CachyOS wants to be your NAS operating system
On Christmas day this week, the team behind the popular CachyOS Linux distribution published a “2025 recap” blog post looking back how the distro has changed over the year, and also previewing what’s to come. One thing previewed was CachyOS for NAS and other server devices.
After listing what features and improvements CachyOS got during the year 2025, the blog post shifted to looking to the future. The CachyOS team wrote:
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!
It’s a big announcement, as CachyOS has skyrocketed to the top of the Linux zeitgeist in recent years, earning a name for itself among gamers and regular desktop Linux folks. I’m even running CachyOS myself on one of my computers right now, and I have to admit it’s a good one as far as Arch Linux distributions go.
After gaining that reputation in the desktop Linux world, CachyOS is setting its sights on the Linux server scene. It’ll be interesting to see how it compares to the likes of typical server distro choices like Ubuntu Server, Debian, and TrueNAS. Judging by the announcement, though, it’s not just the homelab enthusiasts CachyOS wants to cater to. “Verified images” for hosting providers implies enterprise ambitions.
The blog post didn’t say when we can expect CachyOS Server Edition to get here, and it didn’t get into much detail on what we’ll get in terms of, for example, filesystems. However, regular CachyOS already supports popular NAS filesystems like Btrfs and ZFS with Z-Raid support, so it appears CachyOS is poised for a server debut.
The full blog post this announcement came in is itself an interesting read, not just because of how it showcases recent shifts in the Linux world like full transitions to Wayland, but also the inside look at distro development and operations. CachyOS delivered a total of 11.45PB in data from its servers, for example. That’s petabytes, or units of 1,000TB.
I Tried CachyOS, and Now It Might Be My New Main Distro
At first glance, CachyOS looks like another “Arch Linux but Easy” distro, but here’s why I’m such a fan of it.
While we’ll have to wait an indeterminate amount of time for the first CachyOS Server Edition release, the regular CachyOS experience is available if you download an ISO from the CachyOS download page. For now, you can choose between the Desktop Edition and, for gamers on the go, the Handheld Edition.
Source: CachyOS blog via Phoronix
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