Introduction

This guide documents a complete, field-tested installation and optimisation of CachyOS on a 2020 Intel MacBook Air (MacBookAir9,1). Every configuration detail has been verified on a live running system.

What is CachyOS?

CachyOS is an Arch Linux-based distribution built for performance. It ships with optimised kernels (BORE scheduler, LTO compilation, x86-64-v3 instruction sets), sensible defaults, and — since June 2024 — official T2 MacBook support built directly into the default kernel.

For Intel Macs reaching end-of-life from Apple's update support, CachyOS is an excellent way to keep your hardware fast, secure, and useful for years to come.

Why This Guide?

The official CachyOS wiki covers T2 Macs generally. This guide is specific to the MacBook Air 2020 (MacBookAir9,1) and documents real-world issues you'll encounter that aren't covered elsewhere:

• The fan exposes itself via ACPI (APP0001:00), not the traditional applesmc platform path — this breaks the default thermald configuration
• apple_bce is compiled into the CachyOS kernel (not a loadable module), so modprobe apple-bce always fails
• Glob patterns in scripts fail silently when called from fish shell via sudo bash
• paru/yay cannot be called via sudo -u inside a sudo session

All of these are fixed in this guide's scripts.

System Overview

Component	Detail
Model	Apple MacBook Air 2020 (MacBookAir9,1)
CPU	Intel Core i5-1030NG7 @ 1.10GHz (Ice Lake)
Kernel	6.19.x-cachyos
Bootloader	Limine 10.8.2
Audio	PipeWire 1.6.0 via apple-bce
Swap	ZRAM 15.4G (zstd)

Quick Start

If you're already running CachyOS, start here:

Run thermal setup first

Your CPU can sustain 100°C at near-idle fan speeds without intervention. This is the first thing to fix.

# 1. Fix thermals immediately
sudo bash scripts/01-thermal-setup.sh

# 2. Then optimise the rest
sudo bash scripts/03-optimise.sh

For a fresh install, start with Disable T2 Security.