CachyOS Setup

My personal CachyOS setup with GNOME, automated with Ansible.

Software

Purpose	Choice
Terminal	Ghostty
System monitoring	Mission Center
DNS provider	NextDNS via systemd-resolved — routes all system DNS queries over DNS-over-TLS with DNSSEC validation
Audio player	Gapless
Video player	mpv — custom MVUtensils motion interpolation for TV-style motion smoothing, toggled with Shift+I
Media server	Jellyfin — hardware-accelerated decoding on the AMD GPU
Web browser	Firefox
Code editor	Visual Studio Code
AI coding agent	Oh My Pi (OMP)
Netflix browser	Opera — the only browser that gives me 1080p Netflix playback on Linux
RSS reader	NewsFlash — for following news from my favorite websites
Proton version manager	ProtonPlus — manages Proton-GE and Proton-CachyOS versions
PDF toolkit	Stirling PDF

Machine profiles

The shared playbook configures both machines. It then selects one profile from the local hostname, so hardware-specific packages and services do not leak between them.

Profile	Hostname	Additional configuration
desktop	cachyos-desktop	Wootility and the Jellyfin media server
laptop	cachyos-laptop	asusctl, supergfxctl, rog-control-center, and solaar; supergfxd is enabled and started

GNOME extensions

• Dash to Panel — provides a horizontal taskbar similar to Windows.
• Smart Home — controls my Philips Hue bridge.
• Vitals — displays and monitors system temperatures.

Manual assets

• Import roles/packages/files/newsflash/Newsflash.OPML from the NewsFlash UI when initializing feeds.
• show-elgato-output.sh is a validated standalone helper. Run ./show-elgato-output.sh --help; its default capture device is machine-specific and can be overridden with --video-device and --sound-device.

Appearance

• Icon theme: Papirus
• Default system font: FreeSans 12
• Terminal font: Inconsolata Medium 14

Ansible Vault password

vault_password_file is intentionally omitted from ansible.cfg; bootstrap.sh supplies it only for run and check, so lint and CI do not depend on a local secret.