CachyOS is designed to deliver lightning-fast speeds and stability, ensuring a smooth and enjoyable computing experience every time you use it. Whether you’re a seasoned Linux user or just starting out, CachyOS is the ideal choice for those looking for a powerful, customizable and blazingly fast operating system.

The greatest strength of CachyOS is its expanding community. Community members help one another by sharing tips, providing support, and contributing to the project’s success. Your feedback helps us to continuously improve the CachyOS experience. You can join the community on the CachyOS Discord and the CachyOS Forum.

How is CachyOS different from other Linux distros?

CachyOS focuses heavily on performance. It ships with custom-compiled kernels, aggressive compiler optimizations, and tuned system settings aimed at reducing latency and improving responsiveness, especially on modern CPUs. Arch remains minimal and neutral by comparison, leaving most optimization decisions to the user.

Is CachyOS suitable for beginners?

CachyOS is generally better suited for intermediate to advanced Linux users. While it offers a graphical installer and sensible defaults, it is still Arch-based, which means users are expected to be comfortable troubleshooting, reading documentation, and handling occasional manual intervention after updates.

What are CachyOS recommended system requirements?

CachyOS recommends 8GB RAM, 50 GB of storage (SSD/NVMe), x86-64-v3 capable CPU, 50 Mbps or better internet speed and Nvidia GPU (GTX 900 gen or newer), AMD GCN 1.0 (AMD R7 240 or newer) or Intel (HD Graphics or newer, Arc series).

Can I use CachyOS on older or low-end hardware?

CachyOS is optimized primarily for newer CPUs and systems. While it can run on older hardware, some of its benefits may be reduced, and certain optimized binaries may not be ideal for very old processors. Users with legacy systems may find vanilla Arch or lighter distributions more appropriate.

What’s New

Desktop Edition

Empower your computing with a modern, customizable desktop environment – browse the web, stay connected with friends and family, manage files, enjoy multimedia, and work efficiently in a visually stunning interface that adapts to your needs. Benefit from Free and Open Source Software with a focus on security, privacy, and peace of mind.

Handheld Edition

The CachyOS Handheld Edition provides a GameMode-like experience and comes with preinstalled gaming tools. It officially supports the ROG Ally, Steam Deck OLED and LCD, Legion Go, and Lenovo Legion Go S. At the moment, only KDE Plasma is supported.

Features

• ISO/Installer: Added Orca and espeak-ng for better accessibility
• initcpiocfg: Enabled systemd hook on supported configurations
• Netinstall: Hyprland dotfiles have been removed
• pacstrap: Install bcachefs-dkms if bcachefs is selected as the filesystem
• Calamares: Added support for plasma-login-manager and cosmic-greeter
• Cosmic: Switched from SDDM to cosmic-greeter
• Fonts: Improved fonts for Asian users
• chwd:
  • Installs intel-media-sdk and vpl-gpu-rt on supported GPUs
  • Enabled Nouveau NvBoost for Fermi GPUs
  • Dropped support for 390xx legacy NVIDIA driver
  • Added support for Xbox ROG Ally/X
• cachyos-hello:
  • Removed internal package installer; opens CachyOS package installer instead
  • Added CLI interface for the GUI functionality
  • Various ISO version check fixes
  • cachyos-settings: zram-generator: Removed compression for incompressible pages
• Proton-CachyOS:
  • Added dxvk-gplasync as alternative DXVK. This can be enabled via PROTON_DXVK_GPLASYNC=1
  • Added DISABLE_LAYER_MESA_ANTI_LAG when using PROTON_FSR4_UPGRADE
  • Brought in multiple Wayland fixes (fullscreen offset, dead keys, DPI behavior, video output tweaks) and winewayland.drv improvements
  • Introduced and tuned per-game shader cache behavior and larger shader caches (especially for NVIDIA)
  • Added FSR3 and XeSS upscaler upgrades

Fixes

• Limine: Fixed installation of Limine without entry registering on broken UEFI
• Uses systemd variant of btrfs-overlayfs hook
• Calamares: Removed attr2 as an option on XFS mount settings
• chwd: Disabled T2 chip’s USB Ethernet interface