Arch-based CachyOS 260308 focuses on user-friendliness

Arch-based distro CachyOS is back for both desktop and handheld users, as usual. This year's second update arrived yesterday and is labeled 260308. While the reworked website aims at all users, there are separate goodies for desktop/laptop users and for the handheld crowd as well.

First, we should mention that the desktop CachyOS edition gets animated GIF/WebP previews in the installer when selecting the desktop environment. This feature is enabled for Plasma, GNOME, Niri, and COSMIC, so newbies get to see what they choose before deciding what to go for. The desktop selection stage also gets support for JPEG XL to reduce image sizes.

GNOME and KDE installations now come with Cachy-Update enabled by default, while the hardware detection has been improved alongside the error message when the EFI partition is too small.

Winboat can be easily installed and enabled now via CachyOS-Welcome. This area also supports keyboard navigation for improved accessibility.

In the handheld edition, SDDM has been replaced with plasma-login-manager, with Limine now the default bootloader with automatic snapshots. However, systemd-boot can still be selected by those who want to go with it instead.

In addition to the above, both version received a bunch of minor improvements and fixes. To provide faster and more reliable downloads to more people, new mirrors have been announced: jura12 in Russia, Zyner in Sweden, and All Things Linux in Canada. The download links can be found in the blog post announcing the update that you can see below.