Opinionated Arch Derivative Cachyos Overtakes Mint And Mx On Distrowatch

CachyOS bills itself as a Blazingly Fast & Customizable Linux distribution and that seems to be winning it friends. In the last month, it’s the number one distro on the popularity chart on the widely-used DistroWatch comparison site.

We know, it’s not a great indicator, but it’s still an interesting change and shows the project is attracting attention – the good way.

CachyOS offers the UKUI desktop mostly only seen in Ubuntu Kylin. It’s pretty, and unusual, and pretty unusual

One of the last times that we mentioned DistroWatch rankings, we got a chorus of disapproval on various open sourcey social media. Up to a point, the criticism is valid. DistroWatch’s rankings don’t prove anything. The site itself acknowledges this:

Saying that, it is notoriously hard to get any figures for interest in different Linux distros. Only a handful of paid enterprise distros have reliable usage numbers, and those vendors aren’t sharing them anyway. DistroWatch is one of the very few ways to get any impression, and when Facebook blocked the site in early 2025, that itself was newsworthy. But, as we said at the start of 2024, MX Linux and Linux Mint consistently top this particular chart, and both are still in the top four – with Debian the other one that’s rising, doubtless due to the recent release of version 13.

We also attracted criticism when we reviewed CachyOS in summer 2024. We pointed out a number of issues we encountered, and were scolded in the comments for testing a distro optimized for cutting-edge kit on an elderly ThinkPad W520, a model that dates back to 2011. Since The Reg FOSS desk now has a rather new testbed, a Dell XPS 13 9370 (which The Register‘s own Avram Piltch reviewed a few years ago), we thought we’d give it another try. We looked for other reviewers’ impressions and found that our previous write-up had been discussed on CachyOS’s forums.

They didn’t like the review much, but a later comment noted:

Good for them – we are always happy to help. According to that response, some of the issues we came across had already been fixed, and others were by design – which is reasonable. CachyOS is what some call an “opinionated” distro, and everyone has their own opinions.

We still saw some glitches with the July 2025 installer medium, which at the time of writing is the latest available. We tried the Xfce, UKUI, and COSMIC desktops. All worked well. UKUI is an uncommon desktop in the West, but we like it, although it’s nowhere near as configurable as Xfce. COSMIC is still in alpha, but it’s maturing into something that’s very much like GNOME, though slightly less minimal and noticeably snappier. It comes with the extra paru installer for pulling software from the occasionally troubled Arch User Repository (AUR) pre-configured, which meant it was the work of seconds to install the latest Google Chrome, for example.

For something more mainstream, there’s Xfce – this time with the added option of Wayland

We still saw some glitches, though. For example, as far as we could tell, Calamares didn’t install network-manager or any other GUI for connecting to Wi-Fi. This time around, it did add the machine’s swap partition to the config, in addition to its standard zram config. This vulture is neither a gamer nor keen on benchmarks, but we can confirm that CachyOS is blisteringly quick, and all three desktops felt exceptionally responsive.

CachyOS has a good showing in the latest Steam survey, too, with 4.21 percent of users, very close behind Ubuntu 24.04. We suspect that its high-performance optimizations may be helping it in the growing market for Linux gaming.

CachyOS may not be for everyone, but it’s clearly carving out a niche for itself, and anything that wins more popularity for Linux is good news in our book. ®

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