2d ago

Sorry, but which of these distros is right for me?

I'm currently trying to decide between CatchyOS and Nobara.

I'm sorry to be generating another of this kind of conversation as I can see they are getting pretty tedious. But you see I'm finally getting ready to take the plunge and try Linux again (after a brief encounter in the early 2000s).

I'm a gamer and I care a lot about gaming but I'm also a game dev. I need to be able to use Unreal Engine, Blender, Gaea, and other dev tools. My understanding is that something like Bazzite isn't right for me there.

So I've been looking at CatchyOS and Nobara. I've read their documentation and so far leaning toward CatchyOS. But sometimes people say Nobara is easier to use. I am not afraid of a command line, but frankly I don't tinker with my computer for fun. I get in and get what I need set up so I can get back to making things.

So what do you all think?

44 comments

Its a lot funner and faster to just test them all, grab ventoy throw all the isos on a ventoy usb, spend an hour installing and testing each, see if you like cachyos gaming packages and the wiki, or if you prefer another distro, I would go with a gaming distro the first time around so you figure out what packages you need and may want to keep in the future
I use cachyos, its nice, has everything for gaming in a post insrall script you click a button, just install it and you wont want to distrohop, it has a good wiki, many yt videos, benefit is the aur, if you dont care about the aur go bazzite (only reason I don't use bazzite is aur, otherwise all Id use are flatpaks)
- Use limine and btrfs partition, activate snapper support early, so you can rollback easily if any issues arise, ive found it easiest with that bootloader.
I'd honestly stick to proven, well-supported distros like openSUSE Tumbleweed, Fedora or Ubuntu, especially as a newcomer.
- This. I'm on Nobara on my main rig because I didn't know any better when I ditched Windows. It's a decent distro mind you. But it's really just Fedora with some experimental stuff from one dude (which breaks stuff from time to time). I've since installed tumbleweed on my laptop and am much happier with it. Next time something major breaks on the main rig I'm switching that too
- bazzite (based on fedora atomic) is working really well for me
  i turned off all the gnome extensions they install by default but apart from that it's been great for gaming and dev work
Just to really clarify: there is no real performance difference between "gaming" distros and any other one. They just have some stuff pre-installed you can just install yourself. The only real thing you want to be aware of are standard distros vs immutable distros. I would steer clear of immutable until you're more comfortable in general.
All that being said CachyOS (Arch based) is fine, but skip Nobara and just go stock Fedora Gnome or KDE to skip the prepackaged customizations and just get a clean experience.
- Okay. I'd been hearing that performance gains were essentially immaterial or on a case by case basis, but that the prepacked stuff helps things "just work". For example I like Sim Racing and I use a Fanatec race wheel, I'm hoping that one of these would reduce the hassel with it.
  
  Fanatec will need an extra kernel module: https://github.com/gotzl/hid-fanatecff
  
  They won't help anything materially work "better" let's say. I guess Nobara might have an edge with something like Nvidia drivers being prepackaged in a way that makes them easier to run on first install (it's a big maybe), but the same issues will arise after the fact with Nvidia's drivers, just because the hoops you have to jump through are the same everywhere. That's an Nvidia problem.
- What's the problem with nobara?
  
  The primary concern I see expressed about Nobara is that it's maintained by a single person. I'm not sure if that's still true today, however.
What's easy to use is pretty subjective. As a game developer, you're already at least a step or two removed from the proverbial average computer user. I suggest downloading live images of a few different distros and desktop environments, and playing with each for a while to get a feel for the differences.
I'm a gamer and developer, too. KDE Plasma is my desktop of choice these days.
I need to be able to use Unreal Engine
Someone else asked about this just 8 days ago, here:
https://beehaw.org/post/21209323
Regarding that particular requirement:
The Unreal Engine for Linux page indicates that they offer pre-compiled builds for Ubuntu 22.04.
It's possible that those pre-compiled builds might work on Linux Mint, since Mint is based on Ubuntu. I would probably try this before committing to the officially supported Ubuntu version, both because it's nice to have a newer distro and because Mint has a good track record of avoiding Ubuntuisms that are not generally well received (e.g. Snap).
If you don't mind some extra work, you can apparently build Unreal for other linux distros. See here:
\ https://dev.epicgames.com/documentation/en-us/unreal-engine/linux-development-quickstart-for-unreal-engine
The first question you should consider is whether you actually need a gaming distro. I've been using bare-ass Arch for both gaming and development and haven't had any performance or stability issues I didn't cause myself.
From the two options, Nobara is likely better for a beginner. It's based on Fedora, which has good support ~~and doesn't do anything fucky with the kernel.~~ (it does, the kernel is built with patches and custom options)
Cachy is based on Arch, which in itself requires a more in-depth knowledge of the system and/or a willingness to learn. The performance improvements they advertise with the customized kernel and scheduler options are really only relevant if you want to squeeze the last bit of performance out of the system. Your day-to-day experience will be the same.
It doesn't matter.
I tried a few and so far I am finding CachyOS to be the most painless.
I don't have any interest in things like Blender or Unreal Engine but I'm curious what makes them incompatible with Bazzite? The only thing that's been a real PITA for me is old printer drivers (like a 15yo printers).
- Any immutable distro is problematic for development and media workflows for a number of reasons. It's best to just go with the stock working versions of things unless there is a specific use-cases for using immutable.
  
  I develop (nothing graphical) and mostly Bazzite has been fine for development. Every now and then it's a little awkward (e.g. switching back and forth between a native terminal and distrobox) but I've never felt it was "incapable" of something. I just wouldn't discount immutables entirely. If OP is starting from scratch I think they could give it a spin and know within a week if it was incompatible with their workflows.
Fedora.
Possibly Open Suse
As a first distro why make it more complicated?
BTW: Never Ubuntu.
CachyOS, at the end of the day feels and acts like a bleeding edge linux distro. Fedora on the other hand hides all of that and yet is also bleeding edge. I usually get packages BEFORE CachyOS with Fedora (matter of days usually, but just highlighting how current it usually is).
- The one thing I don't like about Fedora is how close it is to the Red Hat corporation. I know modern RHEL is downstream from Fedora so they can't suddenly end it, like they did with CentOS, but it still left a sour taste in my mouth.
  
  Fedora is sponsored by Redhat it is true. Not the only sponsers of course. And I get that Redhat is IBM (sadly). I would be a lot more concerned if Redhat was under Oracle, so while IBM isn't great, it could be worse.
  But other than that, it is a community driven model, I don't believe they take direction from Redhat or exclusively obfuscate or hamper OSS because of Redhat.
  I mean if you go down this rabbit hole, take a look at all the major contributors and sponsors for the linux kernel itself....
  
  🙄 this again.
I went through the whole Cachy, Nobara, or Pika and finally said fuck it and loaded up Cachy this past weekend. Wasn’t getting anywhere with my analysis paralysis. Pretty happy with it so far tbh.
Now if I can just figure out how to get this stupid xone driver to work so I can use my Xbox controller I’ll be happy.
If you are new to Linux, you should honestly just go with a more stable and simple distribution. I always recommend Linux Mint for its simplicity or Kubuntu for its familiarity with Windows.
I do all the things you described and I am daily driving PikaOS (shares some development/developers with Nobara I believe, it's just Debian-based instead of Fedora-based) and it's been perfect for me. I haven't used Nobara personally but assuming it's similar to PikaOS I would happily recommend it for developer use.
What is your current OS?
I am also trialing cachyOS as a win10 replacement and I am liking it.
If your current OS supports virtualisation (as in not a home version of windows) run them in a VM and see how the os goes with normal tasks you do.
- Windows 10 Pro. Yeah I guess I could do that. But I have multiple drives and was going to just install one of these onto it and boot into it or back to Windows if I have to. So either way, yeah if I don't like it I can switch. But I'm worried that either will seem fine and It's going to be months later when an issue or an advantage of one of the other would creep up. I want to get ahead of that.
  
  I have only had bad experiences in dual booting which is why I do everything via VMs. Win 10 comes with Hyper-V that you can enable to do VMs with.
  
  Be warned that Windows Update can see your other partitions. It ate my boot partition, then choked on it and took the entire system with it. That was the last time I had Windows on my computer.
Try it, and if you don't like it try another. They're free.
- Drive it like you stole it. If the wheels fall off get another one.
I've used both nobara and cachyos, and I've stuck with nobara. it's a lot more of a "just works" distro for gaming and creative stuff (vr "just worked", so did connecting an xbox controller wirelessly, and using my drawing tablet) and its more set up out of the box than cachy. I enjoy a distro that I can install and get going immediately with no issues, and without having to install a bunch of other packages myself to get it to do what I want it to do. also when I ran cachy last year on both my desktop and my laptop, I got a month in and my repos completely broke, dont know why and couldn't figure out how to fix it, so that's something to keep in mind.
- I'll ditto this.
  Nobara is the most "It just works" linux distro I've tried. Its made gaming painless and seamless with having all that stuff preloaded, it updates frequently to keep on top of support, all in all its a fantastic OS and with no real tinkering.
I run nobara on three separate machines with different hardware in each. So far it's been rock solid. I do a fair bit of development on one of them including some blender modeling and it seems to be fine. Blender isn't quite as snappy for me on Linux as opposed to Windows but that could just be my somewhat older hardware. The Dev/blender machine is an older MSI laptop with a 3060 in it.
Don't be afraid to give nobara a shot.
One of the things you could do as a new Linux user is to try out some support questions with your favorite search engine. Try 'catchyos my headset mic is not working' or 'nobara how do I change my background wallpaper every 15 minutes' or '
<distro name>
<real problem you've had the past 2 years>'.
This approach will give you an realistic view how much support you will have when you're dealing with an actual problem.
I've started with Mint, switched to OpenSUSE Tumbleweed soon after because I wanted KDE. Swtiched to Fedora now.
IMO, if you can use Mint, you can use Fedora or OpenSUSE. They're just as easy.
OpenSUSE comes with easy BTRFs snapshots and home folder encryption setup in the installer. But it is a slightly oddball distro and a few things sometimes work a little different which sometimes requires workarounds. It comes with decent gui tools as well for maintining your packages and repository (yast)
Fedora is more mainstream, but doesn't have the abovementioned features easily accessible in the install or out of the box. You can have nice gui for managing your packages and repositories but it has to be installed by you. I still made the btrfs and encryption happen by following a tutorial on youtube. I'm happy with it.
IMO btrfs snapshots are essential to making the distro beginner friendly. It significantly simplifies fixing something that broke.
If you were only gaming I'd recommend CachyOS. I made the switch about a year ago with no hassles or tinkering. I will say though when updating it is important to pay attention to any warnings and keep a backup with something like timeshift to rollback to in emergencies!
Since you have development as another use case I'd be more inclined to use a fresh install of something like fedora and customise it yourself. I'd imagine it's less likely to break a new install rather than a customised fork if you try to change something.

44 comments