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.
Also, the folks behind this are nice…
CachyOS originated in the Polish Arch community IIRC, but all the discussion I’ve seen from them is just… cool.
Nothing weird or dramatic like one tends to see in linux projects, just folks really into building this stuff.
I think they have a bunch of Arch veterans, right? Like the guy who started it is also some big time Arch maintainer. You can go to archlinux.org and search the repo for packages by maintainer and Peter Jung gives you 100+ results.
iirc it started as a spinoff since vanilla arch preferred to stay conservative in regards to compiling packages with “the new” cpu optimizations. They are not so new at all, but since it meant breaking support with old hardware… Hence, the dillema that called ina fork and here we are.