Just a few days ago I reported that a bunch of different Linux gaming distros have teamed up to ‘improve the open source gaming ecosystem’. One distro that is noticeably absent from the Open Gaming Collective (OCG) collaboration, though, is CachyOS, and Peter Jung, founder and developer of CachyOS, has explained why (via GamingOnLinux).

Replying to someone on Reddit, Jung, AKA ptr1337, explains: “We have thought about this but we opted out, since we do not see all too much benefit from our side. Handheld stuff is not our major focus. Also, we had some concerns that this could become a ‘bureaucratic loophole’, which seems to be more or less true so far.

“Additionally, to us all this ‘initiative’ looked like an emergency rushed thing, so that Bazzite finds new kernel maintainers and for other technical stuff after kicking the maintainer, which basically made most integration work for them.”

The dev also expressed that the company doesn’t want to be associated with Playtron, another somewhat controversial distro that’s part of the OGC. Apparently, “there are more reasons, but I’ll keep them out of the public.”

The idea behind the OGC seems to be twofold: first, to ensure different distros aren’t all working on the same things separately and unnecessarily and to work on shared solutions, and second, to have more collective power and presence within broader Linux. On the latter point, this should be helped by patches for the new and shared OGC kernel, according to Bazzite, being “at least in review for eventual inclusion into the Linux kernel.”

CachyOS is an Arch-based distro that focuses on staying “blazingly fast“. That purported speed is a big part of its appeal for gaming, for obvious reasons. Our hardware commander Dave tried it for a while and didn’t hate it, though he didn’t find it too different to his experience using Bazzite given he mostly used the standard Gnome desktop environment.

Jung’s allusions towards Playtron likely refer to the strange history of baking crypto features into the OS, plus concerns over a Playtron handheld’s terms of service seeming to hint at practically non-refundable deposit.

The CachyOS dev also seems to imply that the OGC is a handheld-centric collaboration. However, it’s not only handheld distros present in the OGC. Nobara Linux is on the list, for instance, and that’s a desktop distro made by Proton-GE developer GloriousEggroll.

In another reply, Jung says that the collective simply isn’t necessary for the distro:

“We’ve been working together with ChimeraOS and Asus-Linux for more then a year. Much testing and integration from Inputplumber came from the CachyOS Handheld Edition too! 🙂 I dont think for that a collective with strings attached is needed.”