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by joe_mamba 33 days ago
Question to the Arch Linux veterans out there. Is CachyOS better than EndeavourOS or vice versa?

From what I read Cachy comes with a lot of proprietary repos and gaming stuff already installed along with a custom kernel tuned for gaming performance which makes it more bloated and less stable than vanilla Arch distros like Endeavour which just ships with the bare minimum quality of life tweaks over installing arch from scratch.

What's your experience and what would you recommend for someone switching their laptop from Windows mostly for dev work but who doesn't play too many games. I see arch is the most popular community favorite now, but I was thinking maybe a Fedora based distro would be a better fire-and-forget daily driver after the Arch AUR malware attack conundrum, as I don't have the time to deal with stuff like that on a daily basis.
2 comments
Caboose8685 32 days ago
CachyOS takes the default arch repos and re-builds packages targeting CPU generations and their instruction sets. There are no proprietary repos. Cachy has their own personal repo where some packages not in arch repos are built.

Gaming stuff is NOT installed by default, but there is a button in the Hello app new users can click that installs 2 meta packages that install almost everything one might want for gaming. Take a look at it in a VM and see for yourself.

The performance increases from their kernel + optimized packages are small but noticeable to me. Give their wiki a read-through: https://wiki.cachyos.org/

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hd4 32 days ago
I've used Cachy for about 2 months, having used Arch for a long time prior to that.

It just feels a lot faster (anecdotally) than Arch. I don't tend to play a lot of games either, but for tasks like web browsing and watching YouTube, it feels smoother. I don't think I'd go back to Arch unless Cachy did something really stupid to mess up which I hope they won't. No point in leaving free performance on the table with little downside.

Also you should never need the AUR. I've never needed it for anything in years, so the malware attack wasn't a concern at all. Yes, absolutely do switch away from Windows.

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