CachyOS

Reader supplied reviews for CachyOS Average rating 8.1 from 511 review(s) 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: -- 260809251129241221231210221230 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: 260809 Rating: 10 Date: 2026-08-30 Country: New Zealand Votes: 4 TLDR for windows only users like I was in the past: The user experience is probably better than windows (especially windows 11) as far as KDE plasma CachyOS went for me. I highly recommend trying it on a second ssd like I did to start with (dual boot). Even just installing it over windows should be fine unless you need to use some archaic software with dubious linux support (looking at you Autodesk). ~~Fluff~~ As the countdown on the remaining Windows 10 extended security updates was ticking down, I, a teenager with a very average technical capability (i.e. not a dev), was faced with using Windows 11, which I frankly did not want to do. I held my breath, bought a second ssd and gave Linux (CachyOS which a computer science friend running Arch recommended) a try. One and a half years later, I must say, I really appreciate myself for being an open minded individual. I will write this review with focus on the experience of transitioning from only having ever used Windows 10 to CachyOS. ~~The review~~ Overall if you're transitioning from windows 10, you will find that if you use KDE Plasma as the desktop environment, CachyOS turns out to be quite similar to the windows 10 experience. This combined with the really nice pre-installed software (not in the windows shitty preinstalled software way, looking at you windows media player), makes the process of learning the two mains things when it comes to using linux for the first time quite chill: - the package manager (which is now even simpler with Shelly, a UI package installer) - and the terminal (which therefore due to Shelly, is kinda optional now, but is still nice to know basic commands) Now I only dared to install CachyOS on a second ssd for a dual boot setup because I need to use archaic 3d software, Maya, and I assumed it wouldn't play nicely with Linux. I was half right. CachyOS (in my very layman understanding), is effectively Arch linux with really nice defaults and alterations - we even share software installation methods. And some amazing dude over on Arch made a installation method for Maya on Arch (on the AUR) despite Maya only being supported for Rocky Linux. So I installed Maya on CachyOS via that method and it worked brilliantly. Maya even ran better than on Windows 10 which was nuts. However one year later in a CachyOS update, dependencies for Maya were updated which made it Maya poop itself so I've been booting into the Windows ssd whenever I need to use that now (I probs should have just installed Rocky linux over CachyOS but oh well I would like to use Substance Painter too so Windows it is on the second SSD). So the point being if an archaic piece of software with dubious Linux support is part of your workflow, probably don't nuke your Windows installation off the bat. ~~Conclusion~~ If you, like me, believe that your computer system should not hate your soul (like come on Win11, stocks pop up in the taskbar by default, copilot by default, application launcher menu has ads, bruhhh), I'd implore you to give CachyOS a go (and I do mean CachyOS, because as far as I'm aware CachyOS compared to other distros has good defaults so setup will be easier as a windows user). Was this review helpful? Yes No Version: 260809 Rating: 9 Date: 2026-08-20 Country: The Netherlands Votes: 1 I installed Cachy OS on my old MacBook air from 2014. This thing flies again. Not everything worked out of the box but with some ChatGPT help everything is good. I decided to stay on LTS because the kernel is more stable and probably less stuff will break. Talking about breaking: i understand things will break LESS if one installs FlatPaks and AppImages. the AUR packages are the ones that break the most. Not sure if that will be my experience too, but after using Zorin, Mint, Solus and Pop OS I can truly say the Cachy is the fastest. Let's say about stability. Was this review helpful? Yes No Version: 260809 Rating: 10 Date: 2026-08-20 Country: France Votes: 12 I've been using CachyOS with the Noctalia shell on my laptop for a bit over 3 months now and it's been such a good experience. Almost everything I needed just worked out of the box, even on one of the most unusual desktop environments for CachyOS, the only things I still have issues with is the suspend feature that does not light my monitor back up and the bluetooth that can take quite some time to connect. Performance wise I have no complaint, everything starts surprisingly fast, the whole desktop runs using "only" 2GiB of RAM even though I customized it a bit. I have a very comfortable frame rate in every game (except for some old visual novels who decided they would only run with openGL...). CachyOS's custom version of proton seems to be helping a lot with both compatibility and performance, I almost never had a game that didn't work out of the box (but I do wanna say that I mostly play small indie single player games so I wouldn't know if it works as well with big AAA games). I also found that the documentation also helps a lot with gaming related issues (along with mostly anything else you may need help with), and as for most other Linux distributions the support is great. I also wanted to mention that it is really accessible to learn and I absolutely fell in love with the Noctalia shell for Niri, I can only recommend other people try this. Was this review helpful? Yes No See all 511 reader reviews of CachyOS...