We"re nearly done with January, and the CachyOS team has decided to bless us with the first release of the Linux distro of the year. This update delivers several improvements to the Arch-based system, including a revamped installer, Wayland in Live Mode, and more.
Starting with the improved installer, Limine, the lightweight GRUB alternative, is now the default bootloader. The bootloader section itself has been moved directly into the Calamares installer.
Architecture detection now happens at the very beginning of the installation, a change that cuts the download size by about 1 GB. The installer now also passes the --needed flag to pacman to prevent reinstalling packages that are already up to date. For those using BTRFS, the installation improves mount options for NVMe drives by defaulting to a single level of compression.
The Live ISO in this release now uses Wayland instead of the good old X11. This change also brings a different login manager to the live environment. If you use Plasma, you will find that Simple Desktop Display Manager (SDDM) has been replaced by Plasma Login Manager for new installations.
The CachyOS team also included both a Stable and an LTS kernel in the ISO to improve compatibility with newer hardware. On the desktop side, the GNOME installation process has been cleaned up, and the settings for the Niri window manager have been reworked.
Other new features to look out for include a mirror status page that shows the syncing state of CachyOS mirrors, which is useful for troubleshooting update issues. The NVIDIA module gets an EnableAggressiveVblank option to reduce interrupt time for low-latency displays. Hardware detection has also been improved.
As for the bug fixes, the installer now properly blocks you from proceeding if your EFI partition is too small. An issue causing the session to freeze on Framework 16 laptops with AMD Zen 5 CPUs during installation has been resolved, and the team updated the udev rules, fixing input for several controllers.