It's been wild to see the shifting popularity of Linux distros over the years.
It wasn't that long ago that the distros with the most momentum were Elementary OS, Solus, Pop_OS, and Manjaro.
This past year I've noticed a few distros that seemed to come out of nowhere with popularity including: Bazzite, Zorin OS, Omarchy, EndeavourOS, and the subject of this post/video: Cachy OS.
Cachy OS is based on Arch Linux, but unlike Manjaro it doesn't freeze it for points releases or make drastic changes that impact the update cycle.
Manajro provides 3 different .iso files for each of it's official desktop environments, and another 3 for it's community-supported desktop environments.
Cachy provides only 2 .iso images. One for desktops/PCs/servers, and the other for handheld-devices like the Steam Deck, ASUS ROG Ally, or Lenovo Legion GO.
The handheld .iso only supports KDE Plasma 6.
On the "main" .iso you get a Plasma 6 live installer to test things out, but also you get one of the most comprehensive graphical installers I've ever used.
Which lets you select options for:
Boot Loaders:
- GRUB2
- Limine
- Systemd_boot
- REfind
File Systems:
- BTRFS
- Ext4
- XFS
- ZFS
- BCache FS
- F2FS(Flash-Friendly File System)
Desktop Environments:
- KDE Plasma
- GNOME
- COSMIC
- XFCE:
- Hyprland
- Sway
- Niri
- i3
- Qtile
- Wayfire
- **Budgie **
- Cinnamon
- LXDE
- LXQt
- MATE
- Openbox
- bspwm
- UKUI
Cachy includes a handful of applications no matter which desktop:
Alacrity terminal emulator(pre-configured with customized FISH or ZSH shells)
BTRFS Assistant(if you installed on BTRFS)
Micro & VIM text editors
Btop++ terminal resource/system monitor
Octopi software manager for Arch & AUR.(Octopi was included on my install, but I'm told it has been replaced with Shelly)
And Cachy's Very OWN Software:
- Cachy Hello:
A welcome-app with all of Cachy's links to documentation.(Cachy's website includes an extensive wiki of tutorials and how-to's that are extremely useful)- It includes toggles for various Cachy performance features such as Profile-Sync Dameon, BPF-tune, Aninancy-CPP, Systemd Out-Of-Memory-Daemon.
- Cachy Software Manager: A curated list of packages by type, and comprehensive list of packages in Cachy's official Arch-repos.
- Gaming Packages in particular lets you pick from every Vulkan-driver imaginable. Graphics drivers for every chipset, integrated GPU, or graphics card that I didn't even know existed before seeing them listed here.
Cachy Kernel Manager: Lets you custom-build kernels, or switch between the various custom ones. Also gives you access to Sched-Ext custom scheduler extensions.
How Cachy Is Different from Arch:
Arch Linux builds their packages for maximum compatibility.
Where Arch is agnostic Cachy is specific.
Cachy clones and rebuilds the entire Arch Linux repository, but with performance-focused enhancements tailored to modern hardware.
This includes compiling more of the system using BOLT/PGO/LTO optimizations using Clang/LLVM Low Level Virtual Machine to build major components.
Cachy further specifies packages for x86_64-v2,v3,v4(Zen4) architectures to make better use of the latest instructions on modern Intel/AMD processor.
Cachy lets you switch between EEVDF, BORE, and BMQ schedulers.
EEVDF – general-purpose (default tuned scheduler)
BORE – optimized for responsiveness, desktop, and gaming
BMQ – alternative scheduler focused on simplicity and performance
And that's before letting you swap out Sched-Ext profiles that let you tune it even further.
There's also kernels built realtime, long-term support, hardened(security), and several more.
Cachy includes profiles/rules for Ananicy-CPP that optimize it for apps or games. Which includes Windows games that may have more than one necessary process. You can also write your own rules for games/apps.
CHWD or Cachy Hardware Detection automatically scans/determines available drivers/firmware.
And believe it or not, there's so many other things you'll learn by actually watching my video.
There's a lot in there. What do you think is the target audience? People need to understand what the different desktops and filing systems offer and I wonder how many do. Linux may be growing, but it's still a minority OS. I get that some people like playing around with their systems, but I just like things to work. I don't do much customisation, but we're all different.
Are you using Kdenlive? I have been getting more into that and it can do a lot. Part of why I want a new PC is to make video editing more viable as it can get laggy.
Cheers for the insight.
!BEER
Yes Kdenlive is the editor I use. 90% of my videos were done with Kdenlive.
There's a few where I used Flowblade, but Kdenlive is the top for me hands down. Flowblade's stand-out feature is it has a GUI for G'MIC(a graphics library for applying effects to images). And it actually allows you to apply them to videos which is really cool. But that's not even something I actually need.
I see a lot of people who are new to Linux choosing Cachy.
They offer so many desktops I think because by casting that wide net they can appeal to anyone.
Debian & Arch both have basically every desktop/window-manager available, but what's unique about this is you can install any of them with a few clicks.
You don't have to customize anything really. In fact, you're getting the most vanilla version of Gnome, KDE, Cinnamon, Mate what have you. The only custom things they ship are the icon pack, themes(for KDE at least, not sure about the others), and Cachy wallpapers. Plus the couple of Cachy tools/apps that are mostly about kernels, schedulers, daemons.
They do include Fish/ZSH shells, and ZSH has Oh-My-ZSH already installed which is like a customized ZSH environment.
For people who want to game I think Cachy has a lot to offer.
It's definitely tailored towards modern hardware.
But also surprising is the amount of Vulkan graphics-drivers there are available which you are prompted for when you install the gaming packages.
I didn't recognize most of them so I had to look them up, and they're drivers for ARM GPU's, and lots of surprising older/less common chipsets that you don't necessarily find on dekstops/laptops/PC's.
Linux is definitely growing, and I don't think there's ever been a time when more people were interested in using Linux to be honest. For multiple reasons.
Chief among them is Windows 11 & Windows Copilot.
I do all my work on old (4 cores with 8GB RAM) hardware, and finding good video editing software has been a real chore.
So far, Flowblade has been fastest and least glitchy for me. It runs circles around KDEnlive and OpenShot on my old hardware.
I upgraded from 8GB to 24GB last year. The old chips were not too expensive and that helped a bit. I'd not heard of Flowblade. The bottleneck is transcoding. It's possible a GPU could help with that.
Adding a graphic card (also old, cost me $12 on eBay) that allowed GPU to be used by software cut my transcoding time in half, and eliminated my editing lag with larger files.
Having a lot of RAM is a game-changer for video-editing.
I've also used Flowblade, and there was a time when it seemed to outperform Kdenlive when actually editing on the timeline. I haven't used newest versions of it so that could have improved a lot I don't know. But during the pandemic Kdenlive had a great-leap forward with people seeming to dedicate a lot of time to it.
I'm using an old Intel Xeon 6-core/12 threads & a Nvidia Quadro GPU(2GB VRAM) and I have 32GB of DDR3. Old hardware that was decent when it was new.
Years ago I did probably 6 or 7 of my videos with Flowblade, but I would honestly feel held back by it if I had to use it now.
Granted video editing styles are very different for everyone.