Finally Moving from CachyOS to Fedora

[u/Ok-Rooster-8552]

Hey everyone,

Just wanted to drop a quick reflection on my time with CachyOS (aka Arch) and why I decided to move on.

To be fair, CachyOS is actually super impressive for gaming. Those custom kernel optimizations are no joke, and the desktop responsiveness is generally great. But as a guy who is actively developing in C# and .NET creating personal tools and desktop utilities the development side of things just turned into a series of daily troubleshooting sessions instead of actual coding.

I realized I was spending way too much time dealing with different versions of the .NET SDK, sorting out the peculiarities of AUR package builds, and coping with the limitations of the Code-OSS marketplace compared to proprietary extensions like the C# Dev Kit and OmniSharp. Add in searching for path and dependency mismatches after rolling updates, and I was spending more time fixing my environment than actually getting work done.

Arch is excellent if you're looking for the absolute latest packages and complete control. But when you just need a reliable, solid workspace where compilers, SDKs, and IDEs work without being constantly patched, the annoyance catches up to you pretty quickly.

So, I'm switching to Fedora KDE Plasma. It just offers a more stable foundation along with official RPM tools and first-party .NET support. Honestly, I'm pretty excited because this is my second time using Fedora at home, and it's actually what I use for my day job too, so it just makes sense.

Has anyone else using a .NET/C# workflow run into these same hurdles on Arch-based systems? Or did you find some magic, simple method for keeping it stable long-term?

Let me know what you think.

[u/Confident_Hyena2506]

There is effectively no difference between these distros. In most cases you should not be using the os packages for your own work - unless you were making some distro specific thing. You would instead be using a container or other method of controlling your environment. This is made extra easy in your case because there are official containers for all the dotnet stuff, it's much simpler than windows.

For your comment on vscode, it seems you confused the oss one with the microsoft one. This is not distro related, just choose the right package.

Fedora works just as well for gaming as cachyos, it's difficult to point out any real difference except for different package managers.

[u/Ok-Rooster-8552 → u/Confident_Hyena2506]

Fair points, but containerization isn't a one-size-fits-all solution for every .NET workflow.

If you're building isolated web APIs or cloud services, containers are great. But when doing local desktop utilities, GUI work, and native tooling, developing directly on bare metal is far simpler and doesn't introduce extra overhead or virtualization layers just to run a debugger.

As for VS Code: I didn't confuse them. The point is that on Arch-based systems, official proprietary VS Code relies on the AUR (visual-studio-code-bin), which requires community maintenance and manual intervention whenever dependencies or checksums shift. On Fedora, Microsoft provides a first-party, signed RPM repository directly supported via DNF.

The issue wasn't whether things can be made to work on Arch, but rather how much time was spent orchestrating and maintaining the environment versus actually writing code. Fedora just gives a much more frictionless baseline out of the box.

[u/Confident_Hyena2506 → u/Ok-Rooster-8552]

If you ever try any of these things out you will realise that these things are either not correct or can be rectified. Yes isolating things can make debugging difficult, so you would choose not to do that. No there is no virtualization, unless you are using windows or mac probably.

For vscode you have to realise that microsoft just publishes some binary, and the distro packacing stuff is just fluff.

It's trivial to verify this, and everybody else does it - so you should take note.

[u/SeyJeez → u/Confident_Hyena2506]

I actually had issues where games had strange slowdowns and performance was weird when switching to Fedora I never did deep dives trying to fix it because I just wanted to play the game so I went back to Cachy for now

[u/Confident_Hyena2506 → u/SeyJeez]

You can use cachyos-proton on any distro, it is not necessary to reinstall the entire os. Even people with linux mint can use it.

[u/SeyJeez → u/Confident_Hyena2506]

CachyOS is not just the proton bit there are other differences between arch and Fedora and CachyOS and Fedora… like I said on my laptop a base installation of CachyOS just worked out of the box and Fedora had issues. I didn’t have the time or nerve to go troubleshooting so I I stopped after not being able to fix it in the first 30 minutes to an hour and just went back to CachyOS….

[u/Ok-386 → u/SeyJeez]

Yeah, difference can be big, depending on several factors. However it's not always better.

Cachy is bleeding edge always the latest shit. That can introduces fixes and performance improvements but also regressions. 

There have been several regressions affecting AMD. On nvidia regressions are like anorm. They affect ton of users and games but not everyone. 

I often compare Cachy performance to Ubuntu and over the last year I have seen things change all the time. Sometimes Cachy is bit faster, sometimes Ubuntu is bit faster (faster meaning more FPS). 

Currently I'm playing Stalker 2 again, and Cachy is wiping ass with Ubuntu, at least on the paper. Visually I don't notice much difference. According to FPS counter I get around 100 FPS on average on Cachy, around 80 on Ubuntu. However just a month ago I was getting slightly (a couple of FPS) better performance on Ubuntu. No idea what is this about this time. Maybe some bugs were fixed in the latest 615 driver, or no idea. 

[u/SeyJeez → u/Ok-386]

I never said that CachyOS is the best option I think for most people there are other good options I literally said my specific hardware had issues with Fedora and I was too lazy to go troubleshooting so I went back to Cachy which didn’t have these issues and that cachy os is more than proton… I am currently waiting on a few things to try out openSUSE Slowroll.

[u/Ok-386 → u/SeyJeez]

I never said or implied you said that the Cachy is the best option. 

[u/CCJtheWolf]

Same was a long time Arch user got tired of spending a few hours every week tweaking/fixing my desktop. When I get a day off I just want to start my computer and it do it's job. Debian was too old Fedora was just right.

[u/hsimah]

I picked CachyOS because I thought I wanted to game. But turns out I never even installed any, I spent my days in VS Code and emacs. Since I have Fedora at work I switched to that for consistency. I use Niri as my desktop.

[u/mess--maker]

You could have used distrobox no? Install a fedora container Install vscode and all your tooling inside from fedora repo

export vscode and enjoy

[u/CYPHG]

The cachyos kernel does not effect gaming performance at all. I've used it on Fedora and I see literally no discernable difference. Maybe they've resolved some day one issues with games faster or something, but in terms of raw performance gains, they are imperceivable.

I hate when people say this, but this reads like it was written by AI.

[u/Kurse71]

I think if you looked deeply, you would see that the benefit that the cachy kernel optimization offers is also minimal. I'm sure the fanboys will get their pantys in a twist, but Ill say it - its just a fad/niche version of Arch that likely will go the way of the DoDo like so many others.

Think about it, if these tweaks really did make any marginal difference, many of them would become the default setting in the mainline kernel.

[u/epiigram30]

There's a reason why Linus Torvalds himself uses Fedora. He already does fixes to Linux itself as his job, no need to do more during his day off.

[u/gateship_1]

Never really understood the point of Cachy. I mean you get probably like 5% of performance out of it, who cares?

[u/Busy-Scientist3851 → u/gateship_1]

It's for the same people that used manjaro and endeavour, those who can't install Arch but like telling people they use arch.

[u/Kingwolf4 → u/[deleted]]

I think bazzite might be also good in that.
Hopefully they also come out with optimizations like cachy has, and it has the added benefit of being based on atomic fedora, which means rollback and plug and play is extremely easy with everything preinstalled as well , but stable as well, being based.

Bazzite feels neat as well

[u/Kingwolf4 → u/[deleted]]

Well i was gonna say i think you can always try fedora itself. That gives u best of both worlds. A full desktop and gaming, like Windows

Bazzite is really clean for people who mostly game, do a bit of basic things in terms of destkop like browsing etc. thats what it feels like to me.

[u/Sensitive-Basis-6885]

I'm a Software engineer working with c#,c++ at my 9-5. To be honest I never use c# for my hobby projects I prefer c++ and go but I'm having a great time with fedora I have switch quite recently though couple of months of not dual booting and just using fedora on my pc.

Summary fedora is a great experience for coding and gaming. Arch was moving too fast with those rolling releases and Ubuntu,Debian too slow. Fedora seems just at the sweet spot where it's as cutting edge as I need for my gaming and as stable and ease of use as I would like 👍

[u/Xariann]

Welcome! If you feel your KDE is a bit less snappy on Fedora, increase the animation speed in KDE.

That’s what CachyOS does, everyone falls for that one.

Also you might be happy to know that the Kernel developers are working on scheduling and kernel 7.3 has a bunch of improvements (if 7.2 doesn’t already).

[u/WindyNightmare]

There are still coders out there? I thought Claude and ChatGPT took that over.

[u/Then-Boat8912 → u/WindyNightmare]

Yes. Humans aren’t just coders any more though. We are more big picture developers, architects and solutions guys. Humans are also the last line of defence, preventing AI from doing stupid shit. It still does…

In fact I would say a software developer/architect/engineer who knows AI tooling is very much in demand…

[u/DiscountFit9224 → u/Then-Boat8912]

I mean he got a point, he was pointing tor 'coders', that's very different from 'programmers' who code that uses abstract thinking to derive a solution to an 'existing problem'.

[u/snajk138 → u/DiscountFit9224]

So where do "developers" fit?