It's not just a gaming and performance distro, it includes QoL fixes on modern hardware.
On my Lenovo laptop, fixes that would take over a day to enable and patch on most distros:
- Wake from sleep
- Nvidia GSP firmware workarounds and correct version OOTB (proprietary)
- Mouse lag/jitter
- External display hotplug
- DDC/CI over type-c
- Embedded controller power profiles from taskbar with correct TDP limits for CPU/GPU
- Battery charge limiter support right from KDE settings
- Working `switcherooctl` in hybrid graphics mode on AMD
- Firefox with video decode acceleration (YouTube) on almost all GPU models
Another gaming feature that is otherwise useful in workstations is the external scheduler support.
Currently using BPFland which makes multitasking as responsive as idle while compiling Yocto/Chromium in the background.
Windows, Mac (mini M1), and kernel built-in scheduler Linux jank and become almost unusable (Ryzen 5800H).
I few months ago, I backed up my windows gaming machine and overwrote the partition with CachyOS. Haven't looked back. Gaming performance and compatibility has exceeded my expectations. Just a much better experience overall. I feel sorry anytime I see someone using Windows.
I feel sorry every time I'm stuck going back to Windows. And admittedly, the situation is not even comparable to how it was ~25 years ago when I first started playing around with Linux, most things I want to do with a computer just work on Linux nowadays. There are still such things that just are not there yet - but for most of them, it's not necessarily Linux's fault.
If we limit the conversation to gaming specifically, one area where I don't see Linux taking over any time soon is competitive/esports oriented titles and their invasive ~rootkits~ anti-cheats. Another place I kind of have to live with Windows is simulation (in my case Elite: Dangerous and iRacing/Le Mans Ultimate) - the overlays and other third-party utilities either don't exist on Linux, or I couldn't get them to work and kind of abandoned the idea.
Audio production is also kind of a no-go. The DAWs and hardware support are absolutely getting there - Bitwig studio is apparently very good for something Ableton-like, and my DAW of choice, Reaper, has native Linux support. But the plugins and virtual instruments for the most part just don't exist. Some work through a Wine bridge, if you're lucky.
However, if you're not too deep in a niche with very specific pieces of software, or don't care about esports offerings, there isn't much tying one to Windows nowadays.
I think the situation with anti-cheat on Linux is changing. Studios are putting resources into anti-cheat that will work on Linux. If I'm being a bit cynical, I could say this is "just" because of Steam Deck and Steam Machine, but I think the number of potential players switching to Linux right now outside of the Steam ecosystem is starting to be worth considering.
The only way they could even consider making it work would involve blessing certain kernel builds, and their integrity would need to be verified. If I am able to swap out the kernel, anti-cheat cannot be effective.
Ubisoft added Easy Anti-Cheat support for Linux and Valve's Proton compatibility layer. I play Division 2 and it runs just fine. More of them are being added by the AAA studios. Missing is Vanguard / Riot Anti-Cheat, no idea when that will get added. Thus far games have not dorked with my kernel.
A balanced take. You name several exceptions that don't work seamlessly on Linux. Recognizing that, I'll note:
- Bitwig 5.x (haven't tried the latest 6.x) is working really nicely for me now across several NixOS machines (I'm using BitwigBox so that yabridge smoothes out VST integration).
- Le Mans Ultimate is working for me now. It would hang on loading a track until a month or two ago (GE Proton recommended).
Same, games aside, it’s just so snappy. I knew windows was slow at a lot of things but I hadn’t quite realized how slow things as banal as locking/unlocking had become. The first week with cachyos was mind blowing on just that front.
PC gaming on linux these days is joy these days. The main games you're likely to struggle with are games that require some windows kernel level anti-cheat software running, so some online multi-player will not be playable for that reason. Proton, wine, and the ecosystem have evolved a lot in the last couple years to the point that I'm surprised when a game can not run on linux. Occasionally, you need to look at https://www.protondb.com/ to see if there is some startup option that needs to be added to get the game to run. If you're into single player games, Linux is generally a really solid choice.
I don’t play multiplayer stuff like Fortnite or Call of Duty, so I might not be your typical user. I use Steam for everything, as well.
But I fully switched to Fedora a while ago because every game I played was either just as performant or ran better on Linux. It’s plug and play, too. I just downloaded Steam and that was it.
I know there are other commenters saying the same thing, but I’m just super excited because of what this means for Linux market share on consumer machines
Wine has evolved a lot, but there's an entire community dedicated to improving games specifically building Proton, essentially a Wine fork focused on games, including big contributions from Valve.
This has made many old and modern games playable without issues. On Steam or Heroic Launcher, running a game has mostly become as simple clicking install and later play.
That being said, it's not all peachy. There's not really been much progress on native Linux gaming outside of Flatpak/Steam Linux runtime. Many native games run worse or with issues.
And Proton/Wine isn't perfect. Many games need tweaks or may not work without glitches. And games with anticheat don't work more often than they do, on purpose.
Still, depending on what games you play and hardware you own it has become entirely possible to ditch Windows and not suffer for it.
In the last few years, Valve has made incredible progress with their equivalent set of API wrappers to what Wine does. Apparently (not experienced first hand) it’s like 97% of the way there, now.
if you have a steam account, and you open it on Linux most of your games will be present to be played. Most of them will just work.
Those that don't you can look up details on protondb.com.
as mentioned above if you play any competitive games that come with anti-cheat features, then you won't be able to join in the fun. So if you don't care about those games, you'll be fine.
Forza Horizon 6 was a bit of a shit-fight to get it working. GPU crashes, audio just failing, and 20-questions with what combination of runtime and configs would get it to play ball, and it would break after some patches, but it really stabilised now and most issues I’ve had have disappeared.
In short, it is the default assumption that a game will play on Linux these days, vs. assuming it won't.
Steam/Valve has built Proton, which I believe is a fork of Wine, and put significant resources into it. Steam distributes it on its own but CachyOS distributes even more patched/optimized versions of it in their repositories.
The games I know do NOT work on Linux are usually online multiplayer competitive games which have kernel-level anti-cheat. Notable for me is Fortnite - though I hear that now, there are even options for enabling strong anti-cheat in Linux but Epic chooses not to support it.
I'm not informed on other niche game types like simulators or games requiring special equipment, but chances are if it's not competitive, or it's single player, you can get it running with good performance on Linux with modern hardware.
Former Windows 11 user here. Microsoft operating systems have been my primary desktop since DOS 6.0, but the embedding of advertisements in Win11 drove to me finally try out Linux distributions, and CachyOS was the only one that stuck for me in terms of familiarity and performance. It's been my daily driver for 1.5 years now, and I've been extremely grateful for it.
I was nervous about this too - but it's "just" the AUR. That means it's only unofficial packages, which we should always take great care when installing anyway.
Yeah I really enjoyed Cachy but the model of using the AUR to install third party applications just seems broken. I don't want to have to trust some random install script maintainer in addition to the 3p app developer. And sadly I don't have the time and attention to spare to review the AUR scripts of apps every time I update.
I switched to Kubuntu to keep KDE (which I really found I enjoyed from Cachy) while using a more stable and familiar ubuntu base. It's not one of the "gaming" distros but I haven't noticed any major drawbacks with the games I play.
I have not needed AUR support for games. The only time I was tempted to install an AUR package was on my laptop for Zoom chat. My gaming machine will never see any of those packages.
The AUR is very user managed and orphaned packages can be picked up I guess to continue maintenance. Obviously, this can lead to some issues. It's one of the tradeoffs for a heavily user supplied repository of packages. You get a lot of good stuff quickly, but I personally will stick with Debian.
That's what I'd probably do, but I'm a software engineer and devops person that also likes to tinker, so I like to have a lot of packages available. Fedora with its 80k packages (~30k apps) has been a blessing.
In comparison, Arch official repos only have 15k packages (~10k apps). There are ways to plug the gap (such as compile missing packages, add Nix package manager), but it's even better if you don't have to.
I switched to Bazzite from CachyOS and while I really appreciate how accessible it is, the immutability of the core OS doesn't do enough to scratch my Linux tinkering fix. So I'll probably install this in a few days.
I loved Bazzite for hardware compatibility out of the box but the necessity of flatpak made it enormously inconvenient as a general machine. CachyOS sounds worth checking out if I still want to game but also occasionally do real work.
I’ve been in love with cachy since I switched from windows but this past weekend has been extremely trying after experiencing metadata exhaustion probably due to the snapshots filling up my home drive. Learned a few things and I realize btrfs is not specific to cachy, but this was definitely the hardest thing I’ve worked through since switching from windows.
I’m annoyed that games I play use BattleEye and the use of BattleEye prevents me from being able to switch over to CachyOS on our family gaming PC+TV setup in the play room. Doubly so because BattleEye appears to do absolutely nothing to prevent PC lobbies from becoming rife with cheaters anyway, so I don’t really get the point of it.
This has been my experience as well. My main game right now is escape from Tarkov and battle eye wont let me into official servers. I’m able to manage my stash and buy from traders just fine.
For other steam titles, popOS and proton were just fine
This one seems particularly attractive to Windows refugees especially gamers. The default desktop looks very much like Windows: even the wallpaper is one of those blue gradient 3d wave shapes.
I tried it in a VM and I don't think I can deal with the jank. The default install comes with 3 different GUIs for installing software, all of them confusing and inconsistent. Apps with context menus that go 5 levels deep everywhere, confusing layouts, sometimes icons, sometimes not. I guess if you are coming from Windows this is the status quo so that's fine.
Not for me but I'm glad this new wave of Linux users are finding success with it.
My newbie recommendation is https://bazzite.gg/. It ships a very simple GUI package manager and the system silently updates in the background. It's also atomic, so rollbacks are easy and destroying the system is hard. It's not a separate distro per-se but a layer atop Fedora Silverblue/Kinoite (you can re-base to/from them without a reinstall).
It's been my daily driver for ~2 years.
The Cachy/Arch approach is more flexible, I'm fine with atomic since containerized workflows are my preference.
On my Lenovo laptop, fixes that would take over a day to enable and patch on most distros:
Another gaming feature that is otherwise useful in workstations is the external scheduler support.Currently using BPFland which makes multitasking as responsive as idle while compiling Yocto/Chromium in the background.
Windows, Mac (mini M1), and kernel built-in scheduler Linux jank and become almost unusable (Ryzen 5800H).
If we limit the conversation to gaming specifically, one area where I don't see Linux taking over any time soon is competitive/esports oriented titles and their invasive ~rootkits~ anti-cheats. Another place I kind of have to live with Windows is simulation (in my case Elite: Dangerous and iRacing/Le Mans Ultimate) - the overlays and other third-party utilities either don't exist on Linux, or I couldn't get them to work and kind of abandoned the idea.
Audio production is also kind of a no-go. The DAWs and hardware support are absolutely getting there - Bitwig studio is apparently very good for something Ableton-like, and my DAW of choice, Reaper, has native Linux support. But the plugins and virtual instruments for the most part just don't exist. Some work through a Wine bridge, if you're lucky.
However, if you're not too deep in a niche with very specific pieces of software, or don't care about esports offerings, there isn't much tying one to Windows nowadays.
- Bitwig 5.x (haven't tried the latest 6.x) is working really nicely for me now across several NixOS machines (I'm using BitwigBox so that yabridge smoothes out VST integration). - Le Mans Ultimate is working for me now. It would hang on loading a track until a month or two ago (GE Proton recommended).
What games are available? Do you use emulators or stuff like Wine?
But I fully switched to Fedora a while ago because every game I played was either just as performant or ran better on Linux. It’s plug and play, too. I just downloaded Steam and that was it.
I know there are other commenters saying the same thing, but I’m just super excited because of what this means for Linux market share on consumer machines
This has made many old and modern games playable without issues. On Steam or Heroic Launcher, running a game has mostly become as simple clicking install and later play.
That being said, it's not all peachy. There's not really been much progress on native Linux gaming outside of Flatpak/Steam Linux runtime. Many native games run worse or with issues.
And Proton/Wine isn't perfect. Many games need tweaks or may not work without glitches. And games with anticheat don't work more often than they do, on purpose.
Still, depending on what games you play and hardware you own it has become entirely possible to ditch Windows and not suffer for it.
as mentioned above if you play any competitive games that come with anti-cheat features, then you won't be able to join in the fun. So if you don't care about those games, you'll be fine.
I'd say it's a majority of games that won't work if they require anti-cheat, but some will.
Steam/Valve has built Proton, which I believe is a fork of Wine, and put significant resources into it. Steam distributes it on its own but CachyOS distributes even more patched/optimized versions of it in their repositories.
The games I know do NOT work on Linux are usually online multiplayer competitive games which have kernel-level anti-cheat. Notable for me is Fortnite - though I hear that now, there are even options for enabling strong anti-cheat in Linux but Epic chooses not to support it.
I'm not informed on other niche game types like simulators or games requiring special equipment, but chances are if it's not competitive, or it's single player, you can get it running with good performance on Linux with modern hardware.
In the release notes they said they removed Paru and are recommending Shelly instead.
I like that I can manage Flatpack and AUR!
Gonna give this a try!!
I switched to Kubuntu to keep KDE (which I really found I enjoyed from Cachy) while using a more stable and familiar ubuntu base. It's not one of the "gaming" distros but I haven't noticed any major drawbacks with the games I play.
https://cybersecuritynews.com/arch-linux-aur-packages-compro...
I hope official, veted Arch repositories grow over time.
In comparison, Arch official repos only have 15k packages (~10k apps). There are ways to plug the gap (such as compile missing packages, add Nix package manager), but it's even better if you don't have to.
Same install.
No problems at all.
Fully succumbed to plasmonic thrall.
Satisfied by being speedy.
So boring. Almost snoring.
(must not distrohop! must not distrohop! must not distrohop!)
For other steam titles, popOS and proton were just fine
This one seems particularly attractive to Windows refugees especially gamers. The default desktop looks very much like Windows: even the wallpaper is one of those blue gradient 3d wave shapes.
I tried it in a VM and I don't think I can deal with the jank. The default install comes with 3 different GUIs for installing software, all of them confusing and inconsistent. Apps with context menus that go 5 levels deep everywhere, confusing layouts, sometimes icons, sometimes not. I guess if you are coming from Windows this is the status quo so that's fine.
Not for me but I'm glad this new wave of Linux users are finding success with it.
It's been my daily driver for ~2 years.
The Cachy/Arch approach is more flexible, I'm fine with atomic since containerized workflows are my preference.