The performance-focused Arch distribution CachyOS has released its ISO for August 2026. On board are KDE Plasma 6.7.4, a revamped installer and a graphical package manager rewritten entirely from C# to the Zig language.
Current desktops and kernel
The snapshot brings KDE Plasma 6.7.4 (with Frameworks 6.28, Gear 26.04.3 and Qt 6.11.1) as well as the Linux 6.18 LTS kernel. The installer has been improved in several places: the Hyprland option now uses the Noctalia login instead of SDDM, the Cinnamon option uses lightdm-slick-greeter, and the COSMIC variant gains COSMIC Monitor.
Package manager rewritten in Zig
The biggest change is under the hood: “Shelly,” the default graphical package manager, has been ported from C# to Zig. This removes the dependency on a managed runtime – according to the developers, the native version uses less memory and starts faster.
Better hardware detection
The chwd detection tool now identifies handheld systems using the DMI “board_name” field and fixes issues with missing DMI information as well as in virtual machines.
