I think if someone is a power user of Windows already then they can adapt to CachyOS as a new user. I'd recommend it to those people because I was that guy lol. The difficulty is...updating! Not using the OS. What does that mean actually for new people looking in?
You read:
https://discuss.cachyos.org/c/announcements/5
Before updating. Every time. Which you do pretty often. That's the point of rolling release. Sometimes you have to manually intervene, usually updating is uneventful. Let's look at CachyOS January 2026 announcement for an example of eventful:
CachyOS says:
Manual changes for existing users:
KDE Plasma users with SDDM can now migrate to Plasma-Login-Manager. Please run:
sudo pacman -Syu plasma-login-manager
sudo systemctl disable sddm
sudo systemctl enable plasmalogin
sudo pacman -R sddm-kcm cachyos-themes-sddm sddm
outside of this the usual:
sudo pacman -Syu
What else is difficult? .pacnew files. What are those? Config file changes, basically. Pacman the package manager doesn't deal with config files. You have your old file and the .pacnew file. You manually merge them. Install meld, it highlights the differences and provides arrows to move the changes easily into your existing config file of whatever got updated. How often? Not very. I've done it...under 15 times in a full year I think?
Now, I think a Windows power user can handle this. Someone scared of folder structures and doesn't read error messages? No.