Linux Discussion

[imacker2011]

I recently switched from Mint to Pop OS latest LTS on my MBP 2015 13“ (in parallel to OCLP Sequoia) and my wife’s MBP early 2013 13“.

The decisive factor for the switch was the Wayland implementation on Pop OS with proper working fractional scaling on the builtin HiDPI displays. Mint Cinnamon on X11 also worked fine but with fractional scaling enabled the CPU load would increase to 100% when watching YouTube videos in Brave Browser (with fans speeding up accordingly). The issue could only be resolved by disabling scaling and turning down the resolution (see here).

Given that the brilliant Retina displays are one of the strengths of these old devices this was a shame. With Pop OS it is working properly. Installation is fine (Broadcom driver needed to be installed manually on the MBP 2013) and the COSMIC desktop experience is great imho.

 

[maflynn]

@maflynn If you have a lot of extra time and aspirin, you can try Gentoo or Linux From Scratch. 😉

lol, I'll pass, I've heard of the work needed regarding gentoo.

and the COSMIC desktop experience is great imho.

Cosmic was the reason why first tried PopOS, its an excellent DE, though I don't know why they changed from modding gnome to building their own. I think they bit off more then they can chew, as there's a lot of complaints about it not quite ready for prime time. My experience with 24.04 is relatively positive, and I wasn't really bitten by too many issues, though I was missing some entries in the system settings

At the end of the day, I felt cachyos (with the gnome DE) was a better fit for how I wanted to approach using linux, it's solid, fast and offers the newest features. What I thought was its weakness, rolling releases instead of point releases, is its strength. I can see the wisdom in rolling out updates once they're ready and tested. Smaller updates is less likely to hose a system then larger updates. In a weird sense, this is why I gravitated to the LTS version, so I can remain on a stable system longer.

 

[S.B.G]

I've heard of the work needed regarding gentoo.

At one time I wanted to install Gentoo just so I could say to myself that I did it. But once I realized how much work and time went into it I decided it wasn't worth my time or effort. Having to compile everything and wait wasn't my idea of fun.

 

[imacker2011]

At the end of the day, I felt cachyos (with the gnome DE) was a better fit for how I wanted to approach using linux, it's solid, fast and offers the newest features. What I thought was its weakness, rolling releases instead of point releases, is its strength. I can see the wisdom in rolling out updates once they're ready and tested. Smaller updates is less likely to hose a system then larger updates. In a weird sense, this is why I gravitated to the LTS version, so I can remain on a stable system longer.

I heard good things about CachyOS – especially with regard to speed and gaming performance. But since it’s Arch based and most distros I used so far were Debian-based, I am a bit reluctant to install it anywhere. Did create a USB stick and started it up a while ago though. It left a good impression.

 

[maflynn]

But since it’s Arch based and most distros I used so far were Debian-based

Yeah, I hear ya, you can make a case either way regarding point releases vs. rolling updates and I too am more used to debian based distros

 

[maflynn]

I decided to install CachyOS on my desktop to evaluate its performance compared to Windows 11 and to assess how the overall user experience stacks up against macOS.

My desktop is powered by an AMD 3700X CPU and an AMD 7800 XT GPU, paired with a BenQ 32-inch 4K monitor that is also shared with my Mac. I would consider this a mid-range gaming build. By 2026 standards, the CPU is somewhat dated, though still capable, while the GPU remains solid overall. I had considered upgrading last year, but hardware prices were higher than I was willing to justify.

Regarding CachyOS, its rolling-release philosophy has grown on me — particularly the way CachyOS implements it. Although the distribution appears to favor KDE, I chose GNOME, as it better aligns with my workflow and personal preferences.

Overall, the environment has proven to be highly responsive. I have not encountered any stability issues, and the installation process required no special configuration — it worked seamlessly out of the box.

Display scaling has been excellent, comparable to Windows. I currently have scaling set to 166%, and everything appears sharp — noticeably sharper than on my Mac, where I am limited to using a 2048×1152 resolution due to macOS’s more restrictive scaling options.

Gaming performance has been particularly surprising. While my PC benchmarks lower than my Mac Studio, real-world gaming tells a different story. Using Wine-based compatibility layers (CrossOver on macOS and Proton on Linux), the difference is significant. On CachyOS, I am seeing performance close to native Windows levels, which is impressive. Although some Bethesda titles report 60 FPS on macOS, the actual game play experience feels less smooth, with noticeable sluggishness and latency.

For productivity, my office applications (OnlyOffice) perform equally well on CachyOS and macOS, with no meaningful differences in usability or stability.

Cloud storage remains an area I need to refine. I am still working on configuring rclone to mount my iCloud Drive, as my initial attempts were unsuccessful.

One area where Linux and CachyOS specifically does not yet match Apple’s ecosystem is platform integration. The seamless interaction between macOS, iPhone, and iPad remains a significant advantage. iMessage, in particular, is a standout feature for me; being able to manage conversations from my Mac significantly improves convenience and workflow. AirDrop has also been essential, and Time Machine provides a reliable, effortless backup solution that currently has no direct equivalent in my CachyOS setup.

That said, Linux and especially CachyOS offers considerable flexibility and room for growth. The ability to customize, configure, and modify nearly every aspect of the operating system is a meaningful advantage.

Overall, I have found the UI and user experience to be excellent. The system feels fast, stable, and adaptable, and it offers a level of control that is difficult to match on other platforms.

 

[S.B.G]

I decided to install CachyOS on my desktop to evaluate its performance compared to Windows 11 and to assess how the overall user experience stacks up against macOS.

My desktop is powered by an AMD 3700X CPU and an AMD 7800 XT GPU, paired with a BenQ 32-inch 4K monitor that is also shared with my Mac. I would consider this a mid-range gaming build. By 2026 standards, the CPU is somewhat dated, though still capable, while the GPU remains solid overall. I had considered upgrading last year, but hardware prices were higher than I was willing to justify.

Regarding CachyOS, its rolling-release philosophy has grown on me — particularly the way CachyOS implements it. Although the distribution appears to favor KDE, I chose GNOME, as it better aligns with my workflow and personal preferences.

Overall, the environment has proven to be highly responsive. I have not encountered any stability issues, and the installation process required no special configuration — it worked seamlessly out of the box.

Display scaling has been excellent, comparable to Windows. I currently have scaling set to 166%, and everything appears sharp — noticeably sharper than on my Mac, where I am limited to using a 2048×1152 resolution due to macOS’s more restrictive scaling options.

Gaming performance has been particularly surprising. While my PC benchmarks lower than my Mac Studio, real-world gaming tells a different story. Using Wine-based compatibility layers (CrossOver on macOS and Proton on Linux), the difference is significant. On CachyOS, I am seeing performance close to native Windows levels, which is impressive. Although some Bethesda titles report 60 FPS on macOS, the actual game play experience feels less smooth, with noticeable sluggishness and latency.
View attachment 2609959
For productivity, my office applications (OnlyOffice) perform equally well on CachyOS and macOS, with no meaningful differences in usability or stability.

Cloud storage remains an area I need to refine. I am still working on configuring rclone to mount my iCloud Drive, as my initial attempts were unsuccessful.

One area where Linux and CachyOS specifically does not yet match Apple’s ecosystem is platform integration. The seamless interaction between macOS, iPhone, and iPad remains a significant advantage. iMessage, in particular, is a standout feature for me; being able to manage conversations from my Mac significantly improves convenience and workflow. AirDrop has also been essential, and Time Machine provides a reliable, effortless backup solution that currently has no direct equivalent in my CachyOS setup.

That said, Linux and especially CachyOS offers considerable flexibility and room for growth. The ability to customize, configure, and modify nearly every aspect of the operating system is a meaningful advantage.

Overall, I have found the UI and user experience to be excellent. The system feels fast, stable, and adaptable, and it offers a level of control that is difficult to match on other platforms.

Did you install it natively, or in a VM?

My Linux box is also running AMD; I have the 3800x and like you said it's old now, but through the years it's still a very capable CPU and I've had zero performance issues with it.

I think I have the same, or similar GPU as you.

 

[maflynn]

Did you install it natively, or in a VM?

Bare metal, I formatted the drive and installed CachyOS over windows

 

[maflynn]

i saw an interesting post on some social media platform a little while ago, and I just remember it.
Its along the lines if linux is so good/open/flexible and easy to use, why hasn't it taken over?

My thoughts and I don't think there's one single answer is that with windows, you have one vendor, microsoft, with macos, you have apple. With linux you have 300 separate and distinct distros The fragmentation is one major impediment that is inhibiting adoption

Also, if you ask the common consumer, do they care what telemetry MS sends, or that they need a MS account - I'd hazard a guess and say no. The outrage, the anger, the frustration is largely with the more technical prosumers/hobbyists/nerdy folks

I'm under no illusions, my use of linux (either for the short term or long term), will have very little if any impact on Microsoft.

 

[S.B.G]

i saw an interesting post on some social media platform a little while ago, and I just remember it.
Its along the lines if linux is so good/open/flexible and easy to use, why hasn't it taken over?

My thoughts and I don't think there's one single answer is that with windows, you have one vendor, microsoft, with macos, you have apple. With linux you have 300 separate and distinct distros The fragmentation is one major impediment that is inhibiting adoption

Also, if you ask the common consumer, do they care what telemetry MS sends, or that they need a MS account - I'd hazard a guess and say no. The outrage, the anger, the frustration is largely with the more technical prosumers/hobbyists/nerdy folks

I'm under no illusions, my use of linux (either for the short term or long term), will have very little if any impact on Microsoft.

Yup. The hardcore Linux people actually don't want it to become mainstream like Windows or macOS. They like the high barrier of entry because it probably makes them feel superior, and more so, they don't want it being popular because it will likely homogenize the OS.

Then there are those who yearn for the "year of the desktop Linux" where it commands a significant amount of market share. I think to most, the "year of the desktop Linux" is more of a meme.

The reality is that, everything you pointed out, is why Linux will very likely never see significant market share and will always be for tech nerds and enthusiasts, as well as server-side machines.

 

[pshufd]

i saw an interesting post on some social media platform a little while ago, and I just remember it.
Its along the lines if linux is so good/open/flexible and easy to use, why hasn't it taken over?

My thoughts and I don't think there's one single answer is that with windows, you have one vendor, microsoft, with macos, you have apple. With linux you have 300 separate and distinct distros The fragmentation is one major impediment that is inhibiting adoption

Also, if you ask the common consumer, do they care what telemetry MS sends, or that they need a MS account - I'd hazard a guess and say no. The outrage, the anger, the frustration is largely with the more technical prosumers/hobbyists/nerdy folks

I'm under no illusions, my use of linux (either for the short term or long term), will have very little if any impact on Microsoft.

I remember this discussion back in the mid-2000s. If Mozilla could generate $90 million a year in revenue as an open source project, why couldn't Linux which has a far larger user-base (in terms of servers, appliances, etc.)? And the answer was fragmentation. There were some companies that did get money for supporting Linux and made a good living at it. But it's fragmented and it's harder to support, maintain and concentrate developers and volunteers into a bunch of smaller projects.

I'd be fine using Linux except for:

My programs run best on Windows or macOS and one of them may only run on x86 after Rosetta 2 is gone. None of them provide Linux support. One provides a Java setup and you can try and get it to run on your own and there are people on Reddit that try to do it and do get it to work but do you want to hack or just get your job done?

I'm tied to iCloud. I made the migration from Android and Evernote to iCloud and it is the smoothest ecosystem I've ever seen that ties all of my devices together and makes it easier to live my life. I can use iCloud through a web browser (I'm doing this on my Windows laptop now), but it's not quite 100% compared to using native apps on macOS. It's good enough as I can always just fix something on a Mac or in a virtual machine if I need to.

Hardware. I love my iMac Pro. I will be so disappointed when support ends. Apple makes great hardware. There is great hardware but a huge variety in the PC world. If you run Linux, will all of this hardware be supported as well as it is on Windows and macOS? Do I want to put in the effort to get it to work? This is why I don't mind running Linux in a VM as you get all of the hardware support from the host operating system.

There are signs that Microsoft is getting the message that tech nerds are very unhappy with what Microsoft has been doing. And I hope that they change to become less evil and annoying.

 

[losthismarbles]

I'd be fine using Linux except for:

Hardware ... Apple makes great hardware.

Very true, but this isn't the nineties or early naughts anymore. Others have been making great hardware too 🙂
* Software we aren't going to mention, you've used Linux distros, you know they can surpass Apple's if one has the patience to learn.

The one exception, where you're in my eyes 101% spot on? Is monitors.
Nothing beats a retina, to this very day.

Excluding a case such as yours (your x86 software)?
I (personally of course, all this mere opinion) find it a question of:
- Freedom
vs
- Better monitor

It's really that simple today. That's what you ultimately pick.
And regarding the monitor, some asterisks there too. Nothing beats a good retina, yes, but, depending on what you do, you can by now get pretty damn close to one, making the above even more tilted a comparison.
In reality of course, freedom has a cost and folks don't want to bother, so there you go, bonus shifting back to the better monitor; granted 🙂

But i think we're at a point where features/openness/customisation is the true factor at play when it comes to 'choosing'.
We've long surpassed "hardware limitations" in as far as daily use PCs may be concerned.
I just wish both big goys (Apple+Microsoft) saw that, because if one were to judge by what they put out, one'd reach the opposite conclusion, stricter and stricter as time goes by.. someday, maybe they'll smell the coffee too. One hopes.

 

[maflynn]

So for anyone trying rclone to mount their icloud drive, it largely doesn't work. There's been posted work arounds, but so far those offered solutions were unsuccessful. I'm getting a
Fatal error: HTTP error 400 (400 Bad Request) returned body: "{\"success\":false,\"error\":\"Invalid Session Token\"}"

googling that, its a known issue, and the work around was to use -user-agent "rclone-test-123" along with a reconnect string. That was not working for me.

In its place, I configured rclone to use my proton drive, which worked flawlessly. I'll move my documents folder from my mac to the proton drive and call it a day.

 

[dmr727]

I seem to go through the process of trying out a new distro every couple of years, and @maflynn 's recent post convinced me to give CachyOS a try. So far it's been great - a perfectly seamless install on my 5800X3D/4070 desktop. I'm also really enjoying the look of Plasma.

Not having great iCloud integration isn't ideal, but I have everything synced to a Synology NAS (including all my Photos), so I can easily access anything I need from there.

 

[maflynn]

CachyOS just rolled out their 7th release. I've yet to run sudo pacman -Syu Waiting to see how reports roll in about its stability

CachyOS March 2026 Release

Desktop Previews, Winboat, Website Redesign

cachyos.org

 

[maflynn]

For @S.B.G

 

[S.B.G]

For @S.B.G
View attachment 2611738

Yup! There's a lot of Arch people like that.

 

[boswald]

I still prefer Fedora on my desktop machine. It's been solid, stable, and has a nice coat of polish that makes it feel professional, but still accessible to "regular people". I don't play a lot of games anymore, but the ones I do play run great. The only issue I have is with the game launchers themselves!

 

[Steve Adams]

I am after trying Zorin, Mint, PearOS, and more. Zorin is the best I have used. PearOS is fun but had usability quirks like the pointer stops responding for a few seconds then starts again. I thought it was the pc I had it loaded on, but it did it on 2 others.

 

[maflynn]

gnome 50 is out and it seems this update is rather feature packed. I guess the biggest change is the removal of the x11 backend, its all wayland now.

GNOME Release Notes

Discover what's new in GNOME, the distraction-free computing platform.

release.gnome.org

 

[salamanderjuice]

i saw an interesting post on some social media platform a little while ago, and I just remember it.
Its along the lines if linux is so good/open/flexible and easy to use, why hasn't it taken over?

My thoughts and I don't think there's one single answer is that with windows, you have one vendor, microsoft, with macos, you have apple. With linux you have 300 separate and distinct distros The fragmentation is one major impediment that is inhibiting adoption

Also, if you ask the common consumer, do they care what telemetry MS sends, or that they need a MS account - I'd hazard a guess and say no. The outrage, the anger, the frustration is largely with the more technical prosumers/hobbyists/nerdy folks

I'm under no illusions, my use of linux (either for the short term or long term), will have very little if any impact on Microsoft.

It's not sold out of the box*. That's the biggest issue. Mainstream people don't think about installing an OS, and it also means the OEMs aren't gearing systems for Linux comparability. Then you get a brave few who try on systems that weren't intended for it because they already have it, have a bad time because the WiFi doesn't work and sleep is broken or whatever and they blame the OS rather than the OEM that built the machine and go back to Windows. Linux has to beat this weird expectation that it should work perfectly on all hardware.

* Yes, it's possible to get pre-builds special ordered or boutique builders, but it's not on the shelf at Best Buy or Wal-mart so it's largely forgotten.

 

[maflynn]

Life is not all rainbows and unicorns in the Manjaro world.
Manjaro 2.0 Manifesto

I know about Manjaro but I never really followed or used it, but it seems the community is really unhappy with how the distro has been managed and is looking to for some significant changes if those don't occur, they may fork the distro

 

[DanneP]

I've tried a lot of distros but it seems like I always fall back to Ubuntu. Right now my early 2015 Air and my HP USFF are both running Ubuntu 24.04.

Recently I tried openSUSE Tumbleweed for a while, but for my usage there was no additional value added. I don't have the time to fiddling with everything and most of the things I like works out of the box on Ubuntu - so that's a huge plus for me.

Ubuntu works very well, it's stable, I like Gnome, and it's reasonably light on resources.

I might have to go with Fedora if I get a M{1,2} device. Arch/ALARM is of course an alternative.

 

[maflynn]

In its place, I configured rclone to use my proton drive, which worked flawlessly. I'll move my documents folder from my mac to the proton drive and call it a day.

So I was premature in my flawless pronouncement of rclone and proton drive.

I started running into issues, where I'm able to connect to the proton drive, but I cannot open or copy a file.

 

[S.B.G]

So I was premature in my flawless pronouncement of rclone and proton drive.

I started running into issues, where I'm able to connect to the proton drive, but I cannot open or copy a file.

Another option to consider if you have the hardware is syncthing. I've been using that for years now at home, and at work and I don't use any of the cloud services anymore.

I have a self built TrueNAS Scale server with 11TB of storage on it. All my files sync between that, the Mac Studio, Air, mini, Arch box and Ubuntu box. It also works on encrypted relay for syncing outside the LAN without having to open ports on the firewall or use a VPN.