CachyOS June 2026 Release
cachyos.org
cachyos.org
The goal is after installing the official ISO, you can get a developer focused desktop environment up and running in ~10 minutes with 1 command. It's quite configurable so you can change around anything you want ahead of time or after you install it. I use it with vanilla Arch but I know of quite a few people using it successfully with CachyOS.
For CachyOS, the only manual adjustment you have to make before running the repo's install script is uninstalling `jack` since it conflicts with `pipewire-jack`. I could easily roll this into the script but so far no one has complained loud enough to automate this. I also wonder if CachyOS will eventually drop that AUR dependency in its official ISO.
If it matters to you, 99.9% of the code is hand coded. The only time I use AI is when I'm 100% stone walled on something and it's a last resort move. Even then it's copy / pasting small snippets into web based AIs where I fully review and refactor its output so you could say the 0.1% is still human vetted.
Moving away from Windows last year was so worth it. I've been wanting to switch since 2017 but always ran into hardware issues. The same hardware I had back then works beautifully with Arch today.
On my Lenovo laptop, fixes that would take over a day to enable and patch on most distros:
- Wake from sleep
- Nvidia GSP firmware workarounds and correct version OOTB (proprietary)
- Mouse lag/jitter
- External display hotplug
- DDC/CI over type-c
- Embedded controller power profiles from taskbar with correct TDP limits for CPU/GPU
- Battery charge limiter support right from KDE settings
- Working `switcherooctl` in hybrid graphics mode on AMD
- Firefox with video decode acceleration (YouTube) on almost all GPU models
Currently using BPFland which makes multitasking as responsive as idle while compiling Yocto/Chromium in the background.
Windows, Mac (mini M1), and kernel built-in scheduler Linux jank and become almost unusable (Ryzen 5800H).
I’ve tried like 5 other distros and usually when it goes into sleep/hibernate the monitor never wakes up so I have to force shutdown using the power button.
I’m going to install this on an older machine and see how it goes. So far it’s been great!
From what I read Cachy comes with a lot of proprietary repos and gaming stuff already installed along with a custom kernel tuned for gaming performance which makes it more bloated and less stable than vanilla Arch distros like Endeavour which just ships with the bare minimum quality of life tweaks over installing arch from scratch.
What's your experience and what would you recommend for someone switching their laptop from Windows mostly for dev work but who doesn't play too many games. I see arch is the most popular community favorite now, but I was thinking maybe a Fedora based distro would be a better fire-and-forget daily driver after the Arch AUR malware attack conundrum, as I don't have the time to deal with stuff like that on a daily basis.
It just feels a lot faster (anecdotally) than Arch. I don't tend to play a lot of games either, but for tasks like web browsing and watching YouTube, it feels smoother. I don't think I'd go back to Arch unless Cachy did something really stupid to mess up which I hope they won't. No point in leaving free performance on the table with little downside.
Also you should never need the AUR. I've never needed it for anything in years, so the malware attack wasn't a concern at all. Yes, absolutely do switch away from Windows.
Gaming stuff is NOT installed by default, but there is a button in the Hello app new users can click that installs 2 meta packages that install almost everything one might want for gaming. Take a look at it in a VM and see for yourself.
The performance increases from their kernel + optimized packages are small but noticeable to me. Give their wiki a read-through: https://wiki.cachyos.org/
If we limit the conversation to gaming specifically, one area where I don't see Linux taking over any time soon is competitive/esports oriented titles and their invasive ~rootkits~ anti-cheats. Another place I kind of have to live with Windows is simulation (in my case Elite: Dangerous and iRacing/Le Mans Ultimate) - the overlays and other third-party utilities either don't exist on Linux, or I couldn't get them to work and kind of abandoned the idea.
Audio production is also kind of a no-go. The DAWs and hardware support are absolutely getting there - Bitwig studio is apparently very good for something Ableton-like, and my DAW of choice, Reaper, has native Linux support. But the plugins and virtual instruments for the most part just don't exist. Some work through a Wine bridge, if you're lucky.
However, if you're not too deep in a niche with very specific pieces of software, or don't care about esports offerings, there isn't much tying one to Windows nowadays.
- Bitwig 5.x (haven't tried the latest 6.x) is working really nicely for me now across several NixOS machines (I'm using BitwigBox so that yabridge smoothes out VST integration). - Le Mans Ultimate is working for me now. It would hang on loading a track until a month or two ago (GE Proton recommended).
I always see this as a yes and no. Yes if you didn't start giving up on mainstream DRM encumbered audio production 10-15 years ago you aren't going to be ready to switch. Those people have sunk too much into their work flows and collections of licensed plugins.
No if like me you gave up on those tools and found new ones, because I didn't like the direction things were going with usb license keys, always online drm, and offline license management installs that feel almost as rootkit/malware coded as modern anticheat systems.
It helps that I gave up on ableton back in 2008 and swapped to Reason & Logic, before ultimately giving up on those as well. Now I just use Renoise & VCV Rack while trying to work up the will to dabble with Puredata and Supercollider.
Bitwig sounds nice but its too expensive and locks me back into the same cycles of update purchases Ableton & Reason once did.
Do I miss my Korg VSTs & Reason Racks? Yeah, I just can't be bothered enough to go back.
In the end for me its just a hobby so I've been willing to throw away my setup and workflow entirely more than once since starting with digital music in 2004.
What games are available? Do you use emulators or stuff like Wine?
This has made many old and modern games playable without issues. On Steam or Heroic Launcher, running a game has mostly become as simple clicking install and later play.
That being said, it's not all peachy. There's not really been much progress on native Linux gaming outside of Flatpak/Steam Linux runtime. Many native games run worse or with issues.
And Proton/Wine isn't perfect. Many games need tweaks or may not work without glitches. And games with anticheat don't work more often than they do, on purpose.
Still, depending on what games you play and hardware you own it has become entirely possible to ditch Windows and not suffer for it.
as mentioned above if you play any competitive games that come with anti-cheat features, then you won't be able to join in the fun. So if you don't care about those games, you'll be fine.
I'd say it's a majority of games that won't work if they require anti-cheat, but some will.
But I fully switched to Fedora a while ago because every game I played was either just as performant or ran better on Linux. It’s plug and play, too. I just downloaded Steam and that was it.
I know there are other commenters saying the same thing, but I’m just super excited because of what this means for Linux market share on consumer machines
Steam/Valve has built Proton, which I believe is a fork of Wine, and put significant resources into it. Steam distributes it on its own but CachyOS distributes even more patched/optimized versions of it in their repositories.
The games I know do NOT work on Linux are usually online multiplayer competitive games which have kernel-level anti-cheat. Notable for me is Fortnite - though I hear that now, there are even options for enabling strong anti-cheat in Linux but Epic chooses not to support it.
I'm not informed on other niche game types like simulators or games requiring special equipment, but chances are if it's not competitive, or it's single player, you can get it running with good performance on Linux with modern hardware.
I think the closest to a AAA game was Anno 1800 and Mount&Blade Bannerlord, both worked fine. All the current popular city builders work fine (eg. Timberborn, Foundation, Manor Lords). A lot of the games I play are early access too, or the pre-release stream.
The one game that didn't work was Bongo Cat, which is free anyway. The devs are working on an X11 version though, and it's practically a whimsical keylogger, so it might not appeal to fans of Linux anyway!
If "works most of the time" is acceptable for you, it's good enough.
If you actually want to be able to play whatever you want to play - instead of what runs - you have to either stay on Windows, or have it as second system.
Here are some games that have worked pretty well out of the box:
- Factorio
- Arc: Raiders
- Overwatch
- Age of Empires 2 DE
- Abiotic Factor
- Subnautica 2
- Windblown
- Dune Awakening
- Cybperpunk 2077
- Star Citizen (with the community installer to help set it up)
See here for a database: https://www.protondb.com/
The main asterisk is that if you use newer GPUs, you’ll need to use a newer kernel / drivers to get solid support (which is why Arch (& CachyOS) is a popular gaming distro). And certain technologies may not be supported for a while, or take some time to set up (ray tracing, DLSS, frame gen type stuff etc.)
Performance is comparable to windows, and sometimes better because windows is a bloated piece of shit. Lol.
A lot of stuff you can try and it works ok, but the main things that are permanently unsupported are kernel-level anti-cheat (like Valorant) or online games with anticheat that will detect something weird in the setup and ban you. But some competitive games work fine (like overwatch)
I play a few games (used to stream videogames although not for a living but wasn't a small streamer with 1 or 2 viewers). The one that I've been playing the most is The First Descendant (I'm a Destiny 2 fan and now that there's no more Destiny, I'm trying to find my next game).
I game about 3-4 hours every evening unless I have something to do. My last 300 hours or so have been all in CachyOS. It's super stable and I'm a nitpicky guy (for example, I run Windows still for those kernel level anti cheat games, with Secure Mode on, and although even CachyOS doesn't support it out of the box, `sbctl` is the best solution to enable it and quite easy to do so!)
Performance is comparable, it's basically some Wine bottles or, thanks to the SteamDeck, a Proton environment with GPU passthrough. For The First Descendant, which doesn't work OOTB with Steam's Proton, I installed ProtonGE (not super hard to install, there's a flatpak of a few apps that can do it automatically for you) and that works great. I need to tell it to enable the Linux anti cheat and since TFD uses Easy Anti-cheat, it's an env var away (which you can configure from the Steam settings for that game).
Performance-wise I actually get better framerate. Presumably because nowadays windows comes with so much nonsense running in the background that I bet you the fact they're not running in the Wine bottle is perfect.
Happy to answer any other questions!
And it's also a return to KDE for me, after many years with Xfce and Gnome. The whole environment feels more stable and mature - tho, I miss title bar window shading that's not present under Wayland.
https://cybersecuritynews.com/arch-linux-aur-packages-compro...
I switched to Kubuntu to keep KDE (which I really found I enjoyed from Cachy) while using a more stable and familiar ubuntu base. It's not one of the "gaming" distros but I haven't noticed any major drawbacks with the games I play.
I hope official, veted Arch repositories grow over time.
In comparison, Arch official repos only have 15k packages (~10k apps). There are ways to plug the gap (such as compile missing packages, add Nix package manager), but it's even better if you don't have to.
In the release notes they said they removed Paru and are recommending Shelly instead.
I like that I can manage Flatpack and AUR!
Gonna give this a try!!
I haven't found anything on Linux like it.
Same install.
No problems at all.
Fully succumbed to plasmonic thrall.
Satisfied by being speedy.
So boring. Almost snoring.
(must not distrohop! must not distrohop! must not distrohop!)
Is Cachy just assuming that everyone's got a high-quality NVME? Is there something about newer OSes that cause a CPU bottleneck for large disk writes?
Mind you, I'm really happy with CachyOS, but I don't really understand why this is a problem and it doesn't seem to be an issue others are having.
sudo smartctl -x /dev/nvmeXXXX
Is this on a laptop? Do you have any indoor pets that have fur? Yaks shed a lot this time of year.
cryptsetup benchmark
First day was a bit rough, first week was still a little rough, but it's been pretty smooth since then, even when learning how to fix things and trying new software.
I'm using Niri and Noctalia as my desktop setup, and it's been different than my Windows experience, but it feels fun and cool to just use a computer in a new way.
Personal preference, but I like my software to have as little patching or customisation done by my distribution as possible, and to be able to use it as upstream intended. This is a longstanding benefit of Arch Linux, but CachyOS goes beyond this to kit out a default install with garish themes and shell configurations to the point that the default user's login shell gets set to /bin/fish.
Some fume was had because I really do not believe that Shelly is a good choice for the primary system package manager. It's written in C# and compiled with .NET AOT and I just cannot shake the sense that it is an incorrect choice for a core system program.
The GUI needs a little bit of polish, but the command line user interface is terrible; there is a DNF/APT style subcommand interface which has no search subcommand, and other features are split into a Source->Action->modifier "shortcode", but that is very different from Pacman. The action letters differ between sources; for example to search repositories you use "-SQa" but to search the AUR it is "-AS", and I believe that it is like this for the sole reason that no thought has been put into it. I'd also suggest that the authors have little experience with Unix and so it isn't made with the same kind of attitude. There are other things like table wrapping at 80 columns making the output unreadable and lack of a package download counter.
When I brought it up to the "community" I was relentlessly flamed for not being entirely positive about this change to the distribution. I'm of the opinion that the maintainer had her feelings hurt because I criticised her project, and lied about the issues I had raised. A pile on ensued.
The final straw for me that made me dump another 24 hours in moving distribution again is that the attitude of the CachyOS project can be summed up as "script kiddie" and the "community" spaces are populated by and large by children. Despite having the same sort of audience Bazzite has a much more pleasant community. Fedora seems to avoid all of this kind of nonsense, I suppose by dint of being run by professionals, and avoiding Discord.
The garish themes can be ignored, deinstalled, avoided by choosing an appropriate environment.
The fuming about Shelly? Yah, hrrm. Had some of that, too.
Solution? yay -Rd shelly You are not forced to use it, and it can be deinstalled. The moment it's not optional anymore, I'm gone.
Don't use the community spaces, if you can't handle spoiled brats chasing the latest fads.
Bazzite is bloat (conceptually). Fedora no good. RedHat neither.
Always felt sluggish to me. Haven't tried since years though, but don't intend to either.
Not missing anything from 'there'.
There is a TUI-client called concord for the terminal, where you can disable all the gifs, movies, memes, cat pics, avatars, whatever. That's making it much more bearable :-)
This one seems particularly attractive to Windows refugees especially gamers. The default desktop looks very much like Windows: even the wallpaper is one of those blue gradient 3d wave shapes.
I tried it in a VM and I don't think I can deal with the jank. The default install comes with 3 different GUIs for installing software, all of them confusing and inconsistent. Apps with context menus that go 5 levels deep everywhere, confusing layouts, sometimes icons, sometimes not. I guess if you are coming from Windows this is the status quo so that's fine.
Not for me but I'm glad this new wave of Linux users are finding success with it.
It's been my daily driver for ~2 years.
The Cachy/Arch approach is more flexible, I'm fine with atomic since containerized workflows are my preference.
The only things left installed are cachy-os-hello, and the kernel-manager. They are useful, and don't break things. Though one could do, without them too.
For other steam titles, popOS and proton were just fine