I’d seen the name CachyOS popping up before but only when I saw it is ArchLinux based and optimized for speed my curiosity put it on top of my wish list.

Tried it on one computer, installation was pretty smooth although I didn’t like their default KDE based installer which felt sluggish. After installation I tested Cinnamon and Gnome desktop and I was impressed by its snappy performance.

Tried it on another computer, a considerable slower computer, and on that one the CachyOS installer kept failing during partitioning and formatting. I tried the text based installer and the GUI based installer several times, tried ext4 instead of the default btrfs, and even pre-formatted but it kept failing with errors that didn’t make sense to me. And I didn’t want to spend more time on it. After this setback I went for a plain Arch Linux installation on the very same computer and that went fine.[1]

Conclusion :

Pros (subjective, personal) :

•  Fish shell as default
•  Has aliases for ls with eza (the successor of exa)
• Feels snappy
• Output of eza shows the icons as it should (Unlike all the recent installations I did among other with Debian, Linux Mint (Ubuntu and Debian based flavors) and I believe also plain ArchLinux.

Cons : None yet.

Here’s the list of aliases it comes with.

alias .. ‘cd ..’
alias … ‘cd ../..’
alias …. ‘cd ../../..’
alias ….. ‘cd ../../../..’
alias …… ‘cd ../../../../..’
alias apt ‘man pacman’
alias apt-get ‘man pacman’
alias cleanup ‘sudo pacman -Rns (pacman -Qtdq)’
alias dir ‘dir –color=auto’
alias egrep ‘egrep –color=auto’
alias fgrep ‘fgrep –color=auto’
alias fish_vi_dec ‘fish_vi_inc_dec dec’
alias fish_vi_inc ‘fish_vi_inc_dec inc’
alias fixpacman ‘sudo rm /var/lib/pacman/db.lck’
alias gitpkg ‘pacman -Q | grep -i “\\\\-git” | wc -l’
alias grep ‘grep –color=auto’
alias grubup ‘sudo grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg’
alias hw ‘hwinfo –short’
alias jctl ‘journalctl -p 3 -xb’
alias la ‘eza -a –color=always –group-directories-first –icons’
alias ll ‘eza -l –color=always –group-directories-first –icons’
alias ls ‘eza -al –color=always –group-directories-first –icons’
alias lt ‘eza -aT –color=always –group-directories-first –icons’
alias mirror ‘sudo cachyos-rate-mirrors’
alias please sudo
alias psmem ‘ps auxf | sort -nr -k 4’
alias psmem10 ‘ps auxf | sort -nr -k 4 | head -10’
alias tarnow ‘tar -acf ‘
alias tb ‘nc termbin.com 9999’
alias untar ‘tar -zxvf ‘
alias update ‘sudo pacman -Syu’
alias vdir ‘vdir –color=auto’
alias wget ‘wget -c ‘

[1] And that made me wonder : Surely an existing ArchLinux installation can be converted into a CachyOS installation 🙂