Comment by cwbriscoe
18 hours ago
I have been playing with Cachy and Plasma in a VM and I am probably going to install that on my next PC build that I am planning. I am currently dual booting Ubuntu and Windows. I haven't logged into windows in over 6 months so I probably won't even setup dual boot with my next machine.
Using Cachy after testing some distros. I tried Nobara but it was too limited. Before this I've used Debian based distros (ubuntu, debian), Redhat/RPM (Redhat, Mandrake, OpenSuSe) and even Gentoo.
So far I really like Cachy. It's been great for the bit of gaming I do. I had a bit of audio grief, but installing a different kernel seemed to have fixed the issue. Overall I'm pretty damn happy with it. It was much easier than default Arch. I tried Endeavour and though it was nice, there was something about it I didn't quite like (I don't recall what). I'm off Windows entirely - between shoving their AI stuff and Ads everywhere, after decades of off and on use, Linux is my forever home.
And yeah, KDE is pretty nice and solid now.
I also really like the BTRFS file system which I didn't know about until installing Cachy. I like the idea of being able to go to a snapshot before I messed something up or a system update did.
I figure if I ever need anything Windows related, I will just load windows in a VM. Gaming wise, mostly the only games you can't play on Linux are Windows games with root kit level anti-cheats. Not sure if that is a downside...
The (much more complicated) middle ground is to put a second GPU in your PC, boot Linux with that GPU, and then reserve the primary GPU for your gaming virtual machine (and pin CPU cores so cache isn't useless while gaming). End result: more reliable gaming experience in a sandboxed environment. There are some anticheats that will detect you're in a VM and lock you out, but there are ways around that if you're persistent enough. Or just don't play such games, which is my preferred approach.
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/PCI_passthrough_via_OVMF#Wi...
If you need an instance of windows at random periods of time, you can always run it as a VM with VirtualBox or KVM/Qemu... or Karton as headlined in the article.
That is what I use as my main machine - https://i.imgur.com/hbDzVus.png I have been on this setup for a while and it is absolutely the best - clean, fast and customizable.
I too have been on CachyOS for 6 months, dual boot but have no need to boot into Windows.
I am running a modern PC (z790, i9-14400k, RTX 4070-Ti)
My main concern was gaming on Linux and I have been pleasantly surprised at the limited issues I have had -- only minor things.
I have recently played around with Gnome-boxes and seems to do the trick although it would be nice have GPU passthrough.
I love CachyOS and the Plasma DE and do not plan to return to Windows.