Switching to CachyOS

As usual, ADHD-lack-of-self-control kicks in..

So I sort of got hyped up about CachyOS from watching a YouTube video…

Next thing I knew I was finishing up backups to my NAS and fully wiping my boot drive on my main computer.

I chose CachyOS primarily from a shoutout by Level1Techs in this Gamersnexus YT Video, which in particular shouted to me as the sort of thing I was interested in if I wanted to fully go all-in on Linux. I like the idea of being able to tinker and FAFO but still have some level of stability for the games that I play without being completely on my own.

Save for some stumbling in figuring out how the fuck Steam compatibility on Linux actually worked I’ve had a pretty seamless experience overall, which surprised me a lot. The fact I have a tech background meant I’ve obviously overlooked some weirdness that someone completely fresh-faced to this would have trouble but this is so much further along than I would have expected. For reference, here’s a quick hardware breakdown

• ASRock B650E Taichi
• Ryzen 7800X3D
• 2x16GB Corsair Vengeance @ 6000Mhz
• Seasonic Vertex GX-1000 PSU
• 2x WD Black SN850X NVME drives
• ASUS RTX 4080 Super ProArt
• CPU under a dual rad watercooling loop (used to include GPU in old build)
• PCIe USB hub (adding support for LianLi case front USB)
• Corsair Commander XT hub

And everything besides the Corsair Commander worked right out of the box without any additional tinkering at all. The Commander required me to grab the OpenLinkHub packages and reconfigure my fan/pump curves because the on-board data for some reason isn’t properly reading; my pump would crank up to audible (for me) without much load and would stay that way even as temps dropped back down below thresholds.

Steam and Compatibility Options

I play with an OLED monitor with HDR so I greatly value having those features even in this environment. Out of the box when I launched either Helldivers 2 or Dying Light: The Beast I noticed all my shit was ultra washed out and I didn’t even have the option to mess with HDR. ProtonDB is supposed to be the salve for making this work but that ended up being woefully unhelpful for two reasons: a lot of people run AMD GPUs in Linux and very few people actually contribute back information that’s useful. A lot of the posts are people copy/pasting configs from elsewhere and just shrugging when it works without understanding why or how it does.

I did manage to get HDR to be enabled and my games are running incredibly smoothly with next to no configuring on my part, but I did have to do a lot of research into what all the possible launch switches were, what they did, and why I might use them. I expect as I dig into other games in my library I will expand that expectation further, but time will tell.

Wayland? X11? GNOME?

What I didn’t expect was weird quirks I’d be sort of locked into based on what DE I chose. I went with KDE Plasma and it turns out stuff as simple as the wallet store being strangely behind in features and usability was just something everyone accepts or replaces. I’m still not even sure if I’m going to stick with it or try to move to something else but I thought I’d mention it. Plasma DE customization is very strange, as I quickly discovered even themes are hilariously fraught with missteps on trying to make the work right. For example:

• I found a theme I liked on (store.kde.org), but it turns out the instructions for installing it and a recommended package to go with it are several years out of date and both aren’t even developed anymore. The link used on the theme page for Lightly wasn’t even the official repo which is archived, but thankfully I discovered Darkly which is actively developed as a replacement.
• Discord text rendering is very weird without setting launch options. Even after adding some launch args text still looks very strange on my other monitor and I’m not entirely sure what the fix is yet.
• Middle-click being paste absolutely DRIVES ME UP THE WALL because the setting to toggle it off doesn’t actually even toggle it off fully - THERE’S A SECOND OPTION YOU HAVE TO DISABLE TO ACTUALLY FULLY REMOVE THE FUNCTIONALITY. On top of that Electron apps just straight up ignore the setting and need their own launch arg OR another package install to run and block it from pasting all the time.

Kernel/Nvidia Driver Updates Causing Crashes

A recent change I dealt with this weekend revolves around some kind of update going through that utterly stumped me. A post on Nvidia’s forums, however, highlighted what the issue might be by someone experimenting and I’m baffled.

I returned to Dying Light: The Beast after a couple days of fucking around and noticed when I started getting into combat with a particular Volatile ‘boss’ I’d crash about 5-15 seconds in. This volatile would cause a lot of smoke effects, jump around, make noise to attract other volatiles and was a pretty cool fight, but I couldn’t figure out wtf had changed to cause this. Trying to vibe-troubleshoot didn’t get me very far, but this post on the Nvidia forums pointed out that limiting framerates to 60 or below seemed to fix their crashing.

Hey, look at that: setting my frame limiter in the game settings to 60 from 144 stopped the crashing entirely. I don’t like it because I have a 240Hz monitor but screw it, I can play the damn game again. No idea when this’ll be fixed (and I amusingly haven’t tested this in other games yet) but something work pointing out.