CachyOS Making Use Of Plymouth For Better Boot Experience, Mitigates For XZ Fiasco

CachyOS as a reminder is the Arch Linux based distribution focused on providing a very performant out-of-the-box experience and supports x86-64-v3 and x86-64-v4 packages along with other default changes compared to upstream Arch Linux. The April 2024 ISO release of CachyOS is now available for those wanting to enjoy a fresh spin of this rolling-release, performance-tuned platform.

With being a rolling release based on Arch Linux, CachyOS had already been shipping the newest XZ releases that were shipping malicious code. That's been a nasty fiasco for XZ that is still being further investigated by many different parties. CachyOS has added a patch to their XZ package to ensure everything is in good shape.

The April 2024 release for CachyOS also now makes use of the Plymouth boot splash screen by default to provide a nice default themed boot animation for a pleasing boot experience.

CachyOS had to resort to using X11-by-default just for their ISOs due to an issue with the Calamares installer when switching the keyboard layout.

The CachyOS update also has a new partitioning layout with separate /boot and /boot/efi partitions for better handling with rEFInd particularly when doing a dual boot installation with Microsoft Windows or other Linux distributions.

There are also various bug fixes and other package updates with the April 2024 update to CachyOS as outlined on the CachyOS.org blog.