I spent decades in SaaS shaving milliseconds—sometimes picoseconds—off response times because every fraction of a second multiplied across millions of requests equals real money. When you’ve lived in that world, when you’ve optimized code until there’s nothing left to optimize, you develop an… inability to accept “good enough.”
So when people tell me “just pick one distro,” I know they’ve never had to choose between stability for work and performance for gaming. Because I tried. I really tried to make Pop!_OS my everything distro.
It was fine.
And that’s exactly the problem.
The “One Distro” Lie
Look, I get it. Dual booting sounds overcomplicated. Why maintain two separate Linux installations when you could just… pick one? Install everything you need on Pop!_OS, tweak some gaming settings, call it a day?
Because “fine” gaming performance on a development-focused distro isn’t actually fine when you know—really know—that you’re leaving 10-15% performance on the table. When you’ve spent a career squeezing every drop of efficiency out of systems, watching your GPU work 2% harder than it needs to feels like nails on a chalkboard.
I need stability for work. I need performance for gaming. Those aren’t the same thing.
Why Pop!_OS Owns My Work Day
Pop!_OS 24.04 with COSMIC desktop (yeah, I’m running the beta) is my daily driver for development work, and for good reason. When I’m deep in code, when I’m learning Rust and trying to wrap my C# brain around ownership and lifetimes, I cannot afford my environment breaking mid-workday.
Pop gives me that stability. System76 tests their updates. They don’t ship bleeding-edge kernels that might introduce weird bugs in the middle of a coding session. Package updates don’t suddenly break my development tools. It just… works. Consistently. Boringly. Exactly the way I need it to.
And because I converted my Pop installation to BTRFS (yes, manually, no it’s not default, don’t get me started), I’ve got snapshot rollbacks if I ever do manage to break something. Which, let’s be honest, I do. I break things. A lot. That’s what happens when you’re a retired dev who still tinkers constantly.
COSMIC desktop on Pop is fantastic for development workflow. Tiling windows, clean interface, keyboard-driven navigation—it’s what I need when I’m juggling code, documentation, and terminal windows. It’s productive, it’s stable, and it doesn’t get in my way.
But for gaming? Pop with a stable kernel is leaving performance on the table. And I can’t accept that.
Why CachyOS Makes Gaming Better
CachyOS runs the same COSMIC desktop—because I’m not a masochist who wants to learn two different desktop environments—but with heavily optimized kernels specifically tuned for performance. And yes, you can feel the difference.
We’re talking 2-15% FPS gains depending on the game. More importantly, we’re talking about consistency—better frame times, smoother gameplay, and about 2% less CPU and GPU work to hit the same framerates. That might not sound like much, but when you’ve spent years optimizing systems, you notice. Your eyes notice. Your muscle memory notices.
Real-World Examples
Elite Dangerous: Smoother frame times in busy stations, less stuttering during hyperspace jumps. The game just feels more responsive.
Cities Skylines 2: This CPU-destroyer actually runs acceptably. Late-game cities with thousands of citizens don’t turn into slideshows. I’m not saying it’s perfect—the game’s optimization is still questionable—but CachyOS’s scheduler tweaks make a noticeable difference.
Gears of War: Buttery smooth. The difference in 1% lows is immediately obvious. No more frame time spikes during intense combat.
The Lossless Scaling Trick
Here’s where CachyOS’s efficiency really shines: I use Lossless Scaling to drop my in-game FPS targets and crank up super sampling instead. Because CachyOS’s optimized kernel means my GPU is working less hard for the same performance, I can push visual quality higher without sacrificing playability.
And here’s the kicker: I can’t even get Lossless Scaling to work on Pop. On CachyOS? Works perfectly. That alone justified the dual boot setup.
The Practical Setup
“But rebooting all the time must be annoying!”
Nope. My rig boots so fast I can’t even walk downstairs to refresh my coffee before it’s ready. NVME SSD, optimized boot process, BTRFS on a shared partition for fast filesystem mounting—the whole reboot takes maybe 30 seconds from GRUB selection to desktop.
The Storage Layout
I’m running both distros with a shared BTRFS partition on my fast 1TB NVME SSD. This is where my development projects live—both installations can access them, and compilation is blazing fast. When you’re learning Rust and dealing with its… enthusiastic compilation times, every bit of speed matters. Trust me, Rust is a beast when it comes to compile times.
Then I’ve got a 4TB drive for the big stuff—games, documents, media files, anything that needs serious storage. Both distros mount it automatically. Steam libraries, game saves, my document archives—it’s all there regardless of which OS I boot into.
This isn’t some janky dual boot where you’re copying files back and forth. It’s a unified storage strategy that happens to run on two different kernels.
But Why Not Just Use Windows for Gaming?
Let me address the elephant in the room: “Why not dual boot Windows for gaming like everyone else?”
Evil Corp? I think not.
I spent years feeling like Microsoft’s personal ATM. I’m not going back. Linux gaming has hit the point where 90% of my library just works, and the 10% that doesn’t? I can live without it. Besides, after you’ve tasted the freedom of a system that doesn’t treat you like a product, going back to Windows feels like wearing someone else’s dirty jock.
Could I get another 5% performance out of Windows? Maybe. Would I have to deal with forced updates, telemetry I can’t fully disable, and an OS that thinks it knows better than me what I should be running? Definitely.
Hard pass.
Is This Overkill?
Probably, by most people’s standards.
But when you’ve spent decades working on systems where microseconds matter, where every inefficiency costs real money, you develop… let’s call it “refined taste” in system performance. Some people can’t hear the difference between 128kbps and 320kbps MP3s. I can’t unsee frame time inconsistency or accept GPU utilization that’s 2% higher than it needs to be.
Could I make Pop!_OS work for gaming? Sure. It’s Linux, you can make anything work. But why settle for “works” when I can have “works optimally for each use case”?
I game when I want to game. I develop when I want to develop. One quick reboot separates work mode from play mode. Both environments running COSMIC so there’s zero learning curve. Both sharing the same storage so there’s zero file management overhead.
The Bottom Line
Dual booting isn’t for everyone. If you’re happy with your gaming performance on whatever distro you’re running, great. If you don’t care about squeezing every bit of efficiency out of your system, that’s perfectly reasonable.
But if you’re like me—if you’ve spent a career optimizing systems and you can’t turn that instinct off even in retirement—then splitting work and gaming across two distros isn’t overkill. It’s just… right.
Pop!_OS gives me the stability I need for development. CachyOS gives me the performance I need for gaming. COSMIC gives me the same desktop experience on both. Fast boots make switching painless. Shared storage makes it practical.
Everyone says “just pick one distro.”
I did. I picked two.
