Must be all that cache
this post was submitted on 05 Apr 2026
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Is it cachy? Or is it what cachy uses that every other distro can as well.
Cachy has, at least in my experience with a Zen 5 processor, it's own special Arch pacman repo with meta packages for various processor types. I believe for the most part mine uses Zen 4 packages.
Add your processor meta package and it adds the appropriate repo where packages have been custom built with feature flags / optimizations for that specific architecture of processors.
So it's a little closer to Gentoo or LFS in those regards, without you having to actually build every package from scratch.
So while yes any distro could do this, in practice a lot don't bother and only release basic i686/amd64/arm32/arm64 sets of packages. Whereas Cachy offers zen4-amd64 packages as an example, and I assume they offer various Intel architecture and other AMD architecture specific packages as well.
This isnt surprising... my work laptop can barely run excel anymore....
Constantly running Windows Telemetry Services or some bullshit background junk eating up 20% CPU.
I got a decent laptop for work. But its fans are always cranked trying to run the full spyware stack of W11+copilot+365copilot, Crowdstrike, lansweeper, screenconnect, fortigate.
Crowdstrike + Defender alone eats a lot. Security software is so heavy in the corporate world and standard Windows bloat on top of that is not helping
My personal daily driver, a 14-year old Thinkpad w/ the same debian install for 10 of those years, runs 10x snappier, cooler and quieter than the MS surface IT at work gave me just 2 months ago. It's also built like a tank and has a clicky keyboard and a sexy red nipple. I never have to think about how many tabs I have open, and it does everything I need it to, the first time, without unexplained delays.
The surface only runs kinda ok with constant policing of resources, absolutely everything non essential disabled at startup (including OneDrive, which I now have to run on an adhoc basis due to its performance impact) and also needs to be on top of a laptop cooler with fans to not overheat and shit itself, so it's not even fully portable.
Debian on old laptop for the win!
back in 2023, i was using a junky old acer laptop from 2014 with 8GB RAM. It was still faster than the 16GB dell laptop work gave me.
Windows tax isnt just monetary...
Can we see this with nvidia?
Yeah, mirrors my experience with similar parameters(CachyOS, Zen3, RDNA2). On average games seem to run more or less the same and maybe even slightly better. But so far it only really mattered in like two cases where i slightly missed the performance target on windows and the 5-15% performance uplift on Cachy were actually noticeable.
IMHO the main takeaway shouldnt be to switch to Linux because of better performance. Like 8-9% more performance on average for free is nice(atleast with this specific testing scenario). But its hardly noticable in most cases. I would rather focus on driving the point home that if you want to switch to Linux anyway you dont have to worry about performance regressions atleast with an AMD gpu.
Otherwise i feel like CPU bound games seem to profit the most. IDK if its just less overhead, better scheduling or what. I'm barely knowledgable enough to just spit out dangerous half-truths.
The older your CPU, the more dramatic the benefits get, due to the lack of windows bloat, kernel level anticheat, etc.
Is there a difference in performance between CachyOS and Bazzite?
I've been using Bazzite for almost 2 years now, and my... personal experience + amalgamation of all the various benchmarks of linux distros vs windows that I have seen is that basically, its variable per certain games, but generally, Cachy and Bazzite both beat Windows by roughly 5-15%, over a broad selection of games, and Cachy sometimes has a slight edge over Bazzite, and maybe works with brand spanking new games a bit earlier.
So basically maybe slight edge to Cachy, in terms of overall performance, but... its not exactly super clear.
Another way to consider it is that performance gains in Cachy are six to eighteen months ahead of “stable” Linux. But that performance increase does mean things are more likely to break with rolling updates.
I don't think Bazzite is that far behind, it's not LTS
you're not going to notice anything that's going to knock your socks off but you might notice like slightly less stutter for fps drop for some things. It does depend on the game though.
I use NixOS with the CachyOS Kernel because I play EVE Online. It's a game that pretty much requires you have multiple clients/accounts going at the same time. For me with the CachyOS kernel if I have 3+ clients open I notice a lot less fps stuttering/lag over say the standard Linux Kernel or even Zen.
At the end of the day, honestly, any distro can pretty much be made into a gaming distro. Stuff like Bazzite, CachyOS, PikaOS are just going to make it "easier" for you because they have stuff installed and configured for gaming in mind by default. easier setup. But unless you're constantly monitoring benchmarks/your FPS then performance increases, if any, aren't going to be groundbreaking.
I am not a tweaker. I like throwing expensive hardware at games, dragging the settings bars to ultra, and if a game doesn’t play well after that, move on to another. I’m not opposed to switching distros if they’re as easy to install as Mint.
For me it was just better support, on my flow z13 bazzite kept freezing the screen, I guess its a reported issue with the display manager. Cachyos doesn't have that issue probably because its much more up to date so fixes have been applied and they take a while to get to fedora then bazzite
I wonder if my Logitech G29 wheel would work with Cachy.
In my own experience, I've had noticeable performance gains after switching to CachyOS from Bazzite, but I don't have any hard numbers to back it up. Everything just seems to run much smoother/higher fps now then when I was on Bazzite.
Thanks. I’ll consider switching.
Funnily i actually had Bazzite running before i distrohopped to CachyOS. But i havent done any benchmarks tbh. I've seen a few comparisons made by others over the last two years and the differences seem to be negligible. Like 3-5% at best between all the tested distros. But the top spots werent even consistent through all the different tests.
tl;dr no
Space Marine 2, which was mentioned in the article, ran like butt on my Bazzite system several months ago. A recent conversation here that revealed others had no problem prompted me to install it again. I found it to run perfectly at ultra settings. I’m left wondering if I did something different, or if subsequent updates to Bazzite were related.
What made you switch?
Biggest reason was because Bazzite is immutable. Great idea in theory but in practice it actually made a few things more difficult for me. Mostly because of simracing and VR stuff. The things i wanted to do are possible with Bazzite but i was just to dumb to do it. CachyOS is a bit more involved in the setup process i would say. But their wiki is great and guided me very well. Beeing arch based i could get a few things(again simracing and VR) i wanted to do just from the AUR which made it a bit easier.
I would say Bazzite has more guardrails which is great until you want/need to overcome them and then it gets more complicated. Thats how i feel at least. With CachyOS you are free to do whatever you want to. But its also easier to fuck up. But so far with the help of the wiki and their discord for a few quick questions everything worked out for me.
Oh, but KDE broke not once but already twice since last august after updates. No biggie with limine and snapshots. Just reverted to the last working version in 2 minutes and my system was working again. In both cases i just updated again after a few days and everything was fine. But Bazzite never broke for me once tbf!
I feel like that’s a low bar to clear, but glad Cachy is getting the attention.