kubuntu 26.04 minimal install: keep the ubuntu and apt you're familiar with, skip the unnecessary or unwanted junk (including snapd) at install time, and get the option of using btrfs filesystem (which is not possible with the main ubuntu installer).

one note: you won't even have a web browser out-of-the-box, and snap-powered 'firefox' package exists in ubuntu repos. so if adding mozilla's deb repo, do not forget the step where you adjust your sources priorities so 'sudo apt install firefox' pulls from mozilla instead of ubuntu.

I've used both, been daily driving Cachy for a year or two now. CachyOS is a bit easier than plain Arch, in my opinion. I've been using Octopi (a gui tool that fronts the package manager) because I never fully got the hang of pacman yet. And I use Btrfs Assistant (another gui tool) instead of configuring snapper from the CLI.

Overall, it's more involved than something likr Ubuntu or Debian, but it feels manageable.

Modern Debian Trixie would be a midpoint between the two.

I switched from Mint to CachyOS also as a developer. As I do a lot of piracy I depend on Bottles and flatpak to play pirated games a bit more securely. When flatpak had an issue a few months back with signing their programs bottles didn't work properly as I had different versions of Nvidia drivers. Up to date native and almost up to date flatpak. I am not sure how others distros handled this, but be prepared that updates might break something. Study a bit about AUR if you decide to go there and try out Cachy for a bit before fully switching on a spare disk or something. I wanted to run a local LLM and virtualbox but I had problems with that likely due to my kernel???? So I am not sure how well it works with docker. All in all, try it out and expect a slight increase in difficulty.

I used Cachy for a long time. It was really stable and dependable, in my experience. The Arch Wiki is also insanely useful. If you know how to troubleshoot, and you don't mid tinkering, it'll be fine.

I started with Debian and am driving Catchy now. Catchy will pull you into the terminal more than Debian will, but you don't sound like someone put off by that.

The good news is that pacman is easy to learn and Catchy's default terminal app is superior.

There are a few big differences when it comes to the package management. Pacman, AUR, and rolling release are some of the largest differences. Y

ou will want to familiarize yourself with some of the most common commands for pacman such as Syu, S, Rsn, Si and such. If use the default shell for Cachy (fish), then tab completion should help.

As for the AUR, that is where you will want to install things that aren't part of the base repo. Keep in mind some stiff is community packaged, so you might not get the support you would expect on Ubuntu.

Finally, Cachy is a rolling release so every time you install a new package, you need to also update your system. In the past rolling distros have been more unstable due to the release schedule, but things don't break too much now. Cachy helps avoid breakage by having snapper which will let you boot into your system with older packages from your boot loader.

The tools are different, but you‘ll be just fine.

I‘m used to Ubuntu Server and installed Cachy on a gaming PC. I’m still looking things up, but that’s about it. Just some more search engine work in the beginning.

A major difference might be the rolling release, which can trash your system/configs temporary. It didn’t happen to me, but friends reported some mishaps and frustrations.