Signal Desktop now includes support for a new “Screen security” setting that is designed to help prevent your own computer from capturing screenshots of your Signal chats on Windows. This setting is automatically enabled by default in Signal Desktop on Windows 11. If you’re wondering why we’re on...
Yeah, I’m actually on CachyOS now. I just always point newcomers to Mint because it’s easy and well supported.
Not a newbie since 2001 (but moved to Mint)
Don’t get me wrong, Mint is great for everyone. I was using it primarily for ages, and I’ve been using Linux for decades as well.
I didn’t mean it as recommending arch or gentoo to new Linux users.
How’s CachyOS been for you? I’ve compiled a few repo packages myself & am in the process of testing Gentoo.
It’s been great so far. Minimalistic in its philosophy (even with a choice of DE, it doesn’t install the typical slew of utility applications and such), and it’s easily the fastest distro I’ve ever used. I’ve had almost zero problems with Steam and Heroic. Overall I think I’m gonna stick with it for the foreseeable future.
If your first priority is speed, would clear Linux be better? Though I can see the appeal in a more performant Arch.
Edit:
What problems did you encounter? Would they also have affected Arch?
Yeah, they were common to Arch. Specifically, Steam would cause the entire system to stutter for a good 30 seconds when starting it up. Found a tip online about it doing something with some extra config files, followed the tip and now it’s working fine.
Even using the CachyOS versions of Proton and Wine libraries (which have the same kind of optimizations applied as the rest of the OS) has worked flawlessly, and my games are smoother than they’ve ever been. Pretty impressed with it overall.
How much of a difference do you notice in practice? Do you think you could see similiar gains by compiling, for example, Wine & some libraries with
-march=native& maybe-O3?Note:
-march=nativedoes imply-mtune=native, at least on gcc, unless you specify another tune yourself. Some people assume that it isn’t the case, but it’s stated in the man page:Sorry for the arch/tune rant.
No worries, I’m here for it!
It’s a noticeable improvement to me, but probably only marginal to the layperson. I haven’t gotten around to more thorough profiling yet (the included btop++ profiler actually caused my games to crash), but I get the impression my PC is utilizing a lot more of its capabilities (based on performance, fan noise, etc), though maybe I’m just confirming my own biases.
I’m guessing you might get similar gains by compiling manually, but the nice thing with CachyOS is that it’s already compiled (likely with other optimizations as well, I haven’t looked too far into it). I have the technical skills to compile manually, but not the time or energy, so it’s a great solution for me.
As you use Cachy, you probably already knew, but Arch compiles for x86_64_v1 (all 64-bit x86 CPUs). While some packages (glibc, I think & codecs, for example) use compiler magic & assembly to use vector instructions when available, most packages compiled for Arch cannot make use of them. Some programs feel much faster when compiling them myself.
I wonder if clear Linux (Intel’s distro) would have any noticeable improvement i performance? I think that Cachy might use a few of their patches.
Note: I’m very much not an Intel shill. I wouldn’t want to actually use it, just interested in the performance.
Yeah, the defacto Arch packages are only compiled for v1, but CachyOS has compiled a lot of the core libraries for v3/v4 (including Wine), which is where I think I’m seeing some improvements. I’m sure the performance would be more optimized by compiling myself, but I don’t have the time or patience for it right now.