Framework Sponsors CachyOS | Hacker News Reader

Framework Sponsors CachyOS

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177 pointsd3Xt3r193 comments

Very interesting that Valve and Framework seem to be throwing their eggs in the Arch basket over Debian/Ubuntu. When I got my first computer, I installed Ubuntu because it was dominant. Maybe it still is for the average Linux downloader, but why are the Hardware companies more into Arch?

I'd think it's because they're introducing updates to address issues w/ the hardware quickly and want a rolling-release distro so users can get the updates faster.

Debian testing is about as stable as it gets while also being a rolling distribution. The promotion of package updates from unstable to testing does not take that long either depending on the severity. I would venture a guess that there is more to it.

Testing doesn't get timely security updates. Arch is more like Sid anyway.

Community also likely plays a role. Arch users are typically more proactive at fixing things themselves and contributing.

> over Debian/Ubuntu

And over Fedora/RHEL. If I had to guess, it could be that new entrants find it easier to submit changes to Arch Linux packages [1]. ChromeOS also steered away from Debian-based distributions, choosing a Gentoo base.

[1] https://gitlab.archlinux.org/archlinux/packaging/packages

They're not though. They're supporting debian and bazzite which is fedora based and have worked with fedora extensively. See https://frame.work/de/en/blog/framework-sponsorships

Personally I'd also think it would be a better engineering choice for Valve to base SteamOS on Fedora Atomic, as it supports the immutable OS paradigm a lot better imo. Especially now with progress in bootc/oci/ostree.

If only Arch supported Arm.

I run Arch Linux on my M1, is that not arm?

Core arch linux doesn't support it, it's an offshoot.

No, you run an Arch derivative.

> Arch Linux is an independently developed, x86-64 general-purpose GNU/Linux distribution that strives to provide the latest stable versions of most software by following a rolling release model.

- https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Arch_Linux

> This page complements the Installation guide with instructions specific to Apple Macs. The Arch installation image supports Apple Macs with Intel processors, but neither PowerPC nor Apple Silicon processors.

(emphasis mine)

- https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Mac

(FWIW, I understand that there is benefit to good coverage of a narrower scope, but I do wish Arch would fold https://archlinuxarm.org/ into the main project and be officially multi-arch, but that is not the world we live in.)

Arch package manager here, there is ongoing work behind the scenes to support multiple architectures (aarch64, riscv, etc), but as our volunteers (myself included) are doing this in our free time, progress is up in the air.

That's great to hear:) Given the long-term existence of eg. https://archlinux32.org/ and https://archlinuxarm.org/ I had always assumed that this was purely a question of policy and that Arch had no interest in supporting anything else. I found https://rfc.archlinux.page/0032-arch-linux-ports/ ; is there anything else I could read to catch up on the state of things?

Debian (or Ubuntu) is a great base if you want to run one program on top of it.

Arch (or even Gentoo) is great if you want to do more detailed customizations of various things.

We also sponsor Debian. We are distro-agnostic and pick our sponsorships largely based on what we see Framework Laptop owners using in our post-purchase surveys and community polls.

That's awesome

This is the way

Great to see this! I have two Framework Desktops running with CachyOS, for AI workloads, software development and light gaming. Great machines! I wish the header for the power button and LEDs was rotated 180 degrees so the NanoKVM doesn’t need extra cable adapters.

Ive bought 5 of your laptops and have used cachyos on all of them so i hope i skewed your results lol

Thanks for the clarification. Glad to see your support for the open source community.

You need a minimal base OS to have the flexibility to build your own stuff on top of it, and you don't want to be at the behest of another corporation. That rules out Fedora, Suse, and Ubuntu. You also need it to be popular and have good hardware support. So the only two realistic options are Arch and Debian.

My guess is that Arch is easier to build on top of because they have a stronger culture of leaving packages as unmodified as possible relative to their upstream sources, whereas Debian maintainers seem to have the opposite culture. A Debian system has a lot of Debian-isms in it overall, whereas the Arch-isms tend to be more like generic sensible defaults rather than OS idosyncrasies.

NixOS would also be a contender, and would have the advantage of being reproducible. It may be surprising but Nixpkgs has a lot of packages

I use Linux for 20 years and I study programming for 10 years, bought 100 programming books, so a linux distribution is basically a programming language container. Slackware was for lisp. Now instead of kiss its simple ain’t easy with clojure. Debian is very tightly tied to perl with both communities bent on reproducibility. (Tho rust is replacing perl). Red hat and ibm is a Java shop. Centos is a scala platform at cern. Ubuntu and Python is a data science platform. Sure is a better Debian like ruby is a better Perl. And here we come to arch, when 10 years ago after a brief stunt with Perl basics I started learning c# the first thing I did is try to run the excercises on the raspberry pi. But because of some hard float soft float something they didn’t work. So I had to jailbreak the raspberry pi and run this new distro on it, the arch Linux. Where it just worked. You see ethics of ai and maybe like data science require the system to be fsf endorsed free system that’s what Debian gnu linux reason detre is. And Debian as Steve Jobs with Java were like against mono, you shall not pass. But for a gaming platform that’s a little bit different. Ex red had ceo now works at unity this mono fork. Ms bought blizzard, they want into this gaming thing badly. So that’s why steam os is arch now, less strict than Debian on the Libre side of things. The rest is history. :D

How is project like Framework Laptop able to sponsor anyone? Are they profitable? Had an impression they're more of a startup stage project far from profitability.

They've raised about $45M in venture capital to date. I don't think they are profitable yet, but they at least have other people's money to throw around for now.

> They raised about $45M in venture capital

Impressive for a hardware upstart (which are usually relatively capital intensive), no?

> at least have other people's money to throw around for now.

Speaking of other people's money... Framework's been sponsoring many a project, some of which are controversial on their forums: https://community.frame.work/t/framework-supporting-far-righ...

It looks a little bit like a tempest in a teapot to me, but I'm impressed with their community guidelines. That thread got an exception to allow for more discussion, and it even permits "Critiques of Framework as a company" and "Calls for boycotts or product criticism".

https://community.frame.work/t/framework-supporting-far-righ...

I can see why they would do this. There's a vocal minority of completely unhinged Linux people. I've been running different Linux distros since 2002 and it has irritated me since then.

Nice, they will probably be able to buy like 128GB of ram in 2026.

I think drumming up interest in getting users to run Linux on frameworks is a way for them to go back to vendors and try to get them to fix issues like power consumption that bugs the hell out of users (looking at you AMD)

Framework is a not a huge organisation. This sponsorship consists of a few laptops and committing to a $250 monthly donation. There’s no contradiction here. CachyOS is also not a huge project.

Thanks, it makes at least some sense then. I'd expect them to sponsor Omarchy similarly then, in my twittersphere that made way more noise lately

Even if Framework were to dismiss or overlook the controversy surrounding Omarchys creator, which is ultimately their call, surely there are better ways to allocate OSS funding than sponsoring a multi-millionaire executives pet project. He can afford to bankroll it himself.

What is the controversy around dhh? That he's conservative leaning?

dhh always been "controversial", initially it was mostly about strongly held opinions about software, engineering and such, presented in a very vocal way that got a lot of attention at the time. Then at one point Basecamp had some drama about employees calling customers names, which spiraled into a debate about racism and company culture, and ultimately leading to Basecamp banning "discussions about society and politics" or similar. More recently he started sharing opinions about London having too many foreigners, immigrant communities having gangs of groomers or something, and a bunch of Ruby community members have written publicly about what they think about him.

The air around dhh always been dramatic for various reasons, not sure that particular theme is new. But I think is new is that currently people are re-evaluating if they want a prominent community leader to have views that could be seen as "against" members of the community they're supposedly leaders over.

Here's a good summary of some recent stuff: https://tekin.co.uk/2025/09/the-ruby-community-has-a-dhh-pro...

He's conservative in a European ethnonationalist way which is very common in Denmark (seemingly a majority position.) - https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c1mgkd93r4yo

But it's anathema to the cosmopolitan multiculturalism we practice and appreciate in most of the anglosphere and parts of western Europe. Of which much of the tech world / HN posters are part of.

Nothing quite like being a minority in your own country and it's history in the next 25 years.

I'm in no place to pass judgement there.

I'm a European immigrant to Canada, in a suburb of Vancouver which is plurality Chinese with Europeans at about 30% and its totally cool and normal.

But I'm also typing this from vacation in Japan where they famously don't welcome immigration much. But people don't seem as upset by Asian nativism compared to European. And I don't have a diplomatic way of explaining the difference - it's the "bigotry of low expectations."

> in my twittersphere that made way more noise

I don't think that carries the weight it used to carry, if it even used to carry any weight. Measuring things by popularity tends to give poor results anyways, you want to sponsor and contribute to good things, regardless of their popularity.

Haha, Omarchy doesn't need sponsoring. To quote its creator, dhh[0], in response to the question "how do you plan on building revenue with your OS?":

I don't need revenue. I'm already rich.

0: https://x.com/dhh/status/1964773032339366006

They're not sponsoring Omarchy with a regular donation. They posted about it on Twitter and gave DHH a free Framework for testing

Astroturfed dotfiles share very little in common with actual distribution.

https://frame.work/hu/en/blog/framework-sponsorships

I think they are doing quite well, the CEO mentioned in a town hall video somewhere that they have strongest growth in the business segment where there are a lot of buyers who like the idea of a computer that their IT department can repair.

I also don't think these project sponsorships cost a whole lot in the grand scheme of things. I imagine they are basically part of the marketing budget.

When one of your main customer targets is Linux users, spending 5 figures on sponsoring a Linux project might be more effective than spending 5 figures on ad impressions.

Yeah, I recommended we buy Framework Laptops for the Linux users in my company and we are quite happy with it.

I imagine I'm not the only one doing that.

Me and a buddy have bought 3 Framework Desktops between us, they are just otherworldly awesome machines, and a good bit more expensive than the other Strix Halo models. I haven't been this excited about a computer since my i7 920 (Nehalem) in 2008, it's absolute alien technology.

I've also finally made the switch from a lifetime of Windows to Linux, and it just so happened to be CachyOS. The snappiness is just infinitely refreshing, to say nothing of not constantly submitting to Microsoft's dark patterns, so I'm super happy to see this news <3 Go Framework and AMD, go CachyOS and Linux!

Poll: Can Microsoft gargle my whole balls?

[A] Yes.

[B] Maybe later.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I have the rest of the month to spend on vacation in my pyjamas coding ultra high precision N-body simulations and rendering them in 8K 60Hz entirely on CPU (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wz1Od_jkkFg) using my amazing new computer.

Obligatory question, how is the battery life, the sleep settings etc ?

It's a desktop mini PC, there's no battery. There are laptops with the same Ryzen AI 395+ CPU+RAM, but I'm doing heavy rendering / computing (actually I got it for rendering work, not AI stuff) and laptops are a bad form factor for that.

Sleep mode... works? I actually turned it off because I have long-running processes and it only uses 4W at idle with the screens off. It's 8W at idle with a 4K 160Hz monitor and a 1440p 144Hz monitor, which IMO is Alien Fucking Technology, considering there's a > 5GHz 16 core CPU with 128GB RAM (4 channels like Threadrippers, vs 2 for normal desktop CPUs) in there.

I'm pretty sure the Framework Desktop has zero minutes of battery life.

Obviously it has no battery, being a desktop. Regarding sleep, under Debian 13 it supports S0 (s2idle) only, which works without issue.

    $ cat /sys/power/state
    freeze mem

I just got the 128 GB model. It is very fast, and sips energy. Such a wonderful machine and naturally CachyOS works like a charm with it.

> Framework has not only provided us with a Framework Laptop 16 to help us optimize our kernel and packages on modern hardware, but they have also committed to a $250 monthly donation.

I'm gonna guess a laptop and a few thousand dollars (over years) isn't exactly breaking the bank.

Who cares if they're profitable? They want to push a right-wing agenda and no amount of silly things such as 'financial sense' will stop them.

When you have a techbro Vivek Ramaswamy as your head whose greatest desire is to be recognized as a honorary white by other techbros, nothing can ever stand in your way.

Our total set of 2025 sponsorships and donations is around $225k, which is a fraction of a percent of our 2025 revenue. We would like to and plan to increase the funding we allocate to open source projects that our products and customers depend on in 2026. Our financials are healthy, and we see this as a good investment.

Funny thing, taking into account the state of affairs in the country: CachyOS mirror for Russia is https://archlinux.gay

(I am Russian; left the country in 2022)

I am very happy to see it on HN today as I procrastinated half of my day reading about CachyOS, filesystems and then looking at Linux laptops including Framework. A laptop that's tested/shipped with CachyOS would be great. If only I could get a trackpoint/no touchpad version one day :)

They did look into putting a trackpoint in there, but there wasn't enough depth in the keyboard cover to support it. Making it work would take re-doing the whole bottom shell (apparently).

I'm tempted to make a thicker bezel so the screen won't close all the way anymore. Pick up the room for a trackpoint by going wedge shaped! (edit, obvious downside: the screen would be a lot weaker when closed)

Yeah, probably not worth it for them although their design gives me hope that at some point there will be an alternative keyboard to choose from. On my keyboard (Thinkpad T14) trackpoint seats flush or even slightly below the keys but that keyboard has quite a bit of travel and it does touch the screen on regular basis when closed.

This is great news, I migrated from vanilla Arch to CachyOS on my Framework 13 AMD a few months back since I primarily use it for Steam gaming, and it's worked great and netted me around 3fps on average across the games I play. I'm glad to see Framework supporting them directly.

I recommend installing proton-catchyos for faster shader compilation as well, but you might run into stability issues if you are on an unstable overclock due to how hard it is able to push the cpu with intrinsics.

Normal stress-ng I barely see 85 degrees while I saw shader compilation clock in 105c.

I thought that got installed by default anyway

me too, until I realized it was a completely independent thing that you can install on any distro

I am pretty sure this already got installed, but I will double-check. I got a nice speedup for shader compilation afterwards. I am not overclocking my Framework 13.

it does not come pre-installed and you have to select it.

what changes did they make to make the shader compilation faster?

it's compiled with similar optimizations as the kernel and has access to fast instrinsics (sse, avx)

How does it do with scaling? That's been one of my main pain points with different Linux distros on my Framework (well, that, the trackpad scroll speed, and battery life/suspension)

Dabbled in CachyOS as a replacement fo my main OS recently it worked well, was trying to do the omarchy on cachy for the kernel improvements but ended up bricking things when trying to update so ended up swapping to omarchy mainline. I am seriously considering swapping back over to cachyos though, seems like it's going in the right direction.

Was also looking to see if that was possible recently. Wonder if either party would consider supporting that officially?

Someone posted a script for installing omarchy on cachy, but it didn't look like it had received updates recently and I reported an issue. Not sure it's being maintained at all unfortunately

I'm enjoying CachyOS so far. I've been running it for a while without issue.

It completely blew up for me as well (unbootable) during an update that included the linux-firmware package split from earlier this year. Fortunately this occurred during a testing period in a VM.

It was an Arch-wide thing, there was an announcement on their site about it.

I was dumb and rebooted without redoing the kernel install, otherwise I probably could have just rolled back and reran mkinit to get fixed but the bootloader entry had already been removed for the old kernel as I think I was also running some cleanup commands, and when I booted to reduced mode I had no network to try and recover so I just decided to reinstall. Helps having a separate drive for files. Didn't have to worry about a backup or anything so it went smooth

Wait, I swore Framework was on the sponsor list to begin with when I learned about CachyOS a couple days ago from HN

If it was just a few days ago, maybe they had already added the logo but hadn't posted the announcement yet?

Sounds plausible - looks like it wasn't there in October, but was there yesterday: https://web.archive.org/web/20250000000000*/https://cachyos....

I just wiped my gaming rig (win11, 12700k, 7900xtx) and installed CachyOS a few days ago. KDE Plasma doesn't work, but Hyprland and Gnome do. I was playing Arc Raiders with a friend within an hour of starting the install. So far everything works, and it even sleeps and wakes without issue.

I did _exactly_ this 3 days ago after I hit a random keyboard chord on accident and brought up CoPilot (which I don't recall installing). I had held on to Windows for gaming just because I didn't want to fuss with Linux, but it was the straw that broke the camel's back. Instantly installed CachyOS onto a USB stick and formatted my entire drive.

I use KDE Plasma and it worked just fine. In fact all of my games (including Arc Raiders) are working just fine on Proton 10, maybe running slightly worse. The only issue I've run into is getting battle.net working through Lutris; I ended up manually installing it through Proton 10 on Steam and it worked just fine. Wish I made the switch earlier.

I got Battle.net working through Steam. The way I have it is I add the battle.net installer into steam, add proton compatibility, once you run it it installs, but next time you run it, it just opens the launcher unless it needs an update. Then you can install World of Warcraft and other games there and run.

So far so good running CachyOS and KDE Plasma.

Lutris by default will use an older WINE version (something based on WINE8 IIRC) by default for reasons I don't quite understand. You can, however, configure Lutris to use proton-cachyos by default, to which I was able to get Battle.net to install and work correctly without issues. Not sure what feature was implemented in later WINE to make that work better, but it works.

I love KDE, but it's too buggy for me. About once a day the bottom dock would just disappear. I really wish they'd focus a little more on stability.

I use Sway on CachyOS, and to me it's the perfect DE. Being able to switch between windows in under a quarter of a second indispensable once you've experienced it.

> switch between windows in under a quarter of a second

I would hope so! 250ms is an extremely long time to switch windows.

I've been using CachyOS with Plasma desktop for a long time now. Including my gaming PC. Zero problems. But I don't play any online games.

You'd probably want to use an X11-based DE like Cinnamon instead, many games still don't play well with wayland.

This has not been my experience. I've an Nvidia desktop and AMD HTPC, both running Wayland and a wide variety of games. What's more, they both do variable sync and HDR.

I haven't used X since 2022. Wayland has been pretty solid for me - although the fractional scaling issue is going to plague us well into 2030 at this rate.

I'll give it a spin though, worth a shot.

Don't Steam Deck games run on Wayland?

AFAIK, Steam Deck runs a Wayland compositor, then runs most (or all?) games via XWayland, to the point that gamescope doesn't even expose Wayland to clients by default. How to count this is left as an exercise to the reader.

Is CachyOS going to be to Framework as Pop!_OS is to system76?

I don’t think so. Framework sponsors many more projects like Arch itself, Bazzite, Debian, FreeBSD…

https://frame.work/de/en/blog/framework-sponsorships

Everything is "blazingly fast" now. What does it even mean.

Start menu loads in under 250ms seconds

Phoronix found CachyOS to actually be meaningfully faster than Ubuntu or Fedora on a Framework Desktop: https://www.phoronix.com/review/cachyos-ubuntu-2510-f43/6

Oh man, now another distro will be labeled nazi... just not that, oh no :) haha!

I love Omarchy, I am sure Cachy is great, just don't feel the need to change much of anything.

Hope this doesn't end up political... Last time the entire Framework Discord's mod team went on strike because of a controversial sponsorship, and ended with the closure of the discord.

>ended with the closure of the discord

oh no anyways. Discord user and there mods are probably the last people anybody in the FOSS or real world should care about or associate with.

Sometimes Discord is still pretty helpful with real-time support. It indeed has its flaws, but some of the best real time help is still given there. I love the C++ discord, it's just filled with gems.

>it's just filled with gems

gems not sorted or indexed at all gated behind a account requiring personal information to just view them.

Luckily that’s a solved, or trivially-solved problem now.

how?

Select All -> Paste into local or cloud LLM -> Ask question

even if the LLM was directly trained on discord it still would not be the same and never will

The same as what?

A permalink is a permalink, whether I found it in 5 minutes to an hour,

or the robot found it in 5 seconds.

Discord is handy for real-time support as a user, but because those support questions don't become a body of searchable public knowledge over time, they are all doomed. The maintainers will burn out from the endless basic questions.

I hadn't heard about this before, so in case anyone else is also curious and wants to save some googling, it sounds like was a few months ago when they sponsored Hyprland[1]. I hadn't heard about controversy with Hyprland before, only being vaguely aware of it, but the forum thread I linked to further links to this blog post[2] with more details.

[1]: https://community.frame.work/t/framework-supporting-far-righ... [2]: https://drewdevault.com/2023/09/17/Hyprland-toxicity.html

I have more of an Issue with the Omarchy sponsorship. While i disagree with Hyprland's maintainer at least Hyprland is actually engineering something great and making it free software. Omarchy is basically just a script.

Not a fan of either but I feel obligated to point out they don't appear to be sponsoring Omarchy, they just posted about it on their social media account(s). Hyprland they actually did do a small sponsorship for.

Yeah I think there might be a mixup with Cloudflare, who are sponsoring Omarchy.

Omarchy is the passion project of a really wealthy person and is backed by his profitable business. What does ‘sponsoring Omarchy’ mean? Like.. where does that money go?

https://blog.cloudflare.com/supporting-the-future-of-the-ope...

I think it amounts to providing free premium CDN service, the stuff you'd usually have to pay for. They didn't say anything about cash money changing hands.

That’s really reasonable then (I guess apart from any disagreements with the authors views). Omarchy isn’t just a post installation script, they have the entire thing bundled as an ISO. So I can see why an in-kind sponsorship of a CDN makes sense. Although it’s still unclear to me how Omarchy specifically fits into ‘the future of the open web’ vs Ladybird

> it's just a script. ... That has brought in thousands of new users to Linux in the past couple of months.

How have your scripts done in comparison?

hopefully those people already left last time

Nothing of value was lost. Discord is the worst way to engage with any kind of serious community. It's a firehose of prematurely fired off messages, badges, emojis, banners, nitro upgrades, flags. Threading sucks. Ten conversations are usually happening at once. It's like if you had a 100gig connection to the WAL of 4chan plugged directly into your brain. It's no wonder kids these days are all autistic or ADHD.

While I agree with some of the things said, the last sentence where you started to imply that neurodivergence can be caused by external factors is completely false. These are physical differences in brain's wiring.

> These are physical differences in brain's wiring.

Physical differences that no test can detect?

Not sure about autism, but ADHD is one of the most studied disorders and you can pick it up with a brain scan, like MRI and other methods (currently imaging methods aren't typically used for diagnosis but it's plausible that some day it will be)

I totally see why Framework doesn't want this toxicity and flamewars.

No Omartchy?

That bloatware went out of fashion.

What exactly does sponsoring CachyOS mean? Bandwidth and hosting? Money going upstream to the actual developers who make the packages?

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