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 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.
Gotcha. Well, I learned something new, so thanks for the detailed explanation!
Just to really clarify: there is no real performance difference between “gaming” distros and any other one. They just have some stuff pre-installed you can just install yourself. The only real thing you want to be aware of are standard distros vs immutable distros. I would steer clear of immutable until you’re more comfortable in general.
All that being said CachyOS (Arch based) is fine, but skip Nobara and just go stock Fedora Gnome or KDE to skip the prepackaged customizations and just get a clean experience.
Okay. I’d been hearing that performance gains were essentially immaterial or on a case by case basis, but that the prepacked stuff helps things “just work”. For example I like Sim Racing and I use a Fanatec race wheel, I’m hoping that one of these would reduce the hassel with it.
They won’t help anything materially work “better” let’s say. I guess Nobara might have an edge with something like Nvidia drivers being prepackaged in a way that makes them easier to run on first install (it’s a big maybe), but the same issues will arise after the fact with Nvidia’s drivers, just because the hoops you have to jump through are the same everywhere. That’s an Nvidia problem.
those prepackaged nvidia drivers were a lifesaver for me personally. i kept hitting walls trying to get them on fedora.
