CachyOS

Reader supplied reviews for CachyOS Average rating 7.9 from 425 review(s) Please specify which version of the distribtion you are reviewing. 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: -- 260308251129241221231210221230 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: 260124 Rating: 8 Date: 2026-03-07 Country: United States Votes: 2 It is now March, 2026. Last year, I encountered an impossible situation: a blank screen after installing CachyOS. This month, the experience is much, much better. The install seems easier, where last year I was ambushed at least twice. One difficulty does persist: CachyOS has disabled the use of os-prober in the grub configuration, for no good reason (IMHO). I have used i3wm, Plasma (both X11 and Wayland), hyprland, and Sway with the new CachyOS. All of them work well. The default i3wm setup was an improvement over others. In general the entire configuration defaults feel better. Startup is speedy. My experience is that CachyOS is noticeably speedier than other OSs. I have a complicated application that is available as a Deb or an RPM. I was able to install the deb by jumping through many hoops, each of which was the equivalent of a black box. It is a sloppy affair, but that is not the fault of CachyOS. My NVIDIA GTX-1050 works out of the box; the correct proprietary driver was installed by CachyOS. This is a major improvement. Or so it seems to me. I give this new version an "8" because I have not worked with CachyOS long enough for highest confidence. So far, this has been a great experience. Except for the complications when installing grub. Was this review helpful? Yes No Version: 260124 Rating: 6 Date: 2026-03-05 Country: United States Votes: 1 After installing CachyOS with KDE desktop. First boot would go to black screen with mouse cursor. After wasting several minutes reinstalling with other desktop environments, KDE was the only one not working. For the first time in years I had to go to a forum to follow bread crumbs to find KDE remedy. The fix was to login into shell and run plasma update. Unlike other review post. I found package installer lacking programs included with other Linux distros. Which lead to me back Arch forums to find work around. If you enjoy trouble shooting “bugs” and package installs. Which is a great way to learn. This might be your OS. Was this review helpful? Yes No Version: 260124 Rating: 8 Date: 2026-03-05 Country: Russia Votes: 5 Really just works distro. What I like about it: - Easy GUI installation - Fresh packages - Out of the box configuration of latest `new feature branch` nVidia drivers which means best performance with zero effort from end-user - Out of the box configuration of snapshots with BTRFS as file system + Limine as bootloader so you can roll-back in case your system got broken after update - Out of the box updating daemon `CachyUpdate` (just ArchUpdate skin) which will notify you about updates every hour (I've changed it to every 8 hours) - Out of the box software to run Windows executables (better to avoid it but nice that you don't need to set it up manually) - Nice Wiki documentation and Discord server - Have GUI for package installer (not as pretty in comparison to other distros' app stores though) - AUR / ChaoticAUR support which means you likely won't face a problems with packages you need (including proprietary ones) - Fast package manager with fun pacman animation - KDE Plasma works without any distro related problems - New open-source technologies like Wayland and PipeWire included and work by default - Just works for me as a Windows 10 refugee who used to observe Linux but not switch - GUI kernel manager so you can try different kernels and find one which work best for your hardware* - Have precompiled packages for x86_64_vN target CPU architectures depending on supported instructions set what can provide some performance benefits** *I don't think it's much useful for modern computers but for older ones maybe but let it be a pros because it gives you opportunity to try **I don't think it's much performance benefits in regular use on modern hardware but maybe that's crucial for older machines What I not really like: - I've heard developers used bots to promote their distro. If so then I highly condemn such behaviour - Have aura of "gaming turbo flex distro" and not as mature as core distros - Can't recommend it to those newbies or Windows refugees who aren't also a solid power-users or have time/will to explore nuances (I myself don't know much) - Strange syntax of package manager which is not as intuitive as `sudo apt install/search/update` or `sudo dnf install/search/update` - I'm sure it still will break some day and I will need to roll-back via snapshots - Default GUI for package installer is kinda ugly compared to modern store-like alternatives - Uses Calamares as installer which is buggy and can hang or close unexpectedly - Lacks offline installer and fully depends on internet connection during installation. Online installation is nice but I think it's better to have a choice between two options For now it's my daily driver for about 1.5 months and first distro which I've found less annoying to consider try switching from Windows 10. 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