Offtopic wondering what distros you tried and why you choose CachyOS as last one (who knows…).
Linux Debian 12 - didn’t allow some kind of permanent customizations, older drivers, dull. But, it is what it is - stable.
Linux Mint - felt like advanced debian, less config for gaming, but still dull
Linux Garuda - my bad, spyware and meh…
Linux Endevour OS - better choice, but still some manual work and additional app and/or combo of their settings
Linux CachyOS - best choice for gaming and other things, emulators works like a charm, PS4 controller, Steam (Proton/Proton-GE), Audio interface with Reaper DAW, KDE connect, OBS Studio, Audacity
Actually, everything works and some thing needs tweaking. But perfect app start with no bloatware, all set properly up. Want to say thanks to developers, because I can digitally breath free.
I love manjaro. The only reason i moved to cachyos was i needed to do a clean install and was getting 2x 8TB nvme and was going to just do a full migration. I migrated 2 weeks ago and been very happy with the performance and gaming. During the 2 weeks prior, i tested about 20+ distros and various DE. I whittled that down to 4 different possibilities: Manjaro gnome,plasma,cinnamon and cachyos plasma. I tested I think every DE that is out there currently. While i liked hyprland, it is useless for gaming. CachyOs won some benchmarks and fell behind others. Mostly DX9 proton titles. I used all the Unigine benchmarks and about 20 different games. I was actually impressed with Manjaro Gnome. They somehow beat that into submission to where i was considering it. Plasma won in the end on performance and smoothness. Cinnamon was promising but gaming was not smooth, Now CachyOS has a bunch of desktops to choose from but in the end, the only one with a lot of work put in was plasma.
After being on it for about 2 weeks now, i can honestly say i will be sticking with it for the future.
I’m sure I’m missing some. And all the *buntus might not be in actual order.
I think the most attractive thing about CachyOS for me is the optimized packages. Can I actually tell an IRL difference? Not really… but I’m a sucker for efficiency and it makes me feel fuzzy knowing there was some effort put in to optimize for my CPU . It also was nice that it happens to do a lot of stuff OOTB the way that I normal set up Arch for myself. Particularly btrfs and the subvolumes. It even goes a little more hardcore (I usually only set up a @/ and @/home for myself on Arch but the more the merrier in Cachy’s case). Still on the fence about daily driving fish. I like all the features but I do sometimes forget that some things don’t work like they do in bash. It’s got me more into scripting though cus if there is something I find I did in bash often that doesn’t work the same in fish I make a bash script rather than memorize a new way . I also use it with Hyprland and found that the dotfiles were a little weird. Cachy sets up hyprland uwsm managed out of the box (which I like) but then the config seems more like it’s for an unmanaged hyprland. Could just be my opinion I suppose. And it uses a lot of tools from sway rather than hyprlands own stuff. I read somewhere that they aren’t maintaining the hyprland dotfiles anymore anyway so that probably explains things. No biggy for me cus I’m just gonna gut them for my own purposes anyway.
Year of the desktop Linux for me started in the summer of 2007
Freespire (1 year)(desktop)
Kubuntu (used for 5 or 6 years) (on desktops & laptops)
Bohdi (used only on a laptop)
Puppy (on USB flash drive)
Slax (on USB flash drive)
Netrunner Rolling (6 months)(on laptop)
Manjaro (9 years) (laptop & desktops)(now only in Virutalbox)
CachyOS (since August) (current desktop)*
KDENeon testing (on my old desktop)
* When I bought/built a new desktop I did use Manjaro, but after hearing about CachyOS and the various hardware specific optimizations I figured I try it as my daily OS.
I did distrohop a lot (not including any that I only tried in Virtualbox – that list would be too long), these were installed for very short periods of time, usually from days to weeks: Ubuntu, Lubuntu, Opensuse, Debian, Fedora, Mandrake/Madriva, PCLinuxOS, and I’m probably forgetting a few.
Started around 2009/2010 with Ubuntu 9.10. Daily drove Ubuntu till they switched to Unity.
Tried out Kubuntu, Xubuntu, Fedora, OpenSuse and maybe a couple others. Did a manual arch install at one point and then wound up daily driving Archbang (arch with openbox preconfigured) for a while, then switched to Fuduntu (real ones remember, a Fedora based distro). Also used Elementary OS somewhere around 2011. After using Arch though, Arch was always my favorite distro because I liked pacman WAY more than apt, yum, or zypper.
I stopped using Linux around then because it no longer fit my usecases and I kinda stopped using my computer outside of my work PC, then earlier this year I my mom had an older HP laptop that was impossibly useless with windows 10 that she gave to me, and I installed Mint 22 on it and thought it was OK, but heard about CachyOS and dual booted Mint and Cachy, saw how fast and performant it was on an older i3 laptop with an HDD and 4GB of RAM, upgraded to an SDD and 16GB RAM and installed just CachyOS on it, and set it up to be my 9 year old son’s first computer. Had fun making sure it was absolutely locked down to DNS filter any adult websites, and editing the host file to force google and bing to always perform a safe search.
I liked CachyOS + KDE so much that I bought a new NVME for my gaming PC and my work laptop and installed it on both systems and now daily drive CachyOS on 3 computers, my gaming rig, my work Lenovo AMD Thinkbook 16, and my son’s HP. I’m not opposed to setting up vanilla Arch and using it cause vanilla Arch is fine, and I considered Endeavor OS and even trialed it out as well. But CachyOS felt NOTICEABLY faster for daily use on older hardware which is what won me over.
I’ve got one other computer that I maintain, my Mom’s older HP Envy that couldn’t upgrade to windows 11, so instead of saddling her with an Arch based system, I installed Zorin OS 18 on that and now she uses it for her home PC, simply because of the GUI app store/app updates. Also I don’t want to have to manage a rolling release of ANY kind on a computer I don’t own or have access too at all times.
I totally get that. I just got my sister to say yes to trying Linux. I wanted to set her up with Kubuntu but on that particular day their servers were down. I figured “what the heck, shes smart enough” and I set her up with CachyOS using KDE. I kinda wish there was some kinda auto update tool that would at least bug her. I tried to stress to her that her system WILL BREAK if she doesn’t update. I showed her how to update via the CachyOS Package Installer. Told her at least once a week she should check. Just waiting for the day that I’m gonna have to fix her outdated keys… I’m sure it’ll come.
I think my journey from sometime in mid/late 2000s was:
Ubuntu, lasted a good while
Mint (with MATE/XFCE/Cinnamon over the years) when Ubuntu started experimenting with Unity/GNOME 3, also lasted a good while
Eventually KUbuntu due to Mint packages being unacceptably old for some of my needs (also, KDE!), lasted for maybe three years
Manjaro when Ubuntu started pushing snaps really hard, fresh packages are also nice to have in many cases (I think pipewire was a part of motivation), lasted for about half a year
Endeavour OS when I realized that the whole idea behind Manjaro doesn’t make much sense and makes AUR often unusable (and got a new computer; Manjaro eventually self-destructed on the old one after an update), lasted maybe for a year or so
CachyOS - got interested because of optimizations, I used to run a self-built linux-tkg kernel with a non-standard scheduler before, so having a well tuned one out-of-the-box was a plus and going from one arch-based distro to another is pretty painless, about two years and holding!
Mint was nice, but its glacial pace makes it hard to recommend for many uses and even just on relatively new hardware (which Flatpaks can’t help with); I’m pretty sure they still lack an edition with a Wayland-enabled DE. Somewhat ironically, I think I’d actually recommend Fedora to people who don’t want an Arch derivative for one reason or another. I’ve also eyed NixOS and Gentoo, but I don’t think I have what it takes to daily-drive either .
You may want to check out cachy-update! I think octopi also has something similar as a part of it.
Ubuntu: all of the homies in high school computer science were getting into linux with ubuntu. Compiz desktop cube and flame effects.
Whatever distro it was that ran on the really old tiny Eee PCs. But this was brief
I overrode that with a minimal xfce debian called “crunchbang (#!)”
Continued using debian for a while. Never really learned how to fix broken package situations. Became increasingly resentful towards apt and the idea of stable release package orchestration/the opposite of what arch does.
Got into Nixos after Ubuntu just refused to boot or reinstall one day and I was looking for something new to try. Enchanted by its elegance, I struggled to become productive on it for a year before giving up. Nixos as it currently stands is not recommendable unless you want to spend a lot of your time contributing to building nixos. It needs a lot of packages, a lot of documentation, and probably also some package generation automation tooling.
Knowing that valve were going to be running arch on their standalone headsets made me open to trying arch again myself. Cachy is the best distro I’ve ever used!
CachyOS as of about a year ago. Going back to Slackware is not an option any more. The extreme stability and simplicity was excellent when I dual booted with Windows. But Windows is gone now. And that bitch ain’t never coming back into my house. Slackware is simply moving too slowly and now where I have a lot of games to keep running, it just isn’t going to happen.
Mandriva - My first Linux success. Ran this for a few months with early Compiz but state of Linux back then saw me back to Windows.
Antergos - my first Arch and one I really miss (endeavourOS is not the same). This lasted longer than on Mandriva and only died because the distro itself died. Also when Proton first appeared, taking those first early steps to Windows Gaming. I went back to windows reluctantly, promising to give it a year or two more to try again.
Garuda Linux - Where I was before this. Really good software, snobby community. This was where I abandoned Windows, gaming now being pretty much on par.
CachyOS - miles better than Garuda despite offering less bells and whistles. This is when I deleted Windows from the dual boot, gone forever. Can’t see me leaving Cachy unless something Antergos-ish happens. Please don’t let that happen.
Arch linux (4 years) - yes I just went YOLO into linux and install arch manually, but after some years I got bored of it because I wasn’t really learning anything about arch/linux anymore.
at that point I was looking for any reason to completely wipe my setup and start with nixos and the odd times where pacman wouldn’t update until I resolved dependancies was enough for me
Nixos (3 months) - I really like the idea of structuring your linux-setup like a programming project, obviously not for everyone but I just made a minimilst and reproductive setup and love it so far. In my mind my packages and system will be more stable but only time will tell.
Also want to try out debian once in the future just to see how different it is from nixos and arch.
As for cachyos this forum is a helpful source and ive gotten family members to try cachyos because it seems very nice for everyone who wants to try a very polished version of arch linux without configuring everything and a great distro to try to get windows users to switch lol
Startet with SUSE in the 90s and yes, I bought those giant boxes with documentation.
SUSE
Knoppix
Ubuntu
Kubuntu
Elementary OS
Raspian
Raspberry OS
Kali Linux
Endeavour OS
PopOS
Manjaro
Linux Mint
Nobara
Ubuntu Studio
CachyOS
From this list I stil use Raspberry Pi OS on my pis, Mint on the Minecraft and 7dtd server and CachyOS for my notebook as the daily driver. On my music studio notebook I run Ubuntu studio because it works very well with the DELL XPS and I save time not caring about system setup.
For servers I run ubuntu server headless since it exists for several workloads.
. It also was nice that it happens to do a lot of stuff OOTB the way that I normal set up Arch for myself. Particularly btrfs and the subvolumes. It even goes a little more hardcore (I usually only set up a @/ and @/home for myself on Arch but the more the merrier in Cachy’s case). Still on the fence about daily driving fish. I like all the features but I do sometimes forget that some things don’t work like they do in bash. It’s got me more into scripting though cus if there is something I find I did in bash often that doesn’t work the same in fish I make a bash script rather than memorize a new way 
It’s inevitable.
.