CachyOS Demonstrates Best Performance Among Popular Linux Distributions
A battery of independent tests run on a beefy System76 Thelio Major turned up a clear performance leader: CachyOS, an Arch-based distro. Across more than 100 benchmarks it beat vanilla Arch, Ubuntu 26.04 LTS, and Pop!_OS 24.04 in aggregate scores.
The margin varied — roughly +5% versus vanilla Arch and as much as +23% compared with Pop!_OS — and those numbers came without any bespoke tuning. The testers attribute much of the edge to running more recent low-level pieces (a newer kernel along with refreshed graphics and compiler stacks), which can change behavior across CPU- and GPU-heavy workloads.
Hardware details matter here: CPU: 64-core AMD Threadripper 9980X; GPU: Radeon AI PRO R9700. Each distribution was installed from scratch and left in a default configuration for the runs, so the results show out-of-the-box potential rather than a hand-optimized setup.
If squeezing out every percent is your thing, CachyOS is a practical option because it ships up-to-date packages while remaining compatible with Arch repositories — the switch shouldn’t be painful for experienced users. That said, real-world gains depend on the apps and drivers you use; I’d try it on a spare drive or VM first and see how your workloads behave.
Benchmarks like these are useful signposts, not gospel. Different tasks and hardware will shift the balance, so expect trade-offs rather than one-size-fits-all answers.