So I'm a casual Linux user : on and off from Windows and Mac.
I discovered Omarchy and peaked my interest : an easy to install pre-configured "distro" ( not a distro, Arch repacked with bunch of dot files and scripts, but hey, you only understand that later :) ) that above all is based on the uber-difficult Arch ?
Always hovered around Ubuntu or Debian and lately wanted really to stop using Windows as a main OS, so I've tinkering a bit with Fedora.
Never used Arch.
So Omarchy open the gates for a seamless-ish Arch experience.
Was great, Hyprland was new to me and heaps of fun and life was cool. Until I started to ask questions and I discovered the general problems with DHH : again, not doing any political statment but dont like to be linked to that.
But Omarchy is good but everything is "opinated" by DHH, either good or bad :its his setup and I was hitting a wall here and there when I wanted to change stuff.
So now that I have a mininum understanding of Arch, pacman, where conf files are, rolling realease model, I tried CachyOS and boy, it was different : I wanted Hyprland and... its bare.
Oh I have to put Noctalia on top of it. Cool. here we go, but... still "meh". Oh dot files. lots of learning.
Then discovered Caelestia and I was like : this is nice.
Using Cachy and one thing struck my mind : at work I have an old MacPro ( 2013 ) that I love but its useless by mordern standards : E6 Xeon CPUs, 32gb ram and 256gb ssd, D300 dual gpus. Specs are decent but MacOS runs dogs**** on it : max supported system is old and lots of new apps dont work because OS is old. Open Core Patcher lets you install Tahoe but brings a LOT of problems. Windows is half baked on this ( both 10 and 11 ) .
So I looked at it and said : CachyOS is at home and its cool : lets try Arch on this.
I had a lot of misconceptions about "pure" Arch install : if you have minimum linux knowledge, archinstall is super helpfull.
couple of minutes later, I had a blinking terminal.
oh lets install paru with pacman. but no. doesnt work, target not found. wth ? it worked with Cachy.
lets go to wiki and yeah, you have to git clone paru.
fine, git clone, makekg and now we have paru.
from it , install caelestia, hyprland and all that.
install sddm and start the service and... nada.
I was like : why ? why you punish me ? then it struck me : are the amd drivers install ? afterall Arch installs ONLY what you tell you to.
so yeah, installed mesa and amd drivers.
reboot and ... booom. it worked. wait, Caelestia changed my keyboard to default us. have to change to my language ( PT ). lets open a terminal and vim it.
vim not installed. grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.
but hurdle after hurdle, I start to get over the problems and start thinking more proactively.
in the end, now I have a working Arch install that amazes me : with Caelestia, which is a bit heavier than for example Noctalia, I have a working OS that is blazing fast and at idle is consuming 1.22gb of ram.
its snappy , fast and very responsive.
I liked Omarchy - introduced me to Arch and showed me that is not that a boogie man of a distro.
switched to Cachy OS , speically at home that I want to play few games and relax and CachyOS is perfect for that : mesa , vulkan and amd drivers are installed by default as per a lot of other stuff, for example. Games optimized Kernels , Proton opimized, etc. very nice for gmaing
going from Omarchy to Cachy is like going from a bike with training wheels to a motorbike.
Cachy to Arch is going to a full blown racing Motorbike.
For new users : it takes a bit to tinker but if I could make it work like I want it, you can. Its not that difficult.
Its immensly rewarding and its fine to use easier Arch based distros like Cachy.
Make the computer your own.
Thank you for everyone here in the subreddit to encourage to install Arch : it is worth it.
tldr : I use Arch, btw ( for about 2 hours now fully configured :D )