Recently I had some difficulty in finding FOSS for my Fedora Sway installation. CachyOS Is On the Rise — Here's Why It Deserves the Buzz - #36 by shybry747. I lamented on the fact that Debian was the king of software and Arch had the AUR.
Therefore I ventured to installing, first Cachy OS with Sway, and then Regolith Desktop on a spare computer to test what I can do with it. I am sorry I do not have any screen shots.
First I tried Cachy OS since it is Arch based, and I am familiar with Arch. They use the Calamares installer which guided you through quite a bit of options. One thing I was impressed by, was the ability to try different boot managers. I decided to stick with grub since I also had a windows installation on that machine that I needed access to. Installation was smooth and soon the system rebooted. The grub window looked lovely, I smiled. Then I got a tty login, 
. Okay, so I logged in, and then I received the wonderful terminal prompt. To start sway, I had to enter the command, sway and then it popped up, with very little.
In honesty, I was expecting it, because I had watched a few youtube videos with the install, but I had to see it for myself. Here is one https://youtu.be/tehOckrxCEQ?si=StA5B0nlYTkynIuk. I had done a vanilla install of Sway with Arch before, and I was not in the mood to configure everything from scratch again. Therefore the shutdown command was issued and it was on to Regolith Desktop.
For Regolith Desktop, I wanted the cleanest install I could do, so no other DEs. You see Regolith 3.0 plus does not have an ISO for install. The instructions tell you to install Debian or Ubuntu then link to the appropriate packages for installation. Install – Regolith Desktop.
To get Regolith on a minimal install, I choose an Ubuntu Server and followed these instructions. Minimal Ubuntu Install – Regolith Desktop. In playing devil’s advocate, I installed the latest Ubuntu 25.10 server, and then followed the install instructions for 25.04. Installation was a pain, since I basically typed out the instructions to execute. (I should really learn about github.) But it didn’t take 10 minutes, I rebooted, and up came a login screen. Nice. Better. I logged in to be greeted by GNOME. I started the menu, saw a Regolith entry, and executed that. Regolith popped up as an app, with the ability to tile and do other functions within the app. 
Again I was in no mood to troubleshoot.
When I installed Fedora Sway spin last year, a login screen was presented. After login, I was presented with a waybar, a rofi menu, and a background screen. It was ready to go. Of course I tweaked after that, but the task did not feel as daunting, as starting from scratch. The fact that it gave me a default browser, file manager and utilities pre-configured is a huge plus. Look here to see what else it has. Fedora Sway Spin | The Fedora Project.
So in summary, I will stick with Fedora Sway, because of that reason. I recently read an article in my google news, and this AI Overview from a search sums it up nicely.
As of February 2026, a “Linux first install” (a user’s initial, often hesitant, transition from Windows or macOS) has to impress immediately to overcome the convenience of established habits and the ease of staying with proprietary systems
With Windows 10 reaching end-of-life and Microsoft pushing restrictive hardware requirements for Windows 11, Linux is seen as a viable, free alternative, but it must deliver a smooth, functional, and modern user experience right out of the box to prevent users from reverting to the “dark side” of familiar, albeit restrictive, OS platforms.
So yes, as highlighted by myself in bold, that was the statement I agreed with in my case. A Sway version that delivered right out of the box, was one that I would stick with.