CachyOS July 2025 Update Brings Shell Choice, Wayland Defaults

posted by Rianne Schestowitz on Jul 13, 2025,
updated Jul 20, 2025

Quoting: CachyOS July 2025 Update Brings Shell Choice, Wayland Defaults —

A month and a half after its previous May release, powered by the latest and greatest Linux kernel 6.15, the Arch-based gamers-focused CachyOS has announced its fifth ISO snapshot for the year.

One of the most notable additions is the ability to choose a preferred shell during installation, deciding between pre-configured Fish or Zsh setups, or sticking with a plain-vanilla Bash environment. Fish remains the out-of-the-box default, yet the extra choice means fewer post-install dot-file gymnastics for users who already swear by Zsh.

Under the hood, following user reports of “trigger-happy” out-of-memory kills, CachyOS has removed its integration with systemd-oomd, opting instead for the kernel’s native memory-pressure controls. The distribution’s keyring workflow has also been hardened to retry more aggressively when key downloads hiccup.

Read on

Linux Magazine:

• CachyOS Now Lets Users Choose Their Shell » Linux Magazine

  CachyOS is a bit niche and not nearly as well-known as the likes of Ubuntu or Fedora, but sometimes those niche distributions do things that might inspire the others to follow suit.

  In a recent announcement for the upcoming July CachyOS release, the developers announced that the user's shell can be chosen during installation. Before you get too excited, the choices are limited to fish, Zsh, and Bash. During installation, if you don't choose between fish or Zsh, Bash will be chosen for you (even though the default configuration will remain fish).

  There are other changes coming to the next iteration of CachyOS, such as KDE Plasma installations defaulting to Wayland. At the same time, the Nvidia legacy drivers and plasma-x11-session will also be installed to avoid problems.

Original:

• CachyOS July 2025 Release

  Hello CachyOS Enthusiasts,

  This is our fifth release this year, and it includes a long-awaited requested feature, improvements for chwd, and more.

  The user’s shell can now be chosen at installation time. In the package list selection, there is now an option to choose between cachyos-fish-config and cachyos-zsh-config. If neither is selected, the system will default to Bash. The default configuration will still be Fish, as it was before.

  We received some reports that systemd-oomd was killing processes too early in some cases. We have removed its integration to avoid these issues.