Cachy OS 240401
Nate Drake peers underneath the hood to find Arch-based Cachy is flashy – but is it also a solid distro to use?
IN BRIEF
CachyOS is a powerful and secure alternative to Arch, sporting its own secure kernel and custom apps. Use the intuitive installer to choose from a huge range of desktop environments and window managers.
SPECS
CPU: 1GHz
Mem: 3GB (4GB best)
HDD: 30GB (50GB best)
Builds: x86_64, x86-64-v3
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.