TLDR: Which distro is better for gaming and video editing (NVIDIA GPU), CachyOS or Ubuntu?
Hi! It’s been probably a month since I started using Linux (escaping from Windows), and I choose LMDE since the distro that I felt aligned more with what I want from a distro on in general is Debian, but since it was my first time using Linux on my main device (just tried Debian on a laptop to run a Homelab) I got recommended Mint to make it easier for me to adapt. The thing is that since I started using LMDE I’ve discovered that it doesn’t cover perfectly my needs. Two things that I didn’t want to lose when switching to Linux were gaming and the ability to run video/audio/photo editing programs flawlessly, mainly DaVinci Resolve and AffinityPhoto. It’s been practically impossible to achieve that, since DaVinci doesn’t work, can’t even get to install AffinityPhoto and some videogames need more recent (NVIDIA) drivers than what Debian and of course LMDE can offer. So, seeing that I want to keep LMDE (and maybe in the future upgrade from LMDE to Debian) but at the same time I’m not willing to give up on those 2 things, I believe the dual-boot option is the one that suits me the most. Now, what I’m here for. I’ve been doing some research and the ones that caught my atention the most were CachyOS and Ubuntu:
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CachyOS: PROS: · High gaming performance and (looks like) compatibility. · Looks like DaVinci works perfectly for a lot of people (although some other people claim having issues). CONS: · Sounds too complex as a distro for someone who has close to zero programming knowledge and just started using Linux. · The rolling release aspect feels a little scary too.
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Ubuntu: PROS: · May not be THE gaming distro but it seems to be working for a lot of people without having extensive programming or Linux knowledge. · Generally may be more compatible and stable than CachyOS in general · Seems it will be easier for me to adapt to since it’s Debian-based. CONS: · Doesn’t seem as good as CachyOS on a performance standpoint, affecting both video editing and gaming capabilities.
Now, my questions would be: Am I mistaken in any of the info I have revolving these two distros? Could I be missing any other options? Which do you think is the distro that could suit me the most? Any recommendation when doing the Dual-boot? I have never done it and it scares me a little tbh.
My main priority is having a stable (and compatible in the first place, of course) experience (maybe Ubuntu?), but I don’t mind having to put more work into it to achieve a better experience (maybe CachyOS?).
I would love to hear from you and, of course, if I’m missing any relevant information I’ll be more than happy to share it too.
Thank you very much! :D
Between these two, Cachy.
If choice is open: Fedora.
“Gaming” focussed distros are often a worse choice imo, because they offer zero performance benefit, are bloated in an attempt to bundle drivers out of the box, are harder to troubleshoot because worse documentation, and the preinstalled configs can cause headaches.
This quite represents the point where I’m at. I’m prioritizing CachyOS (although there are countersides and other gaming-focused OS’s that can end up being better for me) but got recommended Fedora multiple times by now, so, we’ll see, maybe I end up choosing Fedora. Thank you!
Caution, dual-boot means you have to power down your system before you can start the other, if you share any file systems. Hibernate and then booting another distro will result in file system damage.
The alternative would be a virtual machine.
It can also occasionally mess up the grub configuration, which means you have to reinstall grub.
Woah, didn’t know that about grub. I hardly understand what it is, so it leaves me with a question: I don’t know if that makes any sense or goes directly against the nature of the bootloader definition but, can I switch one OS’s bootloader to Limine (got told by another user that grub failed for him with Cachy and switching to Limine solved it) and the other still be grub?
You can chain-load bootloaders but I am sceptical whether more complexity is helpful. At lesst grub is relatively easy to reinstall.
Ok, I’ll stick to just grub or Limine if it assures more stability, I guess it would be overcomplicating it for nothing. Thanks!
It never even occured to me to hibernate and then switching OS. I just use a command to reboot and tell grub to preselect the other OS and go do something else for 60 seconds while it reboots.
It’s true that sometimes the grub config gets messed up, but in two years doing this, I’ve had to reinstall grub once (many more times if you count me distro-hopping).
If you want a good first Linux experience, stick with anything Ubuntu-/Debian-based; they are
- stable workhorses, i.e. they don’t break on you as easily as rolling release distros like CachyOS.
- wildly popular, i.e. you’ll find plenty of resources to help you get started (although, to be fair, the Arch wiki is also ridiculously detailed).
Whatever you do, steer clear of immutable distros like Bazzite for now. As cool as the concept is (I run Bazzite on my gaming machine) - as soon as you do something “non-standard” (and modding your Minecraft .jar with Optifine already qualifies as such), you’ll have to fiddle with the terminal and distrobox containers, both of which will be alien concepts for you at the start and may be top much to make it a good first impression.
helpful
That’s very helpful, I’ll totally have that in mind🫡
Try Debian, nut ubuntu, it just makes problems
I’ll leave Debian for when I switch from LMDE, because I think I’ll still have the same issues I’m reporting on LMDE. Thank you anyways!
CachyOS or Ubuntu?
With all due respect to Ubuntu, but this isn’t even a comparison. I’d try to give you a fair answer if you’d stated Garuda, for example, or Nobara, or Bazzite instead of Ubuntu, because these distros actually put in an effort for gaming specifically, but Ubuntu? It’s a workstation distro and it’s gaming performance is basically whatever the default is on “Linux” as a whole.
I have personally been using CachyOS for over two years now and I’ve been very happy with it. Their installer recognizes your gpu automatically and installs the right drivers for you.
Not to take away from the other ones, I’m sure they have amazing work/performance, too, but this is my experience because I’ve tried all of the distros I’ve mentioned above and CachyOS was the best for me personally.
Your mileage may vary of course. The best thing to do is try different distros and find out for yourself. Make sure your data is backed up while you hop between them until you chose one.
Big second for CachyOS.
I distro hop a fair bit but I keep coming back to Cachy. Personally, I choose to manage and maintain my machine entirely through the terminal, but with Shelly (the GUI package manager CachyOS ships with) and their built in updater, you could probably do all of your basic gaming and video editing for years without ever having to launch a terminal.
Also, snapper backups functional out of the box. Something breaks? Just pick the most recent snapper image in the boot menu, and hold off on updating for a few days.
On that note, Cachy slows their update releases a little more than Arch, so while it’s still bleeding edge, there’s still a little buffer time for stability sake, same with EndeavourOS, another great arch based distro.
Ubuntu has its merits. It’s simple and it generally just works, but Cachy is not nearly difficult enough to pass on.
That sounds very good and gives me hope hahah. I’ll have it in mind. Thank youu
Compared to other distros, do you feel it’s been tougher to maintain everything stable enough to not go crazy? Thanks!
I haven’t had any major breakages with it beside that one time over a year ago where grub shit the bed and I had to reinstall it from a live environment. Then switched to limine and haven’t had a single issue like that ever since.
That’s useful, I’ll have it in mind when booting. Thank you!
In my opinion vanilla Fedora is the best beginner distro. And once you get comfortable with Linux you can try Arch, CashyOS, rpm-ostree based distros or anything else.
I’ll have that in mind, thanks!
Hm… LMDE is Debian under the hood, so if you have non standard requirements then you have to be flexible to make something to work, combining .deb repositories with other solutions like flatpaks, distrobox, compiling from source, nix, guix, appimages, wine prefixes, etc. Just don’t mess with system directories and libraries and you’re good.
Maybe Mint were a better choice to a newbie, but in the end it’s almost the same thing with some nice driver utilities. Look for the release in December.
I would throw bazzite in as an option, especially for a new user.
Bazzite has a good out of the box experience, is meant for gaming, and it uses an immutable distro.
In my opinion the only reason people don’t like immutable distros is bad habits that are hard to break, or wanting highly custom system configurations, both do not apply to a new user. If you never go into the terminal there’s no difference, and if you do a system like brew works pretty well.
The advantage of an immutable system are that you can’t mess up your system and it’s more secure. It also stops you from doing dangerous things or leasing habits that require modifying system packages without knowing what they do.
For just gaming and desktop use (with KDE), it’s a good low maintenance system.
Sounds very very good. I’ll definitely give it some priority. Thank you!
In my opinion the only reason people don’t like immutable distros is bad habits that are hard to break, or wanting highly custom system configurations, both do not apply to a new user
Disagree with the second point. The first thing I did when I finally swapped was to fiddle with it until it felt like what I was used to with Windows. Of course, that’s also the same thing I do in a Windows PC: Make it feel like an older less shit version of Windows.
Over time, I started experimenting. Even use a heavily modified Gnome for my laptop which is a big change. Maybe I just like to mess with stuff.
But you can still theme the hell out of plasma and it will just save to your ~/.local or something, that doesn’t need to hit the system packages.
I am curious if you have examples when you needed something that didn’t work with bazzite, as my opinions are opinions that can be changed
Personally I found Fedora atomic really good for being able to update the rpm os tree if you do want to tweak heavily, but I found fedora without dnf was not a good place (it works with brew, but they don’t include it and I think they still push toolbx, which is great, but not a casual user system).
Might just be my old experience (happy to learn otherwise) but dual booting ended up with more of a painful experience than not. When Windows would update, it would fuck my grub up and cause issues booting into Linux and Windows. You can fix it (most of the time) but expect to do it rather often; especially unpleasant as a beginner.
I know there’s issues with GPU passthrough on vms but IDK if dual booting is the moves unless they seriously improved the experience in the last couple years.
I’ll try not to dual-boot unless it’s the only way; first I’ll stress all options inside LMDE (with makeresolvedeb, VMs, distrobox(?), etc.) and if it still doesn’t solve the issues I’m having in LMDE, I’ll dual-boot (preparing for these cases of course). Thanks!
They’re talking about dual-booting Windows and Linux. Dual-booting two Linuxes (Lini?) should be fine.
I’m not a programmer either. Never have been. You don’t need to be one to use any desktop distro. You’d be fine with CachyOS. It is popular enough that getting help with anything that does pop up should be easy. I’ve used it as well as Nobara and Bazzite. Ultimately, I landed on Bazzite. That was about a year ago and I am happy.
Very useful insight, thanks!
Seeing as you have an Nvidia card, I’d caution against Ubuntu. People talk about how “stable” it is, but it’ll break on it’s own even if you don’t try to update it, and it’s all because of Nvidia drivers.
I recommend getting a distro that has the Nvidia drivers baked it, which mostly narrows it down to Bazzite, Nobara, CachyOS, or Pop!OS.
I’m personally not a fan of Pop! since it’s based on Debian.
I personally use Nobara right now since it’s essentially Bazzite if it weren’t immutable. It’s OK. It does some things well and has some headaches.
I recently had to dual-boot CachyOS alongside Nobara. I haven’t had much time to tinker with it, but it’s definitely different. But one big benefit to Cachy is that you can pick whatever desktop environment and bootloaders you want. Just pick the correspondjng option in the installer.
At the end of the day, Bazzit, Nobara, and Cachy all have the same gaming-focusses system optimizations. It just boils down to specifics from there
Didn’t know Pop! was Debian based. I guess it’s not ideal for gaming because of drivers not being up to date just like debian?
No, you’re entirely misunderstanding distros.
In fact pop exists at least in part explicitly to make it easier to install nvidia drivers to support system 76 gaming laptops.
It’s a good option if you want up to date nvidia drivers.
You’re not me. You will have different tastes too me. No point you using the distros I like. Do what everybody else does, experiment, try a few, read about them. The are loads out there all with little quirks and differences. Try L/K/X/Ubuntu, try cachyos / arch, try void, try Gentoo, try popos… Have a look at distrowatch for loads of inspiration.
Any and all distros can use and run any software any other distro runs so they can all do the same stuff, just they all get there in slightly different ways.
Possibly the best advice here re: the distro.
While it helps to have people give you suggestions, the person who it really needs to work for is you, the user. Don’t let popular opinion turn you away from what works for you, OP. Experiment and play. It costs nothing to put on a new system except some time and effort.
Also, if you put your home/ directory on its own partition, you can experiment with variations of the same types, like the all the variations of Ubuntu. I’m pretty sure modern installers even back up the dotfiles that exist in your current home/ directory for you, so you don’t even have to worry about old dotfiles breaking anything.
Thanks for your kind advice :D Though I didn’t get the half of what you said in the last paragraph hahahah. Guess it shows I wasn’t lying when I said I’m new xd
okay, well, your root directory is always
/that’s where your system stuff lives like/usr//bin//etc/et cetera. however, you also have in there alongside the system stuff a /home/ directory, which is where your user data lives. Think of/home/as yourC:\Users\folder. It’s where whatever your username and its data is is going to live.The thing is, when installing the OS, you can choose to set up (manually) to have your
/home/directory on another disk or disk partition, which separates it from the root/directory psychically or logically respectively.It would be like if you could re-install windows entirely but never lose your
C:\Users\folder because it actually lived atD:\Users\and Windows just always looked for your users folder upon install (which Ubuntu does) and allows you to re-use it if it finds it.So:\
/=C:\
/home/=C:\Users\These aren’t 1 to 1 matches in terms of analogy, but it’s pretty close.
Gotcha! Thank you for taking the time to explain it to me :D
That’s a very helpfull advice. I’ll do that. Thank you!!
if you’ve been using Linux for a month, do yourself a favour and don’t try Gentoo.
Agreed, distro hopping is the best way to find what you like, and learn along the way, but if a distro isn’t easy to install, it isn’t for newbies, or for me a few years in.
Noted🫡
IMO Fedora can do everything that Ubuntu does, without snap or the opinionated Cannonical stuff, it’s an easy GUI installer, has better defaults (except you need to manually add non-fre repos, trivial), and wide software compatibility. You can’t go wrong with Fedora unless you specifically hate having up to date software or major updates every 6-12 months.
Cachy is a fine distro too I guess. I’d probably use EndeavorOS instead. Any distro with a relatively recent graphics stack is going to game the same. The QoL stuff around the margins is going to be more important than the 2% optimization you get from Cachy’s kernel, and cachyos-proton can be run on steam in any distro.
Yeah, Fedora is the one that finally got me to switch
I landed on Fedora Gnome as my default choice unless I have a reason to go other. My wife finally stuck with Linux after trying Mint, Ubuntu, Pop, and Ubuntu Mate, then landing on Fedora KDE. (When I say trying, I mean me trying to get her to use it and then her abandoning the machine for Windows.) Fedora KDE stuck.
As a Debian user and programmer, I also suggest Fedora. As said above, Fedora has everything that Ubuntu does, does not force snap packs on its users, and finally, it offers updated software libraries compared to more stable distros such as Debian.
Seeing that I’m getting closer to Cachy than Ubuntu, I’ll check Endeavor, which I don’t I had heard of yet. I’ll test Fedora too just in case. Thanks!
Note that, EndeavourOS is stock Arch with a GUI installer, if you don’t mind theming which is optional. CachyOS is a tailored Arch so it would probably be easier for you.
To be fair, there isn’t really a such thing as “stock” Arch. You would just have the base and linux linux-firmware packages. EOS gives you a minimal, but entirely functional desktop experience with as few assumptions possible, which is nice for someone who wants to tailor their desktop to their liking. You are correct, cachy would probably be easier, but I don’t think EOS is particularly hard. Either way, gaming is just a matter of installing steam.
Well, technically that’s true but figure of speech. :)
EOS is one of my most used distros to this day and I agree it’s one of the best minimalist distros with a GUI installer out there. It gives you nice defaults and cover almost everything out of the box. However OP is new in Linux world and in my opinion they shouldn’t use Arch at all for the transition period (though that part completely depends on the person). But Cachy has many tools pre-installed comparing to EOS so that’s why it would be easier.
What are your PC specs outside of an Nvidia card?
Depending on your specs, it might make more sense to run it in a Virtual Machine than dual boot.
I started my process of going into Linux with dual-booting for several years while also running a small linux server on a raspberry pi 3B+.
The reality is I hardly ever booted into Linux unless I needed to do something over there. Several times I ignored the Linux side long enough that it was fully broken from not receiving updates for so long. (Literally slept on the upgrade window until the next upgrade was already out and the old upgrade window was gone…ooof. after that I went with LTS just to ensure that didn’t happen again).
Part of the reason I never booted into it is because turning it off and then on again… is actually more time consuming and interruptive than you initially think. I would just forget it was there on a normal day without any specific projects to work on.
I never really took it properly seriously until I fully removed Windows and made my Linux my daily driver. If I still need Windows, I run that in a Virtual Machine. However the amount of times I need it is steadily decreasing.
So, based on personal experience, if you have the specs, I strongly suggest a VM otherwise you might find yourself not even bothering to boot into Linux half the time because everything you do daily is still on Windows. Just a thought nugget to consider. Plenty of people told me I should be running mine in a VM that whole time, too. I was skeptical. Looking back, they were right, and it took me longer to acclimate than it would have if I had been consistently using it.
Specs:
AMD Ryzen 5 5600X, RTX 3070 Ti, 32 GB RAM, HDD, 1 M.2 and soon will add another one.
Similar to what I responded to another user that suggested using makeresolvedeb, I’m not sure the VM could detect the extension card I use for color grading (DeckLink Mini Monitor 4K), which would be an instant turnoff. However I’ll try it before going Dualboot. The only issue I find is that I don’t know how to set the VM properly for it to detect the card and also make the VM being as fast as my pc, since every VM I mount is pretty slow and makes the VM only a useful tool to try distros but not to actually use them. Thank you!
Yeah, GPU passthrough is pretty tough to get with VMs as well, let alone something very tailored to graphics needs like that. So I can understand if you need that to work why it’s a turn off.
Well, VMs being slower than the host machine is just a real tradeoff that happens. You can try using less graphics/ram/cpu heavy systems like Xubuntu/Lubuntu (although to be fair even Kubuntu is pretty lightweight now). But part of it is how much RAM you give it. If you have the spare ram for it, give it as much as you can. I have 32gb of ram and yet rarely break using 10gb of it so if I am running a single VM I usually give it 12gb of ram at minimum. Also depending on what you’re using for your VM you could give the VM more cpu cores to use, but that will in turn speed it up (although depending on the load may also slow down your host as it loses access to cores). Giving it enough ram, enough cores, and putting it on the next M.2 (pulling the OS of an HDD is slow af) you get if there’s enough room. Those are all things that will bring up speed.
Well, I tend to give it a lot of room. Yesterday I tested CachyOS with 24 GB of RAM, 4 CPU Cores and running iso from M.2 and it is slow. Idk if it’s maybe a host to vm relation issue instead of a VM hardware issue, since the VM doesn’t have trouble loading, instead it’s more of a slow-to-show the host what’s happening inside the VM. Idk if I’m making any sense haha
This isn’t an important choice. If you don’t like the distro or you are having issues, it’s like 10 minutes to switch to a different one.
That being said, I would not recommend Ubuntu for a variety of reasons. CachyOS is a great option, but there are others. Just try it, if you have issues or don’t like it, try something else.
That’s what I’ll do, thanks!
