alt Hacker NewsFedora, Ubuntu, Debian, and Mint remain great recommendations; good stability, community support, etc. (even for Ubuntu, a regular user might not actually care that much about snaps so long as everything works)
I just moved to CachyOS, (from Fedora, and earlier from Ubuntu -- I've been on Linux for a while) and I've been very, very happy. The gaming performance is legitimately better than what I was getting on Fedora, and I've just enjoyed the OS and KDE much more than Gnome Shell. I haven't had any real showstoppers with CachyOS, and it really has felt like a user-friendly version of Arch finally exists.
Replies
Are you able to quantify the performance improvement, e.g. in FPS on particular games?
Curious as to how CachyOS does it.
I've yet to have a day when CachyOS can come out of sleep: hangs at various steps and requires a hard reboot that somehow relaunches apps on login that I explicitly closed hours ago.
I think a lot of cachy performance is placebo, because Steam games use the container runtime's Debian 11 libraries, it doesn't use the native CachyOS ones at all.