My experience with CachyOS has been quite positive, and dare I say "turnkey." I have an AMD GPU, so I can't speak to how well it plays with NVidia GPUs. I also use it exclusively on a desktop system, so no laptop experience either. Finally, for full transparency, I only switched to it as my daily driver last week, so this is a relatively recent switch. Before that I was on Pop! OS from System76 (an Ubuntu derivative). In short, the KDE Plasma desktop works beautifully, the Cachy core and extra repos contain most of the packages I care about (I only had to resort to AUR for the Zoom desktop app, which I can live without, TBH), and even for work, using my work account, I can run M365 PWAs with relative ease. Even my Logitech webcam seems to work out of the box with MS Teams for meetings. For personal use, in terms of gaming, the only piece that doesn't work is my ancient Oculus Rift S VR setup. Last time I bothered to try VR on Linux, OpenHMD had basically no support for my Oculus set, but it seems like since then things have changed, and that’s definitely something I intend to look into, especially for my Steam game library. Rouben On Mon, Aug 11, 2025 at 1:22 AM William Park via Talk <talk@lists.gtalug.org> wrote:
- btrfs -- I'm using BTRFS as backup, taking advantage of its "subvolume" feature, which is essentially self-contained directory like mount point. I take read-only snapshots of subvolume (eg. daily, weekly, and monthly). And, that's my backup. -- I'm only using Raid1 (mirroring). Its idea of Raid1 is "one copy" somewhere else, instead of a copy on every device. So, usable disk capacity is 50% of raw total. Eg. 3TB total (3x 1TB) --> 1.5TB usable.
- Arch -- I played with few Arch distros, and wasn't impressed enough to switch. People say its package management (pacman) is better than Ubuntu (apt), but couldn't tell in the short time I tested. -- Too many details to configure. Eg. I know /etc/fstab and /etc/hosts, but at this point of my life, I really don't want to waste my time configuring those files.
Let's us know how it goes. I'm still looking to switch from Slackware. I've been looking at Mint with manually installing "full-kde" desktop.
On 2025-08-10 22:26, Evan Leibovitch via Talk wrote:
My experiment with Brazzite has been, to me, a failure.
For something touted to be a key player in the rise of the Linux Desktop, I'm not impressed. There are so many "so long as you don't" restrictions that I imagine it works fantastic in a handful of very specific scenarios but is pretty bad at anything else.
So, time to move on rather than continue to fight with it. Life's too short.
From one extreme to the other, I'm going to try CatchyOS. It promises multiple new tech for me to learn, notably Arch and btrfs. Plus this thing is massively configurable, to the point of specifying how advanced is your CPU's instruction set and what kind of kernel schedular to use(!). I'm using AI tools to figure out the optimal settings for Catchy for any given CPU/GPU combo.
Any tips and caveats are appreciated.
-- Evan Leibovitch, Toronto Canada @evanleibovitch / @el56
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