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
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!
In my opinion vanilla Fedora is the best beginner distro. And once you fell comfortable with Linux you can try Arch, CashyOS, rpm-ostree based distros or anything else.
I’ll have that in mind, thanks!
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🫡
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?
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!
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!
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.
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!
Have you tried kdenlive? https://youtu.be/9dIqJDy78TI
Looks sooo damn solid tbh, I’ll check it out more deeply. Sadly it doesn’t match my needs since the color grading aspect requires some niche characteristics that for the moment (and honestly seems like in the future too) kdenlive doesn’t support, and doesn’t have much reasons to do it, of course. Thank you anyways!
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)
I went Garuda and I’m happy.
If you like tinkering and tech go Cachy. If you just want things to work go Ubuntu.
Have you tried video editing in garuda or just gaming? Can’t find much feedback on DaVinci in Garuda. Thanks
Just gaming, but anything that works in Arch generally should be fine in Garuda. Honestly, after using Linux for a year and trying 2 very different distros (Mint and Garuda) there’s really not a lot of difference between them for the average user.
Very helpfull. I’ll have that in mind. Thankss!
Add the nvidia apt repository and install the drivers.
While this is possible, I wouldn’t disturb LMDE’s (or Debian’s) harmony with adding Nvidia’s repo. By doing this you add a posibility of a broken or a wonky system after a driver update. Gaming over flatpak would be a safer choice.
That’s exactly what happened. I forced the last drivers with CUDA Toolkit and it broke other parts of the PC making some programs useless.
Yeah, that tends to happen. It’s not a good idea to mix old and new packages.
The problem the op is having is solved with the nvidia drivers. The most common (and nvidia supported!) method of installing them on their distribution is to install the nvidia drivers through the apt repository some other nvidia supported way. In the case there is a problem with a driver update, there is a higher chance someone will document and explain a resolution to that hypothetical problem based on the normal apt installation of nvidia drivers in a format that the op will find when they go looking for a solution on the internet.
Their capacity to run the two photo and video editing programs is something they’ll have to figure out no matter what they do and they said as much in their op, but the nvidia drivers fix the other problem and the apt repo or some other nvidia supported method of installing them is the appropriate suggestion.
Gaming on flatpack just adds another layer of complexity to a system the op already doesn’t understand how to use.
Gaming on flatpack just adds another layer of complexity to a system the op already doesn’t understand how to use.
I completely agree with this. But flatpak at least wouldn’t cause the same possible problems with Nvidia repo.
I think using Debian Testing would be saner than adding Nvidia repo to regular Debian. Mixing old and new packages is not a good idea, or disturbing the harmony of your distro, unless you know what you’re doing.
Catchy and then Arch when you learned 👍
Sounds like a cool challenge, will see if I get to that point in the future 🫡
Addition to other comments, you can also try your chance by installing Steam as flatpak. Maybe that would work without you needing a second distro.
For DaVinci Resolve, you can try this: https://www.danieltufvesson.com/makeresolvedeb
I already did install steam via flatpak. For most games it straight up works flawlessly, but there are times it doesn’t haha. I’ll check again makeresolvedeb but I’m not sure it will fully work since one of the main and most conflictive things regarding my DaVinci setup is that I use an extension card (DeckLink Mini Monitor 4K) and I’m afraid it could have issues recognizing it. Won’t know until I try it tho. Thankss
I see. I don’t like flatpak Steam either but someone on Lemmy told me recently that it got better. But it seems it still has its quirks.
No problem! Yeah, you might have problems with an extension card but it probably would work, might need additional settings though. On the other hand, installing Resolve on Cachy is simple, so there is that too.
Yeah, I’ll definitely check that box before trying DaVinci in Cachy :)
Good luck! :)
changing proton versions helps with some games. Some work with experimental, some with hotfix.
There are even unofficial versions that get those few stubborn games to work ☞ https://github.com/GloriousEggroll/proton-ge-custom
The majority of issues I’ve had are around the GPU (debian Nvidia drivers) and not that much due to proton. I’ll check that proton custom anyways. Thanks!
i’m not on CachyOS, but whenever i asked how somebody got a game to work on linux, the response was Cachy.
I’m on Artix and Debian. Like you wrote, it’s impossible to get some games to run on Debian based distributions (i don’t care enough about games, so i won’t be changing my OS
Ubuntu is Debian based. Won’t be any better than LMDE.
Endeavour won’t give you anything basic Arch can’t.Cachy’s modified for gaming, iiuc. If i had to reinstall on our desktop today, i would go with Cachy.
Seems like for the moment Cachy is winning over Ubuntu by far hahah. Thanks!