I’m currently on PopOS 22 and I’m in the mood to try something different. I mostly game but I do need my system to have support for the everyday tasks I sometimes need to do, so I fell bazzite is a no go.
I see a lot of people recommending Cachy, will it be a smooth experience for someone used to linux? Is Endeavour a better choice? Will I have issued with my PS3 eye camera and x52 stick?
Pop 24 pissed me off so much that I had to do a distro swap. Cosmic has a lot left to work on to be usable for me. Too many headaches.
Bin wise, stuff like mesa 25.1.5 not even supporting fsr4 on a nearly year old 9070xt was enough for me to be like “what am I even doing here?” - cachyos may not have yesterdays nightly mesa build but it does have 25.3.x from very recent. Everything is way ahead of pop. I’m about a month in on just smashing update and praying, but so far zero issues. I even have HDR and VRR working!
Pop was my first Linux distro for gaming. I intended to try it for 6mo-year or so before trying another because I am very patient and learning to troubleshoot things is fun. By the end of three months I had so many things I wanted to install or update and so many of them were in their repos or they had old versions. I upgraded to and tried 24 for another month or so before the jump.
My theory is that Pop accrued a shit ton of technical debt moving to cosmic and it shows. They clearly are continuing to build stuff out and doing bug fixes like crazy but they are at the bottom of a hole and they need to dig themselves out. This hole is gonna take their whole team way longer than a year to get out of imo. When they finally do, maybe then cosmic will be the DE of our dreams. It sure was a fast de, but it also has barebones features. I need to see how it performs once the features are closer to parity with all these very mature 20+yo DEs, but that may take a while.