A lot of gamers want better performance, so a performance oriented distro with gaming quality of life features fills that gap. And ultimately there are a lot of YouTube channels promoting it and it kind of turned into a cool distro to use. This might explain the phenomenon.

I've been using it for a while now, and it's genuinely so good. Before this I was using EndeavourOS which was also a great distro, but I realized that I was basically putting in work to do things CachyOS does out of the box, so I switched and it's been great.

they offer some optimisations to the kernel and the packages that are supposed to yield a tiny bit better performance.

an incredibly small thing that rubs me the wrong way more than it probably should about their setup is that they set Plasma animation speeds to much higher values than the stock Plasma desktop uses. sure, it could be just a part of their customisation tweaks the same way using fish as the default shell is, but it feels like a cheap trick to reel in the "I installed it on my desktop and it's soooo much snappier" review kind of people. like, if your work is as good as you claim, you shouldn't need to artificially make the improvements seem bigger than they really are.

I started using linux full time about a year ago. I started with Arch, but moved to Cachy really quickly when I discovered it. All of the advantages of Arch, but repos optimised for modern hardware, and a whole heap of useful pre-configured tools, like Wine/Proton, fish, snapper etc. Arch is a bare bones, pick and configure your own setup rolling release distro. Cachy is a pre-optimised, rolling release distro with lots of useful stuff right out of the box.

I'm doing my part

Android uses the Linux kernel but none of the familiar "Linux" stack: GNU, X or Wayland, GTK or Qt, GNOME or KDE or other DEs, PulseAudio or PipeWire, APT or YUM or other package managers, and many others that define the Linux experience. Google could replace the Linux kernel with something else tomorrow without touching the rest of Android and most users won't tell, and many apps will run as-is.

My prediction: Ten percent increase for Windows 11 with 25 percent still on 10 and barely an increase for Linux.

I hope I'm wrong.

AFAIK, this corresponds to the snap package of Steam.

I feel like Ubuntu has the greatest exposure among non-Linux folks. It's the only OS any place I've ever worked used on WSL back when I was still on windows. Probably a lot of corporate nerds want to stick to what's comfortable?

I have no idea if that's the reason, but Ubuntu and Mint are the only two distros I've tried for basically that reason. Heard good things about PopOS. Might try it some time if I wind up with an extra computer.

i use mint btw

yes

$ cat /etc/os-release 
NAME="Arch Linux"
PRETTY_NAME="Arch Linux"
(...)

Because this is how distributions declare their names