Yay, we're friends now!! ... lend me 10 euros? :)

ps ... sent a friend request ... I have a troll hammer and can cook friarielli

Another speed advantage CachyOS may have is there use of btrfs compression (ZSTD compression level 3 by default). You probably went with ext4 and got trolled again by the handbook :)

You should consider what you have underneath steam, as an example, I have Chimera Linux (Musl libc, dinit, BSD userland) and CachyOS on two identical chromebooks, Chimera seems to me faster (subjective) and uses 40% less RAM (objective). These are both running Niri (WM) and have practically the same packages (post install) but CachyOS doesn't seem to be as fast as Chimera Linux, though I'm not gaming on either. I've thought of doing a gentoo musl install with the package overlay for steam-launcher, and building everything with lto, but haven't got around to it. Anyhow, you might think about what else is in the stack, and build a gentoo install that strips out any cruft.

So, re the performance issue you're having with Gentoo. I'd suggest gabbing 'checkra1n' and running it on Gentoo & the OSes you're comparing. Mitigations come with a performance hit and gentoo-kernel will have them all enabled. If your machine is strictly a gaming machine (not general purpose) you could disable them via the 'mitigations=off'' kernel param, at least for tests, or whenever you feel safe to do so (ie, actual gaming ... though perhaps not multiplayer).

CachyOS builds packages with 'lto thin', and gentoo doesn't (by default) see the wiki page for LTO ... it's somewhat old now, so I'm not sure what the risks are currently but you might want to try setting it (probably using LLVM is the better option ... that is what CachyOS uses).

here defore million subs on youtube)

hi the friend invite is from me just wanted to quick chat about steam download speed and read/write speeds of ssd´s. i wanted you to give me advice on how i could improve my terrible dl speed since i dont have a clue and you seem to have it. if you do not have the time or interest i want to thank you anyways because your 2 year old post already helped!