CachyOS March 2026 Release Changelog

Announcements
1

Hello CachyOS Enthusiasts,

This is our second release of the year, bringing animated desktop previews in the installer, Winboat integration, a reworked website, and significant handheld edition changes!

First, the installer now shows animated GIF/WebP previews in the Desktop Selection to showcase each desktop environment. This is currently enabled for Plasma, GNOME, Niri and COSMIC, giving users a much better idea of what to expect before making their choice. And also, added support for JPEG XL in the Desktop Selection to reduce image sizes. The Desktop Environment list has also been sorted from easy and accessible setups to more advanced ones like window managers. Cachy-Update is now enabled by default for GNOME and KDE installations. The microcode installation logic has been improved - it will now detect the hardware and install the proper microcode instead of installing both and then removing the unneeded one. The error message when the EFI partition is too small has also been improved.

CachyOS-Welcome now includes a button to easily install and enable Winboat for a seamless Windows Docker VM experience. We have also added support for keyboard navigation to improve accessibility.

On the kernel side, linux-cachyos now publishes tagged releases in a dedicated Linux repository, replacing the previous single-patch (0001-cachyos-base-all.patch) workflow. chwd has massively decreased the initramfs size for NVIDIA dGPU configurations. We have also improved the experience for users in China with cachyos-rate-mirrors, which now includes a proper check before rating the mirrors. In cachyos-settings, the wireless regulatory domain is now automatically set based on the user’s timezone. The website design has been reworked and improved to follow more modern standards.

For the Handheld Edition, we have replaced gamescope-session-plus with gamescope-session-cachyos, which is forked from Valve’s gamescope-session and enables firmware updates for Steam Deck and Lenovo Legion Go devices. SDDM has been replaced with plasma-login-manager, and Limine is now selected as the default bootloader with automatic snapshots - systemd-boot will still be selectable.

On the fixes side, we have removed bcachefs from the filesystem selection, as it now requires bcachefs-dkms. We also fixed encryption when LUKS2 is used and fixed enabling the “ly” display manager. In cachyos-settings, cachyos-bugreport.sh now redacts IP, username, hostname, and MAC address.

Finally, we are happy to announce new mirrors in Russia (jura12), Sweden (Zyner), and Canada (All Things Linux).

Features:

  • Installer:
    • Added support to show GIF/WebP videos in the Desktop Selection to showcase the desktops. This is enabled for Plasma, GNOME, Niri and COSMIC
    • Added support for JPEG XL in the Desktop Selection to reduce image sizes
    • Cachy-Update is now enabled by default for the GNOME and KDE installations
    • Improved microcode installation logic — it will now detect the hardware and install the proper microcode instead of installing both and then removing the unneeded one
    • Improved error message when the EFI partition is too small
    • Sorted the Desktop Environment list from easy and accessible setups to more advanced ones like WMs
  • CachyOS-Welcome:
    • Added a button to easily install and enable “Winboat” for an easy Windows Docker VM
    • Added support for FFMUC DNS server in DNS selection
    • Added Ukrainian translation
  • chwd: Decreased the initramfs size massively for NVIDIA dGPU configurations
  • linux-cachyos: Instead of generating a 0001-cachyos-base-all.patch, a release is now generated in a Linux repository for each release of our patched kernel
  • cachyos-rate-mirrors: Improved the experience for users in China&Russia massively with a proper check before rating the mirrors
  • cachyos-settings: Added support to automatically set the wireless regulatory domain based on timezone
  • website: The website design has been reworked and improved to follow more modern standards
  • GitHub: Added issue templates to important GitHub repos to improve the quality of bug reports and provide guidance for the user
  • Mirrors: New mirrors in Russia (jura12, cachy-arch.ru), Sweden (Zyner), and Canada (All Things Linux)

Fixes:

  • Installer:
    • Removed support for bcachefs in the filesystem selection due to the requirement of bcachefs-dkms
    • Fixed encryption when LUKS2 is used for specific devices
    • Fixed enabling the “ly” display manager
  • cachyos-settings: cachyos-bugreport.sh now redacts IP, username, hostname, and MAC address
  • chwd:
    • Generic handheld profiles and improved support for handheld GPUs
    • fwupd is now enabled for Lenovo handhelds

Changelog for Handheld Edition:

  • gamescope-session: Replaced gamescope-session-plus with gamescope-session-cachyos, which is forked from Valve’s gamescope-session
    • Enables firmware updates for Steam Deck and Lenovo Legion Go devices
  • plasma-login-manager: Replaced SDDM with plasma-login-manager for the login manager
  • bootloaders: Limine is now selected as default with automatic snapshots. systemd-boot will still be selectable
  • Installer: Merged Handheld Calamares with desktop edition calamares together
  • ISO: ISO now uses Wayland instead of X11

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

Thanks to the Team, Looks like you guys have been very busy.

Very helpful:

:+1:

4

Congrats on the new release guys.

May be time to reload my deck to get all the new changes!

Love the privacy changes for cachy bug report as well

Also new site update looks good. Presuming Harsh did that so good work buddy!

5

Many thanks to the entire development team!

6

Dear CachyOS Team thanks a lot for your passion and commitment! :tada:

Great things come with this release!

7

As always, thank you very much for the effort that goes into this. The CachyOS installer has come a long way since I first started using it.

A question about one of the changes though:

Is this meant to be by something other than time zone? Looking at the list of time zones in the installer I see that many countries are not represented; you just choose a city whose time zone best aligns with yours. I wouldn’t think that it’d be suitable to set wifi regulatory domain based upon a choice where you could very easily be choosing a country that is not your own.

That said, it’s a great thing that this is set by default now. One of the best new features, in my opinion. As long as it’s accurate!

8

This is to set the wireless standard configuration, e.g allowing Wifi 7 automatically if the country does allow it.

It also automatically detects if you switch your timezone, e.g youre flying from your country to another country not supporting Wifi 7 then this is disabled :slight_smile:

Frequency regulations are quite important for few countries, and before this change Wifi 7 did not work out of the box in “supported countries”, so this is an improvement for such hardware.

But it will use your current timezone to detect the country/region you are.

9

Okay sounds good. Was a little different than what I was thinking then.

10

for limine on the handheld, is there no way to change the shortcuts or enable the touchscreen?

With systemd you could go into the system firmware options, limine you cant unless you have a keyboard attached or do it the manual way.

Other than that. ISO installed and is running great.

11

That is terrific news :clap::clap::clap:

Also all of the other things like LUKS and Winboat :+1:

12

This was fixed for the inxi last year some time;

But that change only affected the inxi .. anything else in the rest of the dmesg or other output might include that info so theres a whole extra function to actively redact that info;

But looking at it it seems it just automatically overwrites every example of those things. Which may not be actually desirable.

In cases where a flag was missing or we were crafting manual output I had used things like, ex;

| sed -e "s/$HOSTNAME/HOST/gI" -e "s/$USER/USER/gI"

So we might want to use something similar to only redact the users/systems hostname/username/email/IP/+ rather than obfuscating every example of an IP and so on.

13

I’d like to thank everyone who worked hard on this. Thank you so much.

Personally, I’d also appreciate some consideration for lesser known keyboards and machines.

In fact, this has been mentioned in other CachyOS user groups, but after installation, the keyboard doesn’t work (as configured during installation) and instead reverts to a 104 or 105 keyboard, and there are issues with the keyboard backlight on Intel Macs and other devices that can’t be turned on (or controlled) (unless you switch to the Arch Linux kernel).

I’ve encountered these problems myself.

It’s usable without the backlight, and the keyboard issue can be fixed after installation, so although it’s not urgent, I would like it to be resolved. It’s a problem that doesn’t often occur with other distributions these days.

14

What’s the best way to disable possibly FSB spoiled russian servers from mirrors list?

15

Thanks cachyOS team for supporting my device integrated shortcuts. even if my device can handle the latest window, This is the first OS that makes me wanna learn Software, understand all fundamental of linux, and i wanna acknowledge the real of an actual speed from the beast of this

16

Is there a guide on this? Or do I just install Limine, then uninstall systemd-boot from Octopi?

Still, I am happy to see this as the user experience of needing separate boot media for snapshot restoration isn’t ideal.

Since we are adding stuff to CachyOS Welcome, maybe CachyOS Welcome can add a toggle to enable flatpak (along with setting up flathub, ideally with choice as to user or system level install) and then install the proper GUI installer for Flatpak for the DE?

17

For ROG Ally, from back when I was on Bazzite, I got inputs working by pressing Volume Up during boot so that it’ll ask what I want to boot - after that I was able to use dpad and face buttons just fine in the GRUB menu for some reason.

There may be similar workaround for your device?

18

Yeah grub and system D everything worked.

With limine, i can dpad around the main menu in the middle, but you need to hit a button (on your keyboard) to do other things like going into the firmware, right now thats not working (with limine)

19

In the terminal you can manually run “rate mirrors” and exclude countries:
rate-mirrors --exclude-countries RU cachyos | sudo tee /etc/pacman.d/cachyos-mirrorlist

20

It’s good but you broke screen autodim option in power settings. I downloaded January iso just to exclude issues on my end and it works there.

fix it please.

On CachyOS forum on discord another user also reported the same issue.