It is also first in the Distrowatch rank
https://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=cachyos
I distro hopped to it from Bazzite a couple of months ago, and I could not be happier.
If you try the installer, be careful when selecting multiples DE/WM as the conflicts were not listed anywhere for the installation process.
Picking a single environment and then adding the others later was what worked for me.
Any chance, have you ever used Garuda? I’m curious how CachyOS compares on the “ease of use” front. I’ve been on Garuda for like 3 or 4 years now as it is the only one (that I tried) that I’ve had “just work” for everything out of the box. My laptop had a lot of trouble with Bazzite and the nvidia drivers, but again, I don’t have to do anything under Garuda besides install it, periodically run updates, and it plays games just fine with no headaches. I’m not a huge fan of the decoration choices in Garuda, and some of the stuff you mentioned like Winboat and Gaming one-click installs sound amazingly helpful… but everything is working right now so there’s a hurdle to changing, lol.
Garuda “Dragonized” looks horrid, but personally I really enjoy “Mokka”.
I only disabled one or two window effects, left everything else as is. I also added some System Monitor widgets. Here’s my primary and secondary screen.
I think it looks great. Other than the unusual colour theme, nothing really gives off a “pr0 g4merzz” vibe, IMO.
“I am not a huge fan of the decoration choices in garuda”
May I recommend to you Yurihikari’s Garuda Linux Dotfiles?
You may recommend it all you like, but I’m not a huge fan of that either (from what I can tell looking at the githup you linked anyway), lol.