Manjaro KDE vs Cachy OS KDE, the good and the not so good

Posted by activedusk@reddit | linux | View on Reddit | 39 comments

Hello,

After using Manjaro for a few months I got into really optimizing the OS for responsiveness which to me relates to many things but also implies low RAM usage when idle, fast boot time and debloated programs and services running in the background. I would add a dash of clean GUI set up where everything I use regularly was easy to view or access, if not at a glance then after 1 or 2 clicks at most.

https://www.reddit.com/r/kde/comments/1n4876s/with_small_tweaks_manjaro_kde_idles_at_916mb_of/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button

After recently making a post on my optimization process I received several messages criticizing Manjaro and that I should have chosen something else, CachyOS being one of the known and popular alternatives that use KDE as one of their main desktop environments. After hesitating for a bit I gave it a try and I was not pleased by what I found, contrary to popular belief CachyOS lacks polish and is less usable and stable than Manjaro. Let me break it down.

Boot time. After running the same optization on both distros, namely using the contents /etc/xdg/autostart as reference point to find out if there are programs or KDE features I don't need that I can uninstall, editing GRUB timeout and changing the value to 0, installing the latest available kernel version, editing Background services using the KDE window with the same name and turning off and disabling services I don't need and after editing Configure System Tray and disabling widgets from starting automatically at boot that I don't need the results were....crash. CachyOS stuttered, crashed the plasmashell once, after forced reboot it did the same but this time it reverted back to the log in screen and proceeded to freeze after entering the password and attempting to log in and after a second forced reboot, it froze once again while using Configure System tray, but this time it managed to restart the shell after a few seconds. Was this a KDE problem? Was it a kernel problem? Was it something else like zram which is automatically preconfigured for CachyOS and very aggressive? Maybe, idk, but the experience was not pleasant. Also after one of those reboots it also failed to enable the keyboard after booting.

Getting back on track, boot times. After finishing optimizations the best result I got on Cachy OS was 18s while on Manjaro with the 6.17 kernel I managed 13.2s

https://imgur.com/a/yA5WwMi

https://imgur.com/a/xddFOU1

There is not much to say here other, other than lowering the grub timeout, the same bios (UIEFI) settings were used and yet the results are quite different. Almost 50% more time needed for Cachy OS using the same boot loader, namely GRUB.

Ram usage while idling on the desktop after fresh restart, which to me communicates how bloated the system is compared to how optimize it could be with a common sense setup that provides all the needed functions while not being as bare bones as the command line stans would desire. Here again I noticed a gap with CachyOS being more RAM hungry after simillar optimizations

CachyOS

https://imgur.com/a/jX1xTrJ

Manjaro

https://imgur.com/a/6Gpv6xx

Of note here is the pretty aggressive use of zram which on one side does appear to make the GUI more responsive but also has introduced the chance for freezes and stutters which I would qulify as a fail for a normal, daily use OS and Manjaro did not really feel slow ever, in fact the most impactful setting one can make for KDE to make the GUI appear to work quickly and be responsive is to go to System Settings>Quick settings or General Behavior (depending on the distro the wording for this category might be different despite all being Plasma) and finding the "Animation speed" slider and setting it to the fastest value. Here's a lsblk from Cachy displaying the use of zram which was configured by the installer, I had no input.

https://imgur.com/a/Rd2YpsU

Lastly, though a bit unrelated to performance and more related to usability, the Package Manager for CachyOS is far less intuitive to use having a very simplistic GUI compared to Manjaro which offers by contrast an easy way to browse installed packages and install/uninstall them at leisure. Not so clear or usable on the CachyOS side though I give it props for listing the repo packages in a list which makes it a lot more usable for casual use than requiring to know the console command to install them. This is a feature that Manjaro should copy.

CachyOS (crappy) GUI for packages

https://imgur.com/a/cxQumhG

CachyOS (useful repo list of packages) GUI in the package manager

https://imgur.com/a/07vSBGQ

Overall I am not impressed with CachyOS compared to Manajaro for daily use, far less stable and easy to use for casual PC users, especially those migrating from Windows. I give it props for the responsive GUI, likely a combination of aggressive zram config and fabled CachyOS optimized and kissed approved kernel but this trades off stability and leaves a bad first impression. These, imo should be user enabled features post install and not configured automatically from the start. Mediocre boot time, dodgy GUI decisions and overly enthusiastic optimizations, frankly speaking fanboys need to take a sit and be more humble, Manjaro in my findings is far more casual PC user friendly and better set up for first time Linux users. Use CachyOS at your peril, better dual boot with a stable distro, it doesn't boot fast anyway so no need to cry about it with multiboot.

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Stooovie@reddit

CachyOS feels at every step like a overtuned, unstable mess held together by a bunch of weird scripts.

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the_abortionat0r@reddit

CahyOS is the distro form of that kid that just found out about Linux and this they invented some concept nobody thought about before

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Peckerly@reddit

been stable for over a year for me 🤷

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oxez@reddit

Yup.

Most of the "trending" distros posted here likely won't even be here next year.

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TheCrispyChaos@reddit

At the end of the day it’s a hobby distro; today it’s maintained, tomorrow no one knows

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the_abortionat0r@reddit

CachyOS cons: users claim it outperforms other distros while providing zero evidence what so ever.

Manjaro cons: literally the whole distro. There a compile list of historical fuck ups it's so bad.

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activedusk@reddit (OP)

Just reinstalled Manjaro and the results keep improving

https://imgur.com/a/8zD4nTj

https://imgur.com/a/iKksTOl

Will revisit Cachy OS in a few months and compare it again.

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redrider65@reddit

After recently making a post on my optimization process I received several messages criticizing Manjaro and that I should have chosen something else, CachyOS being one of the known and popular alternatives that use KDE as one of their main desktop environments.

Heh. Great little study introducing some rationality into all the CachyOS adoration vs the Manjaro animosity.

Manjaro gets a lot of knee-jerk negativity from people who don't or haven't ever used it. OTOH, Manjaro users tend to be quite satisfied with it. Seems to me that Manjaro has been sufficiently rehabilitated after long past sins to deserve less flak and more love.

This, from a objective observer; I use Mint (KDE) mainly; Fedora is as close to the cutting edge as I wanna be. Just saw thread on kernel panics in /r/Fedora the other day.

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bunkbail@reddit

you have 20+gbs of ram, why would you blame zram for stutters, it doesnt even kick in at such low ram usage. and why would you use lsblk to show zram, when swapon/zramctl is the one you should use to show if zram is even being used? weird post

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activedusk@reddit (OP)

Ram drives are known to cause stuttering regardless of ram usage, lsblk screenshot is proof zram is used as swap space and nothing more, I did not touch it, it was configured by the installer. The point rather was to show ram use when idling shortly after restart to prevent caching and excessive amounts of compression from skewing the result.

My particular setup, how much RAM the PC has is irrelevant, the point was how low the ram use was when the system was idling. The stuttering and freezes I never experienced with any other distro I used, Manjaro worked fine.

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bunkbail@reddit

is this bait? this surely is a bait. no one is this dumb while confidently incorrect.

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activedusk@reddit (OP)

I did not hallucinate freezes and stuttering with CachyOS, if you want to troubleshoot and claim it was not the zram but the custom kernel, be my guest. The problem of stability remains unchanged.

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bunkbail@reddit

you confidently claimed that zram causes those freezes and stutters without even showing if zram is active, not just existing. fedora, popos and countless of other distros ship zram by default, by your own logic, those distros will suffer the same freezes and stutters then. idk why some people are so confidently wrong and insistent.

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activedusk@reddit (OP)

I did not make the thread to troubleshoot nor made that screenshot for that purpose, but to compare two different distros using the same DE and reported the problems I had with one of them. You know it is quite bold of you to claim zram categorically is not to be blamed. Have you ever used ram drives to run programs? I have and they run smooth, so smooth the software is not used to receiving the data so much faster than persistent storage and at some point in the processing and transfering of said data, inevitably that lack of buffering will cause stuttering. This is my past anecdotal experience with RAM drives to, for example, run video games. But fine, let s say zram in this case was not the root cause, what was I am not going to find out because, believe it or not, it is not my problem.

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bunkbail@reddit

Zram is not ram drives like you think they are. Enlighten yourselves.

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activedusk@reddit (OP)

Zram is not a ram drive like you think it is that only works when physical memory is close to the limit.

>you have 20+gbs of ram, why would you blame zram for stutters, it doesnt even kick in at such low ram usage

Bet?

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Careless_Bank_7891@reddit

I too have 20+ gb ram any cachy setup all of it for zram and it doesn't freeze at all

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activedusk@reddit (OP)

Is it a new install? KDE? Did you optimize ram use and boot time can you show a screen shot of

systemd-analyze

And RAM use specifically with konsole utility (you might need to install it from the repo list)

Htop

when system is idling after fresh restart?

Also the installer defaulted to 6.16 kernel and since I have nvidia card, the proprietary nvidia drivers. Replicating and reporting bugs is not easy but frankly I got better distros to use.

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Careless_Bank_7891@reddit

I installed 4 days ago? Counts as a fresh install ig

Startup finished in 5.193s (firmware) + 4.019s (loader) + 2.966s (kernel) + 9.359s (userspace) = 21.538s graphical.target reached after 9.359s in userspace

idle ram usage

Nothing wrong with using other distro, calling one better other than other is your opinion and should be presented so instead of claiming one better than other

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activedusk@reddit (OP)

>I installed 4 days ago? Counts as a fresh install ig

KDE, 6.16 kernel and yes it might count if fresh install after all the freezes happened in the first couple of starts as I began to optimize turning system features on and off and uninstalling stuff. It could be when the system figures out how to use zram, my guess.

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bunkbail@reddit

Yes I'm using zram and have been using zram since forever. I don't have any freezes nor stutter issues. You're just making claim out of your ass.

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activedusk@reddit (OP)

Yes, I just used Cachy OS with zram and it froze and stuttered, I don't have any freezes nor stutter issues with Manjaro, both Arch based distros using the same DE, one with 6.16 kernel (Cachy) and the other 6.17 (Manjaro). One of these differences is the most likely culprit. Can you make a claim out of your behind Cachy kernel is the issue? Well?

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bunkbail@reddit

why dont you enable zram on your manjaro then and see how you make a huge mockery of yourself

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activedusk@reddit (OP)

Because I am not here to troubleshoot cachy OS but benchmark Ram usage, boot time, over all usability vs Manjaro using KDE and also reported it freezes and stutters, which it did. Why don t you defend your asinine assumption zram compressing only happens near out of memory states instead of at time as long as the user opens and closes programs or OS features. Let me have a good laugh.

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Careless_Bank_7891@reddit

I'm using cachy os with both kde and hyprland available and it never freezes

Infact, I had a better time with cachyos kde than fedora kde, fedora kde for some reason crashes even without anything setup and zram was setup on both and it doesn't cause any issues at all. Cachy sets the entire ram as zram (24gb for me) and it doesn't freeze at all

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_Sgt-Pepper_@reddit

also implies low RAM usage when idle

Yeah? No!

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activedusk@reddit (OP)

No? Then bloat, ewww.

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ProtestTheBo@reddit

If your goal was making your install lightweight and efficient im curious why you just didn't start with regular arch and build from there? I also experienced a lot of crashes on cachy but I was using it to try out the new Cosmic DE alpha (as it was one of the first non-ubuntu distros to support it) so I just chalked it up to something going on with cosmic as it was pretty buggy.It seems like theres a new "arch but easy" distro every couple of years (Manjaro,Endevour, Cachyos) with minuscule differences but it is interesting to hear that manjaro comes up ahead in boot time

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get_while_true@reddit

I used Manjaro for years without issues. It's one of the most polished distros in my experience. Mint is also nice out of the box.

For Arch, the customization aspects is very nice but only the lts kernel can actually boot my machine. Also Arch didn't have a driver that worked on my legacy Nvidia card. I only got it installed by converting from Manjaro.

Now on NixOS, and everything customized and working, but I have to pin a kernel version for Nvidia.

Sometimes you just need/ want something that works out of the box. In my experience Manjaro, despite the politics, is often topping that experience.

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activedusk@reddit (OP)

>If your goal was making your install lightweight and efficient im curious why you just didn't start with regular arch and build from there?

I did just that with Debian expert install today and installed plasma from the command line on top of it. Frankly I just missed the ease of use of begginner friendly standard applications such as Ubuntu and Mint offering Additional Drivers application to easily install nvidia drivers. Manjaro and to their credit CachyOS also make it easy from the installer to use directly proprietary drivers. Frankly using the terminal to install drivers is not so challenging but on Debian....heh, not so fast. You need to edit the sources list then add a modprobe thingy to block the open source driver and at the end I still had issues with errors spewing at shutdown and boot related to nvidia. I got in that moment why Linus flipped them off.

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ProtestTheBo@reddit

Thats fair, I do not miss having an Nvidia card, I got an 7800xtx (before the tariffs hit luckily, im unfortunatly american) so I don't even really have to think about drivers with Mesa being part of the kernal. You'll have to give an update on how fast you can get debian to boot haha.

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activedusk@reddit (OP)

I installed Cachy OS on top of it after so many issues but I did check boot time at one point, after firmware it was like 2-3s faster than the fastest I got Manjaro to boot. The issue is that the firmware took longer so it canceled out, maybe I missed a trick during installation, probably generlized firmware support option vs optimized for hardware.

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shogun77777777@reddit

I prefer openSUSE tumbleweed

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elijuicyjones@reddit

EndeavourOS is the best Arch distro IMO. I’m running cachy on one of my laptops currently and it’s not impressive in any way. Lots of talk about it but I’ve never seen better results compared to EOS, and from what you’re saying it sounds like Manjaro also underscores how useless Cachy is.

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EtiamTinciduntNullam@reddit

I think in game benchmarks it really performs best among Linux distros, but difference is not that big.

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elijuicyjones@reddit

I’ve seen all the blustery talk but only tiny little inconsequential and inconsistent gains. If Cachy were actually noticeably better in the real world you’d see widespread adoption.

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EtiamTinciduntNullam@reddit

I think I will stay with Manjaro for now, but CachyOS is pretty popular among gamers at the moment:

https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/1mlluen/linux_market_share_surpasses_6_and_how_mainstream/

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EtiamTinciduntNullam@reddit

Yeah, I was also not amazed with CachyOS, I'm daily driving Manjaro.

CachyOS defaulted to open nvidia drivers for me, ended up with stutters in system and games, browser freezing periodically, you have to switch drivers by terminal, not really user-friendly.

Manjaro uses zswap while for example Fedora and CachyOS uses zram, this is controversial, but from my basic research zswap is better and is easier to set up, but zram is more universal - it doesn't matter what kind of drive you have, your Android phone most likely uses it, and can be used without using disk swap at all.

zswap will compress ram (same as zram), but it will move oldest pages to swap.

zram is more like regular swap, because zram is a block device made from (compressed) ram, which you (most likely) tweak with swappiness to convince kernel that your swap is really fast (which it is). You can also use it for regular ramdisk instead of swap.

There are benefits for having disk swap, kernel can dump inactive memory to your drive, so there is more memory available for cache and programs.

So you can just set up regular swap next to zram with lower priority, the problem is that it is not as smart, and simply zram will fill first then your regular swap on drive will be used. For example if you open a browser that will fill your ram and then play a game which will not entirely fit into your remaining ram without swapping it will use (slow) swap on disk instead of swapping to compressed ram (browser data will stay on (fast) compressed ram swap). You can use writeback device where uncompressible swap data will be stored, but I believe only swap partition can be used.

With zswap you don't need to configure it much (you can tweak it if you want) but you just need to set up regular swap (file or partition, I think zram) and it will use compressed pool of ram and push least frequently used memory to disk swap.

I had also much better battery life on Manjaro than CachyOS or Fedora.

Manjaro seems to just work out-of-box and it updates are delayed, so actually seems more beginner-friendly and it is less likely to run into problems with too new packages.

CachyOS by default has faster animations set up, this makes it also appear a bit faster, but for me on 144hz screen it doesn't look as smooth as regular speed.

CachyOS doesn't come with a good package manager, you can use pamac or octopi. There are several repositories to choose from when installing packages (compiled with better CPU optimizations I believe), I think performance difference won't be that great and it will just be confusing for beginners.

I didn't do a proper benchmark in games, but FPS was very similar.

I appreciate optimized kernel from CachyOS and seems like they have some useful scripts in their "welcome" app.

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EatTomatos@reddit

If you understand what software and kernel optimizations are doing, then yeah they aren't magic. gnu make's default options will always be stable and work, and that's what most software is compiled against. Some software doesn't even work on cachyos because of optimizations. The primary issue with optimizations, is that optimizations are actually built off of gnu defaults to begin with. So you can find isolated systems that have native optimizations. FreeBSD and VoidLinux-musl are built with different native libraries. Chimaera Linux (not chimaeraos) has a literal mixture of software libraries and binaries.

So the fact it, cachyos using all the different optimizations might only be getting a couple exfra of frames in any particular piece of software.

At the same time, this is funnily still more stable than the current Debian. Debian 13 running on Nvidia with X11 is completely bugged out and won't even work. So it could be worse.