I'd like to start a discussion to make it easier for people to nail down which of these similar distros is right for them. CachyOS or Garuda?
I'll start:
CachyOS:
+ clean theme
+ single iso
+ very popular => easier to troubleshoot / ask for help
+ very active developers (meaning in community, not specifically development)
(+) variants of packages optimized for specific cpu architectures
(+) bootloader choice
- less beginner friendly UI on Hello (welcome) app and not as beginner friendly maintenance.
(-) (for beginners) you need a little bit of knowledge to know what you actually need to click or even know about refreshing mirrors, cleaning cache, etc.
(+/-) needs to be configured to have a non default (for some people) bland theme
(-) mirrors seem to get out of sync a bit more than on Garuda - very minor issue - solution: wait a bit (though this can put off some very new users)
Garuda:
+ very preconfigured
(+) interesting themes (for some)
+ welcome app - Garuda Rani is very beginner friendly with an intuitive UI - (-) though terminal through Rani could give the user some confirmation of results of a performed action - new users might get confused by it simply disappearing
+ well streamlined and simplified maintenance (can just run garuda-update)
+ a little easier to understand for newcomers
- one iso = one theme (can mean multiple occupied usbs if not using ventoy or if usbs are of small size)
- sometimes very niche and "opinionated" themes - many people will just not like it (though there is KDE Lite version and Gnome should be default or almost default)
(-) not as popular - can be very slightly harder to troubleshoot or ask for help for Garuda specific topic
Feel free to suggest new comparison arguments!
The systems are essentially extremely similar (and for obvious reasons) but it might be useful to spark up a thread about this so that people can have an easier job choosing between such similar distros.
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