Fresh benchmarks pit CachyOS against Ubuntu 26.04 LTS and Fedora Workstation 44 on high-end hardware. The results? CachyOS pulls ahead in most tests. No shock there. This Arch Linux derivative has built a reputation for squeezing every cycle from modern CPUs through aggressive tweaks.
Phoronix ran the numbers this week on an HP Z6 G5 A workstation. Think dual AMD EPYC 9755 processors, each with 128 Zen 5 cores at 4.1GHz boost, 512GB DDR5-6000 RAM, and dual 1.92TB NVMe SSDs in RAID 0. Graphics came from dual AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX GPUs. All distros got fresh installs: latest CachyOS rolling release, Ubuntu 26.04 LTS, Fedora 44, and Ubuntu 24.04.4 LTS for reference. Kernels varied—CachyOS on its custom Linux 7.0 build with BORE scheduler and x86-64-v4 optimizations; Ubuntu 26.04 on Linux 7.0; Fedora 44 likely on a similar upstream cut; older Ubuntu on 6.17 HWE. Compilers? CachyOS used Clang with LTO and PGO flags across packages. Ubuntu and Fedora stuck closer to stock GCC.Phoronix captured over 100 workloads, from compilation to rendering.
CachyOS dominated. Geometric mean across tests showed it 12% faster than Ubuntu 26.04, 15% over Fedora 44, and 18% ahead of Ubuntu 24.04. It won outright in 60% of races. Take Blender rendering: CachyOS finished 20% quicker than Ubuntu 26.04. Cinebench? Up 14%. Even in AI tasks like TensorFlow, gains hit 10-15%. Fedora trailed in multi-threaded jobs, its upstream approach no match for CachyOS’s Zen 5-specific builds. Ubuntu 26.04 improved over its predecessor—Phoronix noted better graphics from Mesa 26.0 and kernel 7.0—but still lagged. Power draw stayed similar. Speed without extra watts.
Why the edge? CachyOS rebuilds Arch packages for x86-64-v3/v4 and Zen4/5, adds link-time optimization (LTO), profile-guided optimization (PGO), and BOLT binary tweaks. Its kernel packs sched-ext, EEVDF variants, and AMD-tuned patches. “It’s not too entirely surprising given the aggressive stance that the CachyOS Linux distribution has taken on out-of-the-box performance,” wrote Michael Larabel.Phoronix Users on X echoed this. One switched from Windows 11: “getting way better performance with less resource usage.”Phoronix on X
Ubuntu 26.04 LTS arrived last week with Linux 7.0, GNOME 50, and NTSYNC for better Wine/Proton gaming. Canonical touted PostgreSQL 18’s 3x I/O boosts and HAProxy efficiency gains.Ubuntu release notes It supports Intel Panther Lake NPUs out of the box. Solid upgrades from 24.04. Yet benchmarks reveal gaps. Phoronix earlier found Ubuntu 26.04 faster on AMD Strix Point iGPUs thanks to newer Mesa—but CachyOS topped it there too, by 14% on Panther Lake.Phoronix
Fedora 44 dropped days ago, one week post-Ubuntu. GNOME 50 default, Plasma 6.6 with SDDM, GCC 16, LLVM 22. It pushes leading-edge packages—Golang 1.26, PHP 8.5. “This Fedora 44 release comes one week after the big Ubuntu 26.04 LTS release,” noted Larabel, promising more tests.Phoronix Still, in head-to-heads, it couldn’t touch CachyOS’s tuned stack. Users praise Fedora’s stability for daily drivers, but gamers and power users lean CachyOS. “Go with CachyOS if you’re not afraid of tinkering… best performance out of any distro,” advised one poster.X
Trade-offs exist. CachyOS, being rolling-release Arch, demands more maintenance than Ubuntu’s LTS or Fedora’s semi-annual cycle. Updates can break things—though its cachyos-settings tool and auto-snapshots help. Recent April ISO added VRAM optimizations for AMD/Intel, Kyber scheduler, and a new package manager.CachyOS wiki Gaming shines: XDA reported CachyOS beating Windows 11 by up to 27% FPS in titles like Cyberpunk 2077.XDA Framework laptops list it alongside Nobara for AMD GPUs.Framework
Industry insiders watch closely. With Intel killing Clear Linux, CachyOS fills the performance void. Enterprises stick to Ubuntu for support. Developers like Fedora’s fresh toolchain. But for raw speed on Zen 5 or Panther Lake? CachyOS sets the bar. Benchmarks don’t lie. As distros chase parity, expect copycats. Ubuntu might adopt more v3 packages; Fedora could tune kernels harder. For now, CachyOS leads. And it’s pulling away.
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