Thoughts on CachyOS?
Thoughts on CachyOS?
I've been seeing a lot of talk about CachyOS recently. Has anyone here tried it? It seems interesting and I might give it a go (currently on EndeavourOS) on a spare drive in my PC.
Daily drove it for a year, and it did its job fine. The devs are friendly, but to me the distro wasn't that much more than Arch with some different kernels
I added the repos to my existing arch install sometime last year I think. It's pretty seamless in that regard, I think I only ran into a mirror sync issue once, and it was resolved a few hours later.
My CPU supports the v4 packages, but I'm not really sure how much benefit there is for most things. (And things like tf/torch aren't coming from the repos anyways.)
I also use their kernel. I can feel a difference between stock and zen or stock and cachyos, but I don't think I'd be able to tell zen and cachyos apart tbh.
I definitely wouldn't switch distros for it, but since it's a trivial, drop in repo, I'll keep using it.
Adding another organization isn't ideal trust-wise of course.
First thing I did was look at a proper benchmark: https://www.phoronix.com/review/cachyos-linux-perf/1
With the exception of the gaming benchmarks coming out well on CachyOS, in many of the workloads CachyOS didn't demonstrate any measurably better performance over fellow Arch Linux derivative EndeavourOS.
So it's great for gamers who want to squeeze extra performance from their hardware.
That's good to know. Not worth a reinstall for me then.
You could just use CachyOS packages on EndeavourOS. https://wiki.cachyos.org/cachyos_repositories/how_to_add_cachyos_repo/
Benefits from optimizations without reinstalling the whole OS!
I'll give that a go and see what it's like, thanks! This seems like a stupid question, but I'll ask anyway.
What happens to my packages installed with the default repos on my system? Will they get changed to the CachyOS optimized version when I go to update or will they remain the same? My guess is that nothing will happen but I'm not certain.
I just did this last night. I put the Cachy repo behind EOS but ahead of Arch. That keeps the look and feel as EOS but grabs optimized Arch packages from Cachy.
If you are just adding Cachy repos to EOS, you have to install the Cachy kernel explicitly if you want it.
There are not that many Cachy packages actually. Almost everything still comes from the Arch repos. The ones Cachy replaces make sense if you are expecting to juice performance ( including some NViDIA patches in the graphics stack ).
It gets replaced with CachyOS optimized version because it will set the repo priority higher.
Reckon this could be done on nix/other distros?
I appreciate the enthusiasm for another arch fork. I hope it works out for them and its users.
It consistently ran slower on a few benchmarks I care about like language model performance, which was surprising. Baulders Gate was also jankyier for some reason. I love that people are out trying to do this stuff and the community was nice. Just like anything the reality is often less exciting than the marketing. It is bundled together arch with some hopeful optimizations that I am certain will work for some hardware and some applications, but not all hardware and all applications.
Just heard about it now from this post. I like endeavourOS. It has a great community support and the distro is pretty solid. No need to hop around for the same thing.
No need to hop around for the same thing.
It's not really the same thing. EndeavourOS is basically vanilla Arch + a few branding packages. CachyOS is an opionated Arch with optimised packages.
You still have the option to select the DE and the packages you want to install - just like EndeavourOS - but what sets Cachy apart is the optimisations. For starters, they have multiple custom kernel options, with the BORE scheduler (and a few others), LTO options etc. Then they also have packages compiled for the x86-64-v3 and v4 architectures for better performance.
Of course, you could also just use Arch (or EndeavourOS) and install the x86-64-v3/v4 packages yourself from ALHP (or even the Cachy repos), and you can even manually install the Cachy kernel or a similar optimised one like Xanmod. But you don't get the custom configs / opinionated stuff. Which you many actually not want as a veteran user. But if you're a newbie, then having those opinionated configs isn't such a bad idea, especially if you decide to just get a WM instead of a DE.
I've been thru all of the above scenarios, depending on the situation. My homelab is vanilla Arch but with packages from the Cachy repo. I've also got a pure Cachy install on my gaming desktop just because I was feeling lazy and just wanted an optimised install quickly. They also have a gaming meta package that installs Steam and all the necessary 32-bit libs and stuff, which is nice.
Then there's Cachy Browser, which is a fork of LibreWolf with performance optimisations (kinda similar to Mercury browser, except Mercury isn't MARCH optimised).
As for support, their Discord is pretty active, you can actually chat with the developers directly, and they're pretty friendly (and this includes Piotr Gorski, the main dev, and firelzrd - the person behind the BORE scheduler). Chatting with them, I find the quality of technical discussions a LOT higher than the Arch Discord, which is very off-topic and spammy most of the time.
Also, I liked their response to Arch changes and incidents. When Arch made the recent mkinitcpio changes, their made a very thorough announcement with the exact steps you needed to take (which was far more detailed than the official Arch announcement). Also, when the xz backdoor happened, they updated their repos to fix it even before Arch did.
I've also interacted with the devs pesonally with various technical topics - such as CFLAG and MARCH optimisations, performance benchmarking etc, and it seems like they definitely know their stuff.
So I've full confidence in their technical ability, and I'm happy to recommend the distro for folks interested in performance tuning.
Thank you for the detailed answer, I really appreciate. I've had this EOS install for almost 3 years now and I have multiple drives that are full of things. Very happy with it, too. Moving distros for me isn't as easy as it used to be because of the drives and all the things that I have set up. I don't want to go through the pain of re-setting everything up. I'll, however, try cachyOS either in a vm or a little laptop I have that I use for trying things for fun.
I have a very similar sentiment. I’m really happy with EndeavourOS and don’t have any real need or desire to distro hop at the moment.
I am also an EOS fan but I just took one machine and added the Cachy repos to it. Like EOS, it looks like it mostly just uses the Arch repos although, unlike EOS, I guess they offer optimized versions of some packages.
So, the repo hierarchy I have now is EOS, then Cachy, then Arch.
The repo install added a new keyring and upgraded pacman itself.
After a pacman -Syu, all it did was update binutils, Python, neofetch, zstd, kwin, and Xorg-Xwayland.
Neofetch still reports EOS.
I have not installed the Cachy kernel yet or tried their Firefox fork.
It seems like a fairly painless addition. Time will tell.
That's a good way of trying other distros that are based on arch.
It looks nice on paper, but I have a very hard time trusting most of the distributions out there. Especially now, with all the security issues reported in the industry. That may sound unfair towards those distributions, but really, can you blame me for my attitude? I mean they have a lot of control of your system and they patch a lot of stuff; even the Kernel. I wonder if their Kernel can be used on other distributions and how it compares to Zen Kernel (I'm on EndeavourOS too, but using Zen Kernel).
I've not looked at different kernels much so that would be very interesting.
I'm using it for quite some time now. It works better than other distros in terms of UI smoothness (I use GNOME and on an old machine), the included "fixes" commands in the Hello app are really useful. Though I can't benefit from the X86_64 V3 optimizations since my machine doesn't support it. The problem is that it broke 2 or 3 times in the last year. Some issues seem to be related to Flatpaks so I'd highly suggest avoiding them on this distro. They can do stuff up to breaking your file system (no jokes). So if you want a stable system, don't use Cachy. If you want a faster system no matter what, definitely try it. Some of the bugs can be already fixed but it hasn't been enough time for me to recommend the distro as a stable one
Why not Arch?
I really dislike these Arch forks that don't add anything really special. The more your system differs from a normal Arch install, (dracut on EndeavourOS for example) the less helpful resources will be available. Just use Arch instead.
All cachyos does differently is have repos with the best optermisations applied. In practice its just a faster version of arch with an optional archinstall GUI.