Yeah, I like Nick but benchmarking isn't his forte. In all the articles and videos I've come across, most distros perform similarly, usually within the margin of error for most games. I can't imagine any set of optimizations that would lead to a performance increase on the level of a gpu upgrade. It doesn't make sense.

Wendell talks about cachy quite a bit, I wish he'd do some testing but I'm sure he's already busy enough.

It's running through Proton, he mentioned that in the benchmarks it shows up "as playing on windows" because of Proton.

Other than that Nick is pretty transparent about what he does, if something is not mentioned it's likely whatever is default on the distro when running steam through flatpak (flatpak was mentioned).

Good thing SponsorBlock will automatically skip the segments for you so you can enjoy the 20 minutes long video!

Any distro can be tuned

Yeah but people are too lazy to do this lol

Yeah but I'm dumb and I need distro maintainers to tune it for Me

I would not recommend CachyOS to any beginners because after installation it still behaves like regular Arch. Just from today's update:

Replace vlc-plugin-kwallet with cachyos-extra-v3/vlc-plugin-libsecret? [Y/n]

That said, I don't agree with your claims. CachyOS puts a lot of effort into optimizing performance (at the cost of other things, e.g. disk space, server load, support for older hardware, ...), especially for gaming workloads. There have been many benchmarks that consistently show it performing better than other distros out-of-the-box. Generally, the advantage seems to be in the 0 to 15% range. Does that matter? That probably depends on who's asking.

You are correct that all the optimizations are open for everybody to see and copy. However, the mainstream distros don't seem to be interested in doing that for now. And applying the CachyOS optimizations (different kernel, scheduler, optimized packages for Zen 4, ...) to other distros (say Ubuntu) is not really feasible or advisable for most users.

PS: I had to look it up, and of course people tried xD.

You can tune any distro to any degree you want and replace everything including a custom built kernel to get performance. But you know not everyone can/wants to do that, I have a toddler so I'm not going to take a whatever Debian and install a new scheduler and whatever just cause.

You might forget that Linux desktop is growing super fast and fiddling with stuff under the hood is not that common and noobs and people with experience end up fucking things up constantly. Having something that's performant, optimised for your use case, whatever optimisations baked in won't break with updates and you can just install it and forget is a really big deal. This is just not something that was available.

I think you should stop the hate and allow people to be happy with the distro they like for whatever reason.

Just disable it, the "secure" in secure boot is a security for whoever needs to ship signed crap in windows or if your employer needs to spy on you. On a linux gaming laptop its perfectly useless.