I switched to CachyOS and the migration was surprisingly painless
Have been playing with different Linux distros in VM sandbox on my homelab/server. Finally made the decision to dump Windows 10. Regardless, I am by
no means a skilled user of Linux and still need a fair amount of “hand holding” when it comes to doing things in the CLI.
My use case is 99% gaming via Steam, trolling Reddit, YouTube, and checking email.
System is a 7800X3D + RX 9070 XT, 32 GB DDR5-6000 CL30
Backed up everything I cared about to my NAS and installed CachyOS. Used GRUB as the bootloader, btrfs filesystem for boot snapshots, and KDE Plasma for the desktop environment.
It automatically detected and installed the `amdgpu` driver, set the correct resolutions and refresh rates. I just enabled VRR for main monitor and that was it.
My biggest concern was how difficult it was going to be to get games running. But, CachyOS has a literal “install gaming packages” button on its “Hello” window. It downloads and installs Steam, Lutris, Proton, and GOverlay (MangoHUD for metrics, OptiScaler, and one other application whose name I don’t remember). With a little help from Claude AI, I was able to get my game drive mounted and then edit `fstab` so it persisted on reboots, and get Steam pointed at it correctly. Steam instantly recognized all the games and downloaded from the cloud backup.
The only thing I really had to do was double check graphics settings.
The last thing I had Claude help me with was getting my NAS mounted as a network drive and again editing the `fstab` so it persists on reboots.
As far as gaming performance. Holy smokes. The BORE scheduler in CachyOS puts in work. In the couple benchmarks I’ve run since migrating, I’ve seen a persistent 15-20% bump in FPS over Windows 10. For example Helldivers 2 at 1440p went from ~130-140 fps to ~180 fps. In Horizon Zero Dawn Remastered, using the actual in game benchmark, I went from ~130 fps to 155 fps average.
With that’s said, it’s clear the devs have put tremendous work into making the distro as painless as possible to transition to. The performance is definitely there. But it’s not entirely all sunshine, rainbows, and unicorn farts. Some stuff doesn’t have Linux version at all, some stuff the Linux version is a little janky (I’m looking at you Discord), and some stuff has a Linux version and it works just fine.
Honestly, I think the biggest difficulty is going to be me breaking 30 years of Windows habits and relearning how Linux does things. But overall, I have no regrets so far and I’m 2-3 days post migration.