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CachyOS Plans New Server Edition With Hardened Defaults (linuxiac.com)
submitted 7 months ago by to c/linux@programming.dev
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Here is some news that both excited me and gave me pause. In its annual 2025 retrospective, published today, Arch-based CachyOS, widely popular among Linux gamers and heavily focused on performance optimization, reveals plans I did not expect: an expansion into the server space.

“In addition to our ongoing PGO and AutoFDO optimizations, we are developing a specialized ‘Server’ Edition for NAS, workstations, and server environments. We intend to provide a verified image that hosting providers can easily deploy for their customers. This edition will ship with a hardened configuration, pre-tuned settings, and performance-optimized packages for web servers, databases and more!”

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[–] 1 point 7 months ago (2 children)

That’s why I’m asking, what’s the difference? Which defaults? I have never used CachyOS and have no idea what it brings to the table. I use Arch for ~7 years, and I’m no looking for a replacement. Especially an Arch based one. Yet, I’m curious of the difference, and why one would want Cachy, especially as a server.

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  • [–] 3 points 7 months ago (1 child)

    I too run an Arch and am happy with it, and I would like to know why Cachy. The only reason I can see is having x86-64-v3 packages instead of baseline. That is nice, but on it's own doesn't feel worth the effort of switching over.

    Defaults don't matter to me much, as I automate and manage my system config in git (using a tool I wrote myself: https://github.com/VorpalBlade/paketkoll/tree/main/crates/konfigkoll inspired by https://github.com/CyberShadow/aconfmgr). It makes it a breeze to set up a new computer as I want it.

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  • [–] -1 points 7 months ago (3 children)

    I don’t want to spill some memes worth Arch elitism here, but I just doubt Arch derivatives crowd knows what x86-64-v3 thing is. Truth be told, I barely understand that myself. So I guess the difference should lie somewhere else. My previous research showed that the crowd is afraid of no installer installer, but these days Arch has some kind of installer, doesn’t it?

    I’m just struggle to grasp what does it have, what those defaults are? A DE and whatnot? Is it just an opinionated Arch? Looks quite popular for everyone and their dog to have their own opinionated Arch this year, isn’t it?

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  • [–] 2 points 7 months ago (1 child)

    As far as I know they do a few things (but it is hard to find a comprehensive list), including build packages for newer microarchitectures such as the aforementioned x86-64-v3. The default on x86-64 Linux is still to build programs that work on the original AMD Athlon 64 from the early 2000s. That really doesn't make sense any more, and v3 is a good default that still covers the last several years of CPUs.

    There are many interesting added instructions and for some programs it can make a large difference, but that will vary wildly from program to program. Phoronix has also done some benchmarks of Arch vs Cachy, and since Phoronix Test Suit mostly uses it's own binaries, what that shows is the difference that the kernel, glibc and system tuning alone makes. And those results do look promising.

    I don’t want to spill some memes worth Arch elitism here, but I just doubt Arch derivatives crowd knows what x86-64-v3 thing is. Truth be told, I barely understand that myself.

    I think you just did show a lot of elitism and arrogance there. I expect software developers working on any distro to know about this, but not necessarily the users of said distros. (For me, knowing about low level optimisation is part of my dayjob.)

    Also, for Cachy in particular they do seem to have some decent developers. One of their devs is the guy who maintains the legacy nvidia drivers on AUR, which involves a fair bit of kernel programming to adapt to changes in new kernel releases (nvidia themselves no longer do so after the first year of drivers becoming legacy).

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  • [–] 1 point 7 months ago (1 child)

    Thanks for the great reply! I’m sorry for the appearing of the elitism, I guess that’s rather the wording choice than a real attitude. Personally, I don’t feel like I’m very experienced, so there’s nowhere for the true elitism to stem from. I’m really interested in Arch based distros. But I don’t think I’m going to try them, purely because I’m happy with Arch. Hence, I’m asking others. It’s a curious case for me, theoretically. As long ago, I thought people go with Arch based distros purely because they couldn’t manage to install Arch. But that was quite easy, actually. For some reasons, I really disliked Manjaro, but I haven’t heard of it for a long time. Perhaps that’s my bubble.

    There’s some idiotic comments like some guy who literally wasted my time by having idiotic replies, again and again, so I managed to block them. So, thanks for a thoughtful explanation.

    I wonder what is the difference with these newer versions, as most of my hardware is Haswell era or even earlier. It works great with Arch + Sway. Or even Fedora with the default Gnome. As I understand it, you talk of the much newer hardware, like 5 years old.

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  • [–] 2 points 7 months ago (1 child)

    V2 is about Nehalem. V3 is approximately Haswell (iirc it corresponds to some least common denominator of AMD and Intel from around that time). V4 needs AVX512 (that is really the only difference in enabled instructions compared to V3).

    Both my daily driver computers can do v3, but not v4. (I like retro computing, so I also have far older computers that can't even do 64-bit at all, but I don't run modern software on those for the most part.)

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  • [–] 1 point 7 months ago (1 child)

    Have you tried Gentoo? I’ve heard you can compile things for your hardware, I’d love to try it, but I have very little free resources lately. So, some day. I’m curios whether the impact is worth it, the whole compiling chore.

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  • [–] 2 points 7 months ago* (1 child)

    I used vanilla arch as a daily driver for about 3 years and I loved it. but started to need a more ephemeral OS and switched to atomic fedora and centos/Alma precisely for the defaults. So i know you asked about cachyOS and I dony have an answer there. So you can skip the rest of this if that is all you wanted. Im not saying RHEL or bust. Each person has their own needs and i highly recommend just going and doing the hard things yourself to learn, but I get it that it isnt possible for everyone.

    What defaults? Several. 1st SELinux. 2nd ability to select old kernels on boot. 3. Firewall enabled out of the box.

    Sure you can do a lot of additional hardening and nothing is to stop a simple bash script from setting these up on Arch, but I figured I only know a little bit and those have saved my ass multiple times. So there are probably other things the folks in that ecosystem have figured out that I dont know about yet.

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  • [–] 1 point 7 months ago

    How was Atomic Fedora for you? I really want to try it somewhere. I tried on my own machine, but for me Arch is just better. But for someone’s managed computer (a family member, more likely), I think that’s a really cool system.

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