The CachyOS team has published its August 2026 release, the fifth ISO of the year. This update is headlined by a full rewrite of Shelly, the default GUI package manager, and a wave of Rust-powered components across the system.

The CachyOS April 2026 release first introduced Shelly as the default package manager. This month’s release takes it further: the entire application was rewritten from C# to Zig, dropping the managed runtime in favor of native binaries. The result is lower memory usage and faster startup times.

Shelly Gets a Major Overhaul

The desktop app gained a first-run welcome screen, list and grid package browsing, and AUR PKGBUILD previews with live build output. A new Utilities section provides quick access to database sync, cache cleanup, and orphan removal — tasks that previously required a terminal.

The CLI was rebuilt with integrated repository and AUR search, combined update checks covering repositories, AUR, AppImages, and Flatpaks, plus TOML-based backup import and export. Flatpak support is no longer bundled by default and is now available as an optional shelly-flatpak-backend package.

Rust Moves Into More Components

Cachy-Update, the system tray updater, was rebased onto Arch-Update v4.x and its applet rewritten in Rust. A new --check --enable option enables automated update checks and starts the tray in one command. The default check interval is now 6 hours, and tray pagination is configurable via TrayUpdatesPerPage.

The kernel-manager backend inside chwd was also rewritten from C++ to Rust and merged directly into chwd-kernel. On the hardware detection side, chwd now uses board name pattern matching for better handheld device identification, and Bulgarian localization was added.

Experimental Server Edition Profiles

The CLI installer received fixes and refactoring, and now includes experimental installation profiles for a forthcoming Server Edition. This is the first sign that CachyOS is looking beyond desktops and gaming handhelds into server workloads — a notable shift for the project.

Desktop and Installer Changes

The CachyOS March 2026 release introduced animated installer previews; this release continues that momentum. Hyprland installations now use noctalia-greeter instead of SDDM. Cinnamon switched from lightdm-gtk-greeter to lightdm-slick-greeter. GNOME gained gvfs-dnssd and COSMIC received cosmic-monitor.

New Noctalia variants for mango and niri window managers were added, alongside Noctalia v5 support for Hyprland dotfiles. The Nord KDE theme was updated for Plasma 6.7.

CachyOS-Welcome received a DNS rework so the speed-test based server ranking now correctly selects the fastest DNS server. The cachyos-rate-mirrors backend now queries the CachyOS mirrorlist API for mirror ranking, improving accuracy for regional and outdated mirrors. A new Tier 2 mirror in Hungary was also added.

Updating

Existing users need no manual steps. A standard system update is all that is required:

sudo pacman -Syu

For more details and download links for the Desktop and Handheld editions, see the official CachyOS August 2026 release announcement.