CachyOS fans, get ready — this first release of 2025 (download ISO here) was definitely worth the wait. The team held off until NVIDIA’s latest driver was available to make sure users with Blackwell-based 50xx series GPUs had a seamless experience. Now, with the 570 driver in place, Blackwell support is fully integrated.
For those unfamiliar, CachyOS is an Arch Linux-based distribution that focuses on performance and optimization. It builds on the power of Arch while adding aggressive compiler optimizations, a user-friendly setup, and custom tweaks designed to get the most out of modern hardware.
This update introduces Propeller optimizations alongside AutoFDO, taking performance even further. With LLVM 19 now available, the CachyOS kernel is tuned to deliver around a 10 percent boost in throughput, depending on the workload, plus improved latency. The team is open to contributions on its benchmarking script, which is available on GitHub.
If you’re running an older NVIDIA GPU, take note — Blackwell requires the open-source NVIDIA driver, meaning older cards without GSP chips can’t use the “NVIDIA” boot option anymore. If you have a 10xx series or older GPU, you’ll need to select the first boot option instead. Thankfully, the installer will still detect the right packages automatically.
Beyond kernel and GPU changes, this release includes a few user-friendly upgrades. X11 sessions now have tap-to-click enabled by default, something many users have requested. NTFS handling has also improved, with the NTFS3 kernel driver replacing NTFS3G, boosting performance when dealing with Windows partitions. The kernel manager now supports switching to the “server” mode of scx_loader, which could be useful for certain workloads.
AMD users aren’t left out either. This update includes a fix for the AMD preferred core feature, and now the AMD 3D Cache Driver properly registers changes at runtime. Previously, those patches weren’t applying correctly, but that issue has been resolved.
A few important fixes round out this release. The long-standing issue where DaVinci Resolve wouldn’t work with CUDA when intel-opencl-runtime was installed has finally been addressed. Security updates are also included, with glibc patched to fix CVE-2025-0395. Plus, the kernel manager will now try to install the nvidia package for the default Arch kernel if a user installs the CachyOS kernel, streamlining the process.
Handheld edition users will be happy to hear that native Proton support is back, along with several minor fixes and improvements.
Good news, existing users! No laborious manual intervention is needed to get these updates — just run the usual system update:
sudo pacman -Syu
With this release, CachyOS continues show what an optimized Arch-based Linux distro can do, offering better performance, improved hardware support, and a smoother experience overall. Don’t even bother with vanilla Arch — just install this instead.
