The August 2026 release of CachyOS is now available, bringing a suite of system refinements and improved hardware detection for users of PC gaming handhelds. Existing users can access the update immediately through the standard rolling release update process, while new users can grab the improvements via an updated ISO.
Key Technical Improvements
- Handheld Detection: The chwd hardware detection tool now utilizes board_name pattern matching to better identify and configure various PC handhelds.
- Kernel Management: The kernel-manager backend has been rewritten in Rust and integrated into chwd-kernel for improved stability.
- Installer Updates: The installer now offers the CachyOS Hyprland Noctalia desktop option using noctalia-greeter and has switched Cinnamon to lightdm-slick-greeter.
- Performance Tuning: New nice-value tuning has been added to limits.d via cachyos-settings.
Bug Fixes and Infrastructure
The development team addressed several issues regarding hardware identification, including a fix for missing board_name DMI files and improved handling of virtual machine environments. The CachyOS-Welcome tool has also been reworked to handle DNS queries more efficiently, ensuring the speed-test based server ranking functions correctly.Additionally, the Cachy-Update utility has been rebased onto Arch-Update v4.x, and the systray applet has been rewritten in Rust. For mirror performance tracking, cachyos-rate-mirrors now utilizes the official CachyOS mirrorlist API, and a new Tier 2 mirror has been added in Hungary. Official documentation has also been updated, specifically revising the "Gaming with CachyOS" guide to remove older launch options that are no longer necessary when using the latest proton-cachyos-slr.