What Linux OS do you use currently?

[Snowy]

I run POP_OS about 25% of the time right now. Once Windows 10 support ends I'll be making the switch full time.

 

[igor_kavinski]

 

[Peter_Brosdahl]

I spent more time yesterday trying to re-find, than time watching the video, the post I saw on Friday on another website (could've sworn it was Toms) where someone posted a vid of their experience in switching to CachyOS in ~10 minutes from begining to finish. I was nearly did this but held off since my time is very limited and I'm very tired these days and was more interested in gaming. However I will say it does look interesting.

Thoughts anyone on CachyOS for gaming?

Mind you I use an RTX 5090 and want to use all RT effects and DLSS/DLAA whenever offered in a game as well as HDR and G-Sync so it's important that I don't have to chase drivers or other things to get this to work.

 

[DrezKill]

Thoughts anyone on CachyOS for gaming?

I only have it installed on a secondary PC with a 1080 Ti and haven't done much gaming on it yet, so I can't tell you much. When my brother visited last summer he did some light gaming on it. Nothing really all that demanding.

Mind you I use an RTX 5090 and want to use all RT effects and DLSS/DLAA whenever offered in a game as well as HDR and G-Sync so it's important that I don't have to chase drivers or other things to get this to work.

I use the RTX 3090 you sold me for gaming a decent amount in Manjaro Linux on my main desktop. DLAA works fine. DLSS works fine with Doom TDA, but I don't use DLSS very much to begin with, so that was the only game I've tested it with. G-Sync also works fine. For both Manjaro and CachyOS when you install them they give you the option of using the nVidia proprietary drivers right from the get-go, and they manage them for you and keep them updated. Pretty painless. But if you enjoy using features like nVidia VSR for web video upscaling in Chromium-based browsers (like for YT), or you're like me and use nVidia DSR to downscale higher resolutions, well you're outta luck there, cuz neither of those are supported on Linux, unfortunately.

I can't tell you from personal experience how well HDR works cuz I don't use HDR, but I've tested it lightly (not in gaming though) and it works when using a desktop environment that has a compositor that works in Wayland (in this case I'm using KDE Plasma 6, which uses the KWin compositor). Valve's GameScope compositor was the first to support HDR, and you don't have to use SteamOS to use GameScope, it's available for other DEs as well. For example when I look in the Manjaro repo I see GameScope available to grab from there. I've heard that with GameScope you can do downscaling, so that's something I may explore in the future. Not really sure which produces better gaming performance, KWin or GameScope, but at one point it was clearly GameScope (which isn't surprising). GameScope I think is actuall a micro-compositor, or some sh1t like that, so you can run it on Plasma without replacing/disabling KWin (or so I've heard), which is neat.

CachyOS has a lot of custom packages optimized for gaming, so if anything the gaming experience should be better on there than it is on Manjaro. The next time I need to install an OS on my main PC I think I will be ditching Manjaro and sticking with CachyOS. But for now my testing experience has been limited.

CachyOS is definitely the fastest Linux distro out there, since Intel's Clear Linux was retired, and from what I've read it seems that in terms of gaming performance, Plasma 6 and its KWin compositor are currently leading (well outside of SteamOS and the GameScope compositor). And before they took that crown I think GNOME was leading there. But yeah in both Manjaro and CachyOS I use Plasma, and I've had no issues with gaming. Linux as an OS is already faster and leaner than Win10 and Win11, using less resources, so that helps too, with less sh1t running in the background to steal memory and CPU cycles away from games that are running. And then CachyOS on top of that is especially performance-tuned and optimized.

I've had a few situations where games run/behave/perform better in Linux, mostly older games, indie titles, and some A and AA release. A lot of AAA release also work very well, but in most cases their performance is slightly behind Windows 10. One example I can remember is R&C: Rift Apart. Looks great, runs great, but framerate is not as high as in Win10 (but still very high). But then other games like Doom TDA there is literally no difference. It runs literally exactly the same in Linux as it does in Windows (at least for me and a friend). Same with Doom 2016 and Quake 2 RTX. Doom Eternal doesn't seem as smooth as in Windows, despite similar framerate. Same deal with Spider-Man Remastered (although I last tested that like 2 or 3 years ago). Lidar Exploration Program is also fine. Halo MCC works great. Shinobi: Art of Vengeance ran better in Linux. TMNT: Shredder's Revenge and Streets of Rage 4 also look and play great in Linux, and in fact most of my play time for these 3 games I just mentioned have been in Linux (TMNT and SoR4 I believe both have native Linux versions, so they're not using Proton). I use native Linux versions of the PC ports of Zelda OoT, Zelda MM, Star Fox 64, and Mario Kart 64, which run just as well as the Windows versions. The PC port of Super Marfio 64 that I use, Super Mario 64 Plus, works fine with Proton. All 3 UT games work fine in Linux. Quake 3 via ioQuake also works fine in Linux (again I am using native Linux version). Benchmarks like Unigine Heaven and Unigine Superposition work fine in Linux, but Unigine Valley has graphical glitches (but the performance is there). Tunic and Risk of Rain 2 are also fine in Linux. CP 2077 I recall being fine but with just slightly worse performance than in Windows. I don't currently have installed so can't test, but I seem to recall testing it on my previous PC. The only issues I can recall having so far are the Quake 1 remaster doesn't run at all for me in Linux (with all the versions of Proton I've tried thus far), and I I think I had issues with the Doom 1+2 remaster (which doesn't matter to me cuz I don't use that version anyways. I use sourceports like GZDoom and Zandronum when I wanna play games that run on the Doom 1 Engine). Sonic CD remaster didn't use to work but now it does. Nights into Dreams remaster also works fine. All the Half-Life games run great. I think I recall testing games like A Hat In Time, Axiom Verge, Carrion, Sonic Mania, Crash Bandicoot N. Sane Trilogy, and several more (most of which I don't remember), and them all being fine. But some of the bigger games I've wanted to test, like Forza Horizon 5 and Indiana Jones and the Great Circle I haven't been able to due to space reasons. Your mileage may vary with the newer, bigger, AAA releases. But given time, any new game that has issues eventually gets sorted out. I've forgotten what other games I've tested over the last 3 years. My testing has been limited only cuz of available space. I only have a 512GB SSD dedicated to games in Linux, where in Windows I have 3TB of space available for games. I tested a decent amount of games on my X99 system and my current AM4 system, but there's a lot more I'd like to test (for a hopeful eventual future where I am no longer using Windows at all).

Just have to play around with the different versions of Proton and see which works best on a game-by-game basis. These days I use Proton 9, Proton 10, and GE Proton 10 (the custom verison available through ProtonUp). Sometimes a game will look or run better or be more stable on an older verson of Proton, and sometimes a newer version. Sometimes I have to use an older version to get something like a game's launcher to work so I can actually start the game (or for example to be able to log into Microsoft games).

But for gamers who play new AAA graphically-hard-hitting games at 4K with max settings and need absolutely every single f*cking frame per second they can squeeze out of their graphics card, yeah I don't think Linux would be a solution for them. At least not at this time. But it gets ever closer to being a viable solution as time goes on. But if you're like me and play a wide range of games from A to AAA, from 20+ years ago to current, well I've been very pleasantly surprised by how well my Linux gaming experience has gone.

As for controller support, so far everything I've thrown at it has worked fine out of the box. XBSX|S controllers, Switch NSO controllers like the SNES and N64 ones and the NES joy-cons, the Sega+Retro-bit Genesis and Saturn controllers, Switch Pro Controllers, Wii U Pro Controllers, and more. Controller support hasn't been a problem for me in the last 3 years after I came back to Linux land after being gone for years and decided to live there permanently.

My audio experience is also superior in Linux. Starting with Windows Vista Microsoft removed the Hardware Audio Layer. No more DirectSound 3D, and XACT/XAudio2 were not designed for hardware acceleration. All audio is processed by the CPU. I still use a SoundBlaster X-Fi sound card, and in Windows the only way to actually use the card is if a game or program supports the OpenAL API (either natively or through a community patch or what have you). Or I can use the program ALchemy for DirectSound 3D games (it takes calls to DS3D and translates them into OpenAL calls). In Linux things work like old-school Windows, where it sees my sound card as the only sound device, and ALL audio OS-wide is processed on the sound card. This actually makes me prefer watching videos and playing games in Linux. Music is not a problem in Windows cuz I use Winamp 5, and I have a plugin for Winamp 5 that outputs the audio via OpenAL, so yeah the X-Fi at least gets to process that sound when I'm in Windows.

Anyways I've been meaning to get back to messing around with the secondary desktop and CachyOS. I'll definitely let you know how things go whenever I finally return to it. I barely have any space on that system so again game testing will be limited. And even on my main machine I can't test stuff like DLSS Frame Gen since I don't own any graphics cards that support it. I mainly use that PC as a workhorse b1tch to handle tasks I don't wanna tie up my main machine with. For example, when I had to copy nearly 8TB of data from a hard drive to my NAS. That took almost 8 days. But I see future with CachyOS as my main OS, and I need to do more testing to determine if that's where I'll be headed.

 

[DrezKill]

Plasma 6 on both, X11 on the desktop and Wayland on the laptop. Laptop is on kernel 6.9 and desktop is on 6.6.

Main desktop is on kernel 6.12 (so is laptop), still Manjaro and Win10. I built a secondary desktop with some spare parts I had available, and I threw Win11 and CachyOS on it (kernel 6.16). CachyOS defaults to Wayland-only. I can do Wayland on main desktop but there are issues with some programs (and mouse cursor lag on Plasma 6) so I stay X11 there for now. Laptop is still Wayland.

I'm on kernel 6.18 all around now, on both desktops and the laptop, and also Wayland on all of those. Since last year when Wayland + Plasma 6 + nVidia finally started becoming usable, I was jumping around between X11 and Wayland on my main desktop. But now I'm almost exclusively using Wayland on the main desktop. Laptop and secondary desktop have never seen X11.