CachyOS Tuning Notes: the boring stuff that actually matters

Most “Linux tuning” guides are either too scared to touch anything or too happy to set vm.swappiness=1 and call it a day. This is the stuff that actually changed how the system feels on my CachyOS rig.

The rig in question

host    : cachy-prime
cpu     : ryzen 7
gpu     : radeon discrete
kernel  : linux-cachyos
fs      : btrfs (+zstd)
wm      : hyprland (wayland)

Nothing exotic. A mid-range, non-bleeding-edge desktop. The whole point is that none of these tweaks require a special kernel patch or a sketchy AUR package.

1. Pick a scheduler and stop tab-shopping

Cachy ships several kernel flavors. Pick one, run it for two weeks, then decide. Benchmark fatigue is real, and the difference between linux-cachyos and linux-cachyos-bore is a rounding error in normal use. The one that actually makes a difference is not switching every day.

2. Latency over throughput, for a desktop

For anything interactive, shave latency instead of chasing peak throughput numbers:

# Make CPU scaling behave like a desktop, not a server farm
sudo cpupower frequency-set -g performance

# And drop power-saving on the network card if you're on wifi
sudo iw dev wlan0 set power_save off

Yes, this trades idle power. On a desktop I don’t care.

3. Gamemode is not a meme

Install it, add your game launcher to it, and move on:

sudo pacman -S gamemode lib32-gamemode

Most of what gamemode does is what a careful tuning pass would do anyway: governor swap, I/O priority, nice levels. Let it do that for you so you can stop remembering it.

4. Btrfs + zstd is the default for a reason

If you’re on btrfs and haven’t enabled compression, do it now. The CPU hit on modern hardware is completely invisible, and the space savings on ~/.cache alone pay for it.

sudo btrfs filesystem defrag -r -czstd /home

Do that once after enabling compression, on an otherwise idle system.

5. Video: the one setting that actually matters

For Wayland gaming on AMD, the single most-impactful tweak is enabling the right present mode inside your compositor, not some obscure mesa env var. Turn off any “smart VRR” logic you don’t understand and stop compositing in fullscreen — the compositor shouldn’t be involved when you’re in a game anyway.

6. Stop tweaking and start playing

This is the real rule. You’ll hit diminishing returns faster than you think. Once your desktop boots quickly, feels instant, games run smooth at your monitor’s native rate, and you’ve got a working backup — stop. Go play something. The reason we tune these boxes is so we can ignore them.

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Status check

$ teeam tuning --status
[ok] latency        : good
[ok] games          : smooth
[ok] battery impact : N/A (desktop)
[ok] regret         : 0

More notes as I break things. As always — if a post on this site says “reboot before measuring,” take that seriously.