Do CachyOS optimizations actually make any difference whatsoever? I know they enable certain optimization flags whenever building software, but that doesn't directly equate to performance improvements unless you're actually benchmarking and testing it. I've seen some benchmarks in games and it seems there is literally zero performance difference (sometimes it loses to Fedora, even).

I'd always recommend upstream distributions with corporate backing for novice users: Ubuntu or Fedora. If they're coming from Windows: Linux Mint. There's also a clear upgrade path for users who enjoy Mint or Ubuntu: Debian testing.

Arch Linux is awesome, don't get me wrong. I just believe it's borderline unethical to recommend someone installing anything related to Arch on their workstation. It's just not what a beginner should choose at all. CachyOS included, it even makes you choose your bootloader at install (any user-friendly distro would simply never bother you with that and go with GRUB right away).

A user's first distro can make or break their Linux experience. Think hard before recommending new users the flavor of the month or an Arch derivative.

> Do CachyOS optimizations actually make any difference whatsoever? I know they enable certain optimization flags whenever building software, but that doesn't directly equate to performance improvements unless you're actually benchmarking and testing it.

I switched from Windows 11 to Kubuntu a year ago, and then gave CachyOS a shot after hearing praise for it. I'm on a laptop with an AMD iGPU, and CachyOS's `znver4` optimized repos gave a significant bump on my Geekbench results:

(Note: these results are from almost a year ago though)

Lenovo Thinkpad P14s Gen4 AMD

- Windows 11: 2366 Single-Core Score, 10717 Multi-Core Score

- Kubuntu: 2496 Single-Core Score, 9878 Multi-Core Score

- CachyOS: 2569 Single-Core Score, 11563 Multi-Core Score

Repeat tests were essentially the same (Win11 23xx/107xx, Kubuntu 24xx/98xx, Cachy 25xx/115xx)