Part of CachyOS Wiki Notes. From the official CachyOS wiki (last updated 2026-07-05).
CachyOS Desktop Environments
Several DEs/WMs are offered; pick exactly one during installation.
| # | Desktop | What it is |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | KDE Plasma | Comprehensive, flexible DE using the KWin window manager; easy theme/widget downloads |
| 2 | Niri | Scrollable tiling Wayland compositor; continuous grid, keyboard + touchpad optimized |
| 3 | i3 | Popular X11 tiling WM; one self-contained config file |
| 4 | Qtile | X11/Wayland WM configured in Python; various layouts and widgets |
| 5 | Wayfire | Wayland compositor based on wlroots; customization + aesthetics |
| 6 | GNOME | Touch-style interface; easy to learn, limited customization, can be hard to configure |
| 7 | XFCE | Lightweight, traditional drop-down/pop-up menus; Compiz-compatible |
| 8 | bspwm | C-based X11 WM; tiling, stacking, tabbing layouts |
| 9 | Budgie | Simple, elegant, built with GTK |
| 10 | Cinnamon | Advanced features with a traditional UX |
| 11 | Cosmic | Performance-oriented DE built with Rust and Smithay |
| 12 | Hyprland | Dynamic-tiling Wayland compositor; ships CachyOS Noctalia by default |
| 13 | LXDE | Fast, low-resource X11 DE using Openbox |
| 14 | LXQt | Lightweight Qt DE (LXDE + Razor-qt merger) |
| 15 | Mate | Traditional DE forked from GNOME 2 |
| 16 | Openbox | Popular X11 WM; excellent docs, many themes |
| 17 | Sway | Tiling Wayland compositor, drop-in replacement for i3; reuses existing i3 config |
CachyOS-maintained dotfiles:
- Niri —
github.com/CachyOS/cachyos-niri-noctalia - i3 —
github.com/CachyOS/cachyos-i3wm-settings - Qtile —
github.com/CachyOS/cachyos-qtile-settings - Wayfire —
github.com/CachyOS/cachyos-wayfire-settings - Hyprland —
github.com/CachyOS/cachyos-hypr-noctalia
Per-desktop pages: KDE Plasma on CachyOS, Niri Keybinds and FAQ, Hyprland Setup and Keybinds, i3 Keybinds and FAQ, Qtile Keybinds and FAQ, Switching Desktop Environments.