I had been off Linux for a few years but recently returned to arch. I didnt feel like mucking around with everything from scratch so I tried the included install script. Next thing I knew I was in a full xfce environment with everything working out of the box.
If arch can drop you in a full DE of your choosing, from an install script, what is the point of these other options? Genuinely wondering what's going on with them and if I should check them out.
These other arch distros usually come with pre-compiled kernels with special options for different platforms, repos with different package versions to offer some level of stability, custom scripts to manage services and updating, and their own config files for various things. It's pretty much what you do with regular arch but someone else is doing most of it for you.
So they're just desktop environment reskins? With sons basic config files changed? What's the point? You can download some packages and files any time from normal Arch for the same outcome.
Even if I don't use this distro and just use plain Arch myself, I know that CachyOS is a bit more special as it at least compiles the arch repo packages for a newer x86 target and with additional compiler optimizations again that improves performance on newer CPUs. You can achieve the same on an Arch system with the wonderful ALHP project I use on one system but Cachy certainly makes this more accessible.
I plan to go these route but to also bring in the Garuda repos and some tweaks they make. I am running Garuda right now and it works really well for gaming and I like some of their scripts, like garuda-update
Manjaro also has a "rolling release" model that isn't actually fully rolling release. They hold back packages for a few weeks which in return has almost always destroyed the AUR for not only manjaro users but Arch users.
They lie about it being fully rolling. Not just that they have forgotten to sign their signature keys multiple times before releasing big updates.
Sure it's an easier Arch for "beginners" but I'd say it's easier to just install arch on a VM if you really want to learn and use arch that bad a VM is the best way.
Pure Arch is better than Manjaro. Hell I hate Ubuntu but I'd rather use that over Manjaro
If you don't want the themed desktop (KDE) then Garuda KDE lite is great. They also offer other desktop environments that I also think is without the skin
This is what I'm using the last year, really enjoying it. Most stuff does just work, Proton installed by default, haven't had trouble running nearly anything I've wanted to play.
Formally Gentoo based. Ideal for testing virty infrastructure, fixing systems, recovering data of broken systems and resetting passwords on Windows. You can of course use it to install Arch.
I've been keeping tabs on Cachy for a while. I'd love to try it but I'm way too invested in NixOS. I eventually want to work on a project to offer these optimizations in NixOS and have a binary cache available for other users, but that would require a lot of storage and processing power since every single package would have to be rebuilt.