Gaming on CachyOS: a practical compatibility diary

https://xpil.eu/2Cepp

Over the last few weeks I’ve been deliberately stress-testing CachyOS as a daily driver for gaming. Not benchmarks, not cherry-picked demos — real titles from my Steam library, launched one by one, noted, and either enjoyed or discarded. The goal was simple: how much friction is there, really, when gaming on a modern Arch-based Linux distro?

Short answer: far less than you might expect — with a few stubborn exceptions.

The good news: “Just works” is the norm

A striking number of games fell into the boringly perfect category. Launch, play, quit — no tweaks, no Proton gymnastics, no surprises.

Highlights include:

Deep Rock Galactic – flawless, smooth, zero issues
The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt – exactly as expected
Sid Meier's Civilization VI – no quirks at all
Serious Sam Fusion 2017 – excellent performance, fast loads
Payday 2 – flies at max settings
Transport Fever, Two Point Hospital, Supreme Commander 2, Vampire Survivors, Kerbal Space Program — all behaved impeccably

Indie titles in particular were almost universally painless. If a game is reasonably modern and doesn’t rely on exotic DRM or ancient rendering paths, CachyOS + Steam feels… boringly reliable. That’s a compliment.

The middle ground: playable, with caveats

A smaller group worked well enough, but showed some Linux-specific oddities:

Portal 2 – required explicitly forcing Proton to get hardware acceleration
Risk of Rain 2 – slow loading, minor 3D artefacts
The Invincible – fully playable, occasional performance dips
Sid Meier's Civilization V – resolution handling is… inverted logic

None of these are deal-breakers, but they remind you that you’re running through Proton, not native binaries.

The bad news: still broken titles exist

Some games simply refused to cooperate:

Total War: Shogun 2 – won’t start
Cossacks 3, Goat of Duty, Aimlabs – dead on launch
Mini Motorways, Peggle Extreme – blink and vanish
Serious Sam 4 – menus fine, levels freeze on load

In a few cases the failure modes are almost nostalgic: black screens, missing UI labels, wireframe menus. Proton can do wonders, but it can’t resurrect everything.

A pattern emerges

After dozens of installs and launches, a few trends are clear:

Modern engines + Vulkan/DX11 paths → high success rate
Indie and AA titles → nearly perfect
Older Windows-only games with custom launchers or legacy DirectX → risky
When something works, it really works — performance is excellent

CachyOS itself stays out of the way. No distro-specific weirdness surfaced; every issue was game- or engine-related, not OS-related.

Verdict

As a Linux gaming platform, CachyOS feels confident and mature. I didn’t feel like I was “testing Linux” — I felt like I was testing games. That’s the real milestone.

If your library is mostly modern titles, strategy games, simulations, or indie releases, you can game on CachyOS without thinking about it. And when something doesn’t work, it’s usually a known Proton limitation, not a mystery.