For grins, because I enjoy novelty, and because I’m a glutton for punishment, I on-boarded myself to CachyOS on an old laptop. Device support is fantastic. I kept myself inside my Gnome desktop environment comfort-zone, and have been spending a lot of time with Google to do things that take less work on other distros. For example, secure boot is probably now more secure than on any previous Linux install, but I needed Google to find out generally what to do–then translating it to the real world and my specific device. We got there.

I will say, based on the support of x64_V4, this laptop has probably never been faster. It’s an elder Intel i5 with 8Gb of RAM and it runs so much better than it did with Windows 10 or 11.

I will not be any kind of developer, but for media consumption and a little writing, it’s just great.

I will suggest the from a set-up point of view, this was not something I’d recommend as a first or beginner Linux experience. Your mileage may vary.

I was interested in kernel optimizations and a rolling release and that is definitely what I have.