It’s been close to six months since I decided, on a whim, to try dual-booting CachyOS. I installed it to the wrong drive and wiped my Windows install by accident. That was terrifying, but it was probably the best choice I’ve made this year. With nothing to go back to, I’d accidentally broken the last excuses I’d been making to myself for two years about switching fully to the penguin side.
It’s been quite a ride. The learning curve was steep, but not the vertical cliff I expected. Especially early on, I’d hit a problem and think, “God dammit, maybe I should just switch back to Windows.” Each time, I put my big boy pants on and worked through it. And it’s paid off wonderfully: I feel like I actually know everything that’s on my computer and why it’s there.
I’ve broken this down into three broad categories: what I like, what I’ve learned, and what I don’t like but cope with anyway.
What I Like
The customization. Once I learned that, beyond the basic family trees (Arch, Debian, etc.), the distro more or less doesn’t matter, it got a lot easier to settle on one and customize my CachyOS install to be exactly what I want. I haven’t riced my system as hard as some people do, but I’ve made it feel like home.
Gaming is (in most cases) chef’s kiss. Going in, I was afraid a lot of my games wouldn’t work, or that I’d miss the handful that require kernel-level anti-cheat (KAC). Thankfully, that hasn’t been true at all. One of my proudest moments was getting Warcraft III with the Frozen Throne expansion running. I loaded it into Heroic Games Launcher, sorted out a small hiccup with the CD keys, and then it just… worked. No graphical bugs, no crashes, no hitches. It was incredible, and it was my “holy shit, this just works” moment.
I own my computer. For the first time in a very long time, I feel like I genuinely own my computer. With Windows, there was always a sense that I didn’t have full control over what the OS decided to do. It was like living with a roommate you didn’t particularly care for, and who didn’t care for you either. With Linux I have full control, which is amazing, but it also has some downsides, which I’ll get to below.
Things I Learned
Distro doesn’t matter… much. This was a huge one. It helped me settle into CachyOS because I could let go of the FOMO and just tinker with my current system when I didn’t like how something worked.
Backups. Backup, backup, backup! I learned very quickly to set up automatic snapshots. I have, unfortunately, destroyed my system once and had to reinstall completely fresh. I don’t remember exactly what I was doing, but it borked the bootloader, and I was blindly pasting commands from the internet and AI… which, yeah, was dumb. Snapshots and backups make things far less hazardous: if something breaks, whether from user error or a bugged update, I can safely revert. Thankfully I haven’t had to yet, since I’m very careful these days.
The terminal is dark magic, but it isn’t terrifying. I admit I’m one of those “kids” who prefers a GUI whenever possible. Daily driving CachyOS has taught me not to be as scared of the terminal as I was when I was just dabbling in Linux over the past couple of years. I can comfortably handle basic navigation and commands when needed, though I still prefer a GUI.
Heroic Games Launcher and Lutris are your best friends. I can’t overstate how useful these programs are. Steam does a lot with Proton, but being able to reach my non-Steam games, like my small collections from Epic, GOG, and itch.io (plus the odd title that isn’t on any of those storefronts, like Diablo IV or classic Warcraft III), has been a godsend again and again.
Things I Don’t Like but Cope With Anyway
Full control is great, until you break something. As much as I love the total control Linux gives me over the OS, it cuts both ways. If you aren’t careful, you can completely destroy your system with one or two sudo commands. I know this from experience, since that’s exactly how I killed my bootloader.
Packages… where? I have a love-hate relationship with how Linux handles packages. These days I understand it well enough to find what I want when I need it. But as a new user, it was a nightmare trying to understand the difference between the AUR, Pacman (I at first didn’t even know pacman and the AUR weren’t the same kind of thing), whatever CachyOS offers through CachyOS Hello, Flatpaks, AppImages, .debs… the list seemed endless. Sometimes you’d find a package only to discover it’s in the wrong format for your distro, or it’s been abandoned, or it’s bugged to hell. Other times you find it but aren’t sure it’s even safe. This package is on the AUR; should I risk installing it? I can kind of follow the techno-babble the terminal is throwing at me, but what’s the difference between the AUR and the other repositories? I don’t know. Maybe I should just leave well enough alone and not install anything.
Finding the right, up-to-date information can be a hair-pulling nightmare. I’m trying to solve a problem, so I look it up. Do I trust the commands from this forum post from 2012? I can’t find anything newer, and the commands didn’t work. There’s a thread from 2025 on a slightly related issue, but it’s for Fedora-based distros, not Arch. Do I ask on a forum? Which forum? How do I give people the information they need to help me? That difficulty has often steered me straight to LLMs, in my case primarily Claude, because it can find what I need in minutes rather than hours. That said, using an LLM carries its own risks and needs to be done carefully, with a lot of critical thinking.
Some games just don’t work, period. WarDogs came out recently and looks really cool. Can I play it? No, because Linux/SteamOS isn’t supported yet. Battlefield 6 looks cool too. Can I play that? Nope. Tarkov? Nope. KAC has become my biggest pet peeve about Linux, and I wish it would burn in the deepest fires of hell and never come back. Thankfully, 99% of the games I actually play don’t have this problem.
Figuring out when to update is an absolute nightmare. I fully admit this is a side effect of choosing an Arch-based system. But my god, was it scary figuring out when and how often to update. Some people told me to update daily, others weekly, and some claimed I didn’t need to update more than once a year. It’s absurd. I love being on the latest and greatest, but the constant fear of “will this update break something?” is very real. I’ve since settled on updating once a week, on Wednesdays, and so far that hasn’t borked anything.
In Conclusion..
I love Linux and CachyOS, the whole Linux system has finally reached a point in the last couple years where in most cases it just works. I genuinely do not think I’ll ever be going back to Windows and I am very much looking forward to how things shape out as I hit the half way mark on the “1 year Linux Challenge” thing people seem to talk about a lot, though at this point it’s less a challenge and more of a joy.
. Funnily enough I have run Bazzite on my TV box and it’s great for that, but I like having the Arch side on my main machine. Fully agree on the AUR being the Wild West; I treat it more or less as a last resort or only if the package is extremely well maintained and has a good and well know reputation within the wider internet spaces.
so much This. This is probably the main issue I currently have as a relatively new linux user (newer than you by the sounds of it). And figuring out which one I need and when is a bit of a pain.
Good luck to the both of us growing out of microslop!