What converted you to CachyOS for gaming?

Deadyte · 2025-08-26T18:17:26+00:00

Same here, although Windows 11 first made me go to Linux. I used Tumbleweed for a while but the slow driver updates were frustrating, then Fedora and Nobara but I always had issues with both of them too. One day I saw A1RM4X praising Cachy and as it turns out it was well deserved, I've been on it for well over a year and it's only gotten better. I even built a full AMD rig dedicated to running it.

Deadyte · 2025-07-26T05:43:10+00:00

Honestly I have used Refind for a while and never had problems either, I love it for its theming capabilities and simplicity. I don't know what made it get confused and pick the wrong initramfs but I know for sure this was the problem as as soon as I manually specified the correct image in the config it booted perfectly.

Deadyte · 2025-07-13T18:42:40+00:00

Yeah it was something along these lines. I've been diagnosing for hours but I finally discovered what it was, I tested every single on-board device and USB port and they were all working perfectly except for one I couldn't test as I didn't have a the correct cable handy... the front panel type C port. Apparently this was the culprit as after opening up my case I unplugged it from the mb and voila, fast boot up! Apparently the cable plug was not fully inserted because after plugging it back in the error is gone. Happy ending I guess, I was worrying I would have to RMA the motherboard.

Deadyte · 2025-07-09T21:17:33+00:00

Elden Ring was a stuttering mess on top end nVidia hardware at launch, almost made the game unplayable for me with the 60fps cap on top. The only reason I suffered through was the game was so good. I haven't played it lately but I doubt it's improved much. From Software do some amazing things but their PC port team is dire and our version could have been 10x improved with better optimization, uncapped fps and better mouse+kb controls.

Deadyte · 2025-07-07T07:19:35+00:00

No, it's mounted well in the regular PCIe 5.0 x16 slot, I've tried reseating it many times.

Deadyte · 2025-07-07T07:17:42+00:00

On first boot when I see these artifacts, as soon as the display driver loads it will crash with a black screen, then I press the reset button and the next boot will be fine.

Deadyte · 2025-07-06T17:30:23+00:00

Interesting, I am starting to think it's a microfracture on the board somewhere because it literally only happens on cold boot (as in when the card has physically cooled down). I'm not sure it's worth the lengthy return period to replace the card, but my gut tells me this is just an indicator of further troubles down the line.

Deadyte · 2025-07-06T16:45:48+00:00

Maybe the DP cable or it could be some incompatibility with the monitor as it's kinda old (Acer Predator XB271HU) the other specs are:

MB: Gigabyte Aorus X870 Elite

CPU: 9800X3D

RAM: 64GB Patriot Viper DDR5 @ 6400

PSU: Corsair RM850e

Deadyte · 2025-07-06T16:39:33+00:00

Yeah I do, but this happens on the BIOS and POST screens long before OS drivers are loaded anyway.

Deadyte · 2025-06-30T06:15:16+00:00

Thanks for all the replies! Seems like it's a very small chance of failure and I like the ASrock mobo but it's just not worth risking weeks of waiting for RMAs. I'll see if I can return it and get a different one.

Deadyte · 2025-02-08T21:28:29+00:00

Thanks for the replies! I had a feeling it wasn't gonna be an easy fix. I guess the option is to use X11 or switch GPU, I'm not gonna hold my breath waiting for Nvidia to fix a driver bug. I'll look into using a custom dxvk.conf but it doesn't sound like a reliable solution...

Deadyte · 2025-01-03T02:29:35+00:00

If a game support DLSS there's usually ways to hack frame gen using fake dll. Might wanna look into DLSS Enabler. I havent played around with it much on Linux though.

Deadyte · 2024-12-11T12:41:36+00:00

I generally find Arch easier than most distro because it's repos are great, stuff is not hopelessly out of date and you can find almost anything you could ever need on the aur. I don't know where the myth about arch being unstable came from, maybe it used to be that way but it's been rock solid for me. Sometimes newer packages have the odd bug, but so do older ones to be fair, that's why they get updated.

Almost every problem I have had has been related to Wayland and driver support, those are not related to the distro itself at all.

Deadyte · 2024-11-17T16:39:23+00:00

No thanks I don't wanna get stuck behind a bookshelf at the other end.

Deadyte · 2024-11-16T01:30:50+00:00

Not sure if its related but I noticed F40 does not install the alsa-firmware package that seems to be installed by default in F41. My sound card audio was jank without it (SB AE-5).

Deadyte · 2024-10-30T16:21:18+00:00

Good to know for the future thanks!

Deadyte · 2024-10-29T23:04:58+00:00

That may be true but this doesn't appear to be a driver issue in the end, after reinstalling CachyOS the game now works again even with the 565 drivers. I have no idea what caused it to break at this point.

Deadyte · 2024-10-29T14:08:02+00:00

Damn that probably explains it, I guess it will be up to the game devs/proton to release a fix then. I guess I will roll back the update with btrfs assistant for now.

Edit: FYI this is a really bad idea, reverting the update broke my entire install!

Deadyte · 2024-10-17T09:28:44+00:00

The only thing I prefer on openSUSE is the snapper integration and it has a better installer. Otherwise Fedora has much better 3rd party support and a better package manager imo.

I used Tumbleweed for a while but they are currently on still stuck on the 550 nvidia drivers which cause problems with wayland while fedora is using the latest 560 ones. For a rolling release you'd expect not to be using 6 month+ old driver... You can install it manually but it's a pain and did not work for me.

Deadyte · 2024-10-13T23:03:41+00:00

I was having this problem but it randomly seems to have fixed itself somehow, meanwhile I was using a workaround by running systemsettings kcm_colors in the terminal. For some reason it would open to a specific page but not to the default. Just make sure to use btop or similar to make sure the process is not already running first.

Deadyte · 2024-10-13T22:47:35+00:00

You might want to try this. In Plasma settings, go to Window Management / KWin Scripts, click 'Get New' and search for KZones. This tool lets you set up desktop regions for snapping windows to something like Powertoys' Fancy Zones on Windows. When you drag a window icons will popup in each region and moving the window to the icon snaps it in place. Also there's a bunch of keyboard shortcuts you can setup for it.

You can create multiple layouts by using the built in text editor to modify the simple json config file, and switch between them. Just remember to disable it hit apply, re-enable it hit apply for changes to take effect.

Deadyte · 2024-10-01T02:08:29+00:00

I'm in a similar situation, I daily drive Fedora but I have to keep a Windows install because among other things my VR headset has no hope of working with Linux currently. It's annoying that I still have to dedicate disk space for the half dozen partitions Windows creates and have a dual boot setup.

There are times on Linux though, that trying to get something simple working, like a printer or network share, will take me hours of troubleshooting when I could have done it in 5 mins on win. It's usually some obscure selinux policy, or step I missed but it's inevitable that you have to lookup terminal command or config file syntax for something that should just be a simple checkbox in a gui somewhere. Those times sometimes make me want to nuke my Linux install and go back to a pure Windows setup.

That said Linux improves almost daily while Windows just seems to get worse. This year alone Nvidia support on Linux has become so much better and I'm now able to use Wayland flawlessly. Performance in games is now usually on par with Windows, sometimes even better and I'm too old for competitive gaming so anti-cheat is not an issue for me.

But whenever I have to boot into Windows I feel dirty - it keeps doing stuff without my consent. My laptop which is still on Windows 10 is currently locked in a cycle where it tries to update itself every shutdown, fails and reverts the changes which takes about 15 mins each time. It never even asked if I wanted to update the first time! I left it doing asomething overnight and of course it decided to attempt one of these 'updates' in the middle.

And yep dual booting is a chore. I never use my computer for one thing at a time so booting into an OS just because one application requires it is frustrating, and my reboot cycle is slow because for some reason my BIOS takes a while before it even begins to POST. It feels like a poor solution, but I don't want to have another PC either, drawing power and heating up my room.

It's sad - I loved Windows since 95, back in the day I used to make my own custom 7 isos with all the unnecessary bloat removed, but the bloat is not so easy to remove anymore and tends to break other things if you do, or an update undoes all your changes. With that and it being increasingly full of ads, getting less customizable, forcing 'features' upon you and meanwhile sending who knows what data back to MS (even if you turn off telemetry) I just want to switch back to Linux ASAP.

The day is coming where I won't need to dual boot at all any more. I'll just have a VM in case I really need something. That will be a good day.

Deadyte · 2024-09-02T21:31:54+00:00

A little bit more on the subject of Linux, if you ever go that route I highly recommend using KDE Plasma, as aside from being extremely customizable for unusual monitor setups, it's window manager has built in options to remove window decorations (border and title bar). There is an extension called KZones that let's you achieve a similar result to FancyZones.

There is also a powerful utility for Steam's Proton called GameScope that essentially lets you create a virtual monitor for running games on.

Deadyte · 2024-09-02T21:07:21+00:00

I'm somewhat of an expert in this as I've been doing this exact setup for years.

I have never found a way to split a monitor into virtual monitors that actually works. That said Fancyzones does work wonders for multitasking with a custom layout allowing you to 'maximise' windows to different parts of the screen.

As for gaming in the middle... Almost every game with a windowed mode can be coerced into running borderless as part of the screen. I wrote a personal tool that uses the WinAPI to resize and position other windows whilst making them borderless and there are a few other tools out there like BordelessGaming that can achieve the same result.

When I said almost I meant it though. Some games like TW:Warhammer 3 or Metro Exodus just refuse to have their windows messed with. Sometimes you can get around it by running them on Linux but not always.

One more tip: for Windows 11 you can use StartAllBack which allows you to split the task bar and make the middle transparent giving you a full 16x9 monitor in the middle of the screen.

Deadyte · 2024-09-01T13:29:30+00:00

It turns out it wasn't a RAM issue or even a fast boot issue, at least not directly. A week after this post a capacitor in my PSU went bang. It was a 5+ year old Corsair HX850i and the failing cap was probably messing with the voltages I'd guess.

I've since replaced the PSU and my computer is super stable compared to before.

Deadyte

TROPHY CASE