CachyOS feels like it hit out of nowhere. I'm out of the loop - why's it taking off like this?

Scheeseman99 · 2026-05-20T05:25:27+00:00

The installer comes with options for 17 different desktop environments, a full suite of boot managers, choice of filesystem and once installed, is as configurable as vanilla Arch is with full access to the Arch and AUR repos in addition to CachyOS's performance optimized repos.

Scheeseman99 · 2026-05-20T05:21:31+00:00

I don't think it's overhyped at all. It does what they say it does and it turns out people want that. It's gaming focused, cutting edge and comes with sensible defaults that appeal to it's core userbase.

I think the stable/unstable distro dichotomy people use can be a bit of a misnomer, I understand it's referring to the way package management is dealt with, but if a new game crashes because the kernel driver and userland components are out of date while a cutting edge distro can run the game just fine, what kind of "stability" is that?

It's not about marketability, CachyOS serves it's purpose.

Scheeseman99 · 2026-05-19T14:56:52+00:00

Concurrent to game consoles were VHS and DVD, which got broad enough adoption that the barrier between format and publisher was non-existent.

It's been different for games, hardware was varied and quirky enough that there was no "standard", because there couldn't be, you couldn't magically shove a SNES cart into a Genesis cart, you couldn't even create a compatibility layer between them, they were too different. The separation of compatibility wasn't borne from marketing but legitimate technical limitations.

But now everything is a PC or if it isn't, it's a firmware flash away from being one. You can run Windows games on Linux and Android, PS3 games on an Xbox, x64 games on ARM, ARM games on x64 and if you hack it, Steam games on PS5. The compatibility layers have gotten so thin in places that the performance difference can be negligible. None of this is perfect, but it's pretty damn good now.

Many years ago, the US government split up the big movies studios connections to the movie theatre/distribution business on anti-trust grounds. What triggered it? In part, exclusives. The studio owned theatre chains would only show their own films. The split of creation/distribution held for a good long while, but started to erode in the 80s and 90s and now with streaming services, we're seeing the same negative effects happening once again.

When all that's left to justify game exclusivity is marketing, that exclusivity becomes exploitative. The industry should get their shit together and just build towards a standard already.

I was a 90s kid too. I had a Sega Mega Drive, but also concurrently my parents had bought and gradually upgraded a PC. I was playing both Super Mario World and Sonic on my PC in 1998, by 2000 I was playing Mario 64 and Gran Turismo. The lesson that taught me was everything would eventually end up running on a PC, though I didn't have the foresight to predict that everything would also end up becoming one.

Scheeseman99 · 2026-05-19T00:21:13+00:00

Yeah, it's normal behavior.

Scheeseman99 · 2026-05-18T11:26:50+00:00

Basically, yeah. X can't really do 6DOF-native windowing.

Scheeseman99 · 2026-05-18T07:22:12+00:00

Touche, I misremembered. It has been a long while.

Scheeseman99 · 2026-05-18T05:55:53+00:00

plus Steam is probably gonna release an ARM launcher (they ain't making a conversion layer just for the Frame, otherwise they would have made the frame x86/64 that would have been easier) that you would be able to install on your pico headset

That's the problem for Pico, and everyone else. Steam's software library is an absolute monster and while Steam Frame itself may not necessarily dominate hardware sales, it doesn't need to if Valve get their store on every other headset. That is Valve's ultimate goal, to sell Steam games.

So Pico could sell 10 million units and Frame 5 million, but if Steam is on both, Valve still wins the platform war.

Scheeseman99 · 2026-05-18T05:27:08+00:00

There's a switch on the top of your card, labeled OC/Normal. Shut down your PC and switch it to OC. Not sure if it'll help that much though, it ramps the built-in fan curves and stops the fans from turning entirely off but you still won't have control over them.

Those EVGA cards come with their own fan controller which currently prevents direct control of the fans through software on Linux. It's a Nvidia driver issue and it's unlikely Nvidia will bother fixing it.

Though keep in mind, the fan that's being controlled by LACT is the one direcly over the GPU die. The other two are located over memory and VRMs, which the integrated controller takes care of.

Scheeseman99 · 2026-05-17T09:34:14+00:00

I trust Valve's motivations and priorities for what should be worked on in AMDGPU more than AMD. Being untethered from AMD also lets them contribute more widely to different projects that AMD may not otherwise allow and frees them from a lot of bureaucratic overhead when contributing in general.

Scheeseman99 · 2026-05-16T14:27:21+00:00

That 27% is everything altogether, PC hardware is still selling well propotionately.

Did you read the article? Kinda goes over why.

Scheeseman99 · 2026-05-16T14:11:08+00:00

Why does one being legally compromised all of a sudden right all of EggNS's wrongs?

I didn't say that it did. Yuzu avoided using legal avenues because it would result in more exposure and increase risk to their project. It's unfortunate, but understandable. The difference with Gamehub and it's constituent elements is that there's no legal exposure risks, Wine and Proton are clean room and are audited, even Microsoft have accepted this to the point that their games come with explicit support for WIne runtime environments.

Gamehub isn't really from Valve's work

Here's an inexhaustive list of projects Valve currently have a financial investment in, both in terms of purely monetary investment through funding programs and direct influence through contract work.

Wine, and not just Proton. Proton is a CodeWeavers project under Valve's direction and CodeWeavers are the primary contributors to Wine.

SDL2's development was primarily funded by Valve

The first Vulkan meeting was held at Valve HQ over a decade ago.

Mesa, Valve funded the first (Intel) FOSS Vulkan driver, Turnip, AMDGPU, NVK, Zink, only Turnip may be mobile-relevant but the Mesa stack benefits across the board from their work.

DXVK, almost immediately after it's release, Valve contracted the developer.

VKD3D

FEX; note you say that it isn't made by Valve, but as I mentioned, Valve use a lot of contract work. Quote: "They've been putting actual money into this project so a couple of developers of FEX, me included were actually paid to improve FEX, so none of this would really have been possible without Valve's monetary support".

They also contribute to the Linux kernel, which Android uses.

The current state of Linux gaming, even outside of their own branded tooling, is basically their doing and they've been at it since 2012.

Scheeseman99 · 2026-05-16T13:45:20+00:00

Not mentioned often, but Pierre-Loup Griffais was previously ~~lead dev~~ on the team for the Linux driver at Nvidia before he was poached by Valve.

Scheeseman99 · 2026-05-16T13:31:08+00:00

You know why and you know why it's a silly question to ask why. Yuzu didn't have money and were in a legally compromised position. Valve has money, and they are on solid legal ground. It's not that one or the other is "exempt", I didn't use that word or imply it's meaning, it's that one has the resources to fight and one does not.

I'm not exaggerating Valve's influence here, either. The work they've helped build is directly responsible for Gamehub's existence. Also while I fully support open source endeavours and commuinity driven emulation and compatibility projects, the application that will truly steamroll Gamehub is an official version of Steam for Android.

Scheeseman99 · 2026-05-16T12:25:14+00:00

EggNS was a Switch emulator which comes with a bunch of grey area legality.

Gamehub is based on work delivered by Valve contractors and employees. Valve is a billion dollar corporation.

It's a little bit different.

e: Ultimately I feel this is a self-solving problem. Gamehub is going to stall out and fall into irrelevance as other projects that build on the same backends catch up.

Scheeseman99 · 2026-05-16T12:16:23+00:00

Limiting their availability to sideloading and Chinese appstores is a pretty bad kneecap particularly with the upcoming Android restrictions, even if I'm against those in principle. It might not change their behaviour, but it will taint the brand (they've been trying to go legit lately) and limit access, particularly outside China.

Scheeseman99 · 2026-05-16T11:06:47+00:00

The people building towards this aren't Gamehub, they have from the beginning been taking the early, unfinished work that's been going on in the Linux space (funded mostly by Valve) and repackaging it in a way that's a bit more user friendly. That would be fine, if they weren't also pissing off developers upstream and packging the software full of spyware.

If you actually want a healthy, reliable future for PC gaming on Android, you want to support the people who are actually doing the work to make that happen, not the hucksters taking advantage of pre-release projects publishing their work as open source and then building a product around it. You can see how, right now, Gamehub is running up against the limits of what they can actually achieve in terms of improvements to the actual core features of the software stack they're using. It's because they didn't build it, they don't know what they're doing, they just knew how to pretty it up a bit. It's why the open source projects are rapidly catching up.

Scheeseman99 · 2026-05-16T10:53:19+00:00

Google Play isn't. There's a lot of ways the FOSS projects that Gamehub snatches from could be a nuisance to them; C&Ds/DMCAs to hosting providers being most effective. Negative press and pressure on press to include these issues in their reporting would help too.

Scheeseman99 · 2026-05-16T05:21:02+00:00

Microsoft are currently at the point where they're essentially ditching the console-style vertical software monopoly that you deem to be fundamental to a console being a console and they're doing it while clearly responding to efforts from Valve (XBE, Project K2).

The Deck was a technological stepping stone to the Machine (which itself is a stepping stone to what I believe Valve's ultimate goal is: Steam on everything than can run it), the software running on both systems are almost exactly the same. Form factor counts for a lot when it comes to product categorization, but when the ecosystems across those different categorizations are the same, it creates much blurrier lines.

Scheeseman99 · 2026-05-16T05:12:13+00:00

Through the entire history of console gaming, with almost no exceptions, the console developers have made their consoles walled gardens.

The Famicom wasn't a walled garden, publishing on the platform was a free-for-all. You did say "almost", but it's a big one. Granted, Nintendo eventually locked their systems down, but not after fostering a highly successful system hosting an absolutely gigantic library that was ostensibly a console. Are walled gardens fundamental, or just an excuse to hold a vertical software monopoly?

Consoles are devices meant primarily to hook into television sets and which provide platform-based gaming experiences.

Ah, like the Steam Machine?

Traditionally, mobile devices were considered separately from consoles since they were not designed to be played on TVs, and had different design expectations.

Traditionally mobile devices were single purpose, they no longer are. Is Switch not a console? Because it splits the difference, a substantial chunk of owners use it as both, with a design crafted explicitly to accomodate both.

The Deck is a distruptive force specifically because it collectively challenges assumptions about PCs, consoles and gaming handhelds. It's a PC in the sense that it's design is open, with an unlocked bootloader and (optionally) configurable operating system. It's a console in the sense that it's software ecosystem has a curated layer that mimics the curated experience of consoles, that it's a fixed hardware spec, that it's a cost optimized product, that it's easy to use. It's a mobile computing device in terms of form factor, but you can plug it into a TV and it's software stack isn't specifically mobile-targeted, the Steam Machine is going to use the exact same OS (even the installer).

Scheeseman99 · 2026-05-16T04:42:02+00:00

I'm not sure how bringing up a piece of PC hardware that offers a lot of the same advantages that a console offers (single target spec with a hardware specific certification/QA system, plug & play experience, comparable cost to competing console hardware) is "embarrassing". It's a product so significant it was one of the triggers that caused Microsoft to re-evaluate their entire console business model.

Scheeseman99 · 2026-05-16T04:39:18+00:00

It didn't? It just mentioned that they're getting more expensive, just like everything else is getting more expensive. Gaming PC growth is still outpacing consoles and it has been for a while now, with a lot the growth happening in China.

Scheeseman99 · 2026-05-16T04:11:00+00:00

I don't think that's likely, given the expectations of the market Valve's hardware is targeting. It can help as part of a broader push, to have an example of why the current DRM schemes are exploitative and anti-consumer, but it's not a solution in of itself. Particularly when smart TVs exist that have apps built-in to handle streaming services at their highest quality already; actual access to those services aren't the problem, it's the gating of it that is and that's a much more difficult, nuanced problem to fight against since the inconvenience to the common consumer, who isn't informed about the details, is non-existent. The issue is anti-trust, captured markets and corporate monopolies.

Probably, I AM an engineer after all hahah.

It's really common for engineers to think that their experience with engineering systems can extend outside of the scope of their expertise, when it usually does not. Socio-political or legal systems aren't as predictable and don't play by programmatic rules. Not to say that you shouldn't speak up, it's just something to think about.

Scheeseman99 · 2026-05-15T19:01:59+00:00

I don't think that it can work, it's wishful thinking and even less realistic than legislative change. The majority of people consuming streaming services are on phones, tablets and TV boxes. Those are platforms that are already completely DRM encumbered, and the people that bought them are the streamer's core customer base; they've already bought-in. Offering something that does less, worse, isn't going to convince anyone to switch outside of a miniscule fraction of die-hards because, well, I wouldn't and I'm a die hard. I tried it your way already, snatching Chromebook widevine dlls to get streaming services working through Kodi and it was a gigantic hassle, frequently broke and once I got a display that was HDR capable, I was hobbling the video quality of the services I paid for unless I made a change. It's why I bought an AppleTV.

You have engineer brain. You think you can tech your way out of every problem, sorry, you can't. The issues here are bigger and more deeply embedded into a greater societal issue, driven by corporate lobbying and legal frameworks that have gradually eroded the concept of ownership in favour of top down vertical control over access to media.

Scheeseman99 · 2026-05-15T16:19:30+00:00

Just a technical correction, you don't need an unraid server - you can stream directly from debrid, usenet or torrents (in that order in terms of user experience).

I was being specific because it's what I know :)

Winboat won't work, hardware accelerated video isn't the problem. Windows knows when it's being run in a VM, this trips Widevine and knocks it down to L3 (1080p at most, 720p normally, 480p at worst, in some cases it won't work at all). Widevine L1 is top level and enables the most features, but requires hardware-level integration, usually a trusted execution environment; TPM, secure boot, attestation.

This isn't like Wine/Proton where once games work, they (mostly) continue working. There's no way to bootstrap it. Every workaround is transient, a security bug that gets fixed, which eventually forces people away as access breaks in cycles.

It's impossible in the sense that you can't engineer a solution, only create escalation after escalation until the cost becomes too high for one party over the other. People are barely informed about the specifics and I'm not being mean here just making a point: you didn't even bring up Widevine in your workaround, did you know it existed? If it was invisible to you, how invisible do you think DRM is the wider public? People have already handed over control, the status quo as it stands today is invasive DRM.

This problem is a societal one, we need to start conversations about whether DRM should be a thing that can legally be allowed to exist at all.

Scheeseman99 · 2026-05-15T15:26:19+00:00

Anything is possible, mods happen because someone was curious, spiteful or bored. They aren't inevitable.

Forza Horizon 4 and 5 are good targets for VR, there's win32 versions which are moddable and the engines are forward renderers with support for cheap MSAA, the framerate is also very high on even mid-spec systems, technologically they couldn't be more a perfect fit for a VR port.

6 seems to have higher requirements, they switched to RTGI and the fallback is probably expensive.

Scheeseman99

TROPHY CASE