I believe when you say app manager, you mean a package manager GUI. If so, you might like GuiMan

If you want something that hides all of the ugly console garbage, well that’s not an option on Arch because reading the pacman output is mandatory; using something like Discover (which hides it) will break your system eventually.

On the other hand, if you just mean “a small curated list of apps for specific tasks”, there actually is one, it can be launched from CarhyOS Hello.

There’s a bunch of gaming/performance settings out of the box ranging from custom helper scripts to ananicy-cpp kernel scheduling tweaks and more. Here’s CachyOS’s page on the “tweaks” they have: https://wiki.cachyos.org/features/cachyos_settings/

They also include an easy to use kernel manager that gives users a lot of options for kernel customization: https://wiki.cachyos.org/features/kernel_manager/ (I may have spent some amount of time borking my system with it… repeatedly 😅)

And they have package repositories that are optimized for newer hardware like Zen4/5 and AVX512 instruction sets: https://wiki.cachyos.org/features/optimized_repos/

I’ve been using Cachy for a while now and it’s been great for gaming. I don’t use it for much else tho. As a sysadmin by trade, I do like the support for ZFS on root (which varies between other distros). Although it was a bit tricky to set up, now it’s running smoothly and my snapshots/backups are working great.

I’m not exactly sure, but a few things have worked better out of the box than other distros.

For example, it boots up faster than any of the other “simple” distros I’ve tried in some time. I tend to like lightweight things that seem to install a “bare minimum” to start, and Cachy appears to do that. It was dead simple to install my favorite window manager, even using X11 instead of Xorg.

The equivalent minimal mint installation took considerably longer to boot, using pretty much my same settings.

In practice I've noticed very little difference between cachy & other distros in terms of performance.

I think it's mostly convenience & marketing. I've run most mainstream distros and cachy definitely worked "out of the box" for gaming. I don't think it's worth swapping for if you're already using Linux.

Nothing wrong with cachy, I just don't think there's any special magic I've noticed that sets it apart from arch.