my 9070 xt experience was poor for several months after release. I can't imagine modern gaming on an lts release.
Maybe instead of imagining it, you should just try it?
This was the one to finally stop getting me to distro hop. Cachy is very easy to use and very well maintained. The performance is usually the selling point people talk about, but it's also very customizable and beginner-friendly (especially for an arch-based distro).
It uses an online installer that lets you choose the desktop environment, boot manager, file system, among other things. You can follow the defaults if you're new. Once you install it, it also comes with a few helper applications that can quickly set up things you'd want to use, like a one-click button that installs all the gaming packages you want to use and their flavor of Proton which is (allegedly) faster than the default.
They also have a really good wiki which I contributed a bit to and a very active community if you need help. All around, 10/10 would recommend to anyone. I managed to convince my friend who's new to Linux to use this instead of Zorin and he's had a great time.