Recently I decided to do some distro hopping and CachyOS is what caught my eye. I am long time Arch and linux user and have worked with lots of distros, and I decided this to install on my old laptop i.e. Samsung RC510, to confirm about its performance. Previously it had old version of Fedora and it was bit sluggish but definitely better than Windows for sure.

Create Bootable USB

So I created the bootable USB using “USB Image writer” from my other Linux Mint machine.

Installation Experience

Booting into the CachyOS live environment was surprisingly fast, even on my aging Samsung RC510. The installer is based on Calamares, which is intuitive and user-friendly—perfect for both newcomers and seasoned Linux users.

One of the standout features during installation is the flexibility it offers. You can choose from a variety of desktop environments, including KDE Plasma, GNOME, Cinnamon, XFCE, LXQt, and more. I went with KDE Plasma for this setup, but it’s great to see CachyOS catering to different user preferences right from the start.

You also get to select your preferred kernel—Cachy Kernel (optimized for responsiveness) or something else. I opted for the Cachy Kernel to see how well it performs on older hardware.

First Impressions

Once installed which was quite fast, CachyOS booted up quickly and greeted me with a clean, modern KDE desktop. The UI felt snappy right out of the box. Plasma is known for being lightweight yet feature-rich, and CachyOS seems to have tuned it well for performance.

The default theme and layout are polished, but what really impressed me was the responsiveness. Animations were smooth, and window transitions didn’t lag—even on hardware that’s over a decade old.

Package Manager

Since CachyOS is based on Arch, so naturally its using pacman as the package manager which I am very comfortable with.

Conclusion

CachyOS has a great future and performance boost was really good on my old hardware. Overall I am quite happy with it and I am going to keep CachyOS on my old laptop but for my main machine I am still going to keep Linux Mint.