Omarchy
An Arch based distribution where the whole desktop is already decided
Omarchy is a full Linux distribution built on Arch and the Hyprland tiling compositor, installed from its own ISO rather than layered onto a machine you already have. It hands you a coherent Wayland desktop on the first boot. Underneath it is still Arch, so pacman and the AUR work as usual. The price is accepting one person's taste, including how and when your system upgrades.
“My daily driver on both my desktop and my laptop. The best OS I have used: the keyboard driven desktop, the defaults and the updates are all decided for you, and they are good decisions.”
Best for when
- you want a tiling Wayland desktop that is finished on the day you install it
- you are setting a machine up from scratch and would rather not make every decision yourself
- you work mostly in a terminal and want the desktop to stay out of the way
Watch out for
- the installer takes a whole drive or the free space beside another OS, and there is no supported way to add it to an Arch install you already have
- Secure Boot and TPM must be switched off in firmware, which rules out a lot of managed work machines
- full system upgrades go through its own command and a direct pacman -Syu is blocked, though installing packages is ordinary pacman or yay, and the stable mirror sits about a month behind Arch
- hybrid Intel and Nvidia laptops still need manual work, and regressions in that area land between releases
- M series Macs are not supported, and the desktop assumes a 2x display, so a 1x screen needs scaling set by hand
It replaces the machine, it does not decorate it
This is a distribution with an installer, not a dotfiles repository you clone over an existing setup. You write the ISO to a stick, answer a few questions and let it take the drive, or the free space next to Windows if you dual boot. As of the version 4 rewrite the project's own internals ship as packages rather than a git checkout, and there is no supported route to add Omarchy to an Arch install you already run.
That framing matters before you download anything. Your current dotfiles do not come with you, the default configuration is the starting point and your overrides live alongside it. The firmware requirements are real too: Secure Boot and TPM have to be off, and because the disk is encrypted by default you need a wired or 2.4 GHz keyboard, not Bluetooth, to type the password at boot.
Packages are plain Arch, upgrades go through Omarchy
The system will stop a direct pacman upgrade and send you to its own update command, because that path also runs the snapshots and migrations that keep a rolling release from breaking underneath you. The stable package mirror deliberately trails upstream Arch by roughly a month for the same reason.
An experienced Arch user keeps the tooling they know: pacman and yay install and remove packages exactly as on any Arch machine, and the AUR is one menu entry away. What changes is the full system upgrade, which runs through one command, and on the stable channel the newest packages arrive about a month late. In return an update is expected to be survivable, with boot menu snapshots and a documented reinstall as the recovery path. That reinstall resets your changes to the default config files, which is worth knowing before you need it.
On the same shelf
NixOS
The whole machine as one config file, with a boot menu full of undo
Distrobox
Another distribution's tooling on your machine, sharing your home directory
Devbox
Per project shells with Nix underneath and no Nix language to learn