I’m currently trying to decide between CatchyOS and Nobara.
I’m sorry to be generating another of this kind of conversation as I can see they are getting pretty tedious. But you see I’m finally getting ready to take the plunge and try Linux again (after a brief encounter in the early 2000s).
I’m a gamer and I care a lot about gaming but I’m also a game dev. I need to be able to use Unreal Engine, Blender, Gaea, and other dev tools. My understanding is that something like Bazzite isn’t right for me there.
So I’ve been looking at CatchyOS and Nobara. I’ve read their documentation and so far leaning toward CatchyOS. But sometimes people say Nobara is easier to use. I am not afraid of a command line, but frankly I don’t tinker with my computer for fun. I get in and get what I need set up so I can get back to making things.
So what do you all think?
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I’ve used both nobara and cachyos, and I’ve stuck with nobara. it’s a lot more of a “just works” distro for gaming and creative stuff (vr “just worked”, so did connecting an xbox controller wirelessly, and using my drawing tablet) and its more set up out of the box than cachy. I enjoy a distro that I can install and get going immediately with no issues, and without having to install a bunch of other packages myself to get it to do what I want it to do. also when I ran cachy last year on both my desktop and my laptop, I got a month in and my repos completely broke, dont know why and couldn’t figure out how to fix it, so that’s something to keep in mind.
I’ll ditto this.
Nobara is the most “It just works” linux distro I’ve tried. Its made gaming painless and seamless with having all that stuff preloaded, it updates frequently to keep on top of support, all in all its a fantastic OS and with no real tinkering.
I tried a few and so far I am finding CachyOS to be the most painless.
What is your current OS?
I am also trialing cachyOS as a win10 replacement and I am liking it.
If your current OS supports virtualisation (as in not a home version of windows) run them in a VM and see how the os goes with normal tasks you do.
Windows 10 Pro. Yeah I guess I could do that. But I have multiple drives and was going to just install one of these onto it and boot into it or back to Windows if I have to. So either way, yeah if I don’t like it I can switch. But I’m worried that either will seem fine and It’s going to be months later when an issue or an advantage of one of the other would creep up. I want to get ahead of that.
I have only had bad experiences in dual booting which is why I do everything via VMs. Win 10 comes with Hyper-V that you can enable to do VMs with.
I haven’t had many bad experiences, if you have to do it you just have to do it.
I went through the whole Cachy, Nobara, or Pika and finally said fuck it and loaded up Cachy this past weekend. Wasn’t getting anywhere with my analysis paralysis. Pretty happy with it so far tbh.
Now if I can just figure out how to get this stupid xone driver to work so I can use my Xbox controller I’ll be happy.
$AURHELPER -S xone-dkms-git xone-dongle-firmware xpad-noone
One of the things you could do as a new Linux user is to try out some support questions with your favorite search engine. Try ‘catchyos my headset mic is not working’ or ‘nobara how do I change my background wallpaper every 15 minutes’ or ‘<distro name> <real problem you’ve had the past 2 years>’.
This approach will give you an realistic view how much support you will have when you’re dealing with an actual problem.
Try it, and if you don’t like it try another. They’re free.
Drive it like you stole it. If the wheels fall off get another one.
I’d honestly stick to proven, well-supported distros like openSUSE Tumbleweed, Fedora or Ubuntu, especially as a newcomer.
This. I’m on Nobara on my main rig because I didn’t know any better when I ditched Windows. It’s a decent distro mind you. But it’s really just Fedora with some experimental stuff from one dude (which breaks stuff from time to time). I’ve since installed tumbleweed on my laptop and am much happier with it. Next time something major breaks on the main rig I’m switching that too
Seconded. After a few years of casually dual booting various distros I finally started daily driving Linux and quickly became a little overwhelmed. I switched to Kubuntu and it’s so much better. It’s nice to have a very widely used distro to get help with while you’re learning.
bazzite (based on fedora atomic) is working really well for me
i turned off all the gnome extensions they install by default but apart from that it’s been great for gaming and dev work
The first question you should consider is whether you actually need a gaming distro. I’ve been using bare-ass Arch for both gaming and development and haven’t had any performance or stability issues I didn’t cause myself.
From the two options, Nobara is likely better for a beginner. It’s based on Fedora, which has good support and doesn’t do anything fucky with the kernel.
Cachy is based on Arch, which in itself requires a more in-depth knowledge of the system and/or a willingness to learn. The performance improvements they advertise with the customized kernel and scheduler options are really only relevant if you want to squeeze the last bit of performance out of the system. Your day-to-day experience will be the same.
If you are new to Linux, you should honestly just go with a more stable and simple distribution. I always recommend Linux Mint for its simplicity or Kubuntu for its familiarity with Windows.
I recently gave CachyOS a shot and only ran into one issue, and resolved it by updating pacman. I’ve been using CachyOS ever since. YMMV.
I did decide to try CachyOS and I’m a week into it now. There’s been some hurdles to get over though.
What sort of things have you ran in to? Were they mostly issues related to hardware?
I guess you could say that. The first is that I have multiple drives. I did install CachyOS on its own Ext4 drive but I have others that I wanted to use as is where I have games installed. They use NTFS. They worked on the first day fine but wouldn’t auto mount on reboots. After setting them to auto mount and despite never booting back into windows they just stopped being writeable on subsequent use. Everything I researched said this had something to do with Windows fast boot. So I disabled that but the problem persisted until I installed ?ntfs-3g? And used it to run some kind of fix that set them as writeable.
Then eventually I found that any download that took some time in Steam would fail with disk read or write errors even when trying to install to my Ext4 root drive. I tried all sorts of download and cache clearing and uninstalling and reinstalling steam. Eentually someone said to run cachyos-bugreport.sh which revealed a whole bunch of usb device errors with a sim rig shifter. I unplugged it and since then my steam downloads are able to finish and work. I don’t know how that is related but… Well anyway things are working right now.
I don’t have any interest in things like Blender or Unreal Engine but I’m curious what makes them incompatible with Bazzite? The only thing that’s been a real PITA for me is old printer drivers (like a 15yo printers).
Any immutable distro is problematic for development and media workflows for a number of reasons. It’s best to just go with the stock working versions of things unless there is a specific use-cases for using immutable.
I develop (nothing graphical) and mostly Bazzite has been fine for development. Every now and then it’s a little awkward (e.g. switching back and forth between a native terminal and distrobox) but I’ve never felt it was “incapable” of something. I just wouldn’t discount immutables entirely. If OP is starting from scratch I think they could give it a spin and know within a week if it was incompatible with their workflows.
They have a purpose. That’s why they exist. I never recommend them to beginners for that specific reason if discussing specific use-cases. If you want something that is hard to break, or a kios-like experience, sure, that’s what they’re made for. Not for beginners coming from an expected development environment that then need to understand everything being containerized and the hoops that come with that.
Fedora.
Possibly Open Suse
As a first distro why make it more complicated?
BTW: Never Ubuntu.
CachyOS, at the end of the day feels and acts like a bleeding edge linux distro. Fedora on the other hand hides all of that and yet is also bleeding edge. I usually get packages BEFORE CachyOS with Fedora (matter of days usually, but just highlighting how current it usually is).
The one thing I don’t like about Fedora is how close it is to the Red Hat corporation. I know modern RHEL is downstream from Fedora so they can’t suddenly end it, like they did with CentOS, but it still left a sour taste in my mouth.
Fedora is sponsored by Redhat it is true. Not the only sponsers of course. And I get that Redhat is IBM (sadly). I would be a lot more concerned if Redhat was under Oracle, so while IBM isn’t great, it could be worse.
But other than that, it is a community driven model, I don’t believe they take direction from Redhat or exclusively obfuscate or hamper OSS because of Redhat.
I mean if you go down this rabbit hole, take a look at all the major contributors and sponsors for the linux kernel itself…
That’s fair. I had to deal with RHEL at my job for almost a decade and I guess it just made me biased against anything related to it. I had completely written off the entire branch of linux as corporate linux, which is not a fair assessment of it. OpenSuse similarly had corporate roots, but I feel they did a better job at distancing their image from it.
🙄 this again.
I dont hang around here often, so I dont know the discourse. How is my prejudice against Fedora wrong? I’ve never used it because of this.
If you’ve never used it, don’t seem to understand how the FOSS ecosystem works and the interaction between the things you speak about, why are you even commenting? Your opinion is literally based on nothing.
What’s easy to use is pretty subjective. As a game developer, you’re already at least a step or two removed from the proverbial average computer user. I suggest downloading live images of a few different distros and desktop environments, and playing with each for a while to get a feel for the differences.
I’m a gamer and developer, too. KDE Plasma is my desktop of choice these days.
I need to be able to use Unreal Engine
Someone else asked about this just 8 days ago, here:
https://beehaw.org/post/21209323
Regarding that particular requirement:
The Unreal Engine for Linux page indicates that they offer pre-compiled builds for Ubuntu 22.04.
It’s possible that those pre-compiled builds might work on Linux Mint, since Mint is based on Ubuntu. I would probably try this before committing to the officially supported Ubuntu version, both because it’s nice to have a newer distro and because Mint has a good track record of avoiding Ubuntuisms that are not generally well received (e.g. Snap).
If you don’t mind some extra work, you can apparently build Unreal for other linux distros. See here:
https://dev.epicgames.com/documentation/en-us/unreal-engine/linux-development-quickstart-for-unreal-engineIts a lot funner and faster to just test them all, grab ventoy throw all the isos on a ventoy usb, spend an hour installing and testing each, see if you like cachyos gaming packages and the wiki, or if you prefer another distro, I would go with a gaming distro the first time around so you figure out what packages you need and may want to keep in the future
If you were only gaming I’d recommend CachyOS. I made the switch about a year ago with no hassles or tinkering. I will say though when updating it is important to pay attention to any warnings and keep a backup with something like timeshift to rollback to in emergencies!
Since you have development as another use case I’d be more inclined to use a fresh install of something like fedora and customise it yourself. I’d imagine it’s less likely to break a new install rather than a customised fork if you try to change something.
