Yes, the filesystem is BTRFS set up with subvolumes that fit the way pacman installs packages well. If a package or a -Syu breaks something, you can simply roll back but not lose the files in your /home. In the default CachyOS config your /home also gets rolled back which caught me by surprise the first time and deleted half a day's worth of writing. So in the Limine boot menu you can select the snapshots that get made before and after each pacman command, boot into them and restore your system to that specific state but keeping your configs, documents and such. It's not a back-up or atomic filesystem, but it's definitely a way of making your OS reliable that also fits an Arch-based distro way more than the ostree concept I was working on.

Regarding the speed optimizations, the CachyOS kernel is fantastic, 1000Hz tickrate, custom scheduler and so on, it really is noticeably smoother and faster. Compiling everything in -v3, -v4 microarchitecture optimizations CAN be beneficial in some cases but mostly it caused the CachyOS team to fall deep into scope creep, they sometimes lag weeks behind in releasing updates for packages the core and extra repos already have so I decided to stick with the regular x86_64 only, just like stock Arch also does.

I find that the performance itself isn't drastic outside of code compilation and video editing, but the responsiveness and smoothness is incredible. To me the 1000Hz tickrate is the biggest improvement, feels like the first time you upgraded your old 60Hz monitor.

And 30 less pre-installed packages you would need to get rid of first