Thanks for posting your experience.

I'm having a hard time justifying the learning curve of CachyOS. In tests done by Phoronix it's a clear winner in benchmarks against Fedora and Ubuntu, but rarely by more than 5%. When I asked on the CachyOS Discord about its suitability for job-critical work, I was not enthused by the answers. What sounded like the most knowledgeable response was "you should be OK so long as you keep current with the CachyOS and Arch wikis". That's not what I consider reassuring for a production system. I should need to be in constant RTFM mode just to have stable use.

I admire CachyOS's advances in kernel-tuning and other forward-thinking offerings (such as Lemine as a modern alternative to GRUB, btrfs as default and alternate kernel schedulers) but I too am uninterested in being an involuntary regression tester. I'm hoping that other distros can learn from it.

I've played with TuxedoOS and KDE Neon. Being two generations away from the core distro build (based on Ubuntu which is based on Debian) and they feel slower to get updates. LMDE eliminates one generation but while it allows KDE it's not supported (which is why I stopped using Mint after it dropped KDE support).

I think that come April I'll go back to Kubuntu 26.04 LTS, they are promising to ship with 6.20 which will be fine for my needs. That's also the release in which AMD's ROCm will be added to the supported repository.

- Evan