I built this PC with Debian on it. That was my choice and I stuck with it for over a year. Looking back, I think I stuck with it longer than I should have.

NVIDIA and Debian have never been friends. Anyone who has tried it knows the dance. You get it working, something updates, you tinker again. It was never fully broken but it was never fully comfortable either. I tolerated it because everything else was fine and I didn’t want to deal with a migration.

Yesterday that changed.

When LM Studio Stopped Detecting My RTX 5080

I run local AI models. I had not touched that side of things in a while and decided to get back into it. Opened LM Studio, went to the settings, and my RTX 5080 was not there. Not detected. Nothing.

I have a high-end GPU sitting in this machine and the software could not see it. I had been down this road before and I knew what came next. More driver digging, more forum threads, more time spent just trying to get the basics working.

I said that’s it.

Why I Chose CachyOS for NVIDIA and AMD on Linux

Honestly I found it randomly on my YouTube feed. Watched a video, it looked like what I needed, and I went for it. Not a lot of research involved.

What sold me was that it is Arch-based with a performance-optimized kernel, solid NVIDIA support out of the box, and genuinely AMD friendly which matters since I am running a Ryzen 9 9900X, a Zen 5 chip. I also wanted to game on Linux properly and CachyOS seemed built for that. I was not interested in setting up vanilla Arch from scratch and this gave me that foundation without the manual overhead.

RTX 5080 on CachyOS: First 24 Hours

I migrated yesterday. First thing I did was open LM Studio. My GPU showed up immediately. That one moment justified the whole migration.

Beyond that, CachyOS just feels fast. Boot, app launches, everything. Coming from Debian the difference is night and day.

The NVIDIA driver situation that had been a recurring headache for over a year was just gone. I did not have to do anything special. It worked.

Is CachyOS Worth Switching From Debian?

One day in and I am comfortable here. What kept me on Debian that long was inertia more than anything else. The actual experience of using this machine is better now and I wish I had made the switch earlier.

I still have things to set up and I will run into issues at some point. That is just Linux. But starting from a place where the GPU works and the software is current is a completely different feeling from where I was.