It uses an online installer that lets you choose the desktop environment, boot manager, file system, among other things. You can follow the defaults if you're new. Once you install it, it also comes with a few helper applications that can quickly set up things you'd want to use, like a one-click button that installs all the gaming packages you want to use and their flavor of Proton which is (allegedly) faster than the default.

They also have a really good wiki which I contributed a bit to and a very active community if you need help. All around, 10/10 would recommend to anyone. I managed to convince my friend who's new to Linux to use this instead of Zorin and he's had a great time.

The discussion between supporters of these kind of distros and people against them are very similar to those between vegetarians.

"I don't know why the community needs a veggie chicken nuggets honestly. We have delicious vegetables."

"But veggie chicken nuggets have their place. They are quick and microwaveable, and they help bringing people in"

"We bring them in with preservatives and chemicals? Sweet potatoes are also quickly microwaveable.."

And so on.

It also generally feels snappier for simple things like opening terminal, but I am pretty sure that was a kde neon issue.

I only use KDE so your experience might be different than mine.

But if you’re a gamer that also uses your PC for development or content creation you can’t go wrong with CachyOS.

https://github.com/Szowisz/CachyOS-kernels

Which enables you to run a Gentoo based system on the kernel modified by the CachyOS kernel team through a ebuild for the official sources on GitHub.

When emerging it deals with all necessary dependency flags and configuration for you, just a little bit tinkering with USE flags required.

Never heard about BORE scheduler. It is an additional patch to the kernel ? How stable is this ?

I’m thinking of trying Ubuntu, but maybe T2 Linux will always be a compromise, hardly CachyOS fault I reckon.

Lately, I've been going the opposite route and using RHEL more and more. I've had a couple breaking changes lately that have been caused by software under rolling release practices, which has made me begin to appreciate operating systems where their APIs and stuff get sort of frozen in time for up to a decade. In fact, this is still a big feature of Microsoft Windows.

I mean, if a server distro can be made to be "LTS" for 5-10 years, then why can't we have a decent desktop Linux OS be like that as well (besides Ubuntu)?

It appears to be done for the sake of hyping themselves as superior, but it's causing problems. I totally wouldn't recommend anything with such approach to new users especially.

Any views how sustainable it is for the authors to keep working on it? Is it just donation based or is there a bigger supporter behind it?

The Arch forums rightfully warn against this and do not want users of these distros, since all these distros are inevitably broken in their own weird ways.

There are multiple very reasonable distros. There is absolutely no need to make these forks.

one reason is better sw support,e.g. Arduino, android, vivado,cuda,you name it,all are supported out of box, saves a lot of time for me