Also, the folks behind this are nice..

CachyOS originated in the Polish Arch community IIRC, but all the discussion I've seen from them is just... cool.

Nothing weird or dramatic like one tends to see in linux projects, just folks really into building this stuff.

What's the difference between this and a fresh install of Arch with a DE like KDE/Gnome?

I've been using Arch for so long now that if I bought a new machine I would find it hard to try anything else.

I am a CachyOS acolyte. It's my end boss distro.

If you try the installer, be careful when selecting multiples DE/WM as the conflicts were not listed anywhere for the installation process.

Yeah, they do need to clean up the installer a bit. It's also not quite turnkey for a Windows dual-boot.

I know this is an unpopular opinion at the moment but I currently think Bazzite is still my favorite for the ROG Ally

CachyOS is awesome. I just switched a few months ago after the praises from SomeOrdinaryGamer. I also wanted to use hyprland again after using plasma for sometime. It's amazing that Cachy lets me use the hyprland DE, but also has libraries to let me run kde software without the need for plasma.

While I will most likely never switch from pure arch, I'm very happy that we're getting more and more polished distros for everyday use.

I've thought about making the switch but what holds me back is stability.

I don't mean stability from a software perspective. But from a distro perspective. Distros come and go all the time. Four or Five have stable enough support through community developers and industry sponsorships that they've managed to become large enough and supported enough to be considered Evergreen Distros for lack of a better word. In other words, distros where the support base is large enough to be considered "too big to fail" (Ubuntu, Mainline Arch, Manjaro, Fedora, Gentoo, etc...)

The rest eventually just fade away. I've always avoided distros that are maintained by a small community of enthusiasts because enthusiasm goes away really quickly once the real work of maintaining a distro rolls around.

I won't pull the trigger on any small community project until I'm reasonably sure I'm not going to have to jump to a new project a year from now when the developers get tired of it and move on to something else.

I'm trying a conversion from endeavorOS with CachyOS repositories, it was pretty seamless, I can keep my settings and endeavorOS theming, and allegedly you can switch back at any time. The cachyOS wiki has a short script for converting vanilla arch or endeavorOS to use cachyOS binaries. Been running for about a week and haven't noticed any problems.

Must...resist...distro...hopping

I've been comfortable on Bazzite for a couple years now but this is giving me the itch.

JSYK the differences are marginal between a vanilla arch install and cachy. You have you dig really deep to see any difference in performance.

iMO cachy is a good marketing arch distro.

Landed on Cachy after Ubuntu> Mint > Bazzite. Wish I had just skipped Mint and Bazzite. A lot of DEs too, so it's kind of however you like it.

I'm also a user, it's arch but more ez intuitive, it also has some popular precomp aur pkg in the repo.

I'm pretty happy with Nobara at the moment, but if I hopped at this point it'd probably be to CachyOS

I recently switched to it because I wanted to finally have a good try at wayland with a distro made for it, and wow was I blown away, cachy is the closest I've ever been to a "it just works" OS (including every windows version I've used, from 98 up to 10), just a couple hardware specific issues that I have fixed (except for one). I also really like plasma, I'm mot committed to it but it was nice to come back to it after using mint for a while. I still wouldn't recommend it to a newcomer but damn, it's good.

Me with a stick poking at LinuxMint : hey, wake up, do something, you have piled-up enough money under the bed already

What does CachyOS have over Bazzite?

It's still an unreal to me, as I remember CachyOS failing to install twice for various reasons. One related to being unable to install the kernel correctly and, the other failing to install the boot loader, leaving me with a dead install. I prefer Bazzite, openSUSE Tumbleweed, Ubuntu for gaming. They seem like nice people, having read the CachyOS forum...But the installer is scuffed AF in my experience.

Funny that Flatpack is one of the most popular distros.

Nobara is my kingdom. Had a pretty bad experience with cachyOS...

I really liked CachyOS when I tried it on my spare Laptop, but when I tried to switch to it on my main Laptop I had a lot of issues with Limine (the default installer made the boot partition 2GB which filled up instantly, so I had to figure out how to manually partition something for the first time) and eventually gave up on it and went back to Bazzite.
Then I finally built a real PC and put Bazzite on it, but Bazzite absolutely shits the bed when I try to run any VR stuff on it. But Cachy handles VR really well, so now I'm dual-booting Bazzite and Cachy on my PC 🥹 I'm actually starting to get more comfortable with Cachy that way, so I might completely switch to it one day, but the prospect of having to keep up with updates and learn how to install and manage stuff the arch way still has me slightly nervous.