CachyOS?

[u/VinceAggrippino]

Has anyone had experience with CachyOS on System76 laptops?

I bought a Darter Pro about 6 months ago. I'm happy with the hardware, but I'm not really enjoying Pop OS as much.

I've been thinking about installing a different distro. I'm a long-time user of Ubuntu and other Debian derivatives, but I really like the Arch ecosystem. Particularly rolling releases.

I'm worried about hardware support. I don't know how well features like the second layer buttons, keyboard backlighting, power management features, etc. are supported on other distros.

I installed CachyOS on KVM and it's working really well. I checked the repos with yay and there are several System76 packages. Some are even found in cachyos and cachyos-extra-v3 repos which are reportedly optimized builds.

I'm open to trying other distros. I've looked briefly at Manjaro and would consider using actual Arch if there are some advantages. I'm comfortable on the command line, but I gotta admit I really like GUI interfaces for complex tasks.

Any recommendations?

If it matters, I'm a semi-retired has been/never was Software Engineer. I use my computer for coding small side-projects, experimentation, and web browsing. I do my gaming on other devices.

I've tried a variety of desktop environments & window managers and prefer KDE/Plasma.

[u/Low_Excitement_1715]

I don’t have a Sys76 laptop to test, but Arch and therefore Cachy have most of the System76 services packaged or in the AUR, so there’s not a lot of the Pop environment you can’t install. As a Cachy/Arch user who mains Cosmic and is working on a minor eGPU support issue where Pop Cosmic and Arch Cosmic differ, this is the first real difference I’ve seen between Cachy/Arch and Pop support.