Chronic distro hopper here. It brings some interesting defaults and is probably easier to get gaming on than default Arch. Lots of stuff that is above my head for performance optimizing, but in all honesty it’s not THAT incredibly different than default Arch, or even default mint. At least on my hardware which is a 3070 Nvidia 12th gen Intel laptop. It does make an impact, but your mileage may vary.

You know how some people really like cars and spend endless time on the garage tweaking and tuning things? Cachy feels like the distro version of that for Linux. If you are an enthusiast then it is great, but you had better be prepared to figure out what esoteric thing broke and why your “car” now no longer works.

Mint is driving a car, Arch/Cachy is being a car enthusiast. Both will get you places, but one is probably going to get you to the grocery store more reliably.

I’ve done dozens of distros and Linux mint is the most familiar, unexciting, and stable one I have found. Ignore the hate. Real Linux fans don’t care how you participate in open source, other than being toxic. Consequently, do whatever you want and install whatever seems like it would be something you’d want to use.

Id highly suggest having a separate hard drive for Linux as it can be easy to break dual boot if you don’t know what you are doing. Last thing you want to do is panic and decide you need to reinstall Windows.

I have distro hopped my dang brains out with everything under the sun. I’m back to Mint. It works without being an absolute pain and is boring as watching paint dry, which is the point of an OS. I just use it to compute, work, code, and game. it boots and updates eventually.

I ended up installing docker. Didn’t want to make a bunch of systemd files. It automatically updates each day and has required almost no maintenance at all. It’s a little strange, but can work great.

I continue to have a hard time with it. I desperately want to like it but feel like it doesn’t handle laptop Nvidia right. I keep getting boot to black screen on KDE and have to rfkill unblock on install and just a host of issues I can’t seem to ever nail down. Might have to try again since switcherooctl, but there are some rough edges for me.

Love MicroOS for server though. Rock solid.