The Performance Of Arch Linux Powered CachyOS

Recently there have been a number of Phoronix readers writing in about CachyOS, an Arch Linux based distribution that is new and is focused on " better speed, security and ease of use," So of course there has been requests to see how well CachyOS performs against other distributions... In thus article is an initial look at the CachyOS performance compared to that of also Arch Linux based Endeavour OS, Ubuntu 22.10, Fedora Workstation 37, and then Intel's Clear Linux that is already well known for its performance attributes.

For this initial round of CachyOS benchmarking it and the other Linux distributions were tested on an Intel Core i9 13900K Raptor Lake desktop at stock speeds (frequency differences in the system table are just sysfs reporting differences between kernels) with ASUS PRIME Z790-P WIFI motherboard, 2 x 16GB DDR5-6000 memory, 1TB WD_BLACK SN850 NVMe SSD, and AMD Radeon RX 6800 graphics.

CachyOS, Clear Linux, EndeavourOS, Fedora Workstation, and Ubuntu were all cleanly installed and benchmarked in their out-of-the-box, updated state as of testing time for seeing how well CachyOS compares to the rest.

CachyOS currently relies on a modified version of the Linux 6.0 kernel, GCC 12.2 for its system compiler, and other package versions aligning with the upstream Arch Linux components. CachyOS calls out the use of the CacULE CPU scheduler as one of its differences compared to the stock Arch Linux kernel.

The CachyOS desktop is a themed version of KDE Plasma 5.26 at present.

Let's see how CachyOS compares to fellow Arch based EndeavourOS, Intel's performance-tuned Clear Linux, and the others. Upstream Arch Linux itself wasn't tested for this article due to Archinstall with this month's ISO continually leading to crashes on this test system.