I totally understand and I do hate recommending Arch right from the start, but CachyOS is a great entry level Arch distro. The installer is pretty straight forward and setup is very minimal if you’re just going to game. The only thing lacking IMO, for beginners, is an “app store” with pretty pictures.
But if you’re gaming, I think you should be on the latest kernel possible, so a rolling release(Fedora) or bleeding edge(Arch). Latest Ubuntu derivative(25.10, soon 26.04) is fine but not ideal. It’s the main reason SteamOS is also based on Arch.
Again, not gaming? Mint is probably the defacto unless you’re on newer hardware.
I think if someone is a power user of Windows already then they can adapt to CachyOS as a new user. I’d recommend it to those people because I was that guy lol. The difficulty is…updating! Not using the OS. What does that mean actually for new people looking in?
Before updating. Every time. Which you do pretty often. That’s the point of rolling release. Sometimes you have to manually intervene, usually updating is uneventful. Let’s look at CachyOS January 2026 announcement for an example of eventful:
CachyOS says:
Manual changes for existing users:
KDE Plasma users with SDDM can now migrate to Plasma-Login-Manager. Please run:
What else is difficult? .pacnew files. What are those? Config file changes, basically. Pacman the package manager doesn’t deal with config files. You have your old file and the .pacnew file. You manually merge them. Install meld, it highlights the differences and provides arrows to move the changes easily into your existing config file of whatever got updated. How often? Not very. I’ve done it…under 15 times in a full year I think?
Now, I think a Windows power user can handle this. Someone scared of folder structures and doesn’t read error messages? No.
I have never, not once, looked at those announcement links.
And I just click on the fancy icon in my taskbar that runs pacman -Syu for me.
I’ll have to look at .pacnew, but again, I think you’re making this way bigger of an issue than it really is, these are pretty simple things to do and learn compared to other Linux bullshit I’ve had to deal with in the past.
Also, talking about updates, I remember an update in October? for two of my Windows PCs at the time that bricked Windows Update. The solution? Reinstall windows. So I installed Cachy instead.
*Edit, and I just looked at sddm/plasma, the latest plasma updates auto disabled sddm for me and enabled plasmalogin. So, not sure why it was a suggested manual change?
I was explaining what’s so “difficult” about running rolling release and best practice because I don’t think it’s all that difficult…😅 but nobody usually explains what people even mean by that. Unknown scary!!
If you want to ignore arch news…that’s up to you I don’t care. Long term things do go wrong now and then. Not that it’s a big deal with snapshots.
It’s pretty much exclusively about the update process for me. With fixed-release distros, you typically only have to actually pay attention, read news posts etc. before updating to a new major version, which in case of Ubuntu LTS happens every 2 years, which is a lot fewer opportunities to fuck up than Arch’s rolling release. Not insurmountable if you’re something of a power user or willing to put in the work to learn, but hardly the first choice for someone asking for an entry-level distro.
But if you’re gaming, I think you should be on the latest kernel possible, so a rolling release(Fedora) or bleeding edge(Arch). Latest Ubuntu derivative(25.10, soon 26.04) is fine but not ideal. It’s the main reason SteamOS is also based on Arch.
Ubuntu’s HWE kernel is just fine, even for LTS users. The only time it might not be enough is if you buy bleeding edge hardware. IME, the actual issue with Ubuntu for gaming is that sometimes you’ll need newer mesa packages, which needs to be acquired separately from the kernel, usually via PPA. If you’re playing newly-released AAA games, that does come up occasionally. e.g. I started using a mesa PPA when I got Elden Ring. Though I’m not sure if even that is necessary if you use the 6-monthly Ubuntu releases.
So yeah, if you’re that kind of gamer, Arch probably is a cleaner or at least equivalent solution than Ubuntu.
I totally understand and I do hate recommending Arch right from the start, but CachyOS is a great entry level Arch distro. The installer is pretty straight forward and setup is very minimal if you’re just going to game. The only thing lacking IMO, for beginners, is an “app store” with pretty pictures.
But if you’re gaming, I think you should be on the latest kernel possible, so a rolling release(Fedora) or bleeding edge(Arch). Latest Ubuntu derivative(25.10, soon 26.04) is fine but not ideal. It’s the main reason SteamOS is also based on Arch.
Again, not gaming? Mint is probably the defacto unless you’re on newer hardware.
I think if someone is a power user of Windows already then they can adapt to CachyOS as a new user. I’d recommend it to those people because I was that guy lol. The difficulty is…updating! Not using the OS. What does that mean actually for new people looking in?
You read:
https://archlinux.org/news/
https://discuss.cachyos.org/c/announcements/5
Before updating. Every time. Which you do pretty often. That’s the point of rolling release. Sometimes you have to manually intervene, usually updating is uneventful. Let’s look at CachyOS January 2026 announcement for an example of eventful:
CachyOS says:
Manual changes for existing users:
KDE Plasma users with SDDM can now migrate to Plasma-Login-Manager. Please run:
sudo pacman -Syu plasma-login-manager sudo systemctl disable sddm sudo systemctl enable plasmalogin sudo pacman -R sddm-kcm cachyos-themes-sddm sddmoutside of this the usual:
sudo pacman -SyuWhat else is difficult? .pacnew files. What are those? Config file changes, basically. Pacman the package manager doesn’t deal with config files. You have your old file and the .pacnew file. You manually merge them. Install meld, it highlights the differences and provides arrows to move the changes easily into your existing config file of whatever got updated. How often? Not very. I’ve done it…under 15 times in a full year I think?
Now, I think a Windows power user can handle this. Someone scared of folder structures and doesn’t read error messages? No.
I have been running CachyOS for 3 months now.
I have never, not once, looked at those announcement links.
And I just click on the fancy icon in my taskbar that runs pacman -Syu for me.
I’ll have to look at .pacnew, but again, I think you’re making this way bigger of an issue than it really is, these are pretty simple things to do and learn compared to other Linux bullshit I’ve had to deal with in the past.
Also, talking about updates, I remember an update in October? for two of my Windows PCs at the time that bricked Windows Update. The solution? Reinstall windows. So I installed Cachy instead.
*Edit, and I just looked at sddm/plasma, the latest plasma updates auto disabled sddm for me and enabled plasmalogin. So, not sure why it was a suggested manual change?
I was explaining what’s so “difficult” about running rolling release and best practice because I don’t think it’s all that difficult…😅 but nobody usually explains what people even mean by that. Unknown scary!!
If you want to ignore arch news…that’s up to you I don’t care. Long term things do go wrong now and then. Not that it’s a big deal with snapshots.
It’s pretty much exclusively about the update process for me. With fixed-release distros, you typically only have to actually pay attention, read news posts etc. before updating to a new major version, which in case of Ubuntu LTS happens every 2 years, which is a lot fewer opportunities to fuck up than Arch’s rolling release. Not insurmountable if you’re something of a power user or willing to put in the work to learn, but hardly the first choice for someone asking for an entry-level distro.
Ubuntu’s HWE kernel is just fine, even for LTS users. The only time it might not be enough is if you buy bleeding edge hardware. IME, the actual issue with Ubuntu for gaming is that sometimes you’ll need newer mesa packages, which needs to be acquired separately from the kernel, usually via PPA. If you’re playing newly-released AAA games, that does come up occasionally. e.g. I started using a mesa PPA when I got Elden Ring. Though I’m not sure if even that is necessary if you use the 6-monthly Ubuntu releases.
So yeah, if you’re that kind of gamer, Arch probably is a cleaner or at least equivalent solution than Ubuntu.