this post was submitted on 19 Apr 2024
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It's not really the same thing. EndeavourOS is basically vanilla Arch + a few branding packages. CachyOS is an opionated Arch with optimised packages.
You still have the option to select the DE and the packages you want to install - just like EndeavourOS - but what sets Cachy apart is the optimisations. For starters, they have multiple custom kernel options, with the BORE scheduler (and a few others), LTO options etc. Then they also have packages compiled for the x86-64-v3 and v4 architectures for better performance.
Of course, you could also just use Arch (or EndeavourOS) and install the x86-64-v3/v4 packages yourself from ALHP (or even the Cachy repos), and you can even manually install the Cachy kernel or a similar optimised one like Xanmod. But you don't get the custom configs / opinionated stuff. Which you many actually not want as a veteran user. But if you're a newbie, then having those opinionated configs isn't such a bad idea, especially if you decide to just get a WM instead of a DE.
I've been thru all of the above scenarios, depending on the situation. My homelab is vanilla Arch but with packages from the Cachy repo. I've also got a pure Cachy install on my gaming desktop just because I was feeling lazy and just wanted an optimised install quickly. They also have a gaming meta package that installs Steam and all the necessary 32-bit libs and stuff, which is nice.
Then there's Cachy Browser, which is a fork of LibreWolf with performance optimisations (kinda similar to Mercury browser, except Mercury isn't MARCH optimised).
As for support, their Discord is pretty active, you can actually chat with the developers directly, and they're pretty friendly (and this includes Piotr Gorski, the main dev, and firelzrd - the person behind the BORE scheduler). Chatting with them, I find the quality of technical discussions a LOT higher than the Arch Discord, which is very off-topic and spammy most of the time.
Also, I liked their response to Arch changes and incidents. When Arch made the recent mkinitcpio changes, their made a very thorough announcement with the exact steps you needed to take (which was far more detailed than the official Arch announcement). Also, when the xz backdoor happened, they updated their repos to fix it even before Arch did.
I've also interacted with the devs pesonally with various technical topics - such as CFLAG and MARCH optimisations, performance benchmarking etc, and it seems like they definitely know their stuff.
So I've full confidence in their technical ability, and I'm happy to recommend the distro for folks interested in performance tuning.
cc: @governorkeagan@lemdro.id
Thank you for the detailed answer, I really appreciate. I've had this EOS install for almost 3 years now and I have multiple drives that are full of things. Very happy with it, too. Moving distros for me isn't as easy as it used to be because of the drives and all the things that I have set up. I don't want to go through the pain of re-setting everything up. I'll, however, try cachyOS either in a vm or a little laptop I have that I use for trying things for fun.
If you're already on Arch/EOS, you don't need to "move distros", all you need to do (ish) is to update your pacman.conf with Cachy's repos and run a
pacman -Syuuto reinstall your packages. Oh, and you might also want to install the cachy kernel and maybe the browser for the full experience. Your files and config will remain the same, unless you plan to update/merge them - in which case, I'd recommend replacing your makepkg.conf with the one Cachy provides, for the optimised compiler flags. Other than that, there's no significant difference between the default configs and Cachy's. In fact, EndeavourOS actually deviates more since it uses dracut for generating the initrd, whereas Cachy, like Arch, defaults to mkinitcpio.Anyways, there's not much point trying CachyOS in a VM since it's really not that much different from EndeavourOS (from a UX point of view); the whole point of Cachy is to eke out the best performance from your system, so running it in a VM defeats the purpose.
I installed CachyOS on a VM ( Proxmox ) just to check out the OOTB experience and I am glad I did.
In a lot of ways, it is similar to EOS as you say. That is a compliment as I really like EOS.
The UX is a bit different though. Lots more blue than purple of course. On the command-line side the differences are bigger. It uses the fish shell with a jazzed up prompt ( reminded me of Garuda ). There are a tonne of aliases. They clearly like Rust as a few of the Rust core util alternatives are installed. They even alias ls to eza.
Both yay and paru are installed at install which is awesome.
The default file system was XFS. Btrfs and zfs were both options. No bcachefs at install but it is available after.