I tried CachyOS on my laptop for a month. I won't be going back to Windows.

For about three decades, the question “PC or Mac?” was just a way to ask someone if they used Windows or MacOS, because if you had a PC, it was just assumed you were running Windows on it. The only real alternative to Windows on the PC is Linux, and for years it was used almost exclusively by programmers, cloud compute engineers, and enthusiasts.

This is because, historically, Linux’s support for things that typical users liked to do on Windows wasn’t as good. Users had to rely on command line far more often on Linux, lots of software didn’t have a Linux version, and support for certain hardware and PCs was never a guarantee. If something broke, fixing it on Linux was often far harder than it was on Windows; sometimes all you needed to do was run a troubleshooter to fix a networking or audio issue on Microsoft's OS.

To be clear, there’s nothing inherently wrong with Linux. It’s the basis for Android and ChromeOS, operating systems that are designed to be extremely easy to interact with. But when it came to PCs, both OSes did different things well for different audiences, and Windows was for the masses. That was the natural order of the PC.

Anybody who’s been paying attention to the state of the PC in the past few years will have noticed that things are changing though, both with Windows and Linux. While Windows 10 was received decently well, Windows 11 has never been liked very much. People complain about performance, buggy behavior, forced integration of and ads for other Microsoft products like OneDrive, and the OS just generally feeling like a step down from Windows 10.

At the same time, Linux has been getting better and better for the average user thanks to greater hardware and software compatibility. Gaming especially is great on Linux now thanks to Proton, which makes most Windows games playable, and users can pick from a wide variety of different versions or distributions of Linux, called distros for short; it's no longer just Ubuntu for typical users, Fedora and Arch for veterans, and a bunch of random other distros for the most experienced of Linux users.

I’ve got a decent amount of experience with Linux myself. Like many PC users, my first experience was with SteamOS on the Steam Deck. I was impressed and decided to try out Linux for my desktop, and settled on Linux Mint because it was supposed to be user friendly, and I ended up sticking with it. I also have Bazzite, a sort of SteamOS clone, on my living room gaming PC.

While I continue to use Bazzite, ever since I replaced my desktop with a laptop, I’ve been back to Windows 11. With laptops, switching to Linux is more challenging because laptops are more locked down, not to mention custom features and settings are often baked into Windows 11 while also being missing from the BIOS.

It’s not an uncommon experience for someone to try Linux on their laptop and immediately see significant issues in regards to performance, fan speed, battery life, keyboard and touchpad functionality, and so on. I haven’t wanted to deal with that on my own laptop; I don't judge Linux for not being as good as Windows in this department though, 99% or more of laptops are made with Windows in mind and the community of Linux programmers really don't get paid to do the same things Microsoft and OEMs do.

Recently though, one distro has been getting lots of praise for its performance, compatibility, and quick updates, and that’s CachyOS. Among new distros, CachyOS’s popularity seems to be only behind SteamOS and Bazzite. Seriously, I see talk about CachyOS almost everywhere, and last year I'm pretty sure I hadn't even heard a single thing about the distro.

So about a month ago I decided to give CachyOS a chance and see if it can replace Windows 11. I wasn’t expecting much out of CachyOS considering I’m trying it out on a laptop with very new hardware that also has no official support for Linux whatsoever.

The laptop in question for this review is MSI's Prestige 14 2026. It’s got Intel’s new Core X7 358H which comes with an integrated B390 GPU. This is probably the best x86 laptop CPU right now if you don’t want discrete graphics, and personally I don't since dGPUs use lots more power and are sometimes just a pain to deal with. That thankfully makes this review much easier since I don't need to worry about a dGPU muddying the waters.

Now that it’s been about a month of me switching between Windows 11 and CachyOS, I’m finally able to share my findings. I’ll be going through my experience point by point to detail where CachyOS falls short and where it succeeds compared to Windows 11.

Installation and setup: surprisingly straightforward

First, installation. This process was pretty simple, especially since CachyOS has a well written guide. All you have to do is download the ISO and use a program to write it to a FAT32 USB drive. I used Rufus because in my experience it always works, while Balena Etcher and Ventoy for some reason almost never work, at least on Windows.

Like with installing Windows, you then need to pull up the PC’s BIOS and set the boot order to load the USB drive with the CachyOS installation. After a reboot you’ll find yourself in a version of CachyOS that is technically usable, but from here you’re meant to run a program that installs CachyOS to a storage device.

The installation wizard is pretty simple if you’re putting it on an empty drive. I went with pretty much all of the default recommendations. CachyOS recommends manual partitioning but I did automatic and that went fine.

The installer is also gonna ask what desktop environment you want, basically how the UI looks. I went with KDE Plasma because it’s the default and apparently has the best support. But a user might find another DE to be more appealing, even if it requires some manual tinkering and configuration. Personally, I'm happy with Plasma since it's Windows-like and straightforward.

What’s really cool about CachyOS is that, like other distros, you can put it on external storage devices, and that’s exactly what I did for my initial test. I installed CachyOS on a 1TB PNY USB drive because my laptop only has one SSD slot in it and my SSD obviously already had Windows installed. As far as I can tell, there weren’t any bugs or performance problems due to using a USB drive.

Later, I did find a 2TB SSD I could plug into my laptop to give both OSes plenty of space and fresh installs. That had consequences I'll get into later.

Before you boot up, you may need to make sure your boot order loads Limine first, because this is the boot manager that allows you to get into CachyOS. If the option isn’t there, you might need to go into another menu for boot stuff; on my laptop it’s called BBS, it might be something different on other desktops and laptops. This is one thing the CachyOS install guide unfortunately overlooks, but if you're following along with me for your own CachyOS install then hopefully you'll avoid this pitfall.

Once all that is done, you can boot into Limine, which slows down getting into CachyOS but also allows you to optionally load Windows 11 or the PC’s BIOS instead. Personally I don’t mind that, and it’s pretty much necessary for those who are dual booting.

After 5 seconds of inactivity or if you just press enter, CachyOS will start up, and this is where I encountered my first bug. Here's what’s supposed to happen: there’s a spinning circle icon, the CachyOS logo pops up, and you’re shown the login screen. Very Windows-like.

Whenever I had my USB dock plugged in though, this spinning circle screen just never went away. Apparently this is a known issue with something called the Plymouth splash screen, but it can be disabled from Limine each time you boot or permanently from within CachyOS.

Unfortunately, this required pulling up the terminal or command line and editing a config file. While this process is well documented by CachyOS, I do have to dock points here because with Windows 11, I seldom ever have to use the terminal to fix or configure anything, let alone an issue that crops up before I even get into the operating system.

I do think that typical users can follow a command line tutorial if they need to, but let’s be honest: people like Windows because it has a very rich and detailed graphical interface that’s far easier and more intuitive to deal with than a text box that requires perfect spelling and grammar in what is basically a made up language. I want to stay away from the terminal as much as possible.

Anyways, loading into CachyOS presents the login screen, but while I get Windows Hello facial recognition and fingerprint scanning with Windows 11, I don’t get that with CachyOS. Some open source software apparently adds this functionality into Linux but since these features aren’t a huge deal to me, I haven’t messed with it yet.

First thing I did when I logged in was configure the display settings. On a 1200p laptop, the size of basically everything was just way too small. But all I had to do was right click on the desktop, pull up display settings which got me a Windows-like settings menu, and set the scale to 150%. I also edited the taskbar to make its height go up to 50 since even at 150% scaling it was still too small for my liking. Now it looks normal, at least to me.

My laptop is also my desktop thanks to a Razer USB4 dock I got a while back, and it’s hooked up to two monitors and all my peripherals. Those two monitors are 4K displays, and the default settings were good but I did bump up scaling to 200% and turned on better color accuracy and depth settings.

Sometimes I did run into games and apps that did not interact well with scaling above 100%. Terraria looked really blurry but I fixed that by running it in Proton rather than the native Linux version, and camera feeds in Zoom were pretty fuzzy. Windows isn't perfect when it comes to scaling either, though overall CachyOS's implementation was worse.

But I have to say, support for displays seems to be a little better on CachyOS than Windows, though on both OSes I ran into bugs. On Windows 11, it’s common for the displays to somehow get capped at 30Hz at random, or sometimes one of the monitors just doesn’t get a signal, both of which are fixed by either power cylcing the dock or by unplugging it and plugging it in again.

On CachyOS, I only experienced the second issue, which is similarly solved by power cycling though sometimes I have had to restart the PC entirely. I don’t think this bug really has anything to do with the OSes, rather the dock itself is probably the issue, but CachyOS seemed to cope with it better, so points for CachyOS here.

I also had to adjust settings with the laptop’s trackpad and my wireless mouse. They both worked, but there were some problems with scrolling. On the trackpad, scrolling is insanely fast by default, but thankfully the second slowest level felt normal.

I had a similar issue with my mouse’s scroll wheel; on web browsers zooming with ctrl plus scroll meant skipping every other increment. Unfortunately, CachyOS didn’t offer quite the balance I was looking for and I ended up just accepting a slower scroll speed so that I could at least have some control.

Overall, the trackpad experience was a little worse on CachyOS; it wasn’t as responsive and accurate as I’m used to with Windows 11. But it still worked fine and I could do my stuff with only a few speed bumps.

I’ll pick up the pace here and rapid fire through some other configuration and setup kind of things CachyOS did or didn’t do well. Every USB device and the Ethernet cable plugged into my dock worked just fine, sleep and resume worked just fine, and Bluetooth also worked just fine. That’s all good.

CachyOS is however missing official apps like the Logitech app that would normally allow for customization of my keyboard and mouse. There are open source alternatives, which may not be quite as good, but personally I don’t care about most of this kind of stuff anyways.

A much bigger deal is losing the MSI app that on Windows 11 controls power and performance settings, battery charging limits, and some other things. I’ll discuss power and performance in greater detail later, but the situation there is especially unfortunate though not an unmitigated disaster. Certain things configured in the MSI app in Windows survive into CachyOS. For example, I enabled an 80% charging limit for better battery longevity and it works in CachyOS. It’s a bit of a mixed bag: I still get all these customizations, but only if I keep my Windows 11 install.

Tablet mode doesn’t work, and while it’s not something I use very often in the intended way, I do prop my laptop up tent style when I dock it, so I have to be a little careful to not accidentally touch the keyboard or the trackpad. If I did use tablet mode more (and I would be if I picked the Flow Z13 instead of the Prestige 14) I would definitely be very unhappy with this though.

And this is a really small issue, but some keys on this MSI laptop are supposed to light up when they’re toggled on or off. This worked fine for caps lock, but not for the mute sound and mute mic keys.

One thing CachyOS does particularly well is updating. All you gotta do to update is click this little icon in the taskbar, which opens up the update app that runs in command line. There are some prompts but it’s just simple stuff like entering Y for yes or N for no, and you’ll have to enter your password too. It’s very quick, usually doesn’t require a restart, and doesn’t hog background resources like Windows update.

Also, it updates literally everything. When I freshly installed Windows 11 onto my 2TB SSD, I had to individually download each driver from MSI’s website and install all of them with .bat programs. Like, there’s not even an update app. What year is it in Windows world? And on top of all that, the audio drivers MSI offers don’t even work properly! My internal speakers on Windows 11 now have two volumes: loud and muted! I can still adjust individual app volumes, but that’s insanely tedious.

To be clear, part of this is on MSI, but having to individually download and install drivers that may or may not work and are probably out of date is the norm for Windows PCs. It’s very strange that the more decentralized OS has the most centralized update system. Windows does host some non-Microsoft drivers that it propagates via Windows Update, but usually these drivers are either old or useless.

As for getting new software on CachyOS, the typical method is to use Shelly. This is sort of like the Microsoft Store but everything is free. The UI isn’t nearly as nice as the Microsoft Store, but it’s much faster and to the point. While with Windows you can go to a website and get an exe or whatever to install or run a program, on CachyOS that’s a much rarer experience; even if there’s a Linux version on a website for whatever software you want, usually it’s for Debian-based distros, and CachyOS is based on Arch.

I was able to get Chrome, Slack, and Zoom from Shelly without much issue, except for some reason I had to restart for the apps to actually be usable. Kind of annoying, but not the worst thing in the world. It's not like CachyOS takes forever to load or forcibly installs updates in between restarts.

Overall, I think I probably prefer Shelly since it has everything in one place, it doesn’t require you to sign into an account, and as far as I can tell doesn’t have nearly as buggy behavior as the Microsoft Store. It could definitely use a glowup though.

Daily driving CachyOS: A nearly flawless experience

Alright, let’s finally move onto the actual day to day experience. I really didn’t have any issues at all. In fact, CachyOS felt noticeably quicker and smoother than Windows 11. Apps launched speedily in most cases, those that didn’t such as Steam tend to take a bit anyways.

I used Firefox for internet browsing since it was included by default, but also because its policy on uBlock Origin is much better than Chromium based browsers. On Windows 11 I typically use Edge but I used to use Chrome, and on my Linux desktop I used Firefox, so comparatively I’d say this is the best browser experience I’ve had across wildly different configurations. Reddit is notoriously slow on Edge but here it’s super quick.

Additionally, the Prestige 14 was super cool and quiet even when lots was going on. As I’m typing this, I have a bunch of Chrome and Firefox tabs open, one of which is a YouTube video playing at 4K. And yet my laptop is barely warm and the fans are barely spinning. On Windows 11, I had to switch away from the performance profile to get the fans to quiet down; on CachyOS, I'm running with maximum performance all the time, and the fans only kick on every now and then.

RAM usage is also low, and I usually see 12 to 16GB in use at any time in CachyOS. Windows 11 meanwhile will sit at 16GB at the least, often pushing into the 20s. I’ve even seen all my RAM used up for stuff like decompressing files. The highest RAM usage I’ve seen on CachyOS without doing anything intensive like gaming is 19GB. Maybe this is down to how the two OSes calculate usage, but Windows 11 has its reputation for a reason.

Battery life also seems really good on CachyOS, but I haven’t run a full test yet. Expect that on the website at some point. Anyways, on Windows 11 I like to see at least 1 hour per 10% of life remaining, so since my battery caps out at 80% charged, I’m getting at least 8 hours per charge, sometimes as much as 16 hours. I run my display at maximum brightness, but I have the keyboard backlight disabled.

When I was using CachyOS off of the USB stick, I got estimates of 11 hours left on 70% battery life while watching a YouTube video on Firefox. At 55% when I was just browsing on websites like Reddit and BlueSky, I also had about 11 hours left. But when I switched to the 2TB SSD, a Teamgroup MP44S that’s got great power efficiency, I frequently saw at least 2 hours per 10% of battery life. Even when doing some more intense stuff like downloading games in Steam, it could still muster around 1 hour per 10%.

I'll probably do some battery life benchmarking in the near future to see how CachyOS compares to Windows 11 in a variety of use cases, so subscribe to the newsletter if you want to see those results when they come out.

Finally, I didn’t have to use the terminal as much as I thought I would, but every time I did I was not a huge fan. Still, of all the distros I have tried, CachyOS has allowed me to avoid the terminal the most, which is a welcome surprise.

Application and gaming performance: A mixed bag

Alright, let’s talk performance and benchmarks, the part of this review that caused a significant delay because I had significant issues benchmarking both in Windows 11 and CachyOS.

The actual benchmarking part was easy for me since I’ve been doing it for a while, but I was getting weird results where somehow the Prestige 14 was decently faster when operating off of battery (or DC power) instead of the charger (or AC power). While the 358H and Panther Lake CPUs are supposed to perform well even without being plugged into the wall, DC is not supposed to be significantly faster.

According to Intel’s own hardware monitor, the integrated graphics somehow were able to consume an extra watt or two while using DC power, which allowed the iGPU to boost a couple hundred megahertz higher, roughly a 10% increase. I have absolutely no idea why this happens with the Prestige 14, but I believe it has been happening since I got it because I recall noticing that performance while I was docked was lower than when I wasn’t, but back then I thought it had to do with the external displays.

Most likely, this is an MSI issue because on CachyOS, DC power has a performance advantage, though it is much smaller. Switching a setting in the BIOS that enabled “performance mode” instead of “balanced mode” seems to have mostly mitigated the issue, another indication that maybe MSI’s firmware is the root cause. But I have seen other instances of non-MSI Panther Lake laptops performing better on DC so I can't say for sure.

On CachyOS specifically, I had to sort out two performance issues. Firstly, the fans weren’t really spinning up very much even in a heavy workload, and on this laptop high fan speeds are absolutely necessary for good performance. Thankfully, switching to performance mode in the BIOS fixed that. However, the laptop still didn’t consume very much power or run the CPU and GPU at high frequencies.

I came to learn from a Phoronix article that, at least on this laptop, the 358H has a very low power limit for some reason, which is a big problem in games since they demand lots of sustained power usage. Thankfully, someone at Intel detailed a guide with the Thermal Daemon tool that would raise the power limit. However, this required opening the terminal and editing a config file, which is kinda high level though mitigated by this Intel employee’s detailed guide, a rarity when it comes to doing this sort of stuff in Linux.

Basically, I had to install the Thermal Daemon software using the pacman command, set the power profile to performance, download this configuration file, copy it to a specific folder, edit the file, run some commands to make the new settings stick, and then it worked.

One annoying part of this process is putting the config file into its proper folder, you can’t just simply move it in the Dolphin file manager, whereas Windows is more permissive with that kind of stuff. I had to use the copy and paste function in the terminal to move that config file, though what I ended up doing because I got frustrated was just creating the file from scratch in the folder and then pasting the text into it.

I suppose the silver lining is that there are multiple ways to solve a problem in Linux.

Considering what I had to do in order to unlock good performance in CachyOS, I decided to test Windows 11 with similarly high performance settings. I disabled virtualization based security (VBS), enabled low latency mode boost with the optional performance boost (though I have no idea if it actually does anything), and set the performance profile to performance boost, a special performance mode that’s disabled by default in MSI’s software suite.

For CachyOS, I did the performance upgrade like I mentioned earlier, and also made sure I was using the 7.2 version of the Linux kernel, which is supposed to have some performance improvements. Games were also run using CachyOS’s custom version of Proton where possible.

For both OSes, I made sure no extraneous extra apps like Firefox were running in the background, and also didn’t make any alterations to the normal default background apps. That second one might be to Windows 11’s disadvantage since the Prestige 14 has a ton of background apps for things like MSI and Intel software, but it certainly didn’t ruin performance as far as I can tell.

I also made sure to let benchmarks warm up the Prestige 14, literally, because at a certain point thermal throttling settles in. This laptop sees a significant drop in performance over several minutes of sustained load, and I couldn't get consistent data without a warmup period. So the performance you’ll see is what you get after several minutes on this laptop, though obviously Panther Lake PCs with better cooling will have better sustained performance.

Anyways, let’s get to the results.

Geekbench 7 CPU

Starting off with Geekbench 7, we can see that weird DC performance boost happening in both Windows 11 and CachyOS, though it's not really noticeable unless you're looking for it. The other interesting thing happening here is that CachyOS is winning by about 7% here in the multi-core benchmark.

CachyOS also has a 7% lead in the single-core results, which means at least in this test, CachyOS delivers a flat 7% performance boost compared to Windows 11. A good start, but we have more benchmarks to cover.

Geekbench 7 GPU

I also ran the Vulkan GPU benchmark, and that performance bug doesn’t seem to be happening here. In regards to performance, CachyOS once again has a small lead, about 5% this time. We can see that the Linux distro can be faster on both the CPU cores and the integrated graphics.

Unigine Superposition

Unigine’s Superposition benchmark is about a decade old but it’s the only gaming graphics test I could find that natively ran on both Linux and Windows 11. There’s a pretty sizeable performance disparity here, roughly 15% in favor of Windows 11. This is a significant reversal from Geekbench 7, but this is a gaming graphics test while Geekbench is really a compute benchmark.

Hitman 3

I tested Hitman 3 at 1080p with every setting maxed out except for ray tracing and textures, because for some reason the in game settings wouldn’t let me switch textures to ultra, which wouldn’t be a problem except in Windows 11 the launcher just didn’t work anymore, and a couple of hours of troubleshooting didn't solve the issue. Points against Windows here.

Anyways, Windows 11 does have a performance lead here, just shy of 20% in the average and about 50% in the 99^th percentile, which is a very big deal. This is the metric that helps measure smoothness or frame pacing, so the experience on Windows 11 should look and feel noticeably better.

Total War: Pharaoh Dynasties

Total War Pharaoh Dynasties was tested at 1080p with the ultra preset, and I didn’t test DC performance here because I forgot Total War games forcibly cap the framerate to 30 FPS even if you don’t want them to. I imagine almost nobody plays Total War on unplugged laptops because there's barely any documentation on this issue; if there is a way to remove the cap, nobody has bothered to find it.

So, this game was really bad for CachyOS. Pharaoh Dynasties also didn’t work with CachyOS’s Proton so I had to select the normal version. When it comes to graphics, CachyOS doesn’t seem to do very well outside of Geekbench.

The Witcher 3 (2022)

The last game I tested was the Witcher 3, and I need to point out that this is the DX12 version and not the big remaster coming out later this month. CachyOS is about 45% faster at 1080p with the medium preset, a much needed win considering it looked like Windows 11 was just completely better in games. Granted, the 99^th percentile wasn’t really any better on CachyOS, which makes the experience a little choppy, but it’s still a win.

If you’re still with me after all these words and data, I really appreciate it, especially since the picture on which OS is better isn’t clear at first glance.

On the whole, Windows 11 has the more complete experience with more features, better support, and more apps that people care about. Performance is okay to good, as is battery life. However, installing and updating core software is a mess, Microsoft features often distracts and detracts from the experience, and I frequently found my laptop getting really hot and loud during what I’d consider normal usage.

CachyOS meanwhile has the more focused experience that offers better performance in day to day use cases, has fewer integrations with products you likely don’t use or care about, and can be really flexible and configurable to your liking. The battery life is pretty good, and performance can be great, but sometimes it’s slow if the hardware or software support isn’t there. You’re also expected to take more responsibility and know more about PCs and Linux to get the experience you want, which is a barrier even to me at times.

If we really think about it, this shouldn’t be a close call. Microsoft is a multi trillion dollar company that’s been synonymous with desktops and laptops for decades. The Prestige 14 was made only with Windows in mind. Meanwhile, the CachyOS team is a baker’s dozen strong and their Patreon makes $5300 a month before fees.

I make more than that. Well, not from Silicon Insights, but you get the point.

Granted, CachyOS is built on top of Arch, but Arch itself only has about two dozen volunteer developers. And okay, Arch is built on Linux, but Linux doesn’t have access to billions upon billions of dollars if it needs it, and it certainly doesn't have the kind of sway Windows does over the PC and gaming console hardware-software ecosystem.

I think this close match is a testament to both Windows 11 and CachyOS. Microsoft has, unfortunately, really dropped the ball here. There really shouldn’t be any areas where Windows 11 is losing by much if at all given the legacy and the resources the company has. If Microsoft wanted to build an operating system that trounced CachyOS or any Linux distro tit for tat, it would have already done so.

I think the main problem has been priorities. Microsoft has focused too much on trying to add new things rather than refine existing features. For example, I use OneDrive, but I know lots of people don’t, especially because it’s kind of forced on you and takes over the normal documents, pictures, and even desktop folders.

Why would I want my desktop icons and folders to be backed up to the cloud? Why would I want my huge documents folder to get uploaded to a service with limited space? Users can of course disable this, but the option to do so is squirreled away in some OneDrive settings menu and is kinda finnicky. I'm speaking from personal experience as someone who wants to use OneDrive, just not in this way, and has had to do this on countless fresh Windows installs.

Another example, when I first got my Prestige 14, it had really terrible battery life and it seemed to be because the NPU was running at full blast. There was some search related thing running in the background 24/7 that I had to go into the services menu to disable. Why was this enabled out of the box?

It’s fine to add new features, but making them opt out rather than opt in is annoying, and it’s especially frustrating that implementing new things seems to have come at the expense of stability and performance. I'm glad gaming performance was consistently a strong suit for Windows, but Linux can always catch up, especially when we're talking new hardware.

Thankfully, Microsoft and the Windows team have already outlined how they’re changing course, but that’s gonna be a multi-month or even multi-year maneuver, so in the here and now Windows is still below expectations.

At the same time, it’s really impressive what these Linux developers have been able to do. It’s been a team effort, between the CachyOS team, the Arch team, the Proton team, and all the developers who work on and maintain each piece of software that goes into CachyOS. We shouldn't take all of this incredible software infrastructure for granted, especially when it's free!

Not considering edge cases like MSI’s software suite having crucial settings, if I had to choose between Windows 11 and CachyOS, I think I’d go with CachyOS. I don’t game a ton on my laptop, I leave that to my Bazzite PC and my Switch 2, so the only significant consideration for me is software support.

The only thing I’m really missing on CachyOS is CapCut for video editing, but even then Da Vinci Resolve is an alternative, and CapCut also works fine on other devices that I own such as my smartphone and my iPad.

What I’ll be doing in the future is dual booting, using CachyOS for most things and switching to Windows 11 if I need to run a specific app for compatibility or performance reasons, or if I need to interact with the MSI app. I've been doing this for a couple of weeks now, and so far it's working out really well.

I think ideally I’d exclusively use Windows 11 because conceptually, I do prefer Windows and I always have, but right now the best overall experience is on Linux. I’m hoping Microsoft will win me back. Getting the speakers on my laptop working properly again would be a good start.

Oh, and one more thing. In the final steps of writing this article and editing the accompanying video, Windows 11 has decided to just no longer recognize my external monitors. I know it's not a dock issue because CachyOS works as expected. It certainly didn't make editing the video any easier. Maybe I'll have to look into Da Vinci Resolve for Linux or Capcut on another device after all.

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