I’ve been using CachyOS as my daily desktop OS on my laptop for a few months now, and it works great. I’ve gone through lots of troubleshooting to get all of my hardware working properly, and I’ve completely reinstalled the OS several times (mostly due to switching from unencrypted to encrypted FS), but any problem I’ve ever come across has been solved with either a package update or a “simple” config change.
Vanilla Arch on the other hand refuses to work. I can install it, I can get to a terminal, but I can’t get any desktop environments to load, all I get is a black screen. I can at least still Ctrl-Alt-F3 to get to a terminal so I’m able to change packages and configs. But despite that, and despite the depth of the archwiki, I can’t figure out how to get a desktop environment to display on my laptop. It’s weird because I know AMD/NVIDIA hybrid laptops aren’t uncommon, but there doesn’t seem to be anything in the archwiki addressing that specific setup, so I’m not sure what packages or drivers I should be using.
The only reason I was attempting to get vanilla Arch working is because I wanted to try out DHH’s Omarchy setup. It runs okay in a Box (qemu) VM in Cachy, but I was hoping to try out the “vanilla Arch experience” too to get my hands dirty.
Whatever secret sauce CachyOS uses for hardware detection and handling should be pushed upstream IMO.
I did read through the archwiki and those pages, I’ve consulted them before when I was having other issues with Cachy, but for some reason I still couldn’t get SDDM to load. I managed to find exactly one thread on bbs.archlinux.org relating to a laptop with a similar setup that actually pointed me in a direction I haven’t tried yet.
vanilla arch should just work almost exactly the same. Does for me, all be it with a little more tinkering required. But i tinker with default cachy install too, prob most of us do.