Explanation and article: https://boilingsteam.com/cachy-os-is-now-the-most-popular-distro-on-proton-db/
For those like me who hadn’t heard of it:
Performance-First Linux, Built on Arch
CachyOS ships every package optimized for your CPU - compiled with x86-64-v3/v4 and Zen4 instructions, LTO, and PGO - on top of a custom kernel with the tuned EEVDF scheduler. The result: a noticeably faster Arch Linux experience with the same rolling-release flexibility you expect.
Me? Oh, Flatpak Linux, of course.
They include a note about that on the page
Flatpak is NOT a distro, but that’s what Steam reports when it’s running on Flatpak, and Flatpak being distro independent we report it as a separate environment, if that makes sense. Feel free to ignore it if you wish.
Thanks for the note, I don’t mean to be too snarky–I do actually run the Steam flatpak.
Interesting write-up about Bazzite. I had Bazzite on one of my kid’s PCs just because it had an Nvidia card but last week reinstalled Fedora Silverblue. Bazzite has some rough edges and some choices I don’t really understand, like using Topgrade and Bazaar. Everyone seems to like it though, maybe I’m in the minority preferring Fedora.
I’m a Linux noob and ended up with Bazzite a bit ago and really like how straightforward Bazaar is, typically what are the shortcomings or downside of Bazaar?
As far as I can tell (I am use Bazzite), the main problem with Bazaar was basically that it was kind of undercooked, had some bugs, both surface level and under the hood, when they first pushed it as the bundled app store for Bazzite.
But its been some months now, and they seem to have been ironed out?
I guess possibly a ‘downside’ could be that it only handles flatpaks, as opposed to also allowing other kinds of direct package installs, but the whole idea of Bazzite is ‘no touchy core os, use flatpak’.
Or, ok, Bazaar is either GNOME only, or GNOME first, whereas Flathub pretty well supports KDE and GNOME, so, if you prefer KDE, I can see the reasoning there for preferring Flathub.
Thanks for the explanation, that all makes sense.
What is this actually measuring? It’s not the same as the Steam Hardware Survey, right?
Surely this represents the subset of users that like doing things like tinkering with their OS and contributing to ProtonDB, not all Linux gamers. Normal people don’t go switching distros every month.
That’s correct! There are a few caveats at the beginning of the article.
I thought this one was most interesting:
This may not be completely representative of all Linux gamers either. But I’d wage this is actually a good predictor where the market is going to shift. We saw first that Manjaro was getting the boot here first, before going under pretty much everywhere.
These two correlate more directly to what you mean:
This may not be representative of all types of Linux users. I’m sure this is not what your AWS architect uses on EC2.
There may be some additional biases, due to whoever used ProtonDB.
When you do a compatibility report on ProtonDB you attach your specs including distro, so yeah this will be biased towards tinkerers. However, HW survey tells a similar story:
I wish they’d merge the non-rolling-release distros by version (as well as by distro “family” in the case of e.g. Ubuntu vs. Kubuntu), so that they wouldn’t look underrepresented compared to Arch. For example, Arch isn’t actually more popular than Mint; it’s just that some of the Mint users are slower to update than others.
I mostly pick my distro based on how nice the name sounds. That’s why I’ll never use Ubuntu.
Some basic bitch life choices.
Is this just racist? It’s a beautiful word
Is Ubuntu a race?
Does it make it sound better that it means humanity in bantu languages, and also designates a philosophy of interconnectedness in a “I am because we are” sense, according to wikipedia?
Yuck, worst species ever.
If you’re considering CachyOS, I would recommend reading this:
https://medium.com/@yalovoy/cachyos-why-i-dont-recommend-it-for-daily-use-7fd62ced70b2
Who is this person? Why does their opinion matter? Why are they writing about FOSS on a Billionaire’s Typewriter? Who is their audience? Why are they so concerned about recommending a corporate backed distros over a hobby distro made for hobby users?
The linked author also has account-gated articles such as The Senior Engineer’s Job in 2026 Is Code Review, Not Code Writing There is nothing in their About page and a cursory online search can’t confirm there’s a real person writing this blog.
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Me personally, I use CachyOS on my gaming computer after bouncing from popOS to Fedora to Arch to Bazzite. Cachy provides a familiar foundation while more of my games work without issues, it provides nice quality of life Arch utilities, and gives me a mutable distro to tinker with when I need to.
Is it perfect for everyone? No. Is it going through a hype-cycle? Yes. If Cachy ends up becoming unstable or insecure on my system, can I switch? Easily.
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It’s really weird to me to see a hot-dropped random blog post heavily upvoted with no discussion. Even if the blog matches the poster’s opinion, we should be careful in 2026 that we’re sharing genuine information with each other and not corporate propaganda or LLM slop posts.
There is absolutely nothing of worth in that article.
First of all, the team size is irrelevant. Even if the maintainers all end up in plane crashes or whatever, all that would happen is packages would “revert” to core Arch when a newer version is released.
Secondly, Secure Boot is a Microsoft-controlled technology that is not FOSS, and should not be considered mandatory like the author implies.
Lastly, the author conveniently doesn’t offer any evidence as to what exactly about Cachy’s “culture” (whatever that means) encourages AUR usage. The only thing I can think of is the fact that an AUR helper is preinstalled.
Not a single claim that isn’t incorrect on its face actually has any sources backing it up.
Can you elaborate on which part of this article has more worth than your average AI slop article?
This was a good read, thanks for posting. I’m on vanilla arch and I looked into switching to Cachy but the size of the team and the direct replacement of Arch specific packages stopped me. I don’t know if I trust a small team, in already the niche OS of today, to maintain everything indefinitely and without issue.
This is one of those scenarios that id wish for those optimizations to come to trunk in a meaningful way than for a separate branch to exist.
