Install your own from one of the parent distros: Debian, Fedora/openSUSE, sources (eg. Exherbo, Gentoo), the state-based one I always forget.
this post was submitted on 20 Apr 2025
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I don't use either but IMO people are far too worried about bloat, it's not some monster that'll drag you down. Unless you're extremely space constrained some extra packages on disk won't make any difference. And even on the slimmest install there'll be stuff you never use anyway.
I understand, but less packages means it's easier to manage my system. One of the reasons I'm leaning towards arch is because of its minimal approach, so that I can install only what I need.
Less packages really doesn't mean much in terms of how easy the system will be to manage. If anything, I'd say a distro with more, but pre installed packages is easier to manage because the maintainers will make sure that those packages will be as easy to work with and upgrade as possible.
That said, I'm definitely not going to stop you from trying Arch though. You can even get similar (or better) optimizations by using the ALHP repos and a kernel like linux-tkg or linux-cachyos for example, although the difference really is negligible in most cases.
Don't buy into the bloat meme.
I use Arch on all my systems now. It does great for gaming on both my beefy gaming PC and my little work laptop (within their respective punching weights). I haven't felt the need to explore CachyOS or any other variants for performance gains and I really do appreciate how bare bones Arch is. Just having the lightweight OS that isn't doing a darn thing beyond what I've asked it to claws back plenty of performance, although I'm speaking more in contrast to Windows than other distros having any sort of bloat.
Still, Arch has been the first distro I really committed to, I've been on it for a year and a half now and learning how to build it out taught me a lot about Linux.
Also, I'm just never sure how long some of this offshoot distros will hold on for, you know? Is that unfounded?
I didn't really think about your last point, in fact a big distro like arch will probably never die, while, just how we saw with arcolinux, these smaller distros with smaller development teasm can die in the future.
Start by using base arch and eventually you can try to use the cachyos repos if you want to try and get some performance uplift.
That's what I think I'm going to do, probably the best approach
There are many meta-packages you can install. Im on arch for years, it works well as long as you dont constantly tinker with it.
I usually set up an arch install with the desktop environment and some basic setup where I can use it for my needs, then I use clonezilla to make a mirror of the install. Once a month I update the mirror by itself. In case I bork my main install, I use the mirror to rewrite my main system, no need to reinstall. I guess having a cheap 500gb ssd around pays for iself in this usecase.
I suggest installing EndeavourOS because it is pretty minimal, you can even select the option to not include EOS's OS theming during the install process, so basically a bare install. Their installer also allows me to choose ext4 instead of the buggy BTRFS file structure. Then, after install and updating, I add the Chaotic-Aur repos. and do an update. Then I get the Garuda Linux repos installed. Why? Because they have lots of handy tools, gaming, power-daemen for both performance and power-savings (laptops) and a handy app for installing kernels, including the CachyOS kernels and their optimizations in the Garuda Settings Manager. If you don't want ext4 file structure you can skip EOS/Chaotic-Aur and just download Garuda KDE light edition.
Else, get Garuda repos on your system by downloading 'Garuda-update' from here, and install with Octopi or CLI command, and then do a system update, then do 'garuda-update' in terminal which should pull in the garuda repos (say 'yes' when prompted to all the options to add repos.) Minimal system with lots of options to choose.
I don't really like endeavourOS, seems like that it points more towards user friendliness than performance, which is not what I'm aiming to. I will probably install base arch, get familiar with it and then select some packages from either cachy or guarda to improve performance.
EndeavourOS doesn't add anything to Arch performance, it is basically a minimal install of arch with their theming included, which you can opt out of during install. But, to each his own.
I've been seeing a lot of people pushing catchyos lately. Has anyone actually tested if these optimizations actually offer any real world benefit?
Makes very little difference
You can try Endeavour OS. Its pretty close to stock. I found cachyos was too bloated for my likings and ffmpeg ran faster on EOS than COS in my case.
ffmpeg will do CPU detection and use features like AVX2 if available even on vanilla distros.
Why would ffmpeg run faster on another distro?