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:
-
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.
-
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 those two, CachyOS for sure. You are already running LMDE, imo there is zero benefit to dual-booting with Ubuntu… You are likely going to be running into the exact same problems you already are.
Debian stable. You’ll be fine.
My experience with Ubuntu desktop has always been a real poor one but I realize other people like it. I’d go with cachy or endevourOS personally. My wife has probably less technical skill than you do and I’ve had her on endevourOS for nearly a year at this point. All she does is YouTube and gaming and it all runs near flawlessly. I also have both our systems dual booted but I also can’t remember the last time I booted into windows for either machine.
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.
The biggest problem with Linux distros is choice paralysis. I’d recommend Fedora/(K/X)Ubuntu/Mint as a first choice.
Fedora is very up to date, so if you’re giddy to try new desktop environment updates (like gnome, KDE, not Cosmic until it’s more mature), then go Fedora with the spin you think you’ll like the most, visually.
Ubuntu is updated all at once every year/2 years or so. By the time an update reaches Ubuntu, it’s already old news. It’s much more stable because there’s less to diagnose, and everything is essentially worked out before it hits your PC.
Mint is Ubuntu, but heavily modified with user friendly changes in mind. From what I’ve seen though, the default theme is really dated, visually, and may not have creature comforts (I haven’t used mint in over a decade).
Bazzite is for you if you are afraid to brick your computer with a stray terminal command; it’s designed to be very resilient to beginner mistakes by taking away root access from the user.
CachyOS/Endevour (Arch based) are great distros, but you’ll be given a laundry list of choices for everything from your web browser, desktop environment, terminal, shell, file browser, and more. If you’re new to Linux, there’s simply too much choice for things you won’t understand yet. Even if you’re into customization, you’re better off trying one of the above as a baseline and going down the customization rabbit hole from there!
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!
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.
I think you need to reassess your position on gaming distros. Nobara and Bazzite both use CachyOS’s optimizations while based on Fedora. And Nobara adds less software than Cachy’s gaming package, I think there’s only one package in Nobara I haven’t needed. And the documentation for Nobara has been easier to follow than Cachy/Arch.
Granted, a decent chunk of Nobara’s benefits are from being run by Glorious Eggroll, the lead maintainer of CachyOS
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.
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).
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!
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!
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.
- stable workhorses, i.e. they don’t break on you as easily as rolling release distros like CachyOS.
I disagree. When I had Ubuntu on my old server it would randomly break every few months. It was generally because I had an Nvidia card and the drivers needed updated, but it makes no sense for graphics drivers suddenly causing issues without an associated OS update
I know of these famed Nvidia driver problems, but they’re
a) not exclusive to Ubuntu; Nvidia is the party fucking up here, so they’re rumoured to be unstable throughout all distros and
b) I’ve been running Debian-/Ubuntu-based Linux distros w/ Nvidia’s proprietary drivers for about 10 years now, and I haven’t come across a single issue with it in all that time.So. Well. That’s anecdotal evidence against anecdotal evidence, I guess.
That’s very helpful, I’ll totally have that in mind🫡
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Thanks! Very useful!
Gotcha! Thank you for taking the time to explain it to me :D
Even when I was back on windows, my data was always stored on a separate physical drive, I do the same now on linux, and will never understand why anyone would choose to store the 2 on the same drive (unless they only have 1 drive).
I didn’t use ‘my documents’ and I don’t use ‘home’ either. No doubt there are some benefits to doing so though.
I didn’t use ‘my documents’ and I don’t use ‘home’ either. No doubt there are some benefits to doing so though.
On my setup, I have the files I care about on separate storage drives, but I link them into the various home folders. I get the convenience of home, with the advantages of a separate drive
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🫡
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!
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, Bazzite, Nobara, and Cachy all have the same gaming-focussed 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.
No, you’re entirely misunderstanding distros.
Jfc you could write this better to not sound like a dick.
OP’s a newbie asking for advice, not someone with the completely wrong idea despite 5 years of experience
Jfc you could write this better to not sound like a dick.
They are misunderstanding distros - I’m just letting them know. No judgement.
You cant really go wrong.
I would try Baazite.
+1 for bazzite because of their inmutable root partition. This should be the way for both beginners and professionals (e.g. adding rootless quadlet for local searxng)
