I switched to Cachy 2 months ago and I think my distro hopping days are over. It’s so, so responsive and reliable. People scared me off arch-based distros for being bleeding edge but so far it’s been very stable, I haven’t encountered any major issues.
If you’re thinking about switching, do it. Switched off from Bazzite and I’m not looking back.
Arch is stable until it isn’t. Unlike LTS distros, you generally will want to check the Arch/cachyOS website or forum before updating to catch any potential system breaking bugs to either wait until they’re fixed, or apply a workaround found by the community in the forums. As long as you do that, you can generally avoid problems, but it is an extra step that something like Debian or Mint generally doesn’t require.
Yep, they broke routing just yesterday or the day before lol. Network requests only go through like half the time right now. But a fix is coming quickly at least.
eh got snapshot and backups on and off pc, if anything goes wrong ill survive and be ready to go in a minute or two, dejadups is lowkey annoyingly slow to load tho
I don’t know what the time frame or interval of these events is. I switched to CachyOS 5+ months ago now, updated in the evening before going to bed (basically daily, bleeding edge as you might say).
I had zero issues. Maybe it’ll be an issue one day. But while I could check for any critical known issues, and that would be an extra step (I don’t, so it’s not), it has saved me so much time just having up to date packages on literally everything just in the repo. It’s insane compared to especially Debian, where things can be years behind and the only way to get a reasonable recent version is to build from source, find a .deb repo for it or install a manually downloaded package directly (like on Windows).
It’s fairly random when a problem pops up. You could be fine for another 6 months to a year, but generally the possibility is there every update.
As for getting updated software, I’ve personally been able to get the latest versions of all the apps I use on Debian thanks to flatpak, which is as simple as adding the flathub repo.
I fundamentally dislike the concept of flatpacks. It’s fine and/or necessary for immutable distros, but I see little point in loading every dependency individually for every app. It’s fine for an app or two, but adds up to a lot relatively quickly when used as the default system. To each their own I guess, but I’m very happy with the ecosystem of the huge, up-to-date native repo + availability of the AUR.
I can’t say I’ve ever actually witnessed those things presenting as a problem on my system, personally.
One advantage (imo) of flatpak over the AUR at least, is that flatpaks can have a verified status, which makes them as safe as using a distro package (sometimes more so, since they can be sandboxed), where as each AUR package should be manually inspected to avoid the potential for malware, as recently occurred on there. Without knowledge on what to look for in an AUR build script, it can be a potentially unsafe source.
Debian + Verified flatpaks offers good security for the widest range of packages for the least effort, at least in my experience.
Battery life is really good, on par with Windows on my current laptop. For some reason battery life was really bad on Bazzite, like 30% worse or so. I don’t know how it compares to other distros.
That’s what I’m finding. I was on Pop-os for a while and battery life was amazing. I started hopping again and found a real drop on Debian, Elementary, and now Ubuntu.
If you don’t mind my asking, what are your main use cases? Mine are mainly browser-based and documents.
Performance should be relatively the same across every distro, there are benchmarks online you can check. I didn’t like Bazzite with my short time using it though, being immutable means you have to jump through hoops to install something that isn’t available as a flatpak. Like I mentioned in another comment the battery life was also not great, and I found it to be a little slow in general.
I switched to Cachy 2 months ago and I think my distro hopping days are over. It’s so, so responsive and reliable. People scared me off arch-based distros for being bleeding edge but so far it’s been very stable, I haven’t encountered any major issues.
If you’re thinking about switching, do it. Switched off from Bazzite and I’m not looking back.
Arch is stable until it isn’t. Unlike LTS distros, you generally will want to check the Arch/cachyOS website or forum before updating to catch any potential system breaking bugs to either wait until they’re fixed, or apply a workaround found by the community in the forums. As long as you do that, you can generally avoid problems, but it is an extra step that something like Debian or Mint generally doesn’t require.
Yep, they broke routing just yesterday or the day before lol. Network requests only go through like half the time right now. But a fix is coming quickly at least.
eh got snapshot and backups on and off pc, if anything goes wrong ill survive and be ready to go in a minute or two, dejadups is lowkey annoyingly slow to load tho
That’s a good way to mitigate the potential downside.
I don’t know what the time frame or interval of these events is. I switched to CachyOS 5+ months ago now, updated in the evening before going to bed (basically daily, bleeding edge as you might say).
I had zero issues. Maybe it’ll be an issue one day. But while I could check for any critical known issues, and that would be an extra step (I don’t, so it’s not), it has saved me so much time just having up to date packages on literally everything just in the repo. It’s insane compared to especially Debian, where things can be years behind and the only way to get a reasonable recent version is to build from source, find a .deb repo for it or install a manually downloaded package directly (like on Windows).
It’s fairly random when a problem pops up. You could be fine for another 6 months to a year, but generally the possibility is there every update.
As for getting updated software, I’ve personally been able to get the latest versions of all the apps I use on Debian thanks to flatpak, which is as simple as adding the flathub repo.
I fundamentally dislike the concept of flatpacks. It’s fine and/or necessary for immutable distros, but I see little point in loading every dependency individually for every app. It’s fine for an app or two, but adds up to a lot relatively quickly when used as the default system. To each their own I guess, but I’m very happy with the ecosystem of the huge, up-to-date native repo + availability of the AUR.
I can’t say I’ve ever actually witnessed those things presenting as a problem on my system, personally.
One advantage (imo) of flatpak over the AUR at least, is that flatpaks can have a verified status, which makes them as safe as using a distro package (sometimes more so, since they can be sandboxed), where as each AUR package should be manually inspected to avoid the potential for malware, as recently occurred on there. Without knowledge on what to look for in an AUR build script, it can be a potentially unsafe source.
Debian + Verified flatpaks offers good security for the widest range of packages for the least effort, at least in my experience.
Any experience with laptop battery life on Cachy?
Battery life is really good, on par with Windows on my current laptop. For some reason battery life was really bad on Bazzite, like 30% worse or so. I don’t know how it compares to other distros.
That’s what I’m finding. I was on Pop-os for a while and battery life was amazing. I started hopping again and found a real drop on Debian, Elementary, and now Ubuntu.
If you don’t mind my asking, what are your main use cases? Mine are mainly browser-based and documents.
When I’m on battery I mainly use the browser. When I’m plugged in it’s usually gaming.
I was looking at Bazzite too. I just haven’t made the switch because I’m not sure if Nvidia performance drops are a big issue.
Performance should be relatively the same across every distro, there are benchmarks online you can check. I didn’t like Bazzite with my short time using it though, being immutable means you have to jump through hoops to install something that isn’t available as a flatpak. Like I mentioned in another comment the battery life was also not great, and I found it to be a little slow in general.