Comment by kachapopopow 3 days ago
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.
> 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.
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.