Omarchy vs CachyOS: which one, and can you run both?

The short decision

Checked against Omarchy 4.0.4 (released 2026-09-15) and the CachyOS August 2026 ISO.

• Choose Omarchy if you want a finished Hyprland desktop that someone else already decided for you, with themes, keybindings, a menu and an update path that ships as one unit. You accept the opinions in exchange for not configuring anything.
• Choose CachyOS if you want a fast Arch base and you want to pick your own desktop. It offers 17 or more desktops and window managers, a graphical Calamares installer and a CLI installer, and recompiled packages for your CPU.
• Choose CachyOS if gaming is the main reason you are switching, especially on a handheld.
• Do not try to put Omarchy 4.x on top of CachyOS right now. The community tooling for that only understands Omarchy 3.x, and the failure mode is an unbootable machine, not an error message. Details below.

Philosophy

CachyOS calls itself “Performance-First Linux, Built on Arch”. Its product is the base: kernel patches, repositories rebuilt with x86-64-v3, x86-64-v4 and znver4 instruction sets plus LTO, and a mirror and installer around that. The desktop is your choice, and the list is long.

Omarchy’s product is the desktop. There is exactly one: Hyprland, with a Quickshell based shell that since 4.0.0 replaced Waybar, Walker, Mako, SwayOSD, hyprlock, hypridle, swaybg and polkit-gnome. Configuration moved from ~/.config/hypr/*.conf to Lua files with a small binding DSL, so a keybinding now looks like o.bind("SUPER + RETURN", "Terminal", { omarchy = "terminal" }). If you want KDE, you are in the wrong distro. See the hyprland.conf to Lua migration for what that change costs you.

Both are Arch underneath. Neither is a fork.

Install

CachyOS gives you choices at install time: bootloader, filesystem, encryption, desktop, extra package groups. That flexibility is why it works as a base for other setups.

Omarchy’s ISO makes those choices for you: Btrfs with Snapper snapshots, LUKS encryption unless you opt out, Limine, SDDM. It is fewer screens and fewer ways to get it wrong. The only real choice is full disk, which wipes the drive, or a free-space install into unallocated space, which is how Quattro added dual boot. If you need to keep another operating system, read should you dual boot first.

Kernel

This is the comparison that changed most recently, so old articles get it wrong.

Through 4.0.3, a normal Omarchy install booted Arch’s own linux package, with linux-ptl and linux-t2 only for Panther Lake and T2 Mac hardware, and CachyOS’s tuned kernel was a real reason to prefer CachyOS. Release 4.0.4 on 2026-09-15 shipped linux-omarchy to everyone and made it the first Limine boot entry. The release notes describe it as tuned to keep the desktop responsive under load, with gaming compatibility fixes and AMD HDMI improvements.

As of 2026-09-16 the stable Omarchy channel carried linux-omarchy 7.2.5-3, plus linux-omarchy-bore and linux-omarchy-muqss variants, and linux-ptl for Panther Lake hardware. CachyOS’s linux-cachyos was 7.2.5-1, built the same day. Same upstream kernel, different patch sets.

CachyOS still has more variants, including linux-cachyos-lts, linux-cachyos-hardened, linux-cachyos-rt-bore and linux-cachyos-deckify for handhelds, and its kernel manager for switching between them and loading sched-ext schedulers. But the headline claim that Omarchy runs a plain kernel while CachyOS runs a tuned one is no longer true.

Wanting the CachyOS kernel on Omarchy is a request upstream has had since discussion #3515 in November 2025. It is open with no maintainer commitment.

Gaming

Omarchy’s gaming story is a menu of installers under Install > Gaming: Steam, RetroArch preconfigured with CRT Royale, Battle.net under GE-Proton, Lutris, Heroic, Moonlight, Xbox Cloud Gaming, GeForce NOW and Minecraft. The Battle.net launcher has a --with-mangohud flag for an FPS overlay. That covers a normal desktop gamer.

CachyOS goes deeper on the plumbing: proton-cachyos with Wine staging patches and FSR, cachyos-gaming-meta and cachyos-gaming-applications, gamescope-session-cachyos, and a game-performance wrapper that switches the power profile to performance for the duration of a game.

If you are choosing a distro because of games, CachyOS is the better fit. If you want a good desktop that also plays games, Omarchy is fine.

Updates and channels

Omarchy updates as one unit through Update > Omarchy. It takes a snapshot, installs the release, runs pending migrations and updates packages. Direct pacman -Syu is blocked by a guard that points you back to omarchy update, because a bare pacman upgrade skips the snapshot and the migrations.

There are four channels: stable, RC, edge and dev. Stable pins /etc/pacman.conf and /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist to Omarchy’s own Arch mirror, which the manual describes as running about one month behind upstream so incompatibilities get caught first. That deliberate lag has a security cost worth understanding before you pick Omarchy, see stable mirror lag and CVEs.

CachyOS is a normal rolling Arch system with its own repositories layered ahead of Arch’s. You update with pacman or its own tools, and nothing stops you.

Those two update models are the deep reason the hybrid is awkward. Omarchy wants to own your mirrorlist. CachyOS needs its own.

Support

Omarchy has an active Discord and a very busy GitHub tracker, and the project ships fast, which means fixes arrive quickly and so do regressions. CachyOS has a forum, a wiki that is genuinely good, and a slower cadence of ISO snapshots, the August 2026 ISO being its fifth of the year.

Neither supports the other. The official Omarchy manual chapter Omarchy on… lists Asahi, Parallels, VirtualBox, VMware, Steam Deck and NixOS. CachyOS is not on that list.

Omarchy on CachyOS

Two community efforts exist, and both are behind.

Discussion #650 by inffy, from August 2025, walks through a CachyOS base install with no desktop, unticking the CachyOS shell configuration box to avoid a tealdeer versus tldr conflict, then running the Omarchy installer. It has 18 upvotes and 11 comments. It ends with wget -qO- https://omarchy.org/install | bash. On 2026-09-16 that URL still returns a one line script that evaluates boot.sh from the repository’s master branch, and that file returns 404. It is also absent from the 4.0.4 source tree, though it is present in 3.8.4. So the last step of the guide no longer does anything.

mroboff/omarchy-on-cachyos is the maintained script, 657 stars, MIT licensed. Its README says it supports Omarchy 3.0 and later. Its last commit is from 2026-06-01, which is before Omarchy 4.0.0 shipped on 2026-08-14. There are 22 open issues and 10 open pull requests.

Issue #74, filed by isaac30503 in August 2026 and still open, is the one to read before you try anything. Two findings:

1. Installing omarchy-settings writes /etc/mkinitcpio.conf.d/omarchy_hooks.conf, which reassigns the whole HOOKS array rather than extending it. On CachyOS that swaps the systemd based sd-encrypt hook for the legacy encrypt hook and drops sd-btrfs-overlayfs. The machine keeps booting until the next initramfs rebuild, which could be a kernel update days later, and then cannot unlock an encrypted root. The reporter says it cost them an install. This is not CachyOS specific: upstream issue #6876 documents the same reassignment dropping lvm2 and resume on a plain Omarchy machine with LVM on LUKS.
2. Omarchy 4 removed the root install.sh the script calls, and moved several hardware scripts. The reporter’s path audit found 9 of 9 expected paths present in 3.8.4 and 4 of 9 in 4.0.0. Because the script does not use set -e, it still prints a success summary.

Pull request #77 by marlo4220mc, opened 2026-09-06, adds 4.x support, boot guards and a version picker that filters pre-release tags. It was still open on 2026-09-16.

There is one more structural problem. Omarchy’s install/post-install/pacman.sh copies its own pacman.conf and mirrorlist over whatever is there. Omarchy’s stable pacman.conf defines only core, extra, multilib and the omarchy repository, so on CachyOS the overwrite removes the CachyOS repository sections entirely and points core, extra and multilib at Omarchy’s lagging mirror. Every package that came from a CachyOS repository is then stranded, which is a partial upgrade hazard.

If you want both, the honest options today are: run CachyOS and copy the Omarchy themes and Hyprland ideas you like by hand, or run Omarchy and use linux-omarchy-bore rather than chasing the CachyOS kernel.

What to watch for on newer versions

• The next release is announced as Quattro RS 4.5. If the kernel work in 4.0.4 continues, the performance argument for CachyOS narrows further.
• Watch pull request #77 on omarchy-on-cachyos. If it merges and gets real testing, “Omarchy on CachyOS” becomes viable again for 4.x.
• Watch upstream issue #6876. A fix that makes omarchy_hooks.conf extend rather than replace HOOKS would remove the single most dangerous part of the hybrid setup, on CachyOS and on LVM machines alike.
• Anything written before 2026-08-14 describes Omarchy 3.x, with Waybar, Walker and hyprland.conf. Treat comparison articles from that era as history. See still true guides and videos.