Does anyone else have experience here? I’m curious about the optimization tweaks that exist and could potentially improve system responsiveness and 1% lows in gaming. For anyone that knows whether it would be worth it or something I should try? Besides maybe cachy proton or the optimized packages am I missing anything?
Seems like a lot of effort for minimal gains. I’ve seen these docs before.
You should look up some benchmarks to see if it’s worth it, the performance gain over arch aren’t as big as they used to be anymore, but the performance lead of cachy and arch over other distros tends to be big.
But it’s an os its more than just optimizations. the linux-cachyos-server kernel is also pretty nice for servers.
https://openbenchmarking.org/result/2212054-NE-CACHYLINU44&hgv=CachyOS&sgn&sor&sgm&swl&grr
seems meh
this was an interesting read. but unless I was needing to format or reinstall I guess I would try it but not enough to get me to switch https://www.fosslinux.com/155930/cachyos-review-2026-the-arch-based-distro-built-for-speed.htm
CachyOS not optimized for gaming.
If anything - SteamOS.
I game on Silverblue, before I was using Arch. My games on average run the same there’s no visible or noticeable difference when it comes to user experience while gaming on Silverblue vs on Arch.
Basically mix/max stuff, nothing noticeable to the avg person.
Cachy while an interesting and impressive distribution, is not worth it in my opinion. Your best option is to get the distro that is best for your computer and optimize it. You might find that X distro does not work well on your computer. I tried Cachy for a while and didn’t like the fact that their dev have tendencies of adding stuff that is too bleeding edge even to the point of adding alpha and beta stuff / WIP. It’s too bleeding edge for me and unstable on my computer. Find the best distro for you and if you want you can install cachy (kernel / proton) stuff under it do it. I’ve been using EOS for a while now and I have very little issues if any. My computer is fast and stable. I play game everyday and I rarely encounter any issues. I don’t run any cachy stuff because in my opinion the improvement are marginal if any for me. I run Arch vanilla kernel and Proton GE for games. The best is to do you. Everything is already optimized most of the time and you won’t be able to get that much more beside the kernel and drivers being code optimized by the devs.
I’m of the opinion that, broadly speaking, many distros today are fine for gaming and allow it. The differences between them are minimal, usually only detectable instrumentally.
If you’re a regular gamer, hyper-optimization isn’t necessary. I don’t think you’d notice the difference anyway. It might be useful if you do esports, but for a normal game, I’d say it’s just useless. You’d play just as well on Mint.
Well that might be pushing it with Debian based distros often having 2 year old software…gaming IS one of those areas where proton type tools get frequent beneficial updates.
It depends on what you’re playing and what you are playing exactly, but yeah, gaming does benefit from a distro that is updated more frequently.
To answer OP, as far as I know, while CachyOS does do a lot better in synthetic benchmarks more or less across the board, the real world performance benefit can be minor at best and depends heavily on what you’re playing, your system, etc. I believe it shows up in 1% lows the most, meaning games will feel smoother due to being able to push slightly more frames than usual, but overall, I would say number chasing by going to a distro like CachyOS is kind of meh. Windows still does better in gaming overall by lot, across a much wider range of hardware, so… yeah. Just… use whatever you please. Don’t stress too much about it.
Well, I don’t think that’s an exaggeration. Not by much. As a secondary distro, I have Debian 13, and I’ve always played the same games as I did on other distros with more up-to-date video drivers, like EOS for example.
To use CachyOS, your system must have a fairly new CPU (v3 or v4). Otherwise, it’s not worh the effort.
This stuff benefit in non trivial way with lots of regressions. As I remember from phoronix testing, only software that gets clear benefit for such optimizations - GNU radio.
Optimizations is complex stuff. And there is screaming difference between squishing maximum perf from one single application and making system with lots of tasks and apps work nice/fast/responsive.
CachyOS is interesting, and was life savior for me. But not so nice for laptops.
And performance benefits is illusive.
I can recommend it for desktop and usability.
For gaming performance optimizations play, Arch Gentoo EndeavourOS - anything will be good, because it is not about result, you can get lots of fun with any OS tweaking millions of parameters in all directions.
This is the distribution I use now as my main distribution (Debian based):
These are the results of the in-game bench tests.
With other distros, the values wouldn’t be too different from these. Basically, it wouldn’t change much.
So, having hyper-optimized distros “for gaming” isn’t necessary in my opinion. You play quite well with many distros these days.
Perfomance wise yes.
It comes down to user experience thing. Apps set, and how whole thing configured.
