CachyOS

Long-term owners

I've been daily driving CachyOS for ~3 years now. It was the first distro I could use "out of the box"

Nov 2025 · comment

What hackers pick instead

• UbuntuA mainstream Linux distro that mostly just works on lots of hardware, suits beginners and offers long LTS support, though critics dislike Snaps and Canonical's direction.560recommend
• DebianA community-run, free Linux distribution recommended for rock-solid stability, curated trustworthy package repositories and painless in-place upgrades; critics say stable packages are old and bug fixes rarely get backported.552recommend
• Fedora LinuxA mainstream, beginner-friendly Linux distro that mostly works out of the box and balances stability with current packages, though frequent release upgrades occasionally break things.437recommend
• Arch LinuxA rolling Linux distro praised for up-to-date, near-upstream packages, excellent wiki docs and installs that last for years, though updates can break things and much is manual.362recommend
• Linux MintA beginner-friendly Linux distro that feels familiar to Windows users, works out of the box with no ads or nagware, though major version upgrades and display quirks can be troublesome.277recommend

Every quote

The 40 most detailed of 380 comments. Each links to the original.

1. If you use a distro like CachyOS for example, you'll find that they use a kernel tuned for desktop use-case, so you don't need to tinker with anything.

   Recommends · Sep 2026 · in “Windows 11's "special" developer edition looks like another marketing misfire”

2. While cachyOS is so much more powerful it doesn't abuse that power like Windows and OSX with so many background processes and telemetry.

   Recommends · Mar 2026 · in “Welcome (back) to Macintosh”

3. Fantastic experience all around. KDE Plasma is an excellent window manager and everything just worked out of the box

   Recommends · Dec 2025 · in “Last Year on My Mac: Look Back in Disbelief”

4. i think cachyos actually does interesting things, but i still would never recommend an arch based distro to anyone

   Mixed · Aug 2026 · in “Omarchy: Any User Process Can Escalate to Root”

5. Games work with minimal farting about, the desktop is great out of the box and customisable in plenty of ways

   Recommends · Jul 2026 · in “Nothing works and everyone is euphoric”

6. the only distro I tried that handled the hybrid NVIDIA/AMD graphics out of the box without user configuration

   Recommends · Mar 2026 · in “CachyOS Is Now the Most Popular Desktop Distro on ProtonDB”

7. I'm sure cachyOS will work a treat out of the box, but i'm also sure that one day things will stop working

   Mixed · Nov 2025 · in “Gaming on Linux has never been more approachable”

8. Many of my games run better on Linux with the open source AMd drivers. (CachyOS rolling rolling rolling).

   Recommends · May 2026 · in “Was my $48K GPU server worth it?”

9. Normal people can definitely install an OS. Last weekend I set aside time help a friend install CachyOS.

   Recommends · Mar 2026 · in “Our Commitment to Windows Quality”

10. CachyOS is the way to go as they provide highly optimised (PGO/LTC etc) and CPU-family specific kernel

    Recommends · Aug 2026 · in “Apple introduces M6 and M5 Ultra”

11. I've been daily driving CachyOS for ~3 years now. It was the first distro I could use "out of the box"

    Recommends · Nov 2025 · in “CachyOS: Fast and Customizable Linux Distribution”

12. CachyOS has been smooth sailing for me! It is an arch derivative and it is blazing fast and stable.

    Recommends · Jan 2026 · in “Second Win11 emergency out of band update to address disastrous Patch Tuesday”

13. Even when I have disabled everything on macOS it is still no where near the speed on CachyOS / Arch

    Recommends · Feb 2026 · in “Why E cores make Apple Silicon fast”

14. It was so painless that I switched my desktop over as well, and I no longer have a windows device.

    Recommends · Jan 2026 · in “Microsoft forced me to switch to Linux”

15. I installed CachyOS for my 8-year old son and his desktop instead of Windows. It's been wonderful.

    Recommends · May 2026 · in “Windows quality update: Progress we've made since March”

16. Here's my quick intro to anyone interested in running a Linux machine for gaming and everyday use.

    Recommends · May 2026 · in “I love Linux, but I can't quit Windows”

17. To be honest, I don't notice a lot of difference and I think I'm as fine with Arch as with CachyOS

    Mixed · Nov 2025 · in “CachyOS: Fast and Customizable Linux Distribution”

18. distributions like CachyOS or Omarchy, that appeal to normal people over gatekeeping forum trolls

    Recommends · Aug 2026 · in “Omacom Foundation funding hits $10M”

19. a top-notch distro like CachyOS or Aurora is quantitatively and qualitatively superior to Windows

    Recommends · Sep 2026 · in “Android 17 is the first since 3.x to add new APIs without releasing to the AOSP”

20. The performance increases from their kernel + optimized packages are small but noticeable to me.

    Recommends · Jun 2026 · in “CachyOS June 2026 Release”

21. It's been more than capable for years. My setup required less configuration than Windows does.

    Recommends · Jan 2026 · in “The struggle of resizing windows on macOS Tahoe”

22. I actually ended up setting a triple-boot setup of Windows, Bazzite and CachyOS on my handheld

    Recommends · Nov 2025 · in “Bazzite: Operating System for Linux gaming”

23. It's about sane default packages and installers and desktop experience, as well as onboarding.

    Recommends · Nov 2025 · in “CachyOS: Fast and Customizable Linux Distribution”

24. I really like the idea of compiling both the kernel and packages for modern CPUs instructions.

    Recommends · Nov 2025 · in “CachyOS: Fast and Customizable Linux Distribution”

25. I still can't trust my CachyOS desktop not to do something surprising during important calls.

    Mixed · Jan 2026 · in “The struggle of resizing windows on macOS Tahoe”

26. I don't see how this could ever be stable enough that I'd want to run a real business on it.

    Mixed · Dec 2025 · in “The Performance of Arch Linux Powered CachyOS on AMD EPYC Servers”

27. it's based on Arch but with additional optimizations, better defaults, and is user friendly

    Recommends · Jan 2026 · in “I dumped Windows 11 for Linux, and you should too”

28. CachyOS does out of the box what many other distros could also do with manual configuration

    Recommends · Jan 2026 · in “I dumped Windows 11 for Linux, and you should too”

29. distributions like CachyOS are being broadly promoted to a user base who can't be reasonably expected to check over AUR packages themselves.

    Criticizes · Jun 2026 · in “Arch Linux Now Believes Malware Incident Under Control: More Than 1,500 Packages”

30. I think a lot of cachy performance is placebo, because Steam games use the container runtime's Debian 11 libraries

    Criticizes · Jan 2026 · in “I dumped Windows 11 for Linux, and you should too”

31. The default install comes with 3 different GUIs for installing software, all of them confusing and inconsistent.

    Criticizes · Jun 2026 · in “CachyOS June 2026 Release”

32. CachyOS is for the kind of gamer who'd de-bloat Windows, etc. to squeeze 1 fps more out of their hardware.

    Criticizes · Jan 2026 · in “I dumped Windows 11 for Linux, and you should too”

33. With all the unofficial patches and experimental compilers they use it must be full of subtle bugs.

    Criticizes · Nov 2025 · in “CachyOS: Fast and Customizable Linux Distribution”

34. I tried to install CachyOS with KDE on my wife's new laptop, and it was crashing KDE all the time.

    Criticizes · Nov 2025 · in “Gaming on Linux has never been more approachable”

35. That distro asking you to pick one out of 5 bootloaders and one out of 13 desktop environments?

    Criticizes · Jan 2026 · in “I dumped Windows 11 for Linux, and you should too”

36. I was only able to install the latest CachyOS image by modifying the boot arguments in grub

    Criticizes · May 2026 · in “Linux gaming is faster because Windows APIs are becoming Linux kernel features”

37. I like their model a lot. I mean it's very Arch to be able to choose whatever you want, but nice to have some opinionated defaults.

    Recommends · May 2026 · in “Your Dotfiles Are Not a Distro”

38. I've only used CachyOS for a couple of months, before that Arch since 2017, and never had any issues with nvidia cards on Linux

    Recommends · Nov 2025 · in “CachyOS: Fast and Customizable Linux Distribution”

39. With CachyOS having ZFS in the installer, you can just natively encrypt your setup with an officially maintained project

    Recommends · Apr 2026 · in “Creating a Bootable Backup USB with Encryption (for Pop!OS Linux)”

40. I'm genuinely impressed with it. The stability is very good, and I'm yet to break anything seriously on it.

    Recommends · Nov 2025 · in “Gaming on Linux has never been more approachable”