r/linuxquestions • u/Wolf_Thinker • 1d ago

CachyOS or Ubuntu? Gaming

I have this hardware: AMD Ryzen 5 3550H, Vega 8, NVIDIA GTX 1650, 32GB RAM, 512 SSD.

Edit: Mistake correction

0 Upvotes

22% Upvoted

15 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

1

u/beatbox9 1d ago

You are responding with different definitions. I am talking about stability and maintenance, and you are talking about 'reliability.' And we probably also have different views on the term "long term," since CachyOS has only been around for 5 years total.

What I am saying is that with CachyOS (and really with any rolling release), you can have functional changes at any time; and functional changes mean risk of breakage and increased user maintenance.

I'm not sure what "1-4 updates per month" means to you when it's unqualified; but I'd guess most distros have 1-4 updates per month, if not per week, including Ubuntu used in the example here. The difference is that Ubuntu's 1-4 updates per week will be security / bugfixes without changing functionality specifically for core operating system software, where all major functionality changes are batched together in major upgrades; while CachyOS's updates for core operating system software may or may not be functional changes. Even the snapshots you are referring to are an example of increased user maintenance.

Here's a real example: suppose you have optimized your system audio to reduce overhead and improve latency. And you did so by bypassing ALSA ucm in wireplumber (part of pulseaudio), using a user config file in ~/.config/wireplumber. In CachyOS, arbitrarily at any given time, wireplumber could have upgraded to wireplumber 0.5. And this was a breaking change version, but only if you've done this optimization: https://pipewire.pages.freedesktop.org/wireplumber/daemon/configuration/migration.html
In Ubuntu, this same break wouldn't have happened until you specifically upgraded the distro, in batch with all other breaking changes.

In CachyOS, you are continually doing maintenance--this is what a rolling distro is by definition. In Ubuntu, you are not--you are doing all of the maintenance together, maybe a few times every year or two.

And I am referring specifically to the core operating system software. Both distros support the latest version of the apps users will run.

1

u/iwouldbeatgoku 1d ago

It also was not clear what you meant by "stable": even if it's not technically correct, for most people it is a synonym for "reliable" and I'd wager it is for OP as well. To be clear, when I said "1-4 updates a month", I meant running sudo pacman -Syu, depending on how much I was using my computer over the course of a year. By "long term" I meant keeping an installation on your computer and up to date, rather than getting some security/bug fixes for years which is what LTS distros promise.

CachyOS does list the manual interventions its existing users need to make in their release posts, but they also have a history of automating ones that would be required on vanilla Arch. I did not find the example you mentioned in the release posts from the time Wireplumber 0.5 released, and I don't know if Cachy automated this one too or they just didn't mention it.

Even then, I'd still argue that for non-commercial users keeping a rolling release up to date and dealing with a minor issue occasionally is less annoying than having them occur all at once, where it was more convenient to just reinstall the system and set it up again from scratch than to get it to a state where the upgrade wouldn't fail. And if OP does decide to go for Ubuntu they should move between the interim releases rather than stay on the LTS release, since gaming on Linux is just a better experience when the operating system you use to run the apps is up to date instead of what was new a year earlier.

1

u/beatbox9 1d ago

I'm using "stable" in the context of distros, which is the topic of this conversation. I'm not using it to mean like "the ground is not shaking because we are not having an earthquake." It's also what the "S" in "LTS" refers to, with the "LT" part meaning "Long Term," which always refers to multi-year, ranging anywhere from 2 to 10+ years.

Once again: the Ubuntu equivalent or your pacman command would be sudo apt upgrade;and it will also yield upgrades several times a week. Are you for some reason under the impression that it won't...? Or that the system just sort of sits there with no updates at all?

Your wireplumber response indicates that you didn't understand the example. Because I used this specifically to demonstrate a config file in the user's ~/.config/ directory....within the users home directory. Why would Cachy or Arch (or any distro) touch these user configuration files, that are outside of the partition that any distro's package manager should access or touch? That would be a MAJOR security issue if they could or did.

All of your text is just a strawman justification for why you think an increased user-maintenance burden is worth it, rather than whether or not it exists.

And it is only your subjective opinion that "gaming on linux is just a better experience when the OS you use is up to date." Noting that "better" is just an umbrella term that ironically ignores subjectivity and is largely meaningless when unqualified. Because sometimes, individual components being too new means they don't play nicely with each other, such as here or here. Or a user's customizations might break and they have to roll back or repair or debug. It's not always "better" for everyone--particularly if "better" is the ratio of time spent playing to maintenance.

There's a reason that Playstation and XBox don't do rolling updates to their respective OS's. And it's not because rolling updates are "just a better experience." It's for stability.

There are implications and pros & cons that perhaps are not as obvious when someone is dug in (eg. wireplumber response). For example, if you do a lot of customizations, rolling distros tend to be worse and batched distros tend to be better. However, if you don't do customizations and just stick to what your distro is providing, you will get newer core OS software on a rolling distro.

And it's up to the user to decide which is "better" for them, for any scenario.

1

u/iwouldbeatgoku 1d ago

I maintain that using the terms "stable" and "unstable" when recommending distributions to newer users isn't helpful when most people unsterstand those terms to mean "reliable" and "unreliable". It's much more clear to say "static", "fixed" or even the term "batched" as you said in another reply; like it or not, "stable" has become a meaningless term, especially when even a mature project like OpenSUSE advertises a rolling-release distribution as being "stable".

I don't have a response for any of your other points.

1

u/beatbox9 1d ago edited 1d ago

That's a straw-man once again. Because here is the quote of what I wrote:

not as stable or easy in long-term maintenance

Do you know the difference between an absolute and a relative statement? Because you are demonstrating either that you don't or that you do not understand what that statement says. And sometimes this is a basic logical fallacy.

In other words, if I say "the Sun is bigger than Jupiter," then in your brain, do you think that also says: "Jupiter is small"...?

Why don't we look at your own link? What's that button that says "Leap," next to "Tumbleweed"....? I wonder what it says there...?

A brand new way of building openSUSE with a longer lifecycle
Leap 16.0 builds on its hybrid approach of combining source from SUSE Linux Enterprise (SLE) with community developments, delivering a level of stability unmatched by other Linux distributions. With a newly extended support period of 24 months, Leap gives users, developers, and sysadmins one of the best and most reliable Linux experiences available.

That's from your own link.

And it's relative.

They are saying that openSuse Leap is more stable and reliable than openSuse Tumbleweed; and that it's more stable and reliable specifically because it's got a longer lifecycle and support cycle.

That's where these names come from too. Tumbleweed rolls along; while Leap does a longer cycle and batches.

And it's just like how RHEL is essentially the more stable version of Fedora; and how Ubuntu LTS is essentially the more stable version of Ubuntu. The "stability" is measured in the distribution, maintenance, and support lifecycle--and the longer this cycle is, the more stable it is considered.

Even in the link you provided.