Arch is an excellent distro for those who want to make every single choice for themselves, but I quickly grew decision fatigue

XDA Developers

A personal account of switching from vanilla Arch Linux to CachyOS, an Arch-based derivative. The author found Arch's constant maintenance demands — pacman output scanning, Pacnew file merging, AUR rebuilds — to be a source of decision fatigue rather than genuine learning. CachyOS resolved this by shipping sensible defaults (Nvidia drivers, Btrfs with snapshots) out of the box while preserving full access to pacman and the AUR. The author notes gaming performance is comparable to other distros, and recommends vanilla Arch only for those who genuinely enjoy the hands-on maintenance ritual.

CachyOS is Arch Linux for normal people, and that's why I switched

CachyOS has the defaults I would've built anyway

Isn't choice the whole point of running Arch?

man i should just put arch on one of my thinkpads.

Arch linux is linux from scratch for normal people. That’s why I switched to LFS

No knock against CachyOS, this sounds quite fine. But have you ever heard of Manjaro? I am using it now, works great, not experiencing any fatigue over updates.

CachyOS is Arch that respects your time. Same pacman and AUR, but with Nvidia drivers, Btrfs snapshots, and sensible defaults out of the box. Vanilla Arch is for the ritual; CachyOS is for the work.

Sometimes arch become maintenance nightmare 😔.