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CachyOS is the Arch Linux distro to try if you want serious speed and performance
Quoting: CachyOS is the Arch Linux distro to try if you want serious speed and performance | ZDNET —
Power. Performance. Luxury. OK, this isn't a car commercial, so scrap that last one.
However, power and performance are the name of the game with CachyOS, and with the latest update, the OS has improved a lot of under-the-hood bits to make this one of the best-performing desktop distributions available.
What exactly have the developers done? It all starts with the Linux kernel. First and foremost, CachyOS now ships with kernel 7.0.0.1. However, this isn't just any old Linux kernel; this is the CachyOS kernel. What does that mean? Well, the CachyOS kernel uses a specifically tuned scheduler, options for BORE, sched-ext, BMQ, and RT.
Linux Magazine:
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The Latest CachyOS Features Supercharged Kernel » Linux Magazine
Leave it to the developers of one of the hottest Linux distributions on the market, CachyOS, to show up the competition by delivering a release that has a souped-up kernel.
Linux kernel 7.0 is at the heart of the latest release, but it's not just your standard, vanilla kernel. Oh, no. The developers of CachyOS have added several patches to give performance a boost, such as enabling Intel FRED for laptops with Intel Core Ultra Series 3 (Panther Lake) CPUs. They've also enabled the new NTFS driver and have improved multi-gen LRU, which is an alternative LRU implementation for optimizing page reclamation and improving performance under memory pressure.
As well, the developers have patched most of the DKMS drivers for compatibility and ensured that the ZFS module is working properly.
When you couple those improvements with the usual CachyOS CPU optimizations, it being compiled with x86-64-v3/v4 and Zen 4 instructions, LTO, and PGO, as well as the kernel being tuned with the EEVDF scheduler, you get a noticeably faster operating system.
CachyOS is based on Arch Linux, which means it's a rolling release. Users of the previous iteration should receive these updates via the normal means. Given that CachyOS takes Arch Linux and gives it a significant performance boost, it's easy to understand why it sits atop the DistroWatch Page Hit Ranking tool.
XDA:
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Linux is the only OS that respects your aging gaming hardware
So the cool thing about Linux distros is that they don't just care about old gaming hardware; they care about all aging hardware. As such, they typically implement tech that allows the OS to run better on weaker hardware, and this just so happens to be a boon for gamers. After all, with the OS taking up less of your resources, it has a lot more to actually render your games with.
Take CachyOS, for instance. While CachyOS is not strictly a gaming OS, it's still beloved by the gaming community because it's designed to be lightweight and efficient. You can totally use CachyOS for other stuff, such as acting as your daily driver or for work, but it just so happens that reducing the impact an OS has on the hardware is great for gaming, too.
It's getting to the point where CachyOS is beginning to post better in-game benchmarks than Windows, which is crazy given the state Linux gaming was in 10-15 years ago. So, if you're on an older gaming PC, you may still be able to squeeze out some more frames just by moving to something like CachyOS.
How-To Geek:
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EndeavourOS made Arch easy to install—CachyOS made it easy to use
Arch Linux is famously difficult to install and use, especially if you're new to Linux in general. EndeavourOS went a long way towards making the installation process easier, but it doesn't solve many of the basic problems that Arch creates for beginners. CachyOS takes things one critical step further.