Omarchy Trial

There is a lot of sameness in technology these days ­and while convergence is fine, it's nice to explore. The announcement of Omarchy­ – an opinionated Arch Linux + Hyprland setup – reminded me of the early Android days when you could flash custom ROMs and experiment with opinionated Android forks. The nostalgia inspired me to give Omarchy a spin on an old Macbook Air.

Install

The install process was seamless for me and worked pretty much as documented in the manual and video tutorial. I did need to set up the Broadcom firmware to connect to a wifi network. With my wifi hardware enabled, I then set up NetworkManager to connect to my home network.

# Install NetworkManager
sudo pacman -S networkmanager

# Enable and start
sudo systemctl enable NetworkManager
sudo systemctl start NetworkManager

# Use nmcli
nmcli device wifi list
nmcli device wifi connect ...

Customizing

Opinions are destined to differ and while I appreciate most of the default apps included with Omarchy, I removed a few to clear up the excellent app launcher Wofi.

# View the default applications installed
ls ~/.local/share/applications

# For Chrome based web apps, simply delete the desktop entry
rm ~/.local/share/applications/WhatsApp.desktop

# If you need to remove other apps that are included try searching your packages
# For example, to remove OBS do the following
pacman -Qq | grep obs

# This should return obs-studio
sudo pacman -Rns obs-studio

Refer to the manual for a complete summary of the included applications.

Bindings

Omarchy defines default apps and keyboard short cuts for things like email and music. Similar to the unused apps, the defaults may not apply to you. For example, I use Fastmail instead of Hey as my primary email. Fortunately, Fastmail can be installed as a Chrome application similar to Hey and Omarchy includes a convenient alias to launch web apps.

# Update AI and Email apps
bind = SUPER, A, exec, $webapp="https://claude.ai"
bind = SUPER, E, exec, $webapp="https://app.fastmail.com"

Ahead

I have been using a Mac as a daily driver for over a decade and it works well, but not much changes and most of the time I am in Chrome, Slack, or my IDE. Omarchy is fresh, exciting, and provides an opportunity to exercise a little more creativity to computer engagement. Hyprland is excellent and while I occasionally mix up when to use CTRL versus SUPER, I find myself looking forward to using a ten year old machine for lightweight tasks or vibe coding. 🚀