CachyOS: Fast and Customizable Linux Distribution
127 comments
·November 30, 2025popcar2
heresie-dabord
> This was the one to finally stop getting me to distro hop.
For me it was Debian 12 with Sway (Wayland) followed by Debian 13 with labwc and Sway.
Now I can switch from a tiling window manager (WM) to a floating WM depending on the work task.
WD-42
I had not heard of labwc before, super cool that it's compatible with openbox themes! Openbox was one of the first "cool wm" I think I used back in the day, probably like 15 years ago now when it supplanted Fluxbox as the dominant *box.
exe34
nixos for me. broke it once 9 years ago, but I never figured out how.
kachapopopow
Here to say that cachyos is by no means just a gaming os it's a really nicely packaged distro and works much better than KDE neon, far better than manjaro.
It also generally feels snappier for simple things like opening terminal, but I am pretty sure that was a kde neon issue.
I only use KDE so your experience might be different than mine.
embedding-shape
Also barely use it for gaming/multimedia, already have Windows for that, I use it for work (software development/machine learning) with Gnome3 and haven't had any issues with it since I started using it in 2025. Don't notice much performance difference with normal Arch though either tbh.
blueflow
During CachyOS installation, select "i3" as desktop environment and look how many of the accessory programs die from linking errors. That should not happen with a package manager with dependency management.
WD-42
This isn't surprising. All of the X11 based WMs are slowly bit-rotting. Unless the people that care about them step up and start maintaining the stack instead of just endlessly complaining about Wayland it'll only get worse.
serf
almost every distro that offers an i3/sway/awesome install option seems to do a really poor job of it.
I don't know why.
Last time I started an endeavoros install with a default i3 it borked the login manager and set no system handlers of any kind. When I went to fix the handlers the entire package that set them was gone. When I went to install that (on the advice of the accompanying forum) I had to install most of GNOME.
If you're using something that isn't KDE or GNOME you're probably going to hit rough edges.
FlyingSnake
I use CachyOS as my daily driver and I gave up on i3 after few tries. It just doesn’t work.
I’m happy with XFCE now and it is very performant.
rainmaking
No issues with sway here.
null
ahoka
With all the unofficial patches and experimental compilers they use it must be full of subtle bugs.
null
Hydraulix989
What are examples of packages that fail with linking errors? What are the errors?
LargoLasskhyfv
Yah well? Why would I when there is Plasma/KDE which never did that to me? :-)
lionkor
User choice
s20n
I used i3 for the longest time and I'd say a wayland based alternative like sway or miracle is a better choice nowadays. Even KDE Plasma recently dropped x11 support [1] so going forward, most apps will target wayland first.
Migrating my i3 config to sway hardly took any effort. I was also able to get rid of a lot of xorg specific configurations from various x11 dotfiles and put them directly in the sway config (Such as Natural Scrolling)
[1]: https://itsfoss.com/news/kde-plasma-to-drop-x11-support/.
lousken
Bazzite (Fedora atomic), CachyOS (Arch), PikaOS(Debian), Nobara(Fedora), (Pop_OS - Ubuntu), it's nice that there's a gaming version of pretty much all major distros at this point so everyone can have a familiar base, hopefully they all survive
IshKebab
I don't understand why we need "gaming versions" for distros. I've never used them but if there's stuff that's broken for gaming in the base distros, shouldn't that just be fixed?
kokada
At least for Bazzite, Nobara and CachyOS, there is the SteamOS desktop option that boots directly to Steam's Big Picture that is quite unconventional in some ways (e.g. this desktop mode kinda also acts as a display manager, so there is the option to boot to your desktop from Big Picture mode and this option is generally broken without specific integration with the session manager).
Sure this could probably be a package in a more "traditional distro", but I'm almost sure most people don't expect their Display Manager to be replaced with Steam when they install a package.
jamesbelchamber
Trade-offs in the default load-out, essentially - some of the things you want for games can bloat out the standard build, compromise the "license integrity" of the base repositories, make system instability more likely etc etc.
There is unlikely to be a time that "things stop moving" enough to make all these trade-offs go away, but you can pretty much just add all this stuff to the base distro yourself anyway if you want to (I still play games on vanilla Silverblue, for example).
cosmic_cheese
Target audience favors in for default load out, too. Gamers aren’t likely to be *nix gurus and want something that will come configured correctly for their use case out of the box, including stuff like Nvidia drivers.
For this group, needing to follow wiki guides and such and spending time on basic system functionality just isn’t happening. If that’s the only option, they’re just going to reinstall Windows.
everdrive
I had Manjaro previously, but it regularly had issues booting due to Plymouth. I'm not quite sure what the issue was, but Plymouth was deprecated. I switched to Fedora for a while, but finally got sick of Gnome 3. (yes, I could have just used KDE on Fedora but wanted to try out Cachy) Cachy has been pretty good, and I'm seeing much better performance in games than in Fedora, although I'm not sure how much of that is due to Fedora open-sourcing their kernel driver was responsible for the difference. (I still had the proprietary ones on Fedora)
I hope some of these work out. Honestly from a strict compatibility and ease of use standpoint nothing has been as simple or reliable for me as Ubuntu used to be. I left it due to snaps and premium nagging, but I've had the usual little "linux" quirks ever since. As much as I love cachy, my current quirk with it is that heavy disk writes tank the system aggressively. A bit of brief research suggests this might be due to using BTRFS, but I'm comfortable enough with the system that I don't want to do a total reformat right now.
I guess what I'm saying is that as much as I love linux there is still some refinement needed.
tormeh
Release-day Mesa updates is something that would be irrelevant for a normal distro, but important for a gaming one.
jcelerier
It's not necessarily broken, but for instance packages in cachy are compiled against x86-64-v3 iirc so they wouldn't work on older machines that don't support avx2
Fnoord
The proof is in the pudding:
> PikaOS Linux is a Linux distribution based on Debian's cutting-edge "Unstable" branch [...] [1]
Trademark and reach.
Gaming distributions don't run a stable version of Linux distributions. They're always a spin-off from one of the popular Linux distributions (rebasing every once in a while), with additional changes tailored towards gaming.
Now, you cannot just say I call my distribution Debian GNU/Linux Gaming Edition. If you would, you'd need to work under the umbrella of Debian. With a different name, you differentiate from Debian, while you can keep the advantages of their framework (hello Ubuntu).
ho_schi
Because there is no need. It just the usual trend/hype.
* Manjaro is Arch.
* Cachy is a patched Arch (exactly what Arch avoids, heavy patching).
* SteamOS is Arch.
* Arch is Arch.
WD-42
I think the main selling point of Cachy is that the binary packages are compiled at a much higher optimization level. It simply won't run on older CPUs without modern extensions. Vanilla Arch definitely does not do this.
embedding-shape
> Any useful and stable patch will be merged by upstream. That is why using CachyOS or ClearLinux isn’t beneficial in long term.
Seems like you're blinded by your own context, if CachyOS for example see patches, integrate them earlier than upstream, and let user use them today rather than "long term", how is that not useful or beneficial to the users who want/needs that?
Besides, testing patches this way sounds like it'll have wider impact in the community than just the distro that integrated the patch, as it'll have a way wider testing userbase then. Isn't that also good long term?
jvanderbot
It's about sane default packages and installers and desktop experience, as well as onboarding.
It doesn't take a lot of work to get any distro to become a good gaming machine, but it does take some work to make it a seamless turnkey gaming machine for the masses.
jcelerier
> When the patch works it will finally land even in Debian Stable.
Which is very pointless if it's three years late for e.g. a game release
Scion9066
There are some things regular distros can't/shouldn't do, like including codecs still under patents, matching proprietary Nvidia drivers with the correct kernel version, proprietary firmware for game controller adapters, the launching of Steam Big Picture mode as the default UI, etc.
thegaitlessgate
Fedora has been rock solid for a few years (minus Zoom + Nvidia), as my primary work OS. I'm always nervous to jump to an Arch-based distro as my daily driver, for fear of having to regularly fix issues. Is this a legitimate concern in 2025? Would my experience (especially with graphics) be improved on something like Cachy?
WD-42
Arch being unstable is a myth. I’ve had far more issues with major upgrades between versions of Debian, fedora and Ubuntu than I ever had on arch. I think my install is almost 6 years old now.
embedding-shape
Same. My first Linux was Ubuntu 9.x, every time I upgraded the major version something broke. Eventually ignored the "Arch is unstable" as I saw my co-workers having zero issues, and been using Arch since 2017 now with zero breakages that I myself wasn't responsible for.
null
jaapz
I have been running arch for about 5 years now, and I think there were about 3 or 4 instances where I'd have to do some manual intervention to fix an update, but those interventions were generally all fixable by commands posted on arch linux's blog (which, for some weird reason, the arch devs expect you to check every time you run `sudo pacman -Syu`)
Arch devs know how much friction manual intervention updates cause, so they try to keep them to a minimum.
Honestly, I've had more problems running windows than running arch.
embedding-shape
> Honestly, I've had more problems running windows than running arch.
Worst thing with Windows isn't the occasional "wtf, how do I undo this change Microsoft forced upon me?" but more "Damn, it's that time of the month where Windows force me to do X", most recently being upgrades that you cannot shutdown or restart your computer without doing. Used to be you could run some command to avoid it, but literally all the hacks stopped working.
So now I'm slightly afraid of booting Windows which I do sometimes, because I don't want to end up in the situation where I need to boot Linux for five seconds to do something quickly, but Windows is refusing to do so without first doing a 20 minute upgrade. Fucking disrespectful of people's time!
vbezhenar
I'm using ordinary Arch for the last year and I didn't have a single issue.
embedding-shape
> Is this a legitimate concern in 2025?
I've used Arch Linux (always with a nvidia GPU no less!) since 2017 sometime, moved over to CachyOS just this year, and had no issues that weren't caused by myself in all this time.
I initially moved away from Ubuntu at that time, as I got so tired of dist-upgrade breaking my system every single time I tried to upgrade, so figured I'll at least understand the breakages better when they happen with Arch. But I never got Arch to break something by itself, it always end up being my fault.
null
voxadam
I've been using Linux since the mid-90s and Linux almost exclusively for the last couple decades and I have only one question, aren't most Linux distros fully customizable? I currently run Fedora on my desktop but I've run everything from Slackware to Red Hat to Debian to Knoppix to Corel to Suse to Arch, you get the idea, and I've found all of them nearly equal in the customizability department. Is there a distro out there that actively fights customization?
kouteiheika
They are all customizable, but you have to remember - not everyone is a Linux expert, and not everyone has the time or the will to tinker.
sydon
None that I know of, however I'd say certain distro's might attract people who want more/specific customization
einpoklum
> fully customizable
There are all sorts of customizable. CachyOS' use of that word is rather inspecific. I guess it means the compilation flags are better customized for your CPU, plus it is easier to choose a kernel with a different scheduler enabled. So, "more customizable" in that sense.
Of course you could ask whether you could 'customize' your distribution not force you to use systemd. Most popular distributions fall flat on that one, I'm afraid...
irilesscent
I've seen this be popular but I'm a little sceptical as to the effectiveness of their optimisations. Does anyone have some examples, anecdotes?
embedding-shape
As shared elsewhere, I've used Arch Linux since 2017 sometime, and this year I replaced it with CachyOS as I was changing disks anyways and wanted to see what all the noise was about.
It's like a Arch brother that holds your hand slightly more, and have some "defaults" they nudge you towards in the docs, and some number-heavy software is slightly faster, maybe 10-15%, but overall it feels and works just like Arch Linux. To be honest, I don't notice a lot of difference and I think I'm as fine with Arch as with CachyOS, that's how little different there is between them.
nirv
Here are benchmark rounds of CachyOS against current Ubuntu and Fedora workstations as fresh as early November:
ahoka
So tuxracer runs better? And some other benchmarks showing how reducing latency decreases throughput in general.
Perz1val
I've setup cachyos repos on arch and it does indeed feel snappier. I've not measured any performance, but I'd imagine it's negligible on my pretty new ryzen 9. Nonetheless, the process was fairly easy and so far nothing has broken because of that. If I were to actually care enough to test it, I'd also try just swapping the scheduler on the normal Arch kernel.
bsagdiyev
Just an anecdote but I've been running it for a few months now and at least for gaming it works well. Arc Raiders plays fantastically. There is an issue with one of my headsets that when you get in game the audio quality drops to dogshit but I think that's a bigger issue with the headset on Linux and not particular to Cachy.
fusl
Sounds like you're using Bluetooth headphones and the game is attaching to the microphone which will automatically switch the audio codec from audio mode into headset mode. I'd suggest trying to completely disable the microphone of the headset so the game won't even try to attach to it.
bsagdiyev
Yep that's it! I ended up just buying a headset for gaming, since I use the other one for mostly music anyways. Solved the issue there. There were some workarounds I could try but I needed a new gaming headset anyways, the padding on my old one basically just fell apart after almost 7 years.
geraldhh
sounds like an issue with bluetooth audio profiles having a hard time with bidirectional usage
FlyingSnake
I’m running CachyOS for a year now as my daily driver (non-work) on my ancient desktop from 2019 and ancient Nvidia card. It is very fast and smooth. I mainly use it to development using LLM sidekicks and it doesn’t break sweat. I use XFCE and just love how fast the experience is.
LargoLasskhyfv
Anecdotically I'm using it since about 2 years on obsolete Kaby Lake Core i5 7500T & Core i7 7700T @35Watts in 1 liter Lenovo Thinkcentres (M910q tiny). Which have integrated HD630 Graphics.
Under Plasma/KDE. I just followed their defaults in the installer, which at the time were BTRFS for the filesystem, whith systemd-boot, and everything wen't well. The only thing which I would have done differently in hindsight would be the boot partition at 2GB, which seems wasteful when only about 50MB are ever used. But shrug?
What else, hrrm, the stuff is mostly clocked down to 800Mhz, because of the chosen scheduler, in spite of this nothing ever lags. Though the systems have 32GB RAM, that should help with that.
It's really smooth, even on that old 'crap', even mostly clocked down.
I also had it never crash on me with anything, neither single applications, or system hangs.
After upgrading with pacman -Syu I immediately clear the package cache with pacman -Scc, because I never ever needed that.
At the moment I'm considering to remove the pacman hooks into btrfs-snapshots, because I never needed them either. Seems like cargo-cult to me :-)
I also let it bitrot for up to 150 days, meaning no updates whatsover, and then lifting it up in one accumulated rush. Effortlessly. In the past, because I've been lazy and couldn't be bothered. Lately more often :-)
I didn't reboot in these long phases without updates. Just suspend to RAM. Which works every single time. And the system stayed always responsive.
Their ZRAM setup is usable by default. No fiddling necessary.
With this stability I dared to activate https://github.com/graysky2/profile-sync-daemon / https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Profile-sync-daemon and never had any trouble with it so far.
At the moment I'm having fun discovering a new world of audio experience with https://github.com/wwmm/easyeffects
How could I live without that?!
(Don't worry, cores stay at 800Mhz with that playing YT in FF, or watching a movie with MPV)
At least on my hardware it's the DREAM.
Oh. Did I mention I don't game at all? With the exception of maybe some Freeciv in the browser...
theoldgreybeard
I ran CachyOS for a while and it’s really good! These days I’m rolling on OpenSUSE Aeon for the immutability and because my homelab stuff is all Suse based.
But if you’re a gamer that also uses your PC for development or content creation you can’t go wrong with CachyOS.
robviren
I have been unable to get anything other than Cachy to run Baldur's Gate 3 as well as Windows on my Lenovo Legion 2021. Best I have found for performance and so far stable on my relative new tower.
ariejan
Tried installing Cachyos yesterday, was playing Arc Raider like 15m later (mainly because I had to wait on the 30GB download). Zero issues so far. Next up is to see if Rocksmith 2014 wants to play ball.
pacifika
I set this up to reinvigorate my T2 MacBook Pro (with Cosmic) but it keeps restarting when the lid is closed, and keyboard and trackpad don’t always resume on restore. I was impressed with the docs!
I’m thinking of trying Ubuntu, but maybe T2 Linux will always be a compromise, hardly CachyOS fault I reckon.
jvanderbot
I've had fantastic experiences reinvigorating macs with Ubuntu. Highly recommended.
mindcrash
For those of you who are a little bit more adventurous - The custom CachyOS kernel is also available within a Portage overlay:
https://github.com/Szowisz/CachyOS-kernels
Which enables you to run a Gentoo based system on the kernel modified by the CachyOS kernel team through a ebuild for the official sources on GitHub.
When emerging it deals with all necessary dependency flags and configuration for you, just a little bit tinkering with USE flags required.
ahoka
Now that you mention Gentoo, the whole distro make me think of this: https://www.shlomifish.org/humour/by-others/funroll-loops/Ge...
LargoLasskhyfv
I prefer apt-shred dist chainsaw.
This was the one to finally stop getting me to distro hop. Cachy is very easy to use and very well maintained. The performance is usually the selling point people talk about, but it's also very customizable and beginner-friendly (especially for an arch-based distro).
It uses an online installer that lets you choose the desktop environment, boot manager, file system, among other things. You can follow the defaults if you're new. Once you install it, it also comes with a few helper applications that can quickly set up things you'd want to use, like a one-click button that installs all the gaming packages you want to use and their flavor of Proton which is (allegedly) faster than the default.
They also have a really good wiki which I contributed a bit to and a very active community if you need help. All around, 10/10 would recommend to anyone. I managed to convince my friend who's new to Linux to use this instead of Zorin and he's had a great time.