I’m currently using DT 5.4.1 (from OBS) on Debian 13 trixie with the 590 open driver. My laptop is an Intel Core Ultra 9 recent with an Nvidia 4060.
Would switching from Debian 13 to CachyOS speed things up significantly. Debian 13 is reasonably fast, but how much faster would it be?
Is it worth it?
Thanks
Changing distro is not going to change your hardware. It is still the same CPU and the same GPU. As long as your drivers are working (eg OpenCL is setup correctly), it should not have a performance difference.
Probably not a significant difference. Even with gaming, CachyOS has a minimal impact on overall performance.
There maybe a difference if CachyOS is shipping with newer improved drivers and / or a newer kernel compared to Debian.
But it will be very hard to predict what the exact improvements will be if any.
But if you have the disk space available of course you could try it. That will be much more useful than trying to guess based on specs.
I am not familiar with Cachy, but how your distro optimizes packages, especially if they are on the critical path of darkroom processing, can make a difference. When dinosaurs walked the earth, at some point I switched from SuSe to LFS (where I rebuilt the whole system from sources from the ground up), and the difference in overall responsiveness was very noticeable.
However, as others correctly stated above, generally you don’t notice a great difference if you swap one general purpose distro for a different one.
Learn more about the distro and try to understand what they do differently, and if it seems to make sense for your use case give it a try.