▶ YouTube Summaries

• YT :: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C7-cYjdmI2s
• Original title :: So I've Been Using Omarchy for 357 Days...

Forrest Knight, a long-time distro hopper (Ubuntu, custom Arch, WSL2, NixOS, Omakub), has used Omarchy almost exclusively since October 2025 and is staying on it. He reviews the first week, daily keyboard-driven use, the Omarchy 4 "Quattro" rewrite onto a QuickShell desktop shell that broke his customizations, security, a fresh install on a Framework laptop, and who the distro suits. The recurring theme: in "the malleable OS for the age of agents", he fixes and ports almost everything by pointing Claude Code at the problem.

What Omarchy is

• Arch Linux + Hyprland tiling WM, by DHH; since summer 2026 a full desktop shell built on QuickShell.
• Over a million ISO downloads; users include George Hotz; the Omacom Foundation has raised $23.7M. Long aside on pronunciation ("Omachi" per DHH).
• Sponsor: Greptile, which has reviewed ~1,500 Omarchy PRs; Forrest iterates with a local agent until Greptile's confidence score reaches 5/5.

First week (October 2025)

• Install took 5:12 on the desktop - slower than the advertised sub-2-minute installs, still far faster than Windows.
• Wi-Fi GUI was unclickable; connected manually via iwd. Never broke afterwards.
• Audio worked out of the box with a complex XLR/interface setup - the only failure was Zoom's mic once, plus agent-caused breakage while porting a recording app.
• GPU acceleration, multi-monitor, hibernation and btrfs snapshots worked out of the box. DaVinci Resolve not attempted seriously.

Daily use

• Keyboard-first: Super+Space launcher, Super+Return terminal, Super+W close, Super+1..5 workspaces, Super+Shift+N to move windows; Fibonacci tiling layout.
• Too many keybinds to remember, so he built "Omarchy Key Promoter" (like IntelliJ's Key Promoter X): a toast shows the shortcut when an app is opened via launcher. Published on the plugin marketplace - which only links to repos, so vet plugins.
• Theme selector with built-in themes, a theme marketplace and Aether, which extracts a palette from a wallpaper. He ships his own Forest Night theme.
• Dislikes the built-in web apps (Chromium-wrapped GitHub, X): middle-clicked links bounce out to a real Chromium anyway. Rejects the "bloat" criticism - every preinstalled app is removable with one button.

Quattro breakage

• Omarchy 4 replaced Waybar, Walker, Mako, SwayOSD, Hyprlock, Hypridle, swaybg and polkit-gnome with one QuickShell shell; NetworkManager replaced systemd-networkd; foot replaced Alacritty.
• Broken for him: custom Waybar islands and a calendar tooltip he'd built, an mpvpaper live-wallpaper script, custom keybinds, Alacritty config.
• Old configs were left in place, so he pointed an agent at them to reapply on the new shell; mostly worked, and the new defaults beat his old config. One step back, two forward: single plugin architecture and consistent theming from one colors file.

Security

• Omarchy has a head of security, a security team and a $100k HackerOne bug bounty - notable while other projects drop bounties because of AI slop. DHH's line: "we can fix everything".

Setup details

• Super+Shift+F mounts and opens his NAS. A Windows PC remains only for Adobe Premiere/Photoshop/Lightroom; the NAS has direct Ethernet links to both machines. Gaming (Battle.net) runs on Omarchy; when it failed on camera, he had Claude Code fix it in minutes.
• Framework laptop (16 GB, Intel iGPU): install in 59 seconds, Wi-Fi GUI works. Dotfiles pulled from GitHub and applied by an agent in ~10 minutes, after cleaning up leftover pre-Quattro configs. Concedes NixOS would be more reproducible.
• "I use Arch, by the way" is dead as a rite of passage; Arch Wiki still applies one-to-one.

Verdict

• Good fit if you like Arch, Hyprland and the theming but want tested updates, rollbacks and good defaults; not if you dislike the base. Customizations survived every update except the Quattro rewrite.
• Echoes George Hotz: keep Arch's customizability, pick tasteful defaults. Staying on it.