What’s the difference between this and a fresh install of Arch with a DE like KDE/Gnome?

I’ve been using Arch for so long now that if I bought a new machine I would find it hard to try anything else.

Arch gives you a bare bones DE, and you have to install/configure everything yourself.

CachyOS gives you a larger volume of default applications in a basic install, and lots of the stuff comes with useful configs out of the box. It also has hardware specific optimisations for multiple generations of CPU in its repos, but how much of a difference that makes in the real world is unclear

I did some Benchmarks and CachyOS claims of around 15% more performance seem to be true. Unigin Heavenbenchmark , Super Tuxkart and Furmark all got improved scores compared to PopOS. Additionally Fallout 4 now runs a lot smoother which is probably due to the BORE scheduler doing something better. My local LLMs also seem to be slightly faster and for some reason now need less V-Ram.

My local LLMs also seem to be slightly faster and for some reason now need less V-Ram.

This is likely due to zram being setup by default

The hell is zram?