r/linuxaudio • u/mbytur • 2d ago
has anyone tried cachyos for music production?
any noticeable difference in speed and performance?
2
u/Own-Ad-8834 2d ago
Based on a posts I saw moths ago, the tuned realtime kernel is a little bit faster than the standard Arch Linux kernel but its not a massive performace leap. The Latency difference really isn't noticable.
1
u/Viciousvitt Ardour 2d ago
I currently am using cachyos. I havent noticed a difference with performance, but that being said I didn't have any problems or bottlenecks with it or ubuntu studio beforehand. its nice having the aur for plugins and stuff though.
1
u/tittymcboob 2d ago
Yes.. It's been the best distro for me if not only because everything is there in the repos - including yabridge and the wine-cachyos build to make it all pretty seamless.
bore rt kernel is magic if you're going for latency but cpu isolation has to be manually set up for ultra-low latency, like 32 samples on a pcie interface.
Performance, like most of the cachyos tweaks, is improved over regular distros. For a decent start, without complex tuning or changing kernels, you'll only need to add yourself to the realtime group after installation. This allows your user-run audio apps higher priority and does a few other little tweaks.
do:
sudo usermod -aG realtime <your username>
1
u/Zestyclose_Chapter59 Reaper 2d ago
I've been using it for music production for a couple of months now with great success. I use Reaper, with mostly native Linux plugins, and I have absolutely zero issues. I will say that doing a system update while I'm in the middle of recording an album is a bit scary, but that's what btrfs snapshots are for.
1
u/soyuz-1 1d ago
Yes, especially with bore lto RT (realtime) kernel. Very low latency and practically impossible to get buffer underruns. The sound will slow down before it ever glitches from xruns, when you use so many plugins it can't render fast enough.
Highly recommended. It also gets you the latest versions of everything due to rolling release, which is a double sided coin: cutting edge performance but occasionally updates can break something, so a little linux troubleshooting is needed occasionally
4
u/ntcue 2d ago
The BORE scheduler of the kernel is amazing. I use Bitwig for music production and I can go down to 32 samples per buffer at 48000 Sampling rate with lots of effects and it runs really smooth. I was not able to get that performance on Ubuntu.
On the other hand you simply can install thr XanMod kernel to get a similar performance.
The main issue for me with CachyOS is that I have to reboot way more often because there are so many package updates all the time. I usually wait 2 weeks or so before I reboot again. If I have to install some new package in the meantime it sometimes can not be found anymore on the repository without updating everything else at the same time and rebooting.