Ditching Bluefin for CachyOS

I was previously using Bluefin fairly extensively. And I was mostly happy — aside from a few niggles, I was able to mostly stay in Linux and only boot into Windows occasionally. Some of the niggles were just Microsoft clashing with Linux — Outlook required for work, etc. Other niggles — sleep not working, high battery use, and lack of HDR — were, I thought, inherent to running Linux on my particular laptop, the Asus ProArt P16 with the 5090. In my last write-up I’d concluded I’d be staying on Bluefin, because the immutable rollbacks were too valuable to give up. Funny how that turned out.

I really enjoy the nitty-gritty of development and updates of the OS itself, but I was finding that the Bluefin community was almost entirely focused on the mechanics of how the install images were made. Trying to participate, it very much felt like no one was interested in making the OS better — just in how it was made — and it didn’t feel particularly welcoming.

So, I pulled on my big-boy pants and tried CachyOS again. I was worried about losing the comfort and safety of immutable Bluefin with its lovely rollbacks, but it turned out this was a massive bonus. Cachy does have BTRFS snapshots, though I’ve not had to use them yet.

I initially installed COSMIC as my desktop environment, just to give it a try, and while there’s definitely aspects of it I love, the lack of animations was a real show-stopper for me, so I went back to GNOME. Imagine my surprise to find HDR worked immediately out of the box. Ok, that’s one bugbear from Bluefin down.

And then the non-immutable nature (mutable, I guess) really came into its own — I pointed my Hermes agent at some silly, and some big, things that bugged me. My laptop would never sleep properly on any Linux distro I’d tried.

I asked Hermes to look into it (running Qwen3.6 at the time) and it did a bunch of work in the background isolating and then fixing the problem — took it maybe twenty or thirty minutes. Then I closed the lid. Laptop went to sleep properly. Major bugbear down there; now the laptop was usable on my commute, and battery life is markedly better too, though I’ve not put numbers on it. Hermes wrote me a nice .md of what it did:

General snappiness was, undoubtedly, better than on Bluefin. Especially after I fixed the flatpak issue. Flatpaks always wake the nvidia dGPU by polling all GPUs. This imperceptibly uses a bit more power than I’d like, but more importantly it very perceptibly makes launching flatpaks take 2–3 seconds if the dGPU is sleeping. Massive PITA. So Hermes could poke some files for me, and now that doesn’t happen.

I’ve not enabled AUR — given the supply-side issues at the moment there — but I’ve been able to get everything I want from AppImages, flatpaks, and Cachy’s repos.

I’m now almost entirely living in Linux, and I absolutely love it. My skin crawls a little when I think about the OS files becoming polluted with dependencies and the like — something that was impossible with immutable Bluefin. But the fact is CachyOS is fast, it’s up to date, and it’s super stable.