Over a month after its previous August update, and after topping DistroWatch’s rankings, the Arch-based performance-focused CachyOS has released its seventh refreshed ISO snapshot for the year.
The ISO and installer now ship with Orca and espeak-ng, providing screen-reading capability throughout the installation process. Under the hood, the team has enabled the mkinitcpio systemd hook on supported configurations.
For compatibility reasons, however, the hook is automatically disabled when users select ZFS or Bcachefs as the root filesystem. Bcachefs users now receive bcachefs-dkms, replacing the stock kernel module to provide better filesystem integration.
Moreover, the installer is now prepared to use both Plasma Login Manager and COSMIC Greeter. COSMIC installations will immediately switch to COSMIC Greeter, providing a better-aligned experience with the COSMIC desktop. Plasma Login Manager support is present but held back until its integration with KDE Settings matures.
Regarding hardware handling, supported Intel GPUs now automatically pull in intel-media-sdk and vpl-gpu-rt, while NVIDIA’s legacy 390xx driver is officially dropped. Fermi-generation cards will instead rely on Nouveau with NvBoost. The release also expands handheld device support to the ASUS ROG Ally and ROG Ally X, improving out-of-the-box compatibility for these x86 gaming handhelds.
Several core utilities have been updated as well. CachyOS-Hello now launches the system’s PackageInstaller rather than maintaining its own, and includes a new command-line interface for all GUI functionality. In cachyos-settings, the distribution disables ZRAM recompression for incompressible pages, concluding that it offers no performance benefit.
For gaming, Proton-CachyOS introduces a series of upgrades. Users can now enable dxvk-gplasync through PROTON_DXVK_GPLASYNC=1. AMD’s Anti-Lag layer is automatically disabled when using PROTON_FSR4_UPGRADE to avoid stability issues.
At the same time, Wayland behavior has been improved with fixes for fullscreen offset, input quirks, DPI handling, and video output. A newly tuned per-game shader cache, with larger limits—especially on NVIDIA GPUs—helps reduce shader recompilation events. FSR3 and XeSS upscaling improvements also land in this update.
The release also includes additional fixes, including correcting Limine installation on systems with broken UEFI implementations and switching to the systemd variant of the btrfs-overlayfs hook for better mkinitcpio compatibility. Calamares removes the deprecated attr2 option from XFS mount settings, and support for the T2 chip’s USB Ethernet interface has been disabled.
Lastly, existing users have one manual action to consider: Steam Native Runtime is deprecated, with a migration guide available on the project’s discussion board.
For more information, see the announcement.
As an Arch-based Linux distro, existing users can grab all these improvements with a simple sudo pacman -Syu command. For those opting for a fresh install, the updated ISO files are available for download via CachyOS’s SourceForge mirrors.
