The CachyOS team has released the June 2026 ISO, the project’s fourth update this year, for this Arch-based Linux distro designed for gaming, performance, offering optimized packages, custom kernels, and an easy-to-use installation process.
The most notable change is the new CachyOS Hyprland Noctalia desktop option in the installer. A preview video is included to help users review their selection before installation.
Under the hood, the package stack has also been improved, as Python now uses extended PGO to improve performance in Python workloads. Plus, the distro added a GCC patch for generic x86 branch misprediction tuning, allowing GCC to better account for branch misprediction costs on modern Intel and AMD CPUs.
Additionally, Pacman now includes network isolation for scriptlets and hooks, preventing package scripts from accessing the network by default. At the same time, the Proton package has been renamed from proton-cachyos to proton-cachyos-native.
The release ships with the CachyOS-flavored Linux kernel 7.1, paired with the latest KDE Plasma 6.7.1, KDE Frameworks 6.27, KDE Gear 26.04.2 apps collection, Qt 6.11, and Wayland by default.
The installer has received several updates. Paru has been removed, and users are now encouraged to use Shelly (a modern GUI package manager for Arch-based systems) via its graphical interface or CLI. MangoWM now uses SDDM as its display manager, and GNOME System Monitor has been replaced with Resources.
On top of that, the Welcome app has been updated to support DNS-over-QUIC through blocky, including custom endpoints. Additional changes include a new Troubleshooting page, support for Ptyxis as a terminal, and translation updates.
The hardware detection tool, chwd, now resolves driver conflicts on multi-GPU systems where different GPUs require incompatible driver branches, such as mixed NVIDIA generations. CachyOS will attempt to install the best common driver or default to the primary GPU in these cases.
Cachyos-settings now sets a 15-second startup timeout and a 10-second shutdown timeout for user services. According to devs, this change prevents extended shutdown delays caused by services waiting too long to terminate.
The installer now correctly manages keyboard layout ordering and locale1 configuration, copies the correct pacman configuration, removes leftover /etc/calamares directories, runs Calamares cleanup after all installation scripts, and eliminates a redundant Limine post-install step.
Finally, the Welcome app now also hides the “Install Apps” button when cachyos-pi is not installed, resolving a related crash. Another issue causing crashes due to unreadable or broken saved settings files has also been fixed, with settings now resetting to defaults in such cases.
Existing CachyOS users do not need to make any manual changes. As usual, updating the system with sudo pacman -Syu is sufficient. New installation images for both Desktop and Handheld editions are now available from CachyOS mirrors.
For additional details, see the announcement.
Octopi still better than Shelly. Nobody nedd this really…