CachyOS is back with its August 2026 release, and the Arch-based Linux distribution continues to look more ambitious with each update.
This is the project’s fifth release of the year, and there is a lot going on here. The biggest change is probably Shelly, the default graphical package manager, which has been completely rewritten from C# to Zig.
The CachyOS developers say the move gets rid of the managed runtime in favor of native binaries, which should mean lower memory usage and faster startup times. That sounds good on paper, although package managers are not exactly where most people are losing sleep over performance. Still, if the developers can make the software lighter without sacrificing usability, I am all for it.
Shelly itself gets a pretty substantial redesign too. There is now a welcome screen for first-time users, and packages can be viewed in either a list or grid layout.
For those who regularly live dangerously in the AUR, Shelly can now preview PKGBUILD files and display build output. A new Utilities section also provides quick access to database syncing, cache cleanup, and orphan removal.
The Shelly CLI has received plenty of attention as well. Users can search both repositories and the AUR directly, while update checks can cover regular packages, AUR packages, AppImages, and Flatpaks.
Backup configurations can be imported and exported using TOML files. Flatpak support is now optional through a separate shelly-flatpak-backend package, which I actually like. If you do not use Flatpak, there is no reason the functionality needs to be sitting there taking up space.
Cachy-Update has also been reworked. It is now based on Arch-Update 4.x, and its system tray applet has been rewritten in Rust.
A new –check –enable option can turn on automatic update checks and start the tray application in one shot. Users can also configure how many updates appear per page in the tray, while the default update interval has been increased to six hours.
Rust is popping up elsewhere in the distribution too. CachyOS rewrote the kernel-manager backend from C++ to Rust and integrated it directly into chwd-kernel.
The chwd hardware detection utility now has better handheld detection using board-name matching. It also handles virtual machines more cleanly, deals gracefully with missing DMI information, correctly quotes pacman arguments, and adds Bulgarian localization.
The installer gets its own batch of changes. There have been fixes and refactoring to the command-line installer, but the most intriguing addition is experimental support for upcoming Server Edition installation profiles.
That caught my attention.
CachyOS has largely made a name for itself as a desktop-focused Arch Linux distribution, particularly among users interested in performance and gaming. A dedicated Server Edition could open the project up to an entirely different crowd.
There are plenty of desktop-specific tweaks in the August release too. The Hyprland Noctalia option now uses noctalia-greeter instead of SDDM, while Cinnamon switches from lightdm-gtk-greeter to lightdm-slick-greeter.
GNOME gets gvfs-dnssd, while COSMIC picks up cosmic-monitor.
CachyOS has also added new Noctalia variants for mango and niri, along with Noctalia v5 support for the Hyprland dotfiles. The Nord KDE theme has been updated for Plasma 6.7 as well.
Meanwhile, cachyos-settings gains a nice-value adjustment intended to address a PipeWire-related error.
Networking has not been ignored either. CachyOS-Welcome gets reworked DNS handling, allowing its speed-test-based system to more accurately select the fastest DNS server.
The cachyos-rate-mirrors tool now uses the CachyOS mirrorlist API when ranking mirrors. The developers say this should improve the handling of regional and outdated mirrors. There is also a new Tier 2 mirror in Hungary.
Gamers should take a look at the updated CachyOS gaming guide too. The documentation has been revised to remove older launch options that are no longer required when using the latest proton-cachyos-slr.
Existing CachyOS users do not need to do anything special for this release. A normal system update is enough.
I have to say, CachyOS feels like a Linux distro that is really on the come up right now. It seems to be making a big splash in the community, particularly among Arch users, gamers, and people who simply want a fast desktop without building everything from scratch themselves.
That does not automatically mean CachyOS is destined to become one of the major Linux distributions, of course. Linux projects can generate a lot of excitement and then disappear just as quickly. But CachyOS keeps shipping, keeps refining its tools, and keeps expanding what it wants to be.
The experimental Server Edition support is probably the part I will be watching most closely. If CachyOS can take the same performance-focused approach it uses on the desktop and successfully apply it to servers, things could get even more interesting.
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