Arch Linux vs. CachyOS vs. Omarchy 4.5 Performance Benchmarks

With CachyOS recently having rolled out its Linux 7.3 based kernel and various other improvements plus with Omarchy 4.5 having been released this week, this article provides a look at how CachyOS and Omarchy are competing on the performance front relative to upstream Arch Linux. Using the same Framework Desktop computer with the AMD Ryzen AI Max+ 395 "Strix Halo" with 64GB of RAM, integrated Radeon 8060S Graphics, and 2TB WD_BLACK SN7100 NVMe SSD, all three Linux distributions were tested on this system. Arch Linux was installed using a generic archinstall setup with the KDE Plasma desktop, CachyOS was installed at its defaults and updated, and Omarchy 4.5 was also done with its stock install. CachyOS is on Linux 7.3 while CachyOS and Arch Linux upstream as of testing were still on Linux 7.2. All three are on GCC 16.2. Omarchy notably defaults to using the performance profile out-of-the-box while Arch Linux and CachyOS defaulted to balanced performance on this laptop. CachyOS notably also includes a lot of out-of-the-box optimizations from Zen 4+ optimized packages and other tuning. This is our first look at how Omarchy is performing relative to Arch Linux and CachyOS, so let's have a look.