CachyOS has previewed Package Installer 2.0, which manages AUR, Flatpak, and official repositories in one interface and supports nine color themes. It is the distribution's third package management UI overhaul of 2026.
Key points
- What happened: CachyOS previewed Package Installer 2.0, which manages AUR, Flatpak, and official repositories in one interface and supports nine color themes
- Why it matters: This is the third package management UI overhaul of 2026, following Octopi, Shelly, and now Package Installer 2.0. CachyOS is repeatedly lowering the barriers for newcomers to Arch-based Linux
- What to watch: The relationship between Shelly and Package Installer 2.0 remains unclear, as does whether version 2.0 will be included in the new CachyOS release teased for the near future
A third rebrand in 2026
CachyOS published an early preview of CachyOS Package Installer 2.0 on November 14. The Arch Linux-based distribution is popular with gamers and surpassed SteamOS in Linux share for the first time (in Japanese) in the September Steam Hardware Survey. But its Arch foundation itself remains a barrier for first-time Linux users. Package installation epitomizes that difficulty, and CachyOS has worked repeatedly throughout 2026 to lower this barrier.
In April, it replaced (in Japanese) the long-standing, text-oriented Octopi GUI package manager with Shelly. Shelly was a GTK 4-based tool—a Linux UI development framework—that could manage AUR, Flatpak, and AppImage packages together, and it was written in C# and .NET 10. By August, however, CachyOS was rewriting Shelly entirely in Zig (in Japanese) to eliminate the managed runtime and move to a native binary.
Now comes Package Installer 2.0, only three months after Shelly was rewritten in Zig. CachyOS Package Installer already had a Qt6-based v1.x series, and version 2.0 is its major update.
CachyOS has not disclosed how Shelly and Package Installer 2.0 will relate to each other—whether they will coexist or one will become the default. Users have also asked what happened to Shelly and whether it was not supposed to become the primary package installer.
The project also teased that a new CachyOS release is coming soon. Whether Package Installer 2.0 will be included remains undecided.
What will change
Package Installer 2.0 is being redesigned around an app-store layout similar to Bazaar, the standard app store in the gaming-focused Linux distribution Bazzite and a front end for the Flathub Linux application distribution platform. Instead of the tabular list used by conventional package managers, the new interface is expected to let users install applications while viewing preview images and descriptions.
Supported package sources include the official CachyOS repositories, AUR (the Arch User Repository, where Arch users share packages), and Flatpak (a sandboxed package format that works across distributions).
They can be managed together in one interface. Flatpak and AUR both use opt-in toggles and are disabled by default. AppImage support is also planned, though as an installer rather than as a managed catalog.
There are nine color themes: four CachyOS themes plus Nord, Dracula, Catppuccin, Tokyo Night, and Solarized. Bazaar does not have a theme feature, giving Package Installer 2.0 a point of differentiation.
The development team also addressed its direction in replies. Features will be added over time. The team wants the interface to be as user-friendly as possible but does not intend to overwhelm it with information.
Arch-based distributions traditionally make users choose performance at the cost of accessibility. CachyOS is breaking down those barriers one by one while preserving its performance advantages. Revising a package management tool three times in seven months is fast, but that speed is itself part of CachyOS's character.
Originally published on Joho no Todai. The Japanese original is here.
