CachyOS November 2025: New ISO brings accessibility, systemd integration and better gaming support, but not without strategic cuts

In the shadow of the big distribution giants, Arch-based CachyOS is releasing its seventh official release of the year and, as always, the devil is in the detail. The November ISO 2025 does not shine with revolutionary leaps, but with a lot of meaningful evolution: accessibility, kernel hooks, handheld support, new graphics routines and finally a more systematic hardware detection make the system more suitable for everyday use, at least if you are prepared to accept certain peculiarities.

First of all, a step that many distributions still lack today: the integration of Orca and espeak-ng in ISO and installer. This may seem like a side issue, but it is an act of digital inclusion, enabling visually impaired people to access the installation in the first place. At a time when even proprietary systems are inflating accessibility for PR purposes, CachyOS is showing real pragmatism here. The new integration of the systemd hook in mkinitcpio is technically more interesting. This enables a completely systemd-based boot behavior, but also brings a clear demarcation: ZFS and Bcachefs are excluded as incompatible, the hook is automatically deactivated there. For Bcachefs there is at least the new package bcachefs-dkms, which replaces the standard kernel module, a necessary step to bring this experimental file system solution into productive environments in a meaningful way.

The Calamares installer framework has also been extended: it now recognizes the Plasma Login Manager and the new Cosmic Greeter. While the former is still waiting for integration with the KDE settings, the latter has already been activated as the default for COSMIC installations. So if you use the Pop_OS-like COSMIC, you now get a more consistent login experience without the detour via the now outdated SDDM. In terms of hardware support, there are several targeted upgrades: Intel iGPUs benefit from the automatic installation of intel-media-sdk and vpl-gpu-rt, while the Legacy 390xx drivers from NVIDIA are finally out, Fermi GPUs will be served with Nouveau NvBoost in the future. It should be clear that this replacement is rather makeshift, but the clock is ticking against legacy hardware. For the first time, there is explicit support for handhelds such as the ROG Ally and Ally X, a clever move in view of the mobile Linux boom in the gaming sector. The system tools have also been refined: The in-house cachyos-hello replaces its internal package manager with the central GUI PackageInstaller and now also supports CLI parameters, a step towards automation and headless usage. At the same time, the compression of incompressible ZRAM pages has been deactivated in cachyos-settings, a sober decision based on benchmarks: no benefit, no effort.

For gamers, Proton-CachyOS offers some exciting tweaks: PROTON_DXVK_GPLASYNC=1 can now be used to activate dxvk-gplasync as an alternative, ideal for GPU-intensive async titles. AMD’s anti-lag layer is deactivated as soon as FSR4 is used – stability problems are a thing of the past. There is also a game-optimized shader cache that is specifically tailored to NVIDIA GPUs. The larger cache size not only reduces recompilation, but also saves loading time and nerves. There are also new upscalers such as FSR3 and XeSS as well as Wayland bug fixes, for example for fullscreen offsets and dead keys. The bugfix page addresses a persistent problem with Limine: On systems with broken UEFI implementation, bootloader entries were not registered correctly – this is now fixed, including switching to the systemd-compatible btrfs-overlayfs hook. Every little bit helps: attr2 has also been removed from the XFS mount options, the T2 Macs lose their non-functional USB Ethernet interface, a sensible cut. There is a warning for existing users: The Steam-native-runtime has been officially abandoned. Those who continue to rely on Valve content will have to adapt to new ways. The standard is now: sudo pacman -Syu, those who want to go further must follow the discussion in the forum.

The ISO is available in several variants and geographical mirrors, including a handheld version. If you want to rely on donation-based support, you can support the project via Patreon.

• CDN: https://iso.cachyos.org/desktop/251129/cachyos-desktop-linux-251129.iso
• CDN2: https://cdn77.cachyos.org/ISO/desktop/251129/cachyos-desktop-linux-251129.iso
• Germany: https://mirror.cachyos.org/ISO/desktop/251129/cachyos-desktop-linux-251129.iso
• USA: https://us.cachyos.org/ISO/desktop/251129/cachyos-desktop-linux-251129.iso
• China: https://mirrors.tuna.tsinghua.edu.cn/cachyos/desktop/251129/cachyos-desktop-linux-251129.iso
• Russia: https://archlinux.gay/cachy/ISO/desktop/251129/cachyos-desktop-linux-251129.iso
• https://sourceforge.net/projects/cachyos-arch/files

Source: CachyOS