Good day fellow cachyos users
first let me share some of my first impressions trying out cachyos on my main desktop.
lets start with my build:
– Ryzen 7 9800X3D
– ASUS ROG Strix X670E-F Gaming Wifi
– RX 7800XT Hellhound
– 64GB (2×32) DDR5-6000 RAM
– 3 NVME-SSDs, 3 SATA-SSDs
– 2x 27" Monitors (165hz and 60hz color calibrated)
What I mainly use my desktop for:
– Software development work
– Gaming
– Photo editing
I'm using windows 11 pro with secure boot / scm disabled.
The journey of trying it out
to try out cachyos I decided to add another 60GB sata SSD I had lying around. A seperate ssd seems to be the best approach for a real test without having too much trouble fiddeling around with my windows installation and corrupt it. Installed cachy on this drive with grub and KDE plasma went down with no problem.
after logging in the first time, started cachyos hello and set a new dns (accept the one from dhcp) and install the gaming packages. doing a system update and reboot as recommended.
Love to see how flawless everything went. One thing that bothers me is that the login screens UI elements flicker on both of the screens (buttons, user, password field). As soon as it gets focus its only shown on one screen and stops flickering. Is this a KDE problem?
Started configuring the look and feel of plasma, setup new widgets and panels and had an overview to https://store.kde.org/. Having to copy paste settings from one screen to the other was new to me, but I don't mind having the freedom of having seperate things on seperate screens. I love to keep my desktop clean and I don't want it to be too fancy. Configured virtual desktop as well as some KWin scripts for snapping windows. yakuake added to the system as well. no problems there, everything just worked as expected.
Adding some more applications to the mix: filen client (still need fo find a proppery oneDrive replacement), discord, steam and downloaded rocket league.
I'm using an astro a50 gen 4, choosing the playback device and input device for the system and discord was a breeze, in discord everything just worked. No tweaking needed. After starting rocket league without further configuration, had to google why matchmaking was disabled. Well rocket league once had a native linux client, that is not supported anymore and you have to start it with proton. Set proton experimental, started goverlay to setup mangohud and started the game. Now everything was like on windows, except the controller (xbox series x with dongle) could not be connected to cachyos. Short roundtrip to google to download xone package, reconnect and done. Screensharing in discord worked as well as switching from fullscreen to boarderless and windowed mode ingame, mangohud worked, what could I asked more at this time.
The game felt slightly different to windows, a the controlls feel a bit "mushier", just not as crisp as normal. Anyone has an idea why this could be? It was just slightly off to what I'm used to, but worked out no problem for playing.
Changed the 30 second time of (do you really want to shut down your system) to 5 and some other things. After some updates (this journey started several weeks from now) now my disk reached its limit already, I suspect due to snapper snapshots as I set btrfs as my filesystem. Didn't want to go too deep into it for now as 60GB is way too small for a real test for other applications.
Setup ventoy and clonezilla on a usb stick, added another lying around 128gb ssd to the rig, copied everything from the 60gb to 128gb, unplug the 60gb, reboot and continue testing.
To this day I'm very pleased with cachyos as well as KDE plasma. Cachyos brings everything you need to get started but doesn't feel bloated by any means. KDE plasma just feels very nice as a starting point, gives you a lot of freedom for configuration but you can managed and tinker without having to deal with .dotfiles or configs right away.
Lets talk about the updating path for migrating fully to cachyos
Like mentioned before, I setup cachyos on a separte drive. As shown above I have a lot of other drives. All other drives are NTFS, with cachyos I can access them if I wanted, but I did not touch them, as the cachyos wiki mentions, NTFS is just not ideal and will causing problems down the road.
I still have some testing to do like choosing a good OneDrive alternative, validating a new raw photo editor for my photos (I don't mind going away from lightroom, I will safe my old catalog if needed there's the option for a vm anyway) etc. But I want to talk about the right way to migrate away from windows.
Windows now sits on a 512GB NVME SSD, is cloning the current 120GB ssd to the current OS drive a good call? I just set up everything in one partition, maybe having /home separte is a thing I want (not sure right now).
I have 3 other data drives containing photos, documents etc. For those I plan to move the content to an external drive, reformat them to ext4 and bring back the files to it. Same goes for the other 2 drives containing games. Or is there a faster way of reformating? Or is formatting and newly download the games the better option since I have 2.5gbs fiber?
Since I'm used to linux for server applications (debian/ubuntu) and fairly new to arch-based distros and KDE (UI based distros in general) are there tipps you can give me or things I have to check before making the switch?
I'm fully dedicated on getting rid on windows, cachyos is my choice.
Kind regards
Source: r/cachyos · by /u/the_toast_