CachyOS August 2026 Release

Key points

CachyOS has published its fifth release of 2026 (ISO 260809). It brings a rewritten Shelly package manager, a reworked update tool, installer changes for several desktops and experimental groundwork for a Server Edition. Existing users need no manual changes.

Installer

• The Hyprland Noctalia desktop option now uses noctalia-greeter instead of SDDM.
• Cinnamon switches from lightdm-gtk-greeter to lightdm-slick-greeter.
• gvfs-dnssd is added to GNOME and cosmic-monitor to COSMIC.
• The CLI installer received fixes and refactoring, plus experimental installation profiles for the upcoming Server Edition.

Shelly package manager

• Shelly, the default GUI package manager, was rewritten from C# to Zig for its major release, producing native binaries with lower memory use and faster startup.
• Desktop app: a first-run welcome screen, list and grid package browsing, AUR PKGBUILD previews with build output, and a Utilities page for database sync, cache cleanup and orphan removal.
• CLI: integrated repository and AUR search, combined update checks for repositories, AUR, AppImages and Flatpaks, and TOML backup import and export.
• Flatpak support is now the optional package shelly-flatpak-backend.

Cachy-Update

• Rebased onto Arch-Update v4.x, with the systray applet rewritten in Rust.
• A new --check --enable option turns on automated update checks and starts the systray in one step.
• The tray has configurable pagination through TrayUpdatesPerPage, and the default check interval rises to 6 hours.

Hardware detection and system tools

• chwd: better handheld detection through board-name matching, Bulgarian localization, and a kernel-manager backend rewritten from C++ to Rust and integrated into chwd-kernel.
• chwd fixes: a missing board_name DMI file is handled gracefully, VM environments are handled correctly, and pacman arguments are quoted correctly.
• CachyOS-Welcome: DNS handling was reworked so the speed-test ranking picks the fastest DNS server.
• cachyos-rate-mirrors now uses the CachyOS mirrorlist API, which should rank outdated and regional mirrors better.
• cachyos-settings: a nice-value tuning was added to limits.d as a fix for a PipeWire error.

Desktops, mirrors and wiki

• New Noctalia variants for mango and niri, Noctalia v5 support in the Hyprland dotfiles, and an updated Nord KDE theme for Plasma 6.7.
• A new Tier 2 mirror in Hungary.
• The "Gaming with CachyOS" wiki guide was substantially revised; launch options no longer needed with the latest proton-cachyos-slr were removed.

How to upgrade

• Existing installations only need the usual update:

sudo pacman -Syu

• The new desktop ISO is on the project's CDN and mirrors and on SourceForge.

Summary by DistroNews, based on the original post.