Leave it to the developers of one of the hottest Linux distributions on the market, CachyOS, to show up the competition by delivering a release that has a souped-up kernel. 

Linux kernel 7.0 is at the heart of the latest release, but it's not just your standard, vanilla kernel. Oh, no. The developers of CachyOS have added several patches to give performance a boost, such as enabling Intel FRED for laptops with Intel Core Ultra Series 3 (Panther Lake) CPUs. They've also enabled the new NTFS driver and have improved multi-gen LRU, which is an alternative LRU implementation for optimizing page reclamation and improving performance under memory pressure.

As well, the developers have patched most of the DKMS drivers for compatibility and ensured that the ZFS module is working properly.

When you couple those improvements with the usual CachyOS CPU optimizations, it being compiled with x86-64-v3/v4 and Zen 4 instructions, LTO, and PGO, as well as the kernel being tuned with the EEVDF scheduler, you get a noticeably faster operating system.

CachyOS is based on Arch Linux, which means it's a rolling release. Users of the previous iteration should receive these updates via the normal means. Given that CachyOS takes Arch Linux and gives it a significant performance boost, it's easy to understand why it sits atop the DistroWatch Page Hit Ranking tool.

Find out more on the CachyOS X account.