[Announcement] CachyOS June 2026 Release

Announcements
1

Hello CachyOS Enthusiasts,

This is our fourth release of the year, bringing the new CachyOS Hyprland Noctalia desktop option, DNS-over-QUIC support, Python and GCC performance improvements, and a variety of installer and hardware detection fixes!

First, the package stack has received a few important improvements. Python now uses extended PGO, improving performance for Python workloads. We have also added a GCC patch for generic x86 branch misprediction tuning, helping GCC better account for branch misprediction costs on modern Intel and AMD CPUs. Our pacman package now includes network isolation for scriptlets and hooks, preventing them from accessing the network by default. We also fixed a regression found in Phoronix Benchmarks when OpenBLAS was used on high core count CPUs. Additionally, proton-cachyos has been renamed to proton-cachyos-native.

The installer now includes the CachyOS Hyprland Noctalia desktop option together with a preview video, making it easier to see the desktop before selecting it. paru has been removed from the installation; users are recommended to use Shelly, either through its GUI or CLI, as an alternative. MangoWM now uses SDDM as its display manager, and GNOME System Monitor has been replaced with Resources. The audio package group now includes realtime-privileges, and the live session has better keyboard layout and variant detection.

CachyOS-Welcome now supports DNS over QUIC through blocky, including support for custom endpoints. A dedicated Troubleshooting page has been added, Ptyxis is now supported as a terminal, and new Azerbaijani and Greek localizations are available. The French readme and involvement pages have also been added. Several existing translations (Italian, German, French, Japanese, Bulgarian) were updated, and we fixed a crash when saved settings couldn’t be read, plus corrected tweak state detection and global-service disabling via polkit.

In chwd, we added Turkish localization and removed cachyos-handheld from the handheld package lists. We also corrected virtual-machine vendor IDs, removed unnecessary fprintd service activation, and fixed the Mesa removal guard. chwd now resolves driver conflicts on multi-GPU systems where GPUs require incompatible driver branches, and ships a 32-bit Vulkan driver for virtual machines.

In cachyos-settings, user services now have a 15-second startup timeout and a 10-second shutdown timeout. This prevents long 90-second shutdown delays caused by user services waiting too long during shutdown.

On the fixes side, the installer now correctly handles keyboard layout ordering and locale1 configuration. It also copies the correct pacman configuration into the installed system, removes leftover /etc/calamares directories after installation, runs Calamares cleanup after all installation scripts, and drops the redundant Limine post-install step. In CachyOS-Welcome, selecting “Install Apps” no longer crashes when cachyos-pi is not installed; the button is now hidden when unavailable.

Features:

  • Packages:
    • Python now uses extended PGO to improve performance
    • Added a GCC patch for generic x86 branch misprediction tuning, improving how GCC accounts for branch misprediction costs on modern Intel and AMD CPUs
    • Fixed a regression found in Phoronix Benchmarks when OpenBLAS was used on high core count CPUs
    • Renamed proton-cachyos to proton-cachyos-native
  • pacman: Added network isolation for scriptlets and hooks
  • Installer:
    • Added CachyOS Hyprland Noctalia desktop option and preview video
    • Removed paru from the installation; users are recommended to use Shelly, either through its GUI or CLI, as an alternative
    • Added SDDM as the display manager for MangoWM
    • Replaced GNOME System Monitor with Resources
    • Added realtime-privileges to the audio package group
    • Improved live-session keyboard layout and variant detection
  • CachyOS-Welcome:
    • Added DNS over QUIC (DoQ) support through blocky
    • Added a dedicated Troubleshooting page
    • Added Ptyxis terminal support
    • Added Azerbaijani and Greek localizations
    • Added French readme and involvement pages
    • Updated Italian, German, French, Japanese, and Bulgarian translations
  • chwd:
    • Added Turkish localization
    • Removed cachyos-handheld from handheld package lists
    • Resolves driver conflicts on multi-GPU systems requiring incompatible driver branches (e.g. mixed NVIDIA generations), installing the best common driver or falling back to the primary GPU
    • Added the 32-bit Vulkan driver for virtual machines
  • cachyos-settings: Applied 15-second startup and 10-second shutdown timeouts to user services, preventing 90-second shutdown delays

Fixes:

  • Installer:
    • Fixed keyboard layout ordering and locale1 configuration handling
    • Fixed copying the correct pacman configuration into the installed system
    • Removed leftover /etc/calamares directories after installation
    • Moved Calamares cleanup after all installation scripts
    • Removed the redundant Limine post-install step
  • CachyOS-Welcome:
    • Prevented a crash when selecting “Install Apps” without cachyos-pi installed; the button is now hidden when unavailable
    • Fixed a crash when the saved settings file could not be read or parsed; settings now reset to defaults on failure
    • Corrected tweak detection (including graphical-session.target.wants) and global user-service tweak disabling via polkit
  • chwd:
    • Corrected virtual-machine vendor IDs
    • Removed unnecessary fprintd service activation
    • Fixed the Mesa removal guard

Manual changes for existing users: No manual changes needed. Just the usual updating:

sudo pacman -Syu

Download:

Desktop Edition:

Grab your copy of the latest ISO from our mirrors on SourceForge:

Handheld Edition:

Support Us:

Your contributions help us maintain our servers. Consider supporting CachyOS through:

Thank you for your continued support!

The CachyOS Team

3

Hi Peter, as much as I love Cachy, I can’t understand why you first replaced Octopi with Shelly and now you even ditch paru. Would you guys explain that move a little in detail?

Octopi and paru are tools that exist for a very long time and have proven themselves over and over to be 100% reliable.

Shelly? Not so much. Just take a look around here in the forum, you will see Shelly doing unexpected things, more than once..

I understand that with @azdanov, at least one Cachy dev is actively contributing to Shelly, but IMHO this cannot be the only reason to force a tool unto new users that still has to prove it is actually capable of doing what paru was known for: being totally reliable.

Because actually…

users are recommended to use Shelly, either through its GUI or CLI, as an alternative.

you are not recommending Shelly as an alternative to paru but as a replacement. For when there is no paru, Shelly cannot be an alternative to it :wink:

4

Best move to make! No longer need to support that attack surface and onus is now completely on the users if do it manually after enabling support in Shelly or installing paru/yay themselves

Time to update my torrents.

5

https://www.reddit.com/r/cachyos/s/WTlOFInNaw

He explains it here

6

Wow, that’s… short. Okay, I guess I have to accept that. To be fair, I didn’t know paru was a stale project, that makes things a little more understandable. Thanks.

7

I really like using cachy-update for installing updates. Without paru, I’m assuming that it will no longer update my AUR packages?

8

You are correct in assuming that. You can install paru to remedy the issue.

And this is only on fresh installs. It won’t affect systems already in progress.

I also use cachy-update/arch-update for updating and that’s what I’ll be doing whenever I install a fresh system again.

9

I don’t use the AUR/paru etc, but won’t shelly replace that and will be “integrated” with cachyos-update? It has AUR support.

10

No, for a couple reasons.

Shelly and cachy-update are separate and have no integration with each other. If you were to run the arch-update script provided by cachy-update and did not have an AUR helper installed, then it would not be able to check AUR packages for updates.

Also, I deselect Shelly from the installer so it never makes it onto my system. Even if there was an integration it would not apply to me.

11

We will look into integrating Shelly AUR update support into Cachy-Update soon.

12

Please pay attention to the shelly logs. At the moment, they are very inconvenient, as they show the change in loading/progress with a new line each time. If a large package is being loaded, it will spam the log with a new line.

13

Isn’t that redundant when Shelly provides a full notification / tray UI option of its own for all package types?

14

Hey, first of all, a huge thank you for your work - you are doing something amazing! Thanks to your work, I’ve finally switched from Windows to Linux almost a year ago

I have a question related to DNS changes & blocky - it’s not installed by default, so I assume it will be installed and configured automatically if I will use cachy-welcome to configure custom DNS & DoT/DoH/DoH? I ask, because right now I use custom config using systemd-resolved i.e. Adguard Private DNS service via DoT + HaGeZi DNSes as fallback.

If answer is yes - does blocky also use some fallback (Cloudflare? probably the most popular upstream & fallback) + does it cache results? I checked this project docs and it’s very similar to ex. Adguard Home, just without GUI

15

Yeah, this is why I can’t use Shelly for system updates right now. I find the log almost impossible to read so I’m worried I’ll miss something important. And Cachy-Update is pretty much perfect in that regard.

16

I believe the “as an alternative.” is for using shelly through its CLI commands instead of using the GUI, and not about Shelly being an alternative to paru. However, the comma placement did make it misleading. :wink:

17

Hi, thank you for the new iso. The new checksum from the iso would be nice.

18

I went a different route after the recent aur compromise. I replaced all my aur packages with official repo ones or changed my workflow to remove aur dependencies. So far I have not lost any functionality. But good to read that shelly is tightening the aur reins now.

19

Nice move. Unfortunately, some things are just not available in the official repos. My current Achilles heel is epsonscan2

20

Yeah, those hardware specific things are a bitch. If I really had to use an aur package I would probably build it from git source or, if feasible, build my own.