CachyOS June 2026 Release

I few months ago, I backed up my windows gaming machine and overwrote the partition with CachyOS. Haven't looked back. Gaming performance and compatibility has exceeded my expectations. Just a much better experience overall. I feel sorry anytime I see someone using Windows.

Same, games aside, it’s just so snappy. I knew windows was slow at a lot of things but I hadn’t quite realized how slow things as banal as locking/unlocking had become. The first week with cachyos was mind blowing on just that front.

Another era, another Arch based distribution.

This one seems particularly attractive to Windows refugees especially gamers. The default desktop looks very much like Windows: even the wallpaper is one of those blue gradient 3d wave shapes.

I tried it in a VM and I don't think I can deal with the jank. The default install comes with 3 different GUIs for installing software, all of them confusing and inconsistent. Apps with context menus that go 5 levels deep everywhere, confusing layouts, sometimes icons, sometimes not. I guess if you are coming from Windows this is the status quo so that's fine.

Not for me but I'm glad this new wave of Linux users are finding success with it.

That's one way to look at it. At the end of the day though its just arch linux with a jetpack. So you can use and treat it like any other arch distro.

I feel sorry every time I'm stuck going back to Windows. And admittedly, the situation is not even comparable to how it was ~25 years ago when I first started playing around with Linux, most things I want to do with a computer just work on Linux nowadays. There are still such things that just are not there yet - but for most of them, it's not necessarily Linux's fault.

If we limit the conversation to gaming specifically, one area where I don't see Linux taking over any time soon is competitive/esports oriented titles and their invasive ~rootkits~ anti-cheats. Another place I kind of have to live with Windows is simulation (in my case Elite: Dangerous and iRacing/Le Mans Ultimate) - the overlays and other third-party utilities either don't exist on Linux, or I couldn't get them to work and kind of abandoned the idea.

Audio production is also kind of a no-go. The DAWs and hardware support are absolutely getting there - Bitwig studio is apparently very good for something Ableton-like, and my DAW of choice, Reaper, has native Linux support. But the plugins and virtual instruments for the most part just don't exist. Some work through a Wine bridge, if you're lucky.

However, if you're not too deep in a niche with very specific pieces of software, or don't care about esports offerings, there isn't much tying one to Windows nowadays.