I feel like CachyOS should be further to Niche than Arch

You still need X11 or Wayland somehow. I would suggest something that can run in “kiosk” mode. That’s essentially what you want - boot a single app and run that.

If you don’t care about wayland, just install xorg-xinit (since you said Arch) and put this in ~/.xinitrc: exec steam -bigpicture

Run startx to launch it on its own. There may be other dependencies you need for steam or for games, but you don’t need a whole DE.

If you want, you can even enable auto-login and then set up auto-start by adding this to your ~/.bashrc (or whatever shell you use):

if [[ -z $DISPLAY ]]; then
  startx
fi

Yes. I tried it for 6 months. Terrible. Takes way too long to compile

For me, I always keep coming back to Arch tbh

Sometimes I get fed up with managing a whole system and once in a blue moon bricking my system on an update, but the alternatives are always worse, and with btrfs now, I don’t have to worry about the latter problem.

Nix was the closest to pulling me away. A centralized config? Beautiful. Static package store without dependency conflicts? Beautiful. Immutable applications? The WORST idea we’ve ever had as a community. For instance, imo, VS Code extensions are fundamentally incompatible with Nix. I spent weeks trying to get it to work doing multiple different things to try and hope it would work. It can’t. VS Code just has to be mutable.

Anyway so I’m back to arch and have been for over a year since I tried Nix (and before that Fedora which has its own issues). Before that I had been on Arch for 4 years.

I think I’ll stay now. It’s really the best option out there. In my mind, Arch is Linux, i.e. it’s how an OS should be built for the Linux kernel and the FOSS ecosystem, and it won’t ever be beat

Maybe this is wrong, but my understanding is BTRFS is generally slower than EXT4, and that’s okay. It’s not going for speed

Where it shines is not in its speed but in its versatility offering compression, rollback, subvol, etc

For example, for applications, you do a lot of writes/reads to Documents or load resources like for games, so use EXT4 for /home or for a dedicated /games partition

For your system, it could be broken via config tweaks or updates, so use BTRFS to have the rollback options

Blue

I did it once

Used it for a month

Compilation never got faster

Miserable experience updating or installing new software

Never trying it again

Just use minimal binary distros like Arch

Or if you really want the control of Gentoo use Nix; it’s just a better system for that since almost everything you need is prebuilt as well

that shit is hard, I had to be extremely careful to protect against SQL injection

People need to learn to be careful

to learn vulkan every time they want to use a GUI for their job

Not every time, just the first time. But yes. Devs should stop being so lazy

compiler design whenever they wanna use java for their job

Every dev should at least know the basics of language design and compiler design, yes. Again, you also only have to learn it once

Nah you should learn

I agree with the last point tbh

At the bare minimum, if you aren’t capable of contributing to the library you use, then you don’t deserve to use it.