I was on arch, had a hardware failure, reinstalled my OS as troubleshoot, but went with Cachy. I use it exactly like Arch, except for the updater which is a pacman + flatpak manager (it just runs the CLI commands sequentially)

Honestly it feels more like an arch with tweaks than a full on independent distro. It still uses pacman & arch repos, has the AUR available etc; they have additional repos & custom packages (like the kernel), but for the end user it’s about the same.

If someone didn’t know anything about Linux but wanted to switch over to it, I’d recommend Cachy just because it’s easy to install & properly sets up the OS for high performance without needing to fiddle with it. Also it has GUI update tools (I just use their CLI version instead) which may look more inviting to people scared of the terminal