Towards the end of 2025, I decided to make the switch to Linux from Windows. There’s a number of reasons to do such a change, mine were mostly because I wanted control over my computer again. It also is a good time to switch with Valve’s Proton being in a fantastic state as of writing this and with plenty of good distros to choose from.

My Previous Linux/UNIX Experience

I’ve been using Linux off and on for servers for about a decade and a half, mostly with Debian or Ubuntu. Specifically I’ve had a home server running for six to seven years that’s running Ubuntu server.

In addition to that I’ve been using Macs for as long as I can remember, including in my professional career. So, using that as a software engineering platform has made me fluent in the command line, POSIX and everything else that comes with that.

With all of that, I also took a class in college on systems programming. If you’re a total nerd and want to know some of the UNIX fundamentals I strongly recommend Understanding Unix/Linux Programming by Bruce Molay.

This post will be about my journey on picking a distro to stick with. A disclaimer is in order though!

Disclaimer

The thoughts below are my own. There are very likely workarounds, solutions or just a simple paradigm shift to the issues I encountered. Some of the issues I encountered weren’t even that big of a deal, I switched because of them just to try something else out and see if it worked better.

If you find Distro X is better, then use Distro X.

CachyOS

After a few trials and tribulations with Mint, Debian and Fedora I landed on CachyOS. I wanted something a bit more cutting edge, good gaming support and KDE. It checked all the boxes!

The installer is a little rough around the edges, but the Arch Wiki is a tremendous resource and helped me through some of the issues I ran into. The issues were mainly self inflicted because I wanted an encrypted disk and separate home partition. The installer didn’t support that out of the box easily, but I was able to get it done.

Once I was booted in I found it surprisingly polished. The last time I used Linux with a desktop was a long time ago and its certainly improved.

Within a couple hours I was able to get Cyberpunk 2077 installed, along with ModOrganizer 2 using NaK for my modlist. It also ran pretty dang well. I was able to have it at Psycho settings with Path Tracing @ 1440p with ~80 FPS. Once I enabled DLSS and frame generation I got it up to 120+ easily and it was buttery smooth.

I did notice some ghosting, though using CachyOS’ PROTON_DLSS_UPGRADE variable that seemed to be fixed. See my report on ProtonDB for more information on the tinkering I did to get it to work with mods.

On NaK

One thing with NaK is because it uses a prefix separate to Steam’s prefix for the game, you need to symlink your save games from the NaK prefix to the Steam prefix. For example:

ln -s "~/.local/share/Steam/steamapps/compatdata/1091500/pfx/drive_c/users/steamuser/Saved Games/CD Projekt Red/Cyberpunk 2077/" "~/NaK/Prefixes/mo2_cyberpunk/pfx/drive_c/users/steamuser/Saved Games/CD Projekt Red/Cyberpunk 2077"

Final Words

I’ve been using Cachy for about a month or so now, the only time I’ve booted back into Windows was to copy some files from WSL. Otherwise I haven’t needed it. It’s been freeing. If you’re on the fence about making the switch to Linux, now’s the time. Here’s a list of games/tools I’ve been using with basically no issues.

  • Cyberpunk 2077*
  • Skyrim Special Edition (with mods)*
  • Starfield + Starfield CreationKit
  • Affinity v3*
  • Old School Runescape w/ Bolt Launcher

I’ll have more to report on things like my backup strategy, disk setup and more!

The * denotes if tinkering with Wine/Proton was required