Nate Drake peers underneath the hood to find Arch-based Cachy is flashy – but is it also a solid distro to use?
Stable versions of CachyOS have been released since late 2022. The OS itself is based on Arch Linux but it’s been heavily customised.
Some of these changes are centred around speeding up the kernel using the BORE (Burst-Oriented Response Scheduler). The desktop packages are compiled with LTO (Link Time Optimisation), as well as enhancements for x86- 64-v3 and x86-64-v4 compatibility. While talking customisation, of all the Linux distros we’ve reviewed, CachyOS is one of the most flexible given that the downloadable GUI installer offers virtually every known desktop environment and window manager, including KDE, Gnome, Xfce, CuteFish, i3wm, Wayfire, LXQt, OpenBox, Cinnamon, UKUI, LXDE, MATE, Budgie, Qtile, Hyprland and Sway. We tried to download the 2.8GB ISO three times from the CachyOS website but it failed. Luckily the site also contains links to download via SourceForge. The live DVD boots via KDE, which now includes Plasma 6.
Away with Wayland
The March 2024 ISO defaults to Wayland sessions, though the latest April release has reverted to X11. The release notes state that this was due to issues with how the Calamares installer interacted with Wayland. We also noted that Gnome ISOs are no longer offered for download, though the setup assistant happily loads the desktop environment if you proceed to install.
If you do opt for the installer, you’ll also see that CachyOS 240401 offers three different bootloaders for online installation: systemd-boot, Grub(3) and rEFInd. It also provides a new rEFInd partitioning layout – in other words it separates out /boot and /boot/efi.
Upon login, we discovered that CachyOS still only has a handful of preinstalled apps but they seem to have been carefully selected.
The OS’s own Cachy Browser is a fork of LibreWolf. It also incorporates patches from Gentoo’s own version of Firefox, as well as “enhanced security and privacy”. We noted that this includes bundling the browser with uBlock Origin to remove ads and trackers, as well as CanvasBlocker to prevent certain types of browser fingerprinting. Both plugins also
