Depends. I'd consider myself still a Linux beginner and CachyOS is the perfect fit for me while Bazzite or Mint wasnt.

But i was already pretty geeky when it came to computers. Just not Linux levels of geeky. But i fucked around with Windows quite a bit. pOweRuSer or whatever. Also i'd say i'm capable of reading documentation/wikis. Idk Cachy strikes the perfect balance for me(!). Most stuff was super easy to setup. For other things i had to do a bit of reading in the great cachy/arch wikis. For some of the more niche stuff i want to do on my PC it was even easier than on Bazzite or Ubuntu based distros. There are still some guardrails and if i dont want to fuck around it just keeps working while i just use the computer(so far atleast).

Would i recommend Cachy to everyone? No. But if you are curious and nerdy enough its a damn great starting point IMHO.

That's why you shouldn't drive a 1969 Mustang project car immediately after getting your licence. You figure it out on a 2003 Honda Civic, then move on to bigger things when you have both the basic knowledge and the willingness and ability to advance your knowledge.

You claim that installing with btrfs failed. Did you look into what the error messages meant? You claim to not know what Flatpak is. Did you look it up?

RTFM is not just a thought-terminating cliché used by elitist wankers. It's a philosophy you have to live by if you want to play with powerful toys. Look at manuals, the Arch Wiki, Stackoverflow, or ask a clanker. If that's beyond your abilities at this time, you'll either have to improve yourself, or surrender for the time and try a more beginner-friendly OS.

This thread is quite literally about Bazzite

I just called you a beginner...

Yeah, the Linux community has a lot of 'If I know something that you don't then it is because I am smart and you are dumb; and not because we have different experiences' type people. I'd guess the neurodivergent ratio is a bit higher in general 'round here. It'll eventually be something you just ignore.

It's a meme in the Linux community that no matter what distro you pick there will be some neckbeard in the comments who will tell you how wrong you are for your life choices. (Unless you choose Arch, then you are one of the Chosen Ones, btw).

As to your issues, each of those is solvable individually, but you are correct that it is frustrating to have to deal with them all at once on top of learning a new OS.

BTRFS

btrfs is a bit of an advanced topic, ext4 will serve you perfectly fine until you have enough experience to even care about the features offered by btrfs and it's not like Windows where you're locked into your choices forever, you could spin up a btrfs volume and move your system to it with minor hassle once you're familiar with the tools.

Package Managers/Flatpak

One of the biggest difference between different distros is the package manager. You've been using apt, but on Arch-derivatives you'll use pacman to install from the official repository.

However, you will find that a lot of the software that you want to install won't be on the official repos and so, in Arch, you will need to turn to the AUR (https://aur.archlinux.org/).

So, for example, if you search for orca-slicer (https://aur.archlinux.org/packages?K=orca-slicer), you'll see a bunch of packages. orc-slicer-bin and orca-slicer both have high votes and popularity. In the AUR world, you'll often see package and package-bin. This is basically 'do I want to compile it myself or do I want it pre-compiled', also these two package (maintained by two different people typically) may have slightly different versions depending on how actively they are maintained.

Here, we'll go with orca-slicer-bin. The way you install from the AUR (there's an easy way, but first the 'real' way) is to find a folder where you would like to store these things. I use ~/projects/AUR but the location is just an organization thing, it doesn't affect anything, the package will be installed via pacman like everything else.

Open a terminal, navigate to your directory, (create it if needed) and clone the project (the Git Clone URL at the top of the AUR page)

cd ~
mkdir -p /projects/AUR
cd projects/AUR
git clone https://aur.archlinux.org/orca-slicer-bin.git

Now you have the files locally, so you can navigate into the directory and use makepkg to build and install the package. Since this is a -bin, it won't need to compile.

cd orca-slicer-bin
makepkg -si

makepkg is a script that automates building and installing, -s says 'find and install any dependencies also' and the -i is 'After build (which is done because it is a -bin) also install'.

Then you'll see some lines where the script verifies that the package is built, grabs dependencies, etcetc. If you're prompted you can , usually, just accept the default by just pressing enter (sometimes you'll want to read/modify the PKGBUILD, but generally not).

Eventually you'll see pacman being called and the application will install like normal.

But, that's a pain in the ass, nobody wants to have to open a browser and manually clone repos etc. So most people use an AUR helper so that the interface is essentially like pacman.

So, now do the same process as above to install yay (or yay-bin).

...

Once that is done, now you can use yay just like pacman. For example, searching for orca slicer:

yay -S orca slicer

Or installing orca-slicer-bin:

yay -Ss orca-slicer-bin

You don't need to use sudo, it will prompt you if you need elevation.

Yay will also install from the official repos (you can largely replace your usage of pacman with yay) and if you just run 'yay' with no switches it runs a full system upgrade.

Flatpak

Flatpaks are another way of packaging software. The idea is that it's a pain in the ass to have one piece of software that requires a package being at version 10 and another package that won't work unless you have version 11 installed. With Flatpak, the software comes in a container with all of the dependencies (which can include other flatpak images).

You can think of these containers are little virtual machines that only run one piece of software (they're not full virtual machines, they share the same kernel as your system, but the technical details are an advanced topic).

Much like yay and pacman, you can search install flatpaks with the flatpak command. flatpak --help will give you a list of commands. The wiki ( https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Flatpak ) is much better. For the average user you really only need to search and install. So:

flatpak search slicer
flatpak install PrusaSlicer
##or by Application ID
flatpak install com.prusa3d.PrusaSlicer

Once they're installed you should be able to launch the applications via the usual methods.

The common issues that people will run into is due to flatpak's essentially acting like a virtual machine.

So, to the flatpak /home/ doesn't exist because in its virtual environment you do not have a user directory. So interacting with files on your actual machine, outside of the flatpak, can be annoying in cases. Ideally, the packages will configure themselves to be able to see any relevant directories that they need to see but not always.

The ways to install software on Linux may seem harder than 'download .exe from Internet, run as administrator' but it helps protect you from things like running untrusted executables from the internet as root.

If you have a smartphone you're already with installing from Repos. App stores are just Repos with price tags. Rarely do people go download .apk files and run them on their phones, everyone knows that you use the repos. Smartphones are simply copying Linux's package manager systems, so you're already familiar with this process but know it by another name.

I can't speak to any specific distro (I manually install Arch from the install medium, like the Flying Spaghetti Monster intended) but you're going to run into similar problems everywhere you go.

You can try to fix your problems by distro hopping and that may work in some specific cases. That being said, you will have more success if you plow through the problem and use that problem as an excuse to learn how that part of your system works so that you can fix it. This will almost certainly be faster than completely reinstalling your system as you go forward in your Linux usage.

If you run any problems and need some help just make a post with as much details about the problem as you can. You'll get assholes (see this thread) but there are some knowledgeable people who are happy to help fix things.

Did you try, I don't know, reading more about the options?

Jesus Christ. You are not helpless.