The expedition has five layers
Think of Signal Garden as a small illuminated installation: stems are geometry, colors are data, and later a compute pass moves the seeds. Before drawing anything, find out which machine will perform the work. Your C++ program calls a Vulkan loader; the loader discovers implementations such as Mesa RADV. An instance connects your application to instance-level services. A physical device describes a particular implementation and GPU. A logical device requests an explicit set of features and queues from that physical device.
These names are ownership and capability boundaries. An instance must outlive its physical-device queries and the devices created through it. A queue belongs to its logical device. Neither a powerful GPU name nor a new header version establishes that a feature is available. Start on CachyOS with the supplied capability probe and the distribution-provided Vulkan tooling. Record the loader version, each reported device, driver information from vulkaninfo, and queue families. Do not guess which adapter your G14 selected.
Your first finished artifact is a plain-text passport, not a window. It lists observed facts, the date, and questions still unanswered. The supplied probe deliberately creates no surface or logical device, so it cannot prove presentation support or claim to have enabled features. This separation makes a failed setup actionable: missing loader, missing driver, and unsupported device are different diagnoses.
Run the native capability probe on CachyOS. Circle every statement that is observed and cross out any inferred GPU specification.