If you've not heard of CachyOS, then you've not been paying attention. This blazingly fast Arch-based distribution has quickly risen to the top of so many lists; it's sure to find itself winning prom queen and president of its class this year.

With this new release (which happens to be the fifth this year), CachyOS gets a good amount of polish, some of it by way of the latest versions of various packages, such as KDE Plasma 6.7.4, KDE Frameworks 6.28, and KDE Gear 26.04.3.

Of course, it's not all just about KDE Plasma. The CachyOS installer received a ton of love as well. For instance, the command-line installer now includes experimental support for the soon-to-be-added Server Edition installation profiles. The GUI installer received several desktop-specific changes, such as Hyprland now using noctalia-greeter, switching to lightdm-slick-greeter for Cinnamon, and adding gvfs-dnssd for the Gnome desktop.

As far as the beauty contest goes, the dev team added new Noctalia variants for both Mango and Niri. As well, Noctalia v5 now supports Hyprland dotfiles. Finally, they've updated the Nord KDE theme for Plasma 6.7.

As for improvements, cachyos-rate-mirrors now uses the CachyOS mirrorlist API for ranking mirrors and adds a new Tier 2 mirror in Hungary. Limits.d received a nice-value tuning as a PipeWire error fix, and the CachyOS Welcome app has reworked DNS, so the speed-test-based server ranking now works properly.

You can read the entire list of updates from the official CachyOS August 2026 release notes and download an ISO from the official CachyOS download page.