Flit's Nest

i have been seeing lots of people suggesting CachyOS in particular to people who are brand-new to linux and are clearly not "tech literate".

STOP.

CachyOS is derived from Arch Linux, which is a do-it-yourself distribution. the only differences are, from what i can see:

• some packages are rebuilt for newer architectures for more performance gain, in CachyOS's own repos. the rest use Arch repos as normal.
• the installation process is smoother and more in line with other, more user-friendly distros.

while the installation process may have been smoothed over, many Arch packages require manual setup before they will work. here are some examples.

users will also need to know how to deal with manual interventions on their system, such as recently when support for the nvidia 590 driver was dropped for some older gpus.

by suggesting these distros to brand-new linux users, you are subjecting them to a do-it-yourself distro when they may not have the knowledge to properly deal with potential troubleshooting and manual setup down the line.

see also, on the arch linux faq:
Why would I not want to use Arch?
I am a complete GNU/Linux user. Should I use Arch?

if you play video games, i personally recommend fedora workstation or fedora kde, with rpm fusion.

if you do not play video games, i personally recommend linux mint.