this post was submitted on 15 Mar 2026
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What's the difference between this and a fresh install of Arch with a DE like KDE/Gnome?
I've been using Arch for so long now that if I bought a new machine I would find it hard to try anything else.
Arch gives you a bare bones DE, and you have to install/configure everything yourself.
CachyOS gives you a larger volume of default applications in a basic install, and lots of the stuff comes with useful configs out of the box. It also has hardware specific optimisations for multiple generations of CPU in its repos, but how much of a difference that makes in the real world is unclear
I did some Benchmarks and CachyOS claims of around 15% more performance seem to be true. Unigin Heavenbenchmark , Super Tuxkart and Furmark all got improved scores compared to PopOS. Additionally Fallout 4 now runs a lot smoother which is probably due to the BORE scheduler doing something better. My local LLMs also seem to be slightly faster and for some reason now need less V-Ram.
This is likely due to zram being setup by default
The hell is zram?
You know how you can compress files? It work for ram as well.
Downloaded more ram, got it
Oh god the meme is true
Basically it compresses your data in the RAM. Needs a little more work form the CPU but it is still faster than swap. fyi
They should have called it cram. Lost opportunity.
Interesting thank you!
It something than claims to handle swapping better on low ram systems.. I never noticed much difference on the lower spec machines I tried it on.
I had zram setup on my previous OS as well and on cachy the LLM didn't need to use it while on my old OS it did. My guess would be that the driver had a little less overhead.
It would still use zram if it's setup, only way it wouldn't is if you gone out of your way to disable it. Combine zram and the bore scheduler and it's going to run better for sure.
But if the LLM stays in the V-RAM or even just stays in normal RAM does it still benefit from zram? I thought that only helped when the ram was not enough.
So I'd say it is more likely the bore scheduler + better drivers.
It's all three! Cachy OS sets it up where it applies to both regular ram and vram. Even if just using a swap in ram, it will still be much faster than swapping to disk. Plus to the application, it looks like it has more ram/vram than there is physical ram/vram.
Yes but my previous OS had zram setup as well, unless PopOS was using a worse compression algorithm, zram was not the main player here. Also there is no such thing as zram for vram unless you are talking about hardware compression.
To add a tiny bit of technical detail here, vanilla Arch enforces support for x86_64 v1, meaning all software available in the Arch repos is built to not use any cpu feature that didn't exist in v1. Not a bad thing since it allows for support of older (64 bit) hardware, but it does leave like 20 years of microarchitecture advancement on the table.
According to the CachyOS website, they have repos with software built for v3 and v4 which can apparently juice your rig for an extra 20% performance.
Pretty much everything. Seperate package repo shipping cpu modern optimized binaries, custom kernel, and a ton of gaming and preformance related patches applied ontop of various packages. As well as a gui installer.
I think it’s aimed more at newbies than seasoned veterans like yourself.
Yeah Arch exists for such a long time I will take base distros for reliability any day. Even if that means losing slight performance many things will go mainline in the future or if I cared enough I'd just patch them there. I honestly feel like baseline distros are really good long term and I think Archs barebones approach is perfect tbh
Everything.
Mostly, it's just too convenient, but it's way more than just a preset. I wouldn't go back to vanilla Arch if you paid me.
Only different config, since it's based on arch.
They have their own pacman-mirror, pacman is set up to download a lot more in parallel and they set the scheduler formerly known as "cachy", which is supposedly really good for a snappy UX.
It's a lot more than that. It doesn't fork Arch like Manjaro, but they have tons of custom and extremely convenient and useful packages in their repos. It's also a living "optimization experiment" in the vein of Intel's Clear Linux (may it rest in peace).