Honestly, having only seriously played around with Ubuntu a little bit a year ago, CachyOS has been nothing but smooth sailing for me. I would consider myself pretty savvy, but with the built in tools provides even a casual user should be able to get up and going.

I use paru instead of pacman, so I can get AUR packages easily, and outside of running a 4 letter command and following the prompts, that’s just about the only thing I’ve had to do in a terminal.

Arch and its variants(CachyOS, EndeavourOS, and Manjaro) are just “difficult” insofar as they usually need you to understand the basics of using the terminal, and how to look up documentation as needed.

With CachyOS, I haven’t played much with the others so I can’t speak for them, you could get away with using the GUI tools shipped by default for a long time and not have any problems.

If it works for you, that’s what matters! Difficulty is subjective, too.

Of course Win11 ran slow, the CPU the tests were done on is 6 generations behind the official cutoff. I’d rather see the results from the same experiment run on a i5-8400, which is min specs.

It’ll still be slow, but at least it won’t be an unsupported platform.