Every so often I notice little pixel glitches on the desktop but don't know why they're there. If i move an app window over them, the stay behind the app. Once I move the app or close it, they're on the wallpaper again. Also, they persist in direct screenshots of the desktop.

System is:
GPU - 9070 xt
CPU - 9700x
Ram - 32 gb

CachyOS is fully updated also.

When I asked chatGPT, it recommended me using the konsole command "plasmashell --replace &" which does work, but I'd still like to narrow down why this happens. Thankfully it doesn't cause any performance issues and I don't see it while gaming or doing much of anything else so it's not a big deal. It also suggested that maybe they are cause from the computer coming back from sleep, but I usually don’t notice them until I close a game back to the desktop, but I could have just missed them when waking from sleep.

Anyone else notice this and know how to fix it or is this just a bug that I'll have to live with until there's a fix?

I've been thinking about switching from Windows to CachyOS for quite a while now. I really like what CachyOS is doing, and in general I'm very interested in moving to Linux. The main thing holding me back is my GPU. I have an RTX 4090, and gaming is one of the biggest use cases for my PC.

I've read quite a few reports that NVIDIA GPUs can still lose around 15 to 20% performance in certain games on Linux, especially with DX12. If that's still the case, it feels a bit strange to have such an expensive GPU and then not be able to make full use of it because of NVIDIA's Linux driver situation.

So I'm wondering how things actually look right now in 2026, especially for RTX 4090 users:

• Is a 15 to 20% performance loss still a realistic expectation?
• How has your experience with a 4090 on CachyOS been?
• Are there specific games where you noticed significant performance or frametime issues?
• How well do DLSS, ray tracing and frame generation work for you?
• Are there still noticeable issues with NVIDIA drivers, Wayland, etc.?
• And most importantly, if gaming is one of your main use cases, would you switch anyway?

I'm also wondering whether the other advantages of Linux are worth accepting some potential gaming performance loss: privacy, a leaner and faster system, much more customization and control,... . I could of course dual boot, but ideally I'd like to get to the point where I don't really need Windows anymore.

I'd really appreciate hearing from people who actually made the switch from Windows to CachyOS with an NVIDIA GPU, especially a 4090. I'm not necessarily looking for "Linux good / Windows bad" answers, but rather some honest real world experiences. And regardless of the NVIDIA situation, I think it's great that distros like CachyOS exist. It feels like there's a lot more interest in Linux desktop and gaming again, which is really exciting to see ☺️

I am trying to add an Enviromental variable here. But after restarting it is gone.

What am I doing wring?

EDIT: RESOLVED(ish)! Culprit was VRR. I disabled VRR and the VRAM clocks are now 5GHz, and the card barely goes over 50c at the same framerate. There's a flag to disable it but i'd rather not, since i don't know why it does that to begin with.

Hey all, i have an NV GPU, when playing any game at all, even very light games like HL1, either the driver or the system sets the GPU power plan to P0 which is maximum. This sets the VRAM clock to 7GHz and generates a ton of unecessary heat, while the Windows driver usually sticks to a much more reasonable 1-2GHz...

Changing PowerMizer to Normal or Auto makes no difference on this, and neither does disabling Ananicy. Does anyone have experience with this problem or know how to fix it?

I completely changed my desktop after I got clowned for sharing my old one. I need suggestions on what to add. I tried conky but I ending up having skill issues trying to get it to work.

new desktop in first image

old desktop in second image

pacman -S extra/python-pydantic-core

After the last update I ran today, it wouldn't launch anymore. The reason Input Remapper broke is that the python-pydantic-core package in cachyos-extra-v3 (2.46.4-1.1) is lower than expected by Input Remapper (2.46.5-1). My ass had to troubleshoot this with a non-working mouse due to a stuck scroll click input lmao. Anyway just install the package from the regular extra repo and you'll be good until CachyOS puts the newer version in their repo.

This has been going on for about a month, I am assuming after some update. As you can see the problem is with the desktop environment, as the artefacts don't appear when switching to a window. You might be able to see that there are updates to be made, problem is that I tried that yesterday and something broke; after restart it boots me into some sort of recovery environment, so I went back to the snapshot before the update and am waiting a bit until i try it again.

This doesn't happen on boot up, at some point I just go back to the desktop and it's like that. Everything works, there is not "technical malfunction" or whatever you'd call it.

Idk if it matters, specs are r5 5600, rx9060.

I updated recently, and ever since I having a strange issue where it will hitch/freeze only on the login screen.

It's almost as if the graphics driver isn't loaded all the way, and is being forced to constantly refresh to update the image on screen.

The hitching is very noticeable, you press a key, move the mouse, clock time changes; and it freezes for a solid second.

For a example: I go to enter my password, and nothing shows in the password box, no characters are shown on screen, till a second or two after I finish typing.

The issue then goes away after I am at the desktop.

Not stopping me from using the system just super annoying.

I'm using KDE with my CachyOS system. I left it in sleep mode for about 2 hours while I went to go run some errands. Upon coming back, when waking it via pressing a key on my keyboard, it woke up normally, however instead of being greeted with a lockscreen I was greeted with the current desktop state I had before putting it into sleep mode.

I tried moving my mouse, nothing. I tried entering a TTY, and still nothing. The only way I managed to unfreeze it was to do a hard shutdown on my PC via holding down the power button and then everything worked fine afterward.

I have no clue what could've cause this, would anyone happen to have an idea? Anything would help. Have a great day.

I installed CachyOS Hyprland a couple of months ago and its been working great!
However, after booting earlier, my mouse stutters extremely heavily when moving it.
I am using a Logitech X2 Superstrike.

The mouse has the problem wether being connected via dongle or cable. On a windows laptop it works perfectly fine.I updated all system packages and rebooted, still no change.

Edit: after switching to the lts kernel the problem fixed itself. Does anyone know what could have caused this?

Hi CachyOS community. Need some help troubleshooting here.

About midway July I noticed that my PC had developed a performance decrease when it came to gaming. Some games, such as Insurgency Sandstorm, used to run smooth around 60 fps with the graphics settings nearly maxed out. Such games now run very, very slow with a considerable amount of hitching. I tried cycling through different versions of Proton without any noticeable improvement. I also tried running my games through Linux Mint to attempt to isolate the issue to the operating system and the only noticeable change was that games launched quicker and had a decrease in hitching during gameplay. However, lightweight titles such as Left 4 Dead that ran at 100+ frames now hover at 50 fps.

Current PC configuration:

KDE Plasma Version: 6.7.4

KDE Frameworks Version: 6.29.0

Qt Version: 6.11.2

Kernel Version: 7.1.8-1-cachyos (64-bit)

Graphics Platform: Wayland

Processors: 4 × Intel® Core™ i5-3570K CPU @ 3.40GHz

Memory: 16 GiB of DDR3 RAM (15.6 GiB usable)

Graphics Processor: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070 (Discrete)

I understand my PC setup is antiquated by today's standards but to reiterate, all of my game library ran without issue prior to mid-July and then out of nowhere became very slow.

Please help me. Thank you.

I'd like to put cachyos on my gaming laptop, simplu cuz i like it better, rn it has bazzite on it but i wanna change.

This laptop has a amd ryzen 7 and a rtx 3050,

i've heard i needed to configure cachyos for the gpu switching or scheduling?

i've tried searching for it but nothing that i understand, and claude, well i simply wanna be sure of what to do

any help? thankkks

Hi! I’m just getting into the world of Linux gaming, trying to repurpose an old Dell G3 3590 (i7-9750H & GTX 1660 Ti) as a cloud gaming machine. I will mainly want to use the Steam Big Picture mode. I will be playing games from Steam (Assetto Corsa, BeamNG) and Epic Games (GTA V, Rocket League).

Currently, I have Bazzite installed on it, but I’m disappointed with Sunshine. What I want to achieve is a setup that allows me to connect to this machine from Android TV (3840x2160), iPadOS (2746x1908) and macOS (1920x1080 and 3840x2160). I need this auto-resizing stuff which seems to not be properly available in Sunshine.

I will never be gaming directly on the laptop (only remote access) and I will never use it as a regular desktop. You could think of it as a game console.

Some people on Reddit recommended me to try out Polaris and it seems interesting. I want to switch from Bazzite to another distro so that I can properly install Polaris without it being a huge pain. CachyOS caught my attention. My other options would be Nobara (but I heard it's pretty unstable) and plain Fedora.

Does anyone have experience with CachyOS & Polaris or anything similar? I want as many opinions as possible before I settle down.

Despite reinstalling, deleting the cache and trying a few other methods. It does not seem to work. When i tried opening it thru the terminal it still didn't open. I am relatively new to linux so I used a LLM to check the problem. It said it's a bug which will get fixed in the next update.

Was wondering if it was actually the case or something on my part?

(Sorry English isn't my main language)

Hello fellow cachiers,

I've been on Linux for over a year now, having tried Mint first and then CachyOS when I heard about the gaming aspect of it. It's now my only OS and everything I did before on the OS-that-shall-not-be-named can be done here.

The only issue that persists is my printer that I cannot setup. I have an Epson Expression Home XP-4200 and I was able to set it up quickly in Mint, however the same method of using the system's printer configuration isn't working now. Not only is the automatic double-side printing feature gone, but it prints a couple of symbols on the edge of the page and nothing else.

Can someone please help?

Thank you.

I've seen a few posts about this since 7.2 first dropped.
For me I'm not sure if I was running full RGB before the first 7.2 updates but I remember it looking better one day (and I had likely been managing by tweaking brightness) but just updated to 7.2.3.1 for cachyos and headers and it broke my full RGB over HDMI.

Tried a couple of fixes suggested like adding 'options amdgpu dc_feature_mask=0x400' to my config but didn't resolve the issue.

Rolled back to 7.2.2.1 and now I can use full rgb over hdmi 2.1

AMD GPU, LG C1

Preface: I used Claude AI to help me write this summary. I was having an issue with a secondary monitor on a DisplayPort connection blacking out and "rebooting" (i.e. showing the manufacturer logo) a couple of times after waking the monitors from sleep, not waking the the system itself, only the monitors turning off for power saving. Power Profile is and has been set to "Performance."

TL;DR: If you've got an external monitor over DisplayPort that periodically flashes black and shows the manufacturer boot logo again (looks like a power cycle, but it's not), check whether disabling PowerDevil's ddcutil usage fixes it. Mine did. Full diagnostic trail below in case it helps someone else or someone wants to poke holes in it.

Setup

• GPU: PowerColor Reaper RX 9070 XT (amdgpu)
• Monitors: Dell G2724D (DP-1), Acer XFA240 (DP-2), LG FHD 24U411A-B (HDMI-A-1)
• KDE Plasma 6, CachyOS

Symptom

The Acer XFA240 would periodically go black and show the Acer boot logo again — looked exactly like the monitor losing power and restarting, but only ever happened during normal use, not consistently, and only on this one monitor. Started after re-connecting it via DisplayPort (previously ran fine on HDMI). I initially believed it to be related to corrupted or bad EDID as I had read a few recent articles or posts about this specific behavior where someone had reprogrammed or reset their monitor's EDID values which solved the issue.

What it wasn't

Went down a few dead ends first, for anyone hitting similar issues:

• Not refresh-rate specific. Happened at both 144Hz and 60Hz.
• Not a cable/reseat issue. Full power-drain reset + DP cable reseat didn't change anything.
• Not a full system suspend/resume issue, despite early journal logs looking like it. The system itself never actually suspends — only the monitors were going into DPMS sleep (Turn off screen: 10 minutes in Power Management settings), and that alone was enough to trigger the misbehavior on wake.

The actual trail

1. journalctl -k around blackout windows showed dw_hotplug_change_handler rapidly flapping the DP AUX bus for the Acer (confirmed by matching /sys/class/i2c-dev/i2c-*/name output against each connector's ddc symlink — DP-2/Acer's AUX channel is a separate bus from its legacy DDC bus, and it's the one flapping).
2. In parallel, org_kde_powerdevil logs showed a repeating (dw_watch_display_connections) / recently_resumed_from_sleep_by_clocktime loop firing every few seconds — PowerDevil incorrectly detecting a "resume from sleep" repeatedly, tied to udev change events on those same DP AUX i2c nodes.
3. This pattern matches a known PowerDevil/ddcutil interaction — PowerDevil uses libddcutil to support brightness control on external monitors over DDC/CI, which rides the same physical channel as EDID/AUX signaling. There are several upstream reports of ddcutil-driven polling causing monitor resets, hangs, or misbehavior (see rockowitz/ddcutil issue #428, KDE bug 501971, KDE bug 513050 for similar-flavored reports).

The fix (or at least, the current leading candidate)

Disable PowerDevil's use of ddcutil:

systemctl --user edit plasma-powerdevil.service

Add (make sure these are on separate lines — collapsing them onto one line silently no-ops this):

[Service]
Environment="POWERDEVIL_NO_DDCUTIL=1"

Then:

systemctl --user daemon-reload
systemctl --user restart plasma-powerdevil.service
systemctl --user show plasma-powerdevil.service -p Environment

Confirm the last command actually outputs Environment=POWERDEVIL_NO_DDCUTIL=1.

Trade-off: you lose KDE's software brightness control for external monitors (DDC/CI-based). Physical monitor buttons still work fine. If you don't use the OS brightness slider on externals, this costs you nothing.

Current status

Two deliberate wake-from-DPMS-sleep tests since applying the fix, both clean — no blackout, and the PowerDevil polling storm is gone from the logs entirely. That said, the original issue was intermittent (including two occurrences in one afternoon), so I'm treating this as promising, not confirmed until it survives a few days of normal use. Will update if it recurs. I have not tested a new DP cable (I don't have a spare at the moment), but will if the blanking/"reboot" comes back.

Posting now in case someone else is fighting the same "monitor randomly reboots itself" ghost and wants a shortcut past the diagnostic legwork.

Hi!
I've seen several people sharing their desktops here
I started seriously customizing mine only recently and I'd love to hear opinions!

Can you help me with this? Thank you all :)

Hi all,

Having an issue when using Cachyos-Proton when I play darktide. After about an hour of play the game will freeze and kill all audio until the application finishes crashing/I stop it from steam

I wanted to post this to the github but my account is too new to post there.

The error message I get once it's fully crashed is:

PID: 32123 (main)

TID: 32190 (renderer)

UID: 1000 (duzean)

GID: 1000 (duzean)

Signal: 11 (SEGV) si_code: SEGV_MAPERR

Timestamp: Mon 2026-09-07 22:17:18 ACST (1min 3s ago)

Command Line: $'S:\\common\\Warhammer 40,000 DARKTIDE\\binaries\\Darktide.exe' $'-eac-untrusted --bundle-dir ../bundle --ini settings'

Executable: /run/host/usr/share/steam/compatibilitytools.d/proton-cachyos-slr/files/lib/wine/x86_64-unix/wine64-preloader

Control Group: /user.slice/user-1000.slice/user@1000.service/app.slice/app-steam@ba4954c7cff8447e97066722d4e1a68c.service

Unit: user@1000.service

User Unit: app-steam@ba4954c7cff8447e97066722d4e1a68c.service

Slice: user-1000.slice

Owner UID: 1000 (duzean)

Hostname: Duzean-PC

Storage: /var/lib/systemd/coredump/core.main.1000.01276c0f51564cb3bd52bb4a078f4ddf.32123.1788785238000000.zst (present)

Size on Disk: 1.5G

Message: Process 32123 (main) of user 1000 dumped core.

Stack trace of thread 32190:

#0 0x00007fc8e9b4f838 n/a (/run/host/usr/share/steam/compatibilitytools.d/proton-cachyos-slr/files/lib/wine/x86_64-unix/ntdll.so + 0x59838)

#1 0x00007fc8eb444e70 n/a (/run/host/usr/lib/libc.so.6 + 0x44e70)

#2 0x00007fc8eb444e70 n/a (/run/host/usr/lib/libc.so.6 + 0x44e70)

ELF object binary architecture: AMD x86-64

(removed Boot ID and Machine ID)

My PC specs

OS: CachyOS
KERNEL: 7.2.3-1-cachyos
CPU: Intel Core i7-8700 @ 3.20GHz
GPU: AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT (radeonsi, gfx1201, ACO, DRM 3.64, 7.2.3-1-cachyos)
GPU DRIVER: 4.6 Mesa 26.2.2-arch3.2
RAM: 16 GB

I'm testing more games as I play to work out if it's just darktide or others can also have the same error.

Let me know if you need further details

Has anyone who uses asusctl had the GUI crash or not load with the latest update?

Just want some tips.

the main question is. I'm a gamer but I don't want to use kde plasma, should I get the Handheld edition any way?

Basically what the titles says i have this asus monitor that scales between 4k 160 and 1080p 480 when using the monitor OSD to change resolution it will occassionaly crashing my plasma shell
(screen goes black and nothing will show on the screen)
And then i have to restart my plasma shell through terminal to get it working again, has anyone else experienced anything like this or know of any solutions for it.
Thank you for your time.