CachyOS

Reader supplied reviews for CachyOS Average rating 7.9 from 389 review(s) Please select a rating in the range of 1-10. Please write at least a few sentences about the distribution while limiting your review to 4080 characters. What are your thoughts on CachyOS? Please include a few pros and a few cons, along with your overall impression of the operating system. Our FAQ page has tips on writing a good mini-review. Version: -- 251129241221231210221230 Rating:    -- 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 out of 10 Your review (minimum 250 words): Past reviews - sort by: DateVotes Version: 251129 Rating: 1 Date: 2026-01-23 Votes: 0 1. Not optimized for the latest hardware: Specifically, it's an OS with x86-64-v3 and v4 repositories, not allowing it to fully utilize the potential of the newest hardware. While Linus Torvalds is critical of the level of CPU optimization and believes this classification will become less relevant, CachyOS's dedication is to not improve performance and introduce more bugs, crashes, freeze-ups and overall headaches. 2. Many unnecessary applications: The GUI has a lot of bloatware, providing tools that users normally wouldn’t use and cannot easily remove later if needed. 3. Buggy pre-installed tools: bottom-tier CLI tools are included from the start, and Zsh comes with no built-in plugins. FishShell is the default shell, widely considered not user-friendly, cumbersome and difficult to use. Other unnecessary tools for setting up your environment are thrown in haphazardly and they don’t work. 4. Stability: If you experience instability, review your hardware configuration. While having multiple desktop environments (DEs) to choose from is an advantage, be aware that some DEs may be unstable. 5. Limited keyboard navigation: The Tab key doesn't cycle focus through buttons in the install menu, preventing installation from the GUI screen using only the keyboard. 6. Unresponsive installer: The installer app can be unresponsive. You might be tempted to click repeatedly, but be patient and wait after clicking a button, or you might cause a crash and kernel panic, like I experienced. 7. KDE stability: While KDE is the flagship desktop environment, it can be unstable sometimes because of how the developers of CachyOS “optimize” their distro. Gnome is considerably even more unstable and difficult to use. 8. Overutilization of Flatpak: When looking for applications, check Flathub for Flatpak versions first- you’ll see how heavily bloated it is and all of the questionable privacy stuff it claims to need to work. Flatpak does not add a streamlined installation experience and reduces compatibility. While CachyOS gaming meta is available, it’s even more unstable than regular CachyOS, using Steam through Flatpak rather than installing it locally will cause more compatibility issues. Finally, it's unfair to compare this Frankenstein patchwork of a distro to other, better distros that actually work and developers who care to have a thriving, friendly community instead of a hostile, bleak one like CachyOS is. If you prefer this, by all means, continue to use it- be prepared for the headaches and drama this will cause though. Was this review helpful? Yes No Version: 251129 Rating: 10 Date: 2026-01-21 Votes: 1 I hop between distros until I find one I like. Mint... OK, it's stable but runs kinda sluggish for me on good hardware. Zorin... Good. Never had any problems. I think it runs better than Mint. Currently running on an 8th gen i7 NUC with 32GB RAM. CachyOS... its been rock stable and not had one problem so far after 2 months of use. Snappy and quick. Currently running on my 8th gen Legion Slim 7i and my Intel Intel NUC 11 Enthusiast (Phantom Canyon). I have not tried the official release of Mint 22.3 yet. Have not really had a desire to. If someone was wanting to switch from win to lin, I would suggest one of the above three based on their needs and/or experience level. All are very good, but for me as a daily, I am using CachyOS. Was this review helpful? Yes No Version: 251129 Rating: 10 Date: 2026-01-20 Votes: 0 I really like the out-of-the-box experience, as it detected my hardware (amd chip + graphics) automatically and i didn't need to configure anything for it. Another point i really like is the support of many desktop environments in the installer menu as you don't need to configure it yourself. For gaming it is perfect, as the gaming package is already installed and you can just transfer your steam games from windows without an error. Most of the times i need to adjust the proton version, as some bugs may appear, but that is not the worst, as i can play many games on epic visual settings with 90 fps. Was this review helpful? Yes No See all 389 reader reviews of CachyOS...