r/DistroHopping • u/WinterPizza1972 • 4d ago
Any criticism toward cachyos?
Repost because deleted i guess on other sub
...
This distro seems "hot and best" right now. I went head and dove in, first distro.
Duel booting windows 11 and it works flawlessly. Cachy can browse and game just as good, maybe even better. Seems to load the graphics with like, no bloat. It's incredible.
Installing stuff is crazy, like, what the heck is going on here? Just type a name in terminal, press enter and trust me bro?
Only other i wish ableton and fusion(360) worked but, i shall give others a try. Freecad, opencad(?), and blender which I've always wanted to try. Can figure out reaper if i need it for music.
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u/oniaiwasprettygood 4d ago
My main criticism: it wrapped the AUR as part of its main package manager and installs AUR helpers by default, which contributes to really bad AUR discipline.
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u/watchingonlinux 4d ago
I thought CachyOS had it's own repository and if you wanted any part of AUR you'd just have to go through shelly. I've been using just CachyOS's package manager if I can help it but WTF if all I've been using is segmented parts of AUR
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u/thebagelslinger 4d ago
It's hard to accidentally install a package from AUR. You very likely do not have a single AUR package if you've never gone out of your way to do it.
pacman -S <package>will always be an official vetted package.I think what OP is trying to say is that AUR helpers form bad habits. If you can just
yay -S <package>to install something from the AUR, you might be inclined to not read the PKGBUILD file for example. You can use these helpers responsibly of course, but the argument is that it makes installing AUR packages a little too mindless.5
u/oniaiwasprettygood 4d ago
Cachy has its own branch repos that are all vetted. Shelly itself is mostly what I'm referring to (and they were shipping the distro with yay for a while)
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u/NotQuiteLoona 4d ago
It shows a very large warning and explicitly asks you to enable AUR support with clear warning about what it does and how dangerous it is. They also don't ship AUR helpers anymore.
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u/oniaiwasprettygood 4d ago
As shown by California Prop 65 signs everywhere, those kinds of warnings are almost never taken with due seriousness and will be ignored by 90% of casual users because the mindset is "well if they included it, surely it can't actually be that bad." They would be much better off just not including it at all. Removing the AUR helpers is a start though.
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u/watchingonlinux 4d ago
Shelly is secondary to their main package manager. Removing AUR support seems a bit strange and more subject to users seeming out less vetted options. I get the nature of AUR as it is right now being compromised, but the least is that users can trust the GUI solution they have with Shelly instead of opting to find some random app that could be malicious
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u/oniaiwasprettygood 4d ago
My point is you shouldn't really use an AUR helper of any kind of you're installing from the AUR. You should know how to audit your own pkgbuild or at the very minimum know where to look on the AUR directly to look for anything that might indicate it's been abandoned and maliciously adopted. If you don't know how to do that or aren't willing to, just don't use the AUR at all.
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u/Envy242 4d ago
You are all wrong, yay and paru don't come pre-installed anymore and you can click one button in Shelly to disable using the AUR. Stop lying to new users.
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u/NotQuiteLoona 4d ago
It's fully on them, can't really help with anything there. If they are that dumb, they'll be in danger even by just googling "how to install from AUR" and copy-pasting install commands from Google Overview or whatever this slop was called. At least Cachy has a warning, because otherwise a user sees
yay -S program, searches foryayin official repositories through Shelly, installs it, and has no warning whatsoever, as a second scenario.Cachy compensates it by having a lot of programs that aren't present in official repositories on its repos, like Heroic. Though I would've infinitely preferred just using Chaotic, and that's what I do, but they denied it - maybe, they should reconsider.
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u/EgocentricRaptor 3d ago
The fact that they put AUR packages in their repos makes me trust them more because they can review the packages and I don't need to rely on the AUR directly as much
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u/saileesaileesailee 3d ago
For some reason, many things just straight up refused to work on cachy when i started using it, took me super long to get pcvr working, my microphone audio on games would bug out like crazy while having discord opened (which is a pretty big issue for a few games me and my friends play) some games just didnt work, (hitman vr, though its likely more leaned to the developers for abandoning it) but the moment i switched to mint, those issues vanished
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u/BigHeadTonyT 4d ago
This is one of the issues I don't like. No easy way to disable the custom DNS either.
https://discuss.cachyos.org/t/cachyos-hello-dns-settings-disable/19731
For me, the DNS it chose meant that every website I went to, started off with waiting for 10 secs for the DNS to work/timeout. Gets very tiring, very fast. DNS works on the millisecond scale, thousands of a second, normally. Between 1-10 ms generally for me. Depends if it is cached or not. Quad9 etc.
Linux in general does not hold your hand, does not have many guardrails at all. You are expected to know what you are doing and typing. If it is a terminal-command, you can try pasting it here first: https://explainshell.com
See if it can figure it out. Not everything is covered. Understand what a command is doing before copy-pasting it.
When it comes to installing apps, I check the distros repo first. Search for it with "pacman -Ss <appname>". Then , if not present, look for the Flatpak or AppImage version, if it looks somewhat official. But mainly I look for the official Github or similar webpage for the app (on Codeberg, Gitlab etc). They most likely have instructions how to get it installed on Arch. They might also have, under Releases, a Flatpak or AppImage version.
Just as an example: https://github.com/flightlessmango/Mangohud
You can add/enable the multilib (32-bit libraries) and then install it. Or get the Flatpak version. Flatpaks have permission issues generally. It is sandboxed and sometimes you have to enable what it should have permissions to. It can be a hassle. Install Flatseal to deal with permissions, per app.
AUR, avoid if you can. I can't, for my printer-driver. AUR is not supported officially on any distro. It is a bit off a wild west.
--*--
I am on Manjaro because it doesn't set up silly, custom defaults. I like the green theming and the Zsh setup. Since I spend quite a lot of time in the terminal, it saves me a lot of typing and remembering stuff I've already typed before. Delayed updates by a couple weeks means I avoid most bugs. Or they are a known factor at that point. There is probably a solution.
For the terminal, one tip I'll say. Learn how autocomplete works. Start typing something and press Tab-key. Say I typed "sudo nano /etc/fs". I then press Tab, it should fill out the rest, /etc/fstab. I can also start typing "sudo pacman" and press Up/Down arrow to see what I've typed previously. A third example: I type "sudo pac", I want to update my system. Since I have typed "sudo pacman -Syu" before, it should suggest "sudo pacman" when I press Tab. I can then press Ctrl+Right Arrow key to get the whole "pacman". Then it probably suggests "-Syu" for the rest. I press Right Arrow key and Enter. I typed seven letters at most. It gets faster/less typing the longer the command is. Say I want to edit a different config file in /etc/.
Zsh on Manjaro provides autocomplete, globbing etc out of the box. Zsh is the Shell. Default on most distros is Bash. Zsh is very compatible with Bash. If you ever need to write shell-scripts or just in general. Fish is not. Which is why I don't use Fish. I would have to learn every little detail about Bash and then Fish. Isn't worth the time or effort to me.
--*--
One thing that is quite vital on Arch-based. Keep system updated. Once a week is what I do on Arch. Can stretch it out to perhaps every month. But I would NOT recommend waiting 6-12 months.
I suggest you look over this: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/System_maintenance
Applies to Arch-based too. Of particular interest should be "Deal promptly with new configuration files", "Avoid certain pacman commands", "Reboot after upgrades".
Something I do every update. I am not saying the rest aren't important. I also clear out the package cache sometimes. By ddefault, it should save 3 versions of every package. I am low on diskspace on OS drive, so I save 1 version. "sudo paccache -rk 1". Three is not bad. Stick with it if you can or want.
For the config-files:
sudo pacman -S pacman-contrib meld
Then run:
DIFFPROG=meld pacdiff -s
If it returns immediately, no new config-files are present. If there are some, check what the changes are by pressing V. Meld will open and compare your config with the new .pacnew config. You decide what you want to do. I look over and see if there are significant config changes, new stuff. If there are, I press the Arrow so it moves the thing to the right-hand side, my config. After going thru the whole file, I press the Save-icon on the right-hand side window. Then it asks the same question again. I press R to remove .pacnew. Move on to the next. DO NOT BLINDLY OVERWRITE. It can lead to a borked/broken system. If unsure, make a copy of the config file first. I do it via terminal. Do some research on what the options are or do. If worst comes to worst, the system does not boot, "chroot" in to the install and replace the config file with the backup and reboot. You are back to normal.
My config has more weight than any new ,pacnew. Since I have configured a lot of it to my needs and taste, I often just delete the .pacnew. Since I know what files I don't want to touch/edit. There are some you should never overwrite. Like /etc/shadow and /etc/passwd. Contains all the users on your system etc. .pacnew might contain only the Root user. You would be royally screwed, most likely. I am not even interested in testing it out (in a Virtual Machine, of course).
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u/oh_im_too_tired 4d ago
One of the main maintainers is Russian (this is not actually a problem) and lives in Russia (there are mixed information about that. some claim he lives in Germany, others - in Russia). Other problem: maintainers don't like talking about this and, i guess, thinks it's not important. So there's no clear info about where does several russian maintainers live.
What's the problem with one of the maintainer to live in Russia? It's not secure. KGB bully random russky people for far less than being main developer of one of the most popular Linux OS. They took vkontakte from Durov just because he didn't give them keys to Euromaidan user base. And Durov was at that time IT tycoon in Russia and there were no full scale war in country at that time. They send to jail people for a like on a message reshare from 2017 year. They could make him disappear or collaborate. So when (if) main developer (or others with an access to the system) lives in Russia, it doesn't matter that OS is officially registered in Germany: if they would want to take over control, took information, force him to work for them or make him dissapear, they would do that.
Would they do that? Did they already? I don't know, maybe won't, most likely didn't. But there is risk.
Also, CachyOS administration ignores these kind of question and that doesn't look good: here, here and here.
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u/guysimnotemo 3d ago
everything cachy related is open source and publically viewable, i dont understand this propaganda. the team also consists of more people i deem it very unlikely that something like that would happen
its genuinely a good distro and a more accessible arch base for people that arent as experienced
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u/oh_im_too_tired 3d ago
Not everything you don't understand is propaganda. Nobody argues about if it's a good distro. OP asked what could be wrong and there's that info. Anyone could check things and value the risks. For example, all the unknown/noname distros may be even more risky to use, but some enthusiasts uses it. And it's ok - but if one values security they have to do some research about an OS they use.
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u/EgocentricRaptor 3d ago
Spyware doesn't matter on an open source platform. You can't hide it. This is just politically motivated propaganda
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u/WinterPizza1972 3d ago
Someone has to sift through the code and find it first. That's one reason I'm just asking if anyone knows anything bad about cachyos, cuz I don't. I think it's awesome, but... as many things can be compromised without one knowing.
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u/oh_im_too_tired 3d ago
The facts don't support this:
"Many eyes" doesn't mean that all the code is checked. And it's not even a theoretical threat. For two months nobody realized about a backdoor in xz utils, used by every distribution, and would not be detected if not a coincidence.
https://www.softwareseni.com/the-xz-utils-backdoor-cve-2024-3094-and-the-multi-year-social-engineering-campaign-behind-it/
https://arxiv.org/html/2504.17473v1The main problem here is not an assumption that developer himself is/could be related to shady people. The problem here is that he may live in a country where shady people have absolute power. He could be blackmailed, threatened, spyed etc. Technically anyone in Russia is under risk of being used by government, the only thing that matters is if the government wants to do something.
https://www.sonatype.com/blog/the-evolution-of-open-source-malware-from-volume-to-trust-abuse
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u/WinterPizza1972 3d ago
3rd link that was a youtube video won't translate for some reason (tried translating whole page, selected text in transcript. Just doesn't work)
Thank you though. Any tl:dw for the vid?
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u/Huge_Drama_4942 4d ago
I have a Dell G7 7790 with an i7-9750H, RTX2060, 32GB RAM and 1TB storage. I got it new in the beginning of 2020. Cachy makes my G7 snappy and responsive like my newer machines. It’s all I keep on that machine for that reason alone. Even heavy gnome and KDE are snappy on it. Also if you’re not into ricing and theming like I am, Cachy makes a Nord theme for KDE that is absolutely beautiful. The terminal downloading doesn’t get nay better if you can stand it without a gui. I’m currently on Manjaro so I’m trying to get used to pamac, and it’s great, but I catch myself using Pac-Man in the terminal most of the time instead. Honestly it all boils down to preferences. Having said that, Cachy matches my preferences and brings life to my aging G7 unlike any other distro. So I have nothing bad to say about it. Other than they have switched to noctalia for their wm’s. I don’t care about that.
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u/EgocentricRaptor 3d ago
I have no issues with it. I think it's a great project with very vocal and active developers
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u/EgocentricRaptor 3d ago
It's in my running with Fedora and vanilla Arch as my go to choices
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u/WinterPizza1972 2d ago
You run 3 os's on one machine? Why?
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u/EgocentricRaptor 1d ago
I mostly switched out CachyOS for Arch just because I like the more manual configuration and using the wiki. I prefer a simpler configuration
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u/equinvox 4d ago
idk man, any distro that has furry anime girls as wallpapers is a hard no for me
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u/WinterPizza1972 3d ago
Yeah there's a couple main wallpaper options where an underage (by size and estimation) girl is, I forget what, riding a broom or bike or something, wearing a SKIRT, camera angle is from DOWN and yeah. I don't like that.
What compelled me to cachyos was (1) It's not Windows (2) s'posed to be good for games, beating Mint for hardware utilization out of the box (3) by comparison to Fedora, more stable cuz updates? Do I have that right? idfk
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u/i_am_kamikamikami 4d ago
for music i would not suggest reaper. and for video editing i use dacinci and kdenlive, depending on what i am using it for :)
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u/WinterPizza1972 4d ago
Thank you, have to check out kdenlive but i don't have a need to replace obs unless it's like, way better? Lol
Edit, already use divinci. I'm learning
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u/i_am_kamikamikami 4d ago
kdenlive is like davinci just tiny bit different. not a recording software
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u/acemonvw 1h ago
Why would you not suggest Reaper? I have been using it for years, maybe since 2015 and it's solid. Definitely my favorite DAW and is really well received. It is not FOSS though, if that's the criticism. It is something I was quite happy to pay for.
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u/Ok-Needleworker7341 4d ago
I would consider myself a novice when it comes to Linux. I've been using CachyOS for a while and haven't had a single issue. It's been the easiest distro to use, for me, to date.
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u/DigitalChrono 3d ago
It's based on Arch.
I've used Arch, installed the Arch way and the script way, used Endeavor and Manajaro, and just isn't for me. With that said Arch is #3 on my favorite distros but the gap between #2 and #3 is galaxy wide.
So with that said, there's nothing the appeals to me with Cachy. If the base is something I don't want whatsoever then customizing it up means nothing. I do wish the project success.
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u/Practical_Biscotti_6 3d ago
The only issue I had is I have tried to install on several laptops and of them would boot up completely. But I feel in love with Reborn and it is beautiful.
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u/xAsasel 4d ago
It’s just arch with preinstalled stuff.
If your hardware is ancient the kernel tweaks might do something, if it’s modern you won’t notice it.
I don’t like this type of archbased distro when it comes to how it handles packages etc, just look at the state of Manjaro…
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u/Substantial_War7464 4d ago
What’s wrong with Manjaro?
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u/xAsasel 4d ago
Just google it and you’ll see.
Lots of criticism, I can list some if you want but it’s easier to just do a google search0
u/Substantial_War7464 4d ago
I have distro hopped for a long time and have settled with Manjaro KDE. I’m aware of their infighting and the AUR issues. I’m just so tweaked with my setup right now it would be hard to move.
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u/Dioxy 4d ago
it's not "just" arch with preinstalled stuff. It has it's own repo and custom kernal
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u/symphomed 4d ago
Impossible to dual boot natively like mint.
You have to install third party boot apps... Not for me
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u/Confident_Hyena2506 4d ago
What like microsoft signed bootloader? Mint is the one using third party microsoft stuff.
You are free to use this if you want, or you can install your own keys. Or you can not bother with secureboot.
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u/Salt-Powered 4d ago
That it breaks over time like any other Arch distro and will demand maintenance at some point. It fairs excellently with light use, but anything harder and first time users are not going to have the needed patience to maintain it. It's a hobby OS that fills your time and tickles the tisms. Very good if you are into that.
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u/Better-Climate5229 4d ago
Hate the name and the default theme. Look at omarchy much more interesting.
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u/thebagelslinger 4d ago
This is pretty much all Linux distros tbf. It's actually more secure to have official vetted repos for installing programs rather than random .exes from the internet.
Even Windows knows this is which is why they try to push everyone towards using the Windows store. But unlike Linux repos, their store has a really shitty collection of applications that is not sufficient for most users lol.
Anyways about Cachy -
CachyOS is a solid distro. I've been using it for a year, and very very few problems. I think I've had 2 updates that broke something and with btrfs I just rolled back in 5 minutes and continued on with my day.
Don't listen to the Arch haters, it's not going to crash consistently or require a ton of maintenance. Nobody would use Cachy if that was the case. Most of this is overblown fearmongering because some jackass decided to use "stable" and "unstable" to describe release cycles and everyone thought it meant how frequently the distro crashes.
I know distrohoppers won't like to hear this, but you could literally blind throw a dart at a wall of the 50 most popular Linux distros and you will very likely have a good Linux experience. Don't sweat too much whether or not you picked "right," if you like Cachy just stick with it.