It’s essentially Arch with a custom kernel and repos. That being said the Kernel and repos are REALLY good. very optimized. I use the CachyOS Kernel on my NixOS system and I use the repos as well as the kernel on a regular Arch system. If you’re a gamer then you’ll notice a definite increase in performance. the devs/maintainers of CachyOS are also very transparent and provide constant updates.

Now you’ll probably ask “well why not just use CachyOS itself?” to which I’ll say they pack A LOT of stuff into the distro most of which I just don’t need. It can result in a long install time, much longer than most distros. But if you want a solid easy to install distro right out of the box you can’t go wrong. They also support just about every DE and WM under the sun. Seriously when you install it they provide you with options for everything AND also provide you with custom configs for everything so you can say use Niri or Hyprland or whatever right away without having to do much if any further configuration. They also have configurations for shells too. They also have their own version of Proton which is quite good, I also use that. They also provide you with the option to have snapper/timeshift set up for you right off the bat so you don’t have to worry about rolling back if something goes wrong.

They also have a fairly new updating feature which I love. Basically it’s a version of pacman where anyone can use it/figure it out. Like other distros like Fedora or Debian it’ll notify you when there are updates and will walk you through the process of updating, providing you with recent Arch News while you update, then clear out orphaned dependencies and clear your cache for you. it’s really a very good updater.

Overall it’s a very solid and easy to use Arch based distro and a fantastic introduction to Arch.