I would not consider Manjaro too big to fail considering what they're currently going through. The distro has been stagnating the past few years tbh. The community wants collective ownership but the founder is stalling more time. If you're curious they made a big post about it on their forum

agree. I used to have time to tinker and if things break, I distro hop. Dont have time for that now, I want things to work.

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…)

bruh, no Debian?

You can switch back to arch pretty easily and also just upgrade from arch. That's the real benefit of cachy is standing on the shoulders of giants like Arch.

All of the recent gaming focused distros felt this way to me, it's why I'm sticking with good old tried and tested vanilla Fedora with OpenSUSE as my backup option if RedHat ever fucks it up. I don't want a toy to play with but a tool that just works and that I don't have to think about and that's exactly what Fedora is.

What are you looking for? I just use Mint because it works for my old hardware.

Don't worry.

It will simply be a live environment testing.
You will not be curious about the preconfigured openbox and wayfire DE options either.

It will be a small partition to test bare metal.
You will not expand that partition later.

It will be an equal dualboot.
You will not neglect updating your bazzite and feel guilty about it and finally distrohop fully.

I think they have a bunch of Arch veterans, right? Like the guy who started it is also some big time Arch maintainer. You can go to archlinux.org and search the repo for packages by maintainer and Peter Jung gives you 100+ results.

Arch gives you a bare bones DE, and you have to install/configure everything yourself.

CachyOS gives you a larger volume of default applications in a basic install, and lots of the stuff comes with useful configs out of the box. It also has hardware specific optimisations for multiple generations of CPU in its repos, but how much of a difference that makes in the real world is unclear

My son recently switched to CachyOS after bad experiences with Windows, Bazzite, more Windows, Mint and Zorin. CachyOS was the first time he was happy since losing his love for Windows.

And he doesn't like command lines and configuring stuff, but he says for CachyOS everything was easy and there's tutorials simply telling you what to type, and that works.

He does need to remember that after yay you still need to answer a bunch of questions, because he was wondering why a Discord update didn't work while the update was waiting for his input. There's probably an option somewhere to tell it to always use the default.

You skipped over the fact that getting vanilla Arch installed is often what trips people up, and also what makes people who run vanilla Arch feel like they accomplished something and truly built something - because they did.

You’re also glossing over the fact that a lot of people run the CachyOS kernel even on vanilla Arch because of the performance gains from having a kernel specifically compiled for instructions your CPU supports.

In other words; I don’t think the convenience of a proper installer, nor even just a 5% gain in performance, is just “marketing”.

Bias disclaimer; I run CachyOS btw

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.

Which distribution doesn't allow to run KDE software on non-KDE desktops? How would this even be possible?

The RogAlly is not Cachy's objective. It's for regular desktop use.

The biggest difference, I think, is rolling releases. For gaming, I don't really understand why anyone would prefer slower update cycles since there are frequent updates that fix compatibility or increase performance.

CachyOS is set up to install everything needed for gaming from the main Hello app. Once the Winboat and Gaming one-click installs are run, it just works. I got an itch.io .exe game running by double clicking the .exe. For Steam, I just needed to choose a default Proton compatibility package to use in the app and after that it's been seamless.

CachyOS is apparently "optimized" for gaming performance—I don't pretend to know what that means or how much of an impact it has. I don't really care about eking out a tiny bit more performance, tbh. But I'm super impressed with how well everything just works and (as a bit of a power user) how completely customizable things are, so I can install just about anything I need easily.