This is my Part 3 about Omarchy, after using it for more than a year full time, as my main daily driver first on Lenovo ThinkBook 14 AMD, and now TUXEDO InfinityBook Pro 14 Gen10, for my business and personal use, replacing my MacBook Pro M1 after using macOS for 15 years. See more in Part 1 about my transition, what tools I needed, and in Part 2, the good, the bad, and the fixable. I’m also the original author of the Windows VM work (PR #1333, merged via #2462), making Excel and Word available for me as I needed to write offers in Word and my daughters needed it for school. Recently I have also contributed a couple of plugins, the most used being the timezone plugin.
This Part 3 is about the newest Quattro version, which onboarded a whole lot more people. One would say it went a little viral. It’s everywhere on Twitter, and on socials. So this is my take after using it for a month, comparing it to the previous version and what I like most, and maybe some things you should still be aware of.
So What’s New?
Maybe the biggest question: what is new that started the hype even more? Why is it all over social media when it was already out there for a full year?
The main reason is its integrated design with Quickshell (written in C++, Qt, QtQuick), which made the full interface one cohesive OS that is ultra fast1. It feels like an OS such as macOS, not like 100 different tools patched together, which is what Linux usually is. Sure, most distros have a cohesive look, but as soon as you want to change anything, you need to look at different dotfiles, different ways of configuring, some use toml, some json, others .ini files, etc. Omarchy built it all on the same tool chain, which is well chosen, ultra fast, and looks beautiful, and the config is unified with Hyprland bindings, monitors and toggles in Lua and the the shell itself with QML. If you don’t know the details, everything is available through the integrated Omarchy Menu.
And even more so, if you want to change monitor settings, you can just do it from the top bars, and Omarchy will change the settings in your dotfiles. It’s still the same tools underneath (most of them, as Omarchy comes with lots of great tools that are designed for Omarchy, e.g. Omasnap, the best screen capture tool, which finally replaced my beloved Snagit adequately on Linux - also because I added the cut-out feature myself and scrolling capture was recently added too, omacut for video editing, omawrite, and a bunch of other tools). But otherwise it’s the best-of-breed Linux utils and most importantly, TUIs.
The new launcher is amazing in two distinct ways. Opening it and typing is so fast. It feels instant. With the old Walker Launcher, I always had to physically wait before I typed what I searched for, as otherwise it would swallow the first letter.
Second, something I’ve built for myself from day one: you can fuzzy search the config entries below the tree. E.g. if you want to change the background, you don’t need to remember or know that it is under the parent Style and search for it for a couple of seconds, going into the wrong branches a couple of times. Instead, you just search back..+ enter and you’re there.
Pluggable: Change Your Operating System, the Malleable OS
But probably the biggest release and unlock for most people coming new into Omarchy (and Linux: remember, the target audience of Omarchy is not existing Linux users, who already know most of the glory and sheer beauty of tools out there, but macOS and Windows users) is the plugin marketplace (3000 in the less than a month, currently at 3548).
But why is this such a big thing, you might ask? Because it opens up the genie (Fable or GPT-6 Astra) to basically add any tool or visual to your OS that you want. Yeah, does not sound impressive, right? But ask Microsoft or Apple to add a timezone plugin into the actual OS, or change the ugly (personal taste) liquid glass back to the standard view, so it does not take drain battery out of your laptop for making the windows translucent. You can’t. You just get what you get. And the last couple of years, or months, were a disaster for macOS and Windows: instead of adding useful features, they shipped surveillance (hello Windows Recall), or bad rounded corners on macOS, or bad liquid glass design choices you had no control over.
If you experience it once: one prompt to change this, or to integrate your personal API into your OS, and it changes your perspective. That’s why people, especially non-technical ones who didn’t even have the possibility to program an app before, can now just ask to build an alert, or add an OCR function to your saved clipboard images (as a Plugin, PR to add to Omarchy), or update the fuzzy finder to search files, etc. I have literally changed 100s of things in my Omarchy setup. It might look similar to the default, but it’s very customized to my workflow. Which is what I love most.
I can customize the OS to work for me, instead of me needing to adapt to how the OS is working. Again, very hard to put into words if you haven’t experienced it. That’s why I recommend to everyone who is a little curious: take an old laptop that can’t work anymore with the latest macOS or Windows, and just install Omarchy (needs a USB stick), it literally takes less than a minute (current world record, not released yet, 9 seconds).
It’s not a Better macOS or Windows
Also, DHH, the creator of Omarchy, didn’t intend to make a better macOS or Windows. Instead, he created a whole new OS that didn’t exist yet.
People who said it’s just a couple of dotfiles are totally wrong. Because when I initially tried Linux, the sheer amount of work to make external monitors, internal camera, fingerprint, etc. work was astronomical. When I installed Omarchy the first time, it all just worked, out of the box. Most of my favorite tools were installed already, and design and theming are top notch.
Even more, it has a tiling manager, one thing I had in my macOS setup anyway, and it’s very terminal and TUI centric, another thing I was already doing on macOS, so the switch was super natural to me. But I understand that for a normal Windows or macOS user, moving windows around, maximizing and closing windows with the mouse, this new OS might be overwhelming at first.
This OS is not meant to be learnt in minutes, it takes some effort to learn, and that’s intentional. Because all good things, ways of working that are different from what we are used to, need some work. The best thing I can think of, as a Vim Motions lover, is Vim. You don’t learn the commands and way of working in a day, you need at least a week to be roughly as proficient as with your old way. For full proficiency, it will take at least 3 months.
But they make it easier and easier to learn. There’s a shortcut to just show all key shortcuts, or you can just pop up Learn Omarchy.
What Else? The Agentic OS?
I think that’s it, these are the most critical changes compared to the version before. But wait, there’s one more. The malleable computer, as DHH likes to say. It integrates with any agent of choice, and they’re all installable with “one menu item”. Every harness or model you can think of is there. And why is that? Because you can ask your agents to fix bugs with your monitor, or to set things up when you are at a presentation or a new co-working place. Before you might have needed to google and spend lots of time, now you are just one prompt away from almost anything.
This is what Linux could do before Omarchy, but not macOS or Windows. And it’s now accessible, packaged in a single under-1min installer, beautifully designed and with all the features you want anyway, built by a large community.
This is what I haven’t seen before. That’s why there are so many people showing up, building things I needed anyway, and then sharing theirs with others. It’s so infectious. That’s why people who don’t use it can’t believe it. And the pace at which changes come in is so rapid that it’s hard to keep up, and not to have an outdated opinion about it. Because the Omarchy I wrote about in Part 1, or in Part 2, is not the Omarchy Quattro of today anymore. And by the time I share this article, or you read this, I’m sure there are 100 other new cool improvements worth sharing.
That’s why you should keep an eye on the RSS feed or website news to see what’s going on. Also DHH has already hired through the Omacom Foundation a bunch of Linux folks who work on Hyprland, QuickShell and more. People who otherwise had to do that in their free time can now work on it full time, hopefully with a comfortable salary, making the Linux experience better for everyone.
Improving the Linux Experience for Everyone, Open-Source Based
This is what I fell in love with throughout my career anyway: open source software, sharing what you build for anyone to see your code, forking or contributing. Working on a common goal together, instead of each one in their private repos.
This is what Omarchy is: an open Linux repo where all the fixes each of us would otherwise have needed to suffer through now get shared, and even packaged in a way that we can install in a crazy 9 seconds!!!!
That’s why everyone is so excited, at least the ones who realise this, or don’t have countless hours to set up a hard disk, or a partition. At least, that’s what I did in my early years, 100 times with Windows, and also a few times with Linux, and it was always a pain. Being afraid to hit the wrong partition, to make it too small and then later needing to repartition or reinstall the OS because I didn’t choose a good default. These are things I don’t enjoy.
Making it My Own: Fonts, Workflow Optimizations
But what I enjoy are aesthetics and workflow improvements. I want to change the fonts in my terminal, I want to change my workflow for taking notes, or capturing print screens that have worked for me for the last 20 years, that I have optimized so diligently. So now there’s an OS where I can take that to the moon, and I did.
Sure, there’s a lot of time “wasted”, but I’d say I loved it, I learned a ton, and why wouldn’t I spend a ton of time optimizing the toolchain I use every day for my work? I’m an author and data engineer who works 8-10 hours every day on the computer, sometimes even in my free time playing around with nerdy stuff like neovim, Obsidian and distraction-free typewriters. I love this. But every second I optimize is joy given back when I use the operating system. It’s how I interface with the computer.
Omarchy has made it possible to take an awesome starting point, customize it to my needs, make it my own, while still getting all the new cool features that I might not have known I needed, but once there, I can just use them. E.g. just one example, the speech-to-text integration with voxtype is just so cool and handy, I’m not a talker to my computer, but here and there I might use it. So I would not spend hours to set it up, but you know what, I once accidentally saw it on Twitter, I tried it, and it just worked.
This is really the beauty of Omarchy, for me, and why Quattro took off so much. And potentially for you too? But we are just at the start, so there’s much more to come, and I’m very excited for it. Though I also just value using the system, I need to get work done. So even if you don’t want all the hype or changes, you can just use Omarchy, and you get the best Linux experience out there. The latest update included a bespoke Omarchy Linux Kernel, just for Omarchy, to keep the desktop responsive and multitasking smooth, even under heavy load or memory pressure.
So that’s a lot of words for the 4.0 version of a Linux distro, but I hope I could make it clearer what it is all about.
If you want to know more about my terminal workflows, (note-taking, database, writing with Zen and Nvim) or nerdy Omarchy-related stuff, check out my second brain note on Omarchy with all its backlinks and graph, where you can see related notes. Especially check out the beautiful TUIs, this is really my favorite places to be in when on a computer. For example, for this article is written on a Typewriter, no GUI, just plain terminal style (Simple Raspberry Pi Zero 2 with Debian and Neovim).
Find more related links and the custom plugins I’ve contributed to Omarchy so far. Thanks for reading this far. Feel free to share your workflow and how you use Omarchy—I’m always interested in learning more.
Further Reads
- Omarchy Note with backlinks and interactive graph to find related notes.
- Part 1: My Journey from macOS to Arch Linux with Omarchy
- Part 2: Arch Linux (Omarchy) — 8 Months Later: The Good, the Bad, and the Fixable
- My Omarchy workflow video and macOS for comparison
- Omarchy Event Switzerland (Biel P15)
- All my dotfiles, including omarchy under Linux mostly under linux_applications,omarchy,hypr
My Plugins
All my Omarchy plugins:
Timezones
Search Images with OCR from Clipboard
TUI Email Client in the top bar
My Website Analytics in the top bar
Cliamp: Listening Music in a TUI
Not my plugin, but one I tested, and super cool to listen Spotify:
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Quickshell is newly used for the bar, launcher, menus, notifications, on-screen displays, control panels, lock screen, and polkit agent now all live inside a single long-running shell process with a plugin architecture. That means Waybar, Walker, Mako, SwayOSD, hyprlock, hypridle, swaybg, and polkit-gnome are all gone, replaced by one coherent, fully-themed, IPC-scriptable shell. Release notes ↩︎