Here is some news that both excited me and gave me pause. In its annual 2025 retrospective, published today, Arch-based CachyOS, widely popular among Linux gamers and heavily focused on performance optimization, reveals plans I did not expect: an expansion into the server space.
“In addition to our ongoing PGO and AutoFDO optimizations, we are developing a specialized ‘Server’ Edition for NAS, workstations, and server environments. We intend to provide a verified image that hosting providers can easily deploy for their customers. This edition will ship with a hardened configuration, pre-tuned settings, and performance-optimized packages for web servers, databases and more!”
I used vanilla arch as a daily driver for about 3 years and I loved it. but started to need a more ephemeral OS and switched to atomic fedora and centos/Alma precisely for the defaults. So i know you asked about cachyOS and I dony have an answer there. So you can skip the rest of this if that is all you wanted. Im not saying RHEL or bust. Each person has their own needs and i highly recommend just going and doing the hard things yourself to learn, but I get it that it isnt possible for everyone.
What defaults? Several. 1st SELinux. 2nd ability to select old kernels on boot. 3. Firewall enabled out of the box.
Sure you can do a lot of additional hardening and nothing is to stop a simple bash script from setting these up on Arch, but I figured I only know a little bit and those have saved my ass multiple times. So there are probably other things the folks in that ecosystem have figured out that I dont know about yet.