My path was Btrfs for the whole single SSD, so no RAID, no encryption, no trouble. Systemd-boot as boot-manager as default at the time, by now you can also have GRUB or Limine with bootable Btrfs-snapshots. I didn't see the need to change, though.

Desktop Environment is KDE/Plasma, which may be best supported. I don't know about the others, because since later Plasma 5 it has been more than good enough for me, so I didn't try.

(Just FVWM2 for 'the lulz' by myself, but it makes no sense anymore, because you don't save that much RAM, when your'e using applications pulling in all sorts of deps anyway.)

On my obsolete all Intel hardware it ran fantastically fast and rock solid from day one without any hickups, glitches, or crashes. I had some programs from the AUR crash on me, but that wasn't really the AURs, or Cachys fault, just bitrotten apps, like Hexchat, which got fixed meanwhile. But there is KVirc, in QT, so why care? Shrug?

What else to expect? There seems to be some animosity from parts of the Arch-community towards Cachy, because of percieved bugginess, and being flooded with support questions from Cachy-users, pestering them, without telling they are using Cachy.

So don't do that? ;-)

Maybe that is because Cachy has no IRC, only Discord and a webforum. I've looked into both and they are mostly noise with bad SNR to me. Most people have either bad(ly supported) HW, or are 'holding it wrong'. Again, that happens with all distros.

If you state your problem clearly, you'll get help, on both sides. It just so happens that I never needed any, since I'm doing this cybershit since about 1985 :-)

That leads me to share another observation: During and after install I never really needed to intervene. But I did check, and still do check everything that changes. However, besides the rarely needed changes/edits for something in /etc, I never needed that. No difference to Arch at all. It just works.

At least on my hardware, and my chosen path like Btrfs, bootloader, login-manager, DE, it wasn't necessary. I could have just blindly clicked "Yes, Yes, come on, gimme the hot stuff!' all along.

I'm not using their graphical pacman-frontends, just pacman in Konsole(how lame, I know...), and meanwhile 'yay' too, because someone here pointed me to it.

( https://github.com/Jguer/yay )

Check it out, see if it works good with your needed drivers, for your hardware, in the ways they compile and link the stuff, optimizing the shit out of it.

Revert to plain Arch if not. Nothing lost but a little bit of time.

Maybe much won, because of WOW!1!! ;->

Edit: I forgot, they have something like an installation manual/wiki mix, not as comprehensive as Archs, but usable as an overview of all the optimizations they do.

I'd suggest reading that first before doing anything with it:

https://wiki.cachyos.org/cachyos_basic/navigation-guide/

Since you already know Arch

https://wiki.cachyos.org/features/kernel/

https://wiki.cachyos.org/features/cachyos_settings/

https://wiki.cachyos.org/features/optimized_repos/

https://wiki.cachyos.org/configuration/sched-ext/

should cover most of the differences from Arch.

EditOfTheEdit:

I'm also a real fan of their ZRAM-setup and related sysctls.

They may seem crazy, but work reliably for me and my workloads.

Since years.