CachyOS [1] recently hit number one on DistroWatch [2]. While some may have been surprised, CachyOS's popularity is not unexpected. First publicly released in 2021, CachyOS is an Arch Linux-based distro (see the "Arch Linux Integration" box). It offers Linux kernel performance optimizations utilizing the highly responsive Burst-Oriented Response Enhancer (BORE) scheduler [3] by default, performance-optimized software packages compiled for different x86 microarchitectures (e.g., x86-64-v3, x86-64-v4, and Zen 4), and a hardware detection tool that improves your experience with installation and configuration.

CachyOS allows for customization. Users can choose from several desktop environments via the CachyOS installer including KDE Plasma, Gnome, Xfce, bspwm, Budgie, Cinnamon, COSMIC (first stable release scheduled for December 2025), i3, Hyprland, LXDE, LXQt, MATE Desktop, Openbox, Qtile, Sway, UKUI, and Wayfire.

If you are a gamer, CachyOS simplifies Linux gaming by including Proton, which is designed for Steam integration, plus the necessary libraries as dependencies in meta-packages, which makes the gaming setup process very easy. CachyOS also has a Handheld Edition that supports gaming consoles such as the Steam Deck, ROG Ally, and Legion Go.

The CachyOS development team has also created several system tools: cachy-chroot [4] to ease the process of chrooting into an existing CachyOS installation, kernel-manager [5] to install and manage kernels from any Arch Linux repository, and CachyOS Hello [6] (Figure 1) to help get you started.

Figure 1: After installation, CachyOS Hello appears with links to get you started (shown here on the default CachyOS KDE desktop environment).

In this review, I introduce the CachyOS installer, package manager, and other tools and show why it's favored by performance-minded Linux users.

Getting Started

Once you have confirmed that your hardware meets CachyOS's system requirements (see Table 1), you are ready to download the official CachyOS ISO [7]. You will also need to download balenaEtcher [8], run it, and follow its step-by-step instructions.

CachyOS has adopted and modified the universal installer framework, Calamares, as its default installer. The CachyOS installer provides a clear and useful interface with simple, step-by-step instructions for each option and stage, so you don't need to be a Linux expert to use it.

After launching, the installer will prompt you with a few questions. First, you will be given a choice of boot managers: systemd-boot (the default), GRUB2, rEFInd, or Limine. Both systemd-boot and GRUB2 support Btrfs snapshots, which significantly boost OS robustness (the ability to easily load the previous system state from the bootloader cannot be overrated). Next, you can choose between English and more than 10 localizations for the installer interface's language. You will also be asked about the system locale dialog.

The next step – probably the most complicated and a showstopper for many users – involves partition management (see Figure 2). Click on any partition and a menu will pop up that asks you how to proceed. You can either select keep to leave the partition as is, format it in one of the popular filesystem formats, or set a mount point if needed. The test installation with a 250MB boot partition, a 40GB root partition, and the rest of the space mounted as /home worked well without any issues.

Figure 2: Managing partitions with the CachyOS installer.

Now you are ready to choose a desktop environment from the 18 available options in the left sidebar (see Figure 3). You will find more information along with the configuration files for these options online [9], but I'll highlight some interesting environments here:

• UKUI is a lightweight, power-efficient environment that uses the Qt and GTK frameworks with a Windows 7 look and feel (especially appealing to newcomers to Linux who came from Windows)
• Wayfire [10], a Wayland compositor, features a customizable and extendable environment
• niri [11], another Wayland compositor, offers a minimalistic, tiling-focused environment

Figure 3: Reflecting the true power of Linux, you can choose from 18 different desktop environments (UKUI shown here).

After choosing the desktop environment, the installer presents a list of packages split by categories. Choose which packages you'd like to add or exclude from the default package set.

The final step is easy: Set a username and password. After this, the installer will apply the configuration and install CachyOS to the selected drive. For headless servers without a GPU, or as a fallback option, there is also a New CLI Installer [12], which works in a terminal. If all the steps were completed successfully, the default CachyOS desktop environment will show up after rebooting (see Figure 1).

CachyOS does a good job with system pre-configuration for many different hardware setups, especially for those with NVIDIA graphic cards. It also installs all needed software dependencies. Most of this work happens out of sight thanks to CachyOS Hardware Detection tool (chwd), which is written in Rust. The command

chwd --list-all

will return all available hardware profiles, such as nvidia-dkms-390xx or vangogh-steam-deck. Each profile has its own system configuration, drivers (e.g., NVIDIA graphic drivers), and packages used by CachyOS for optimal operating system configuration.

Performance Optimizations

The CachyOS development team provides several optimized kernel variants for different tasks, including:

• linux-cachyos – the default kernel version built with ThinLTO [13] and Clang; it utilizes AutoFDO [14] for better performance
• linux-cachyos-server – a server-optimized configuration
• linux-cachyos-hardened – a security-focused kernel with hardening patches that uses the BORE scheduler [3]
• linux-cachyos-lts – a long-term support version for stability that uses the BORE scheduler
• linux-cachyos-rt-bore – a real-time kernel with the BORE scheduler
• linux-cachyos-deckify – an optimized variant for the Steam Deck handheld gaming console
• linux-cachyos-eevdf – a kernel option that uses Earliest Eligible Virtual Deadline First (EEVDF) scheduler [15] for improved responsiveness
• linux-cachyos-bmq – an option that uses the BitMap Queue CPU Scheduler (BMQ) [16]

CachyOS also provides package build configuration with GCC and Clang compilers, configurable Timer frequency options for better system throughput and latency, kernel Control Flow Integrity (CFI) [17] for better security, and many compiler performance optimizations flags.

Another interesting kernel technology, the Extensible Scheduler Class (sched-ext) [18] enables implementing kernel thread schedulers in Berkeley Package Filter (BPF) and dynamically loading them. This allows users to change kernel schedulers without a kernel rebuild.

Overall, CachyOS maintains a large set of optimized kernels for many different tasks and experimental technologies. All these optimizations make a difference in real tests. In a performance benchmark test (from Phoronix.com) of Xonotic (a popular game) on CachyOS, CachyOS was 17 percent faster in 3D performance than openSUSE Tumbleweed and 22 percent faster than Fedora Workstation 42 (see Figure 4).

Figure 4: Xonotic 0.8.6 performance benchmark test on CachyOS (© Phoronix).

CachyOS Settings

Other optimizations can be found in the cachyos-settings package [19]. Of particular interest in terms of performance is that CachyOS offers aggressive ZRAM Rules that create RAM memory disk with on-the-fly disk compression. With SATA Power Management, you can set the performance policy to max_performance on SATA devices. Other features include various tweaks for NVIDIA graphics, disabled powersave mode for the Intel audio driver, and a special PCI latency service to boost responsiveness, which can be enabled with

sudo systemctl enable --now pci-latency.service

Finally, Ananicy Cpp [20], a C++ rewrite of the Ananicy daemon, uses a set of rules to manage process priorities and gives users the ability to easily prioritize tasks such as gaming, video production, or code compilation.