Over a month after its previous August update, and after topping DistroWatch’s rankings, the Arch-based performance-focused CachyOS has released its seventh refreshed ISO snapshot for the year, powered by Linux kernel 6.17.

The ISO and installer now ship with Orca and espeak-ng, providing screen-reading capability throughout the installation process. Under the hood, the team has enabled the mkinitcpio systemd hook on supported configurations.

For compatibility reasons, however, the hook is automatically disabled when users select ZFS or Bcachefs as the root filesystem. Bcachefs users now receive bcachefs-dkms, replacing the stock kernel module to provide better filesystem integration.