CachyOS: Install and Configure the Performance-Tuned Arch Linux Distro (2026)

✅ Tested on CachyOS 260809 (August 2026 ISO) · KDE Plasma 6.7 — Last updated: August 2026

CachyOS is an Arch Linux-based distribution built around a custom kernel, its own hardware-detection tooling, and a graphical installer — the pitch is "Arch, but someone already did the tuning for you." It's become one of the most recommended distros in gaming and enthusiast circles, but a lot of that recommendation is repeated without much scrutiny. This guide covers what CachyOS actually changes versus vanilla Arch, how to install and configure it, and — honestly — what independent benchmarks actually show, which is more nuanced than most reviews let on.

What Makes CachyOS Different from Arch?

CachyOS isn't a fork of Arch's package set — it's Arch underneath, with a project-maintained layer on top:

• A custom kernel lineup (see the Kernel Selection section below) built with LTO, AutoFDO and Propeller optimizations, with sched-ext (SCX) support enabled so you can load alternate CPU schedulers without a reboot.
• chwd (CachyOS Hardware Detection) — a Rust tool that detects your GPU and network hardware and applies the right drivers automatically, instead of you hunting down the correct package.
• CachyOS-Hello — a first-boot welcome app that bundles post-install tweaks, package installation shortcuts and kernel management in one place.
• Its own package repos, layered with Chaotic-AUR for pre-built AUR packages, plus rate-mirrors to keep your mirrorlist fast automatically.
• A graphical installer — CachyOS maintains its own Calamares-based installer (cachyos-calamares) as well as a newer terminal-based installer (New-Cli-Installer) as an alternative.
• Full mutability — unlike Bazzite or SteamOS, nothing about the base system is locked. You use pacman and the AUR exactly as you would on vanilla Arch.

The project isn't a one-person side effort either — the CachyOS GitHub organization maintains around 30 active repositories, including its own Proton and Wine forks (proton-cachyos, wine-cachyos) and even a COPR repo that ports some of its packages to Fedora.

Editions and Desktop Environments

• KDE Plasma (6.7) — the default and most polished edition on CachyOS.
• GNOME (48) — clean and modern, less CachyOS-specific tweaking applied than the KDE edition.
• Hyprland — tiling Wayland compositor for a keyboard-driven workflow; as of the 2026 ISOs this includes an option for the Noctalia shell on top of Hyprland.
• XFCE — lightweight option for older hardware.
• CachyOS Handheld Edition — KDE plus a gaming-mode layer, built for Steam Deck-style handhelds (ROG Ally, Legion Go).

System Requirements

• CPU: x86-64-v3 recommended (Intel Haswell / AMD Zen or newer) for the optimized package builds — older CPUs fall back to the standard x86-64 repo automatically.
• RAM: 4 GB minimum, 8 GB realistic for KDE or GNOME.
• Storage: 20 GB minimum; an SSD is strongly recommended, since the default filesystem is btrfs with subvolumes.
• GPU: NVIDIA, AMD or Intel — driver selection happens during install.

Download and Install CachyOS

Download the ISO for your desktop edition from cachyos.org and flash it to a USB drive:

sudo dd if=cachyos-desktop-*.iso of=/dev/sdX bs=4M status=progress conv=fsync

Boot from the USB. You'll be offered two installer paths:

• The graphical installer (Calamares-based) — partitioning, desktop environment, driver and timezone selection through a guided UI. This is the one most users want.
• The CLI installer (New-Cli-Installer) — a text-based alternative maintained in parallel, useful over SSH or on minimal hardware.

Key decisions in the graphical installer:

• Partitioning: automatic (erases the disk) or manual — btrfs with subvolumes is the default and recommended.
• Kernel: linux-cachyos is the default selection — leave it unless you have a specific reason to change (see below).
• Drivers: chwd detects your GPU automatically; confirm the proprietary NVIDIA option if that applies to you.
• Gaming extras: Steam, Proton and MangoHUD can be ticked during install to skip post-install setup entirely.

Kernel Selection and Management

CachyOS ships several kernel variants in its own repos, all switchable after install:

# List available CachyOS kernels
pacman -Ss linux-cachyos

# The default: EEVDF scheduler + LTO + AutoFDO + Propeller optimizations
sudo pacman -S linux-cachyos

# BORE scheduler — tuned for desktop/gaming responsiveness
sudo pacman -S linux-cachyos-bore

# BMQ scheduler — lower overhead alternative
sudo pacman -S linux-cachyos-bmq

# Real-time kernel, for audio production or latency-sensitive work
sudo pacman -S linux-cachyos-rt

# Long-term-support fallback — more conservative, shipped as the
# recovery option on recent ISOs after stability reports on the
# bleeding-edge default (see Troubleshooting below)
sudo pacman -S linux-cachyos-lts

# Rebuild the bootloader entry after installing a new kernel
sudo grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg

Most CachyOS kernels (BMQ is the exception) also enable sched-ext (SCX) — the kernel's plugin scheduler interface, which lets you load an alternate CPU scheduler written in Rust or C without rebooting. CachyOS provides scx-manager, a GUI for picking and switching schedulers on the fly instead of editing kernel command-line flags by hand.

Gaming Setup: Steam, Proton and MangoHUD

If you ticked gaming extras during install, Steam and Proton are already set up. If not:

# Confirm multilib is enabled (needed for Steam's 32-bit dependencies)
grep -A2 "[multilib]" /etc/pacman.conf

# Install Steam and gaming tools
sudo pacman -S steam mangohud gamemode

# Install Heroic for Epic and GOG, from the AUR
yay -S heroic-games-launcher-bin

CachyOS maintains its own Proton and Wine builds — proton-cachyos and wine-cachyos — which Steam and Lutris can use instead of upstream Proton/Wine. Enable MangoHUD and GameMode per game through Steam's launch options:

mangohud gamemoderun %command%

Package Management: pacman, AUR and Chaotic-AUR

# System update
sudo pacman -Syu

# Install a package
sudo pacman -S package-name

# Search packages
pacman -Ss keyword

# Install yay (AUR helper) if not already present
sudo pacman -S yay

# Install from AUR — or from Chaotic-AUR's pre-built binaries when available,
# which skips compiling large packages from source
yay -S spotify discord obsidian

# Keep mirrors fast automatically
sudo rate-mirrors --protocol https arch | sudo tee /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist

# Remove a package and its now-unused dependencies
sudo pacman -Rns package-name

Real-World Performance: What the Benchmarks Actually Show

This is the part most CachyOS coverage skips. The marketing framing is "the fastest Arch-based distro," and vendor-run gaming benchmarks sometimes back that up — but independent, broad benchmark suites tell a more modest story.

A widely discussed Phoronix benchmark run (summarized in a Hacker News thread comparing distro performance) found that CachyOS performed similarly overall to Fedora, EndeavourOS and Ubuntu — while Clear Linux, Intel's aggressively-optimized distro, kept roughly a 6.5% advantage over all of them, CachyOS included. In other words: across a broad set of general workloads, CachyOS isn't dramatically faster than a well-configured mainstream distro.

XDA's own review ran Geekbench 6 and measured CachyOS at 3,148 single-core versus 3,062 on Ubuntu — about a 3% difference, not the kind of gap that changes how a machine feels to use.

Where CachyOS's advantage is real is narrower and more practical than "it's just faster": you get a kernel already tuned for desktop responsiveness (BORE/EEVDF), gaming tools pre-installed instead of configured by hand, and automatic hardware detection via chwd. That's a meaningfully better out-of-box experience than vanilla Arch — it's just not the same claim as "faster hardware performance," and it's worth being honest about which one you're actually getting.

System Performance Tuning

# Check the current CPU governor
cat /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/scaling_governor

# Set the performance governor manually (schedutil is the balanced default)
echo performance | sudo tee /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu*/cpufreq/scaling_governor

# zram (compressed swap in RAM) ships enabled by default on CachyOS —
# confirm it's active
systemctl status systemd-zram-setup@zram0.service

CachyOS vs Arch vs Bazzite

The real dividing line between these three isn't speed — it's how much of the system you're allowed to touch, and how much maintenance you're signing up for:

• CachyOS: fully mutable, full AUR access, a tuned kernel and a graphical installer on top of standard Arch. You maintain it like any Arch system — it just starts from a better baseline.
• Vanilla Arch: the same control, zero of the hand-holding. Choose this if you specifically want to build the system yourself; otherwise CachyOS gets you to the same place faster.
• Bazzite: Fedora Atomic underneath, meaning the base system is immutable — you can't break it by installing the wrong thing, and there's always a rollback point. Better for people who want gaming-ready Linux with near-zero maintenance; you trade away CachyOS's full flexibility to get that.
• SteamOS: the Steam Deck's own OS, also immutable, purpose-built for that hardware rather than general desktops.

Known Issues and Fixes

NVIDIA: HDMI stuck at 60Hz after a driver update

Reported after routine NVIDIA driver updates — the display gets detected at 60Hz instead of its actual refresh rate (144Hz and similar). The working fix reported by affected users is rolling back to the previous NVIDIA driver version until the next driver release resolves it:

# List installed NVIDIA driver versions available to downgrade to
pacman -Qi nvidia-open-dkms nvidia-dkms 2>/dev/null

# Downgrade via the Arch Linux Archive if needed
sudo pacman -U /var/cache/pacman/pkg/nvidia-dkms-<previous-version>.pkg.tar.zst

Why does the installer offer an LTS kernel as a fallback?

After stability reports on the bleeding-edge default kernel, CachyOS started shipping linux-cachyos-lts as a selectable fallback directly in the installer, rather than something you'd only discover after running into trouble. If your system feels unstable after install, switching to the LTS kernel is the first thing to try.

NTFS partitions not mounting as expected

CachyOS reverted its kernel's default NTFS3 driver behavior for mounting NTFS partitions after user reports of problems — if you dual-boot with Windows and have trouble accessing your NTFS drive, check which NTFS driver is actually being used rather than assuming the kernel default is active.

pacman database lock error

sudo rm /var/lib/pacman/db.lck

AUR package fails to build

sudo pacman -Sy archlinux-keyring cachyos-keyring
yay -S --rebuild package-name

Troubleshooting Common Questions

Is CachyOS actually faster than other distros?

Not dramatically, according to independent benchmarks — broad testing has shown CachyOS performing similarly to Fedora, EndeavourOS and Ubuntu, with XDA measuring only a ~3% Geekbench difference against Ubuntu. Its real advantage is a pre-tuned kernel and gaming setup out of the box, not raw hardware speed.

Is CachyOS good for Linux beginners?

It's more approachable than vanilla Arch thanks to the graphical installer and automatic hardware detection, but it's still fully mutable Arch underneath — you're expected to maintain it yourself. If you want gaming-ready Linux with near-zero maintenance, Bazzite is the easier starting point.

Does CachyOS support NVIDIA GPUs?

Yes — chwd detects NVIDIA hardware and offers the proprietary driver during install. See the Troubleshooting section above for a known HDMI refresh-rate issue after driver updates.

Can I switch an existing Arch install to CachyOS without reinstalling?

You can add the CachyOS repos and install the CachyOS kernel and tools on top of an existing Arch system — you don't strictly need to reinstall from the CachyOS ISO. Most users still install fresh from the ISO for the guided partitioning and hardware detection.