TLDR: Which distro is better for gaming and video editing (NVIDIA GPU), CachyOS or Ubuntu?

Hi! It's been probably a month since I started using Linux (escaping from Windows), and I choose LMDE since the distro that I felt aligned more with what I want from a distro on in general is Debian, but since it was my first time using Linux on my main device (just tried Debian on a laptop to run a Homelab) I got recommended Mint to make it easier for me to adapt.
The thing is that since I started using LMDE I've discovered that it doesn't cover perfectly my needs.
Two things that I didn't want to lose when switching to Linux were gaming and the ability to run video/audio/photo editing programs flawlessly, mainly DaVinci Resolve and AffinityPhoto.
It's been practically impossible to achieve that, since DaVinci doesn't work, can't even get to install AffinityPhoto and some videogames need more recent (NVIDIA) drivers than what Debian and of course LMDE can offer.
So, seeing that I want to keep LMDE (and maybe in the future upgrade from LMDE to Debian) but at the same time I'm not willing to give up on those 2 things, I believe the dual-boot option is the one that suits me the most.
Now, what I'm here for.
I've been doing some research and the ones that caught my atention the most were CachyOS and Ubuntu:

• CachyOS:
  PROS:
  · High gaming performance and (looks like) compatibility.
  · Looks like DaVinci works perfectly for a lot of people (although some other people claim having issues).
  CONS:
  · Sounds too complex as a distro for someone who has close to zero programming knowledge and just started using Linux.
  · The rolling release aspect feels a little scary too.

• Ubuntu:
  PROS:
  · May not be THE gaming distro but it seems to be working for a lot of people without having extensive programming or Linux knowledge.
  · Generally may be more compatible and stable than CachyOS in general
  · Seems it will be easier for me to adapt to since it's Debian-based.
  CONS:
  · Doesn't seem as good as CachyOS on a performance standpoint, affecting both video editing and gaming capabilities.

Now, my questions would be:
Am I mistaken in any of the info I have revolving these two distros?
Could I be missing any other options?
Which do you think is the distro that could suit me the most?
Any recommendation when doing the Dual-boot? I have never done it and it scares me a little tbh.

My main priority is having a stable (and compatible in the first place, of course) experience (maybe Ubuntu?), but I don't mind having to put more work into it to achieve a better experience (maybe CachyOS?).

I would love to hear from you and, of course, if I'm missing any relevant information I'll be more than happy to share it too.

Thank you very much! :D

Add the nvidia apt repository and install the drivers.

I went Garuda and I'm happy.

If you like tinkering and tech go Cachy. If you just want things to work go Ubuntu.

Catchy and then Arch when you learned 👍

CachyOS or Ubuntu?

With all due respect to Ubuntu, but this isn’t even a comparison. I’d try to give you a fair answer if you’d stated Garuda, for example, or Nobara, or Bazzite instead of Ubuntu, because these distros actually put in an effort for gaming specifically, but Ubuntu? It’s a workstation distro and it’s gaming performance is basically whatever the default is on “Linux” as a whole.

I have personally been using CachyOS for over two years now and I’ve been very happy with it. Their installer recognizes your gpu automatically and installs the right drivers for you.

Not to take away from the other ones, I’m sure they have amazing work/performance, too, but this is my experience because I’ve tried all of the distros I’ve mentioned above and CachyOS was the best for me personally.

Your mileage may vary of course. The best thing to do is try different distros and find out for yourself. Make sure your data is backed up while you hop between them until you chose one.

What are your PC specs outside of an Nvidia card?

Depending on your specs, it might make more sense to run it in a Virtual Machine than dual boot.

I started my process of going into Linux with dual-booting for several years while also running a small linux server on a raspberry pi 3B+.

The reality is I hardly ever booted into Linux unless I needed to do something over there. Several times I ignored the Linux side long enough that it was fully broken from not receiving updates for so long. (Literally slept on the upgrade window until the next upgrade was already out and the old upgrade window was gone...ooof. after that I went with LTS just to ensure that didn't happen again).

Part of the reason I never booted into it is because turning it off and then on again... is actually more time consuming and interruptive than you initially think. I would just forget it was there on a normal day without any specific projects to work on.

I never really took it properly seriously until I fully removed Windows and made my Linux my daily driver. If I still need Windows, I run that in a Virtual Machine. However the amount of times I need it is steadily decreasing.

So, based on personal experience, if you have the specs, I strongly suggest a VM otherwise you might find yourself not even bothering to boot into Linux half the time because everything you do daily is still on Windows. Just a thought nugget to consider. Plenty of people told me I should be running mine in a VM that whole time, too. I was skeptical. Looking back, they were right, and it took me longer to acclimate than it would have if I had been consistently using it.

Go Nobara. It just works, with hardly any configuration needed, and is kept remarkably up to date with its updater alone.

While this is possible, I wouldn't disturb LMDE's (or Debian's) harmony with adding Nvidia's repo. By doing this you add a posibility of a broken or a wonky system after a driver update. Gaming over flatpak would be a safer choice.

You cant really go wrong.

I would try Baazite.

Big second for CachyOS.

I distro hop a fair bit but I keep coming back to Cachy. Personally, I choose to manage and maintain my machine entirely through the terminal, but with Shelly (the GUI package manager CachyOS ships with) and their built in updater, you could probably do all of your basic gaming and video editing for years without ever having to launch a terminal.

Also, snapper backups functional out of the box. Something breaks? Just pick the most recent snapper image in the boot menu, and hold off on updating for a few days.

On that note, Cachy slows their update releases a little more than Arch, so while it’s still bleeding edge, there’s still a little buffer time for stability sake, same with EndeavourOS, another great arch based distro.

Ubuntu has its merits. It’s simple and it generally just works, but Cachy is not nearly difficult enough to pass on.

Addition to other comments, you can also try your chance by installing Steam as flatpak. Maybe that would work without you needing a second distro.

For DaVinci Resolve, you can try this: https://www.danieltufvesson.com/makeresolvedeb

You're not me. You will have different tastes too me. No point you using the distros I like. Do what everybody else does, experiment, try a few, read about them. The are loads out there all with little quirks and differences.
Try L/K/X/Ubuntu, try cachyos / arch, try void, try Gentoo, try popos.... Have a look at distrowatch for loads of inspiration.

Any and all distros can use and run any software any other distro runs so they can all do the same stuff, just they all get there in slightly different ways.

The problem the op is having is solved with the nvidia drivers. The most common (and nvidia supported!) method of installing them on their distribution is to install the nvidia drivers through the apt repository some other nvidia supported way. In the case there is a problem with a driver update, there is a higher chance someone will document and explain a resolution to that hypothetical problem based on the normal apt installation of nvidia drivers in a format that the op will find when they go looking for a solution on the internet.

Their capacity to run the two photo and video editing programs is something they’ll have to figure out no matter what they do and they said as much in their op, but the nvidia drivers fix the other problem and the apt repo or some other nvidia supported method of installing them is the appropriate suggestion.

Gaming on flatpack just adds another layer of complexity to a system the op already doesn’t understand how to use.

Compared to other distros, do you feel it's been tougher to maintain everything stable enough to not go crazy?
Thanks!

That sounds very good and gives me hope hahah. I'll have it in mind.
Thank youu

I already did install steam via flatpak. For most games it straight up works flawlessly, but there are times it doesn't haha.
I'll check again makeresolvedeb but I'm not sure it will fully work since one of the main and most conflictive things regarding my DaVinci setup is that I use an extension card (DeckLink Mini Monitor 4K) and I'm afraid it could have issues recognizing it. Won't know until I try it tho.
Thankss

Possibly the best advice here re: the distro.

While it helps to have people give you suggestions, the person who it really needs to work for is you, the user. Don't let popular opinion turn you away from what works for you, OP. Experiment and play. It costs nothing to put on a new system except some time and effort.

Also, if you put your home/ directory on its own partition, you can experiment with variations of the same types, like the all the variations of Ubuntu. I'm pretty sure modern installers even back up the dotfiles that exist in your current home/ directory for you, so you don't even have to worry about old dotfiles breaking anything.

I'll check that out, thanks!

Have you tried video editing in garuda or just gaming? Can't find much feedback on DaVinci in Garuda.
Thanks

That's exactly what happened. I forced the last drivers with CUDA Toolkit and it broke other parts of the PC making some programs useless.

Specs:

AMD Ryzen 5 5600X,
RTX 3070 Ti,
32 GB RAM,
HDD,
1 M.2 and soon will add another one.

Similar to what I responded to another user that suggested using makeresolvedeb, I'm not sure the VM could detect the extension card I use for color grading (DeckLink Mini Monitor 4K), which would be an instant turnoff.
However I'll try it before going Dualboot. The only issue I find is that I don't know how to set the VM properly for it to detect the card and also make the VM being as fast as my pc, since every VM I mount is pretty slow and makes the VM only a useful tool to try distros but not to actually use them.
Thank you!

Just gaming, but anything that works in Arch generally should be fine in Garuda. Honestly, after using Linux for a year and trying 2 very different distros (Mint and Garuda) there's really not a lot of difference between them for the average user.

Sounds like a cool challenge, will see if I get to that point in the future 🫡

Gaming on flatpack just adds another layer of complexity to a system the op already doesn’t understand how to use.

I completely agree with this. But flatpak at least wouldn't cause the same possible problems with Nvidia repo.

I think using Debian Testing would be saner than adding Nvidia repo to regular Debian. Mixing old and new packages is not a good idea, or disturbing the harmony of your distro, unless you know what you're doing.

Yeah, that tends to happen. It's not a good idea to mix old and new packages.

IMO Fedora can do everything that Ubuntu does, without snap or the opinionated Cannonical stuff, it's an easy GUI installer, has better defaults (except you need to manually add non-fre repos, trivial), and wide software compatibility. You can't go wrong with Fedora unless you specifically hate having up to date software or major updates every 6-12 months.

Cachy is a fine distro too I guess. I'd probably use EndeavorOS instead. Any distro with a relatively recent graphics stack is going to game the same. The QoL stuff around the margins is going to be more important than the 2% optimization you get from Cachy's kernel, and cachyos-proton can be run on steam in any distro.

That's a very helpfull advice. I'll do that. Thank you!!

I see. I don't like flatpak Steam either but someone on Lemmy told me recently that it got better. But it seems it still has its quirks.

No problem! Yeah, you might have problems with an extension card but it probably would work, might need additional settings though. On the other hand, installing Resolve on Cachy is simple, so there is that too.

+1 for bazzite because of their inmutable root partition. This should be the way for both beginners and professionals (e.g. adding rootless quadlet for local searxng)

Thanks for your kind advice :D
Though I didn't get the half of what you said in the last paragraph hahahah. Guess it shows I wasn't lying when I said I'm new xd

Seeing that I'm getting closer to Cachy than Ubuntu, I'll check Endeavor, which I don't I had heard of yet. I'll test Fedora too just in case.
Thanks!

Very helpfull. I'll have that in mind. Thankss!

Yeah, I'll definitely check that box before trying DaVinci in Cachy :)

okay, well, your root directory is always / that's where your system stuff lives like /usr/ /bin/ /etc/ et cetera. however, you also have in there alongside the system stuff a /home/ directory, which is where your user data lives. Think of /home/ as your C:\Users\ folder. It's where whatever your username and its data is is going to live.

The thing is, when installing the OS, you can choose to set up (manually) to have your /home/ directory on another disk or disk partition, which separates it from the root / directory psychically or logically respectively.

It would be like if you could re-install windows entirely but never lose your C:\Users\ folder because it actually lived at D:\Users\ and Windows just always looked for your users folder upon install (which Ubuntu does) and allows you to re-use it if it finds it.

So:\
/ = C:\
/home/ = C:\Users\

These aren't 1 to 1 matches in terms of analogy, but it's pretty close.

Note that, EndeavourOS is stock Arch with a GUI installer, if you don't mind theming which is optional. CachyOS is a tailored Arch so it would probably be easier for you.

Good luck! :)

Yeah, GPU passthrough is pretty tough to get with VMs as well, let alone something very tailored to graphics needs like that. So I can understand if you need that to work why it's a turn off.

Well, VMs being slower than the host machine is just a real tradeoff that happens. You can try using less graphics/ram/cpu heavy systems like Xubuntu/Lubuntu (although to be fair even Kubuntu is pretty lightweight now). But part of it is how much RAM you give it. If you have the spare ram for it, give it as much as you can. I have 32gb of ram and yet rarely break using 10gb of it so if I am running a single VM I usually give it 12gb of ram at minimum. Also depending on what you're using for your VM you could give the VM more cpu cores to use, but that will in turn speed it up (although depending on the load may also slow down your host as it loses access to cores). Giving it enough ram, enough cores, and putting it on the next M.2 (pulling the OS of an HDD is slow af) you get if there's enough room. Those are all things that will bring up speed.

To be fair, there isn't really a such thing as "stock" Arch. You would just have the base and linux linux-firmware packages. EOS gives you a minimal, but entirely functional desktop experience with as few assumptions possible, which is nice for someone who wants to tailor their desktop to their liking. You are correct, cachy would probably be easier, but I don't think EOS is particularly hard. Either way, gaming is just a matter of installing steam.

i'm not on CachyOS, but whenever i asked how somebody got a game to work on linux, the response was Cachy.

I'm on Artix and Debian. Like you wrote, it's impossible to get some games to run on Debian based distributions (i don't care enough about games, so i won't be changing my OS

Ubuntu is Debian based. Won't be any better than LMDE.
Endeavour won't give you anything basic Arch can't.

Cachy is modified for gaming, iiuc. If i had to reinstall on our desktop today, i would go with Cachy.

if you've been using Linux for a month, do yourself a favour and don't try Gentoo.

This isn't an important choice. If you don't like the distro or you are having issues, it's like 10 minutes to switch to a different one.

That being said, I would not recommend Ubuntu for a variety of reasons. CachyOS is a great option, but there are others. Just try it, if you have issues or don't like it, try something else.

changing proton versions helps with some games. Some work with experimental, some with hotfix.

There are even unofficial versions that get those few stubborn games to work ☞ https://github.com/GloriousEggroll/proton-ge-custom

I haven’t had any major breakages with it beside that one time over a year ago where grub shit the bed and I had to reinstall it from a live environment. Then switched to limine and haven’t had a single issue like that ever since.

Well, technically that's true but figure of speech. :)

EOS is one of my most used distros to this day and I agree it's one of the best minimalist distros with a GUI installer out there. It gives you nice defaults and cover almost everything out of the box. However OP is new in Linux world and in my opinion they shouldn't use Arch at all for the transition period (though that part completely depends on the person). But Cachy has many tools pre-installed comparing to EOS so that's why it would be easier.

I’m not a programmer either. Never have been. You don’t need to be one to use any desktop distro. You’d be fine with CachyOS. It is popular enough that getting help with anything that does pop up should be easy. I’ve used it as well as Nobara and Bazzite. Ultimately, I landed on Bazzite. That was about a year ago and I am happy.

Have you tried kdenlive?
https://youtu.be/9dIqJDy78TI

Yeah, Fedora is the one that finally got me to switch

I can't really tell you what will work for you, but I took a similar starting path...

When I finally took linux seriously as my Primary OS a few years ago, I too picked LMDE, and generally thought it was good. I eventually moved on because I wanted access to newer stuff like Nvidia drivers.

My next distro was Fedora KDE Edition, and.tjis would be my generic recommendation for anyone coming from Windows. Rolling updates isn't scary, actually it means you don't have a terrifying big upgrade looming on the horizon.

About a year ago I started hand-crafting my own Hyprland on Arch setup. It's great. Bleeding edge stuff, and contrary to the memes it's actually been the easiest to maintain - possibly because I only have the packages I need. BUT I wouldn't recommend this for someone without a software engineering background.

I also dabbled withe EndeavourOS which deserves a shout.

As a Debian user and programmer, I also suggest Fedora. As said above, Fedora has everything that Ubuntu does, does not force snap packs on its users, and finally, it offers updated software libraries compared to more stable distros such as Debian.

Agreed, distro hopping is the best way to find what you like, and learn along the way, but if a distro isn't easy to install, it isn't for newbies, or for me a few years in.

Even when I was back on windows, my data was always stored on a separate physical drive, I do the same now on linux, and will never understand why anyone would choose to store the 2 on the same drive (unless they only have 1 drive).

I didn't use 'my documents' and I don't use 'home' either. No doubt there are some benefits to doing so though.