Marcelo Alcantara

When we introduced Omarchy M in September, Marcelo was the guy building the native Mac installer. Since then, he’s become the one coordinating the whole effort. Sixteen people from all over the world, each working on a different layer of the stack, from GPU drivers and displays to Touch ID and the installer itself. Somebody has to keep all of that pulling in the same direction, and Marcelo has been that person.

The result shipped in Omarchy 4.5. You can now download an app on macOS (or run brew install omacom/mac/omarchy), and it’ll put Omarchy right alongside it on your M1, M2, M3, or Neo MacBook. No USB stick, no terminal incantations. Two months from team announcement to “just download it” is an incredible pace.

That’s a huge credit to everyone on Omarchy M: Scott, Chris, Naeem, Dj, Joshua, Eduardo, Shun, Ryan, Miguel, Liam, Eryk, Jaidip, Shawn, Randy, Jon, and Marcelo. You finished what Asahi started, and you’re already pushing on to M4, M5, and M6. Thank you!

Birk Skyum

Birk joined Omarchy Dragon in September with his Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x and a track record of upstream fixes in Arch Linux ARM, libcamera, PipeWire, systemd, and the kernel. Since then, he’s taken on coordinating the bring-up of the entire Snapdragon lineup. That means gathering the machines, figuring out what works and what doesn’t on each one, and making sure the fixes land where they help everyone.

You can already see his fingerprints all over the ARM work in 4.5: no more pointless reboot prompts after every update, cameras that show up at login on Snapdragon laptops, and apps that are offered (or hidden) based on what actually runs on ARM. But that’s just the beginning. Birk is driving toward an upcoming release where every Snapdragon machine we support will just work. Sleep, battery, video, cameras, the lot. That’s the bar, and he’s the one making sure we clear it.

Welcome!

Omarchy is going to run beautifully on every major platform, and Core needs the people who are making that happen. Marcelo and Birk have been doing exactly that. Now it’s official.

Welcome to Omarchy Core, Marcelo and Birk!

Floating workspaces with a dock

Super + L now cycles any workspace between tiling, scrolling, and floating. On a floating workspace, every window gets a titlebar in your theme’s colors, and a dock shows your pinned apps, everything that’s running, and a grid of every app installed. Drag to reorder or pin, right-click for more, and Super + M minimizes a window down to the dock.

This is a wonderful on-ramp for anyone arriving from macOS or Windows who isn’t ready to go all-in on tiling yet. Or for anyone who just wants one workspace where windows can sprawl. Mix and match per workspace, and the bar shows which layout each one uses.

Omarchy on Apple Silicon

Our incredible Omarchy M team has shipped the native Mac installer. Download an app on macOS, and it’ll put Omarchy right alongside it on your M1, M2, M3, or Neo MacBook. No USB stick, no terminal incantations. Prefer Homebrew? That’s one line:

brew install omacom/mac/omarchy

This is what we set out to do in September: finish what Asahi started. Two months later, you can just download it. Amazing work by everyone on the team.

And they’re not stopping there. M4, M5, and M6 are all being worked on right now, so it probably won’t be long until Omarchy runs on every Apple Silicon Mac.

ARM support for NVIDIA DGX Spark + N1X (and soon Snapdragon)

Omarchy 4.5 ships its first ARM ISO, and with it comes preliminary support for NVIDIA’s ARM machines: the DGX Spark desktop and the laptops built on the N1X, like the Dell XPS 16 Creator Edition and the ASUS ProArt P14. And soon we’ll have support for the entire lineup of Snapdragon ARM machines as well. It’s still early days, so expect a few rough edges, and please report anything that breaks on GitHub.

50 languages and 5 input methods

Omarchy now speaks 50 languages. Pick one under Setup > Language (or run omarchy language <code>), and the menu, the desktop, and Omarchy’s notifications switch immediately. The system locale follows on your next login.

Speaking a language is only half of it, though. You also need to type it. So Omarchy now sets up proper input methods for Japanese (Mozc), Korean (Hangul), Simplified Chinese (Pinyin), Taiwan (Zhuyin), and Hong Kong (Cangjie), right from the installer or later under Setup > Keyboard. Each one comes with the right fonts for its character forms, the candidate window follows your theme, and Super + I switches between your input languages. Hangul, Zhuyin, and Cangjie keep their keys in the standard positions even if you type Latin on Dvorak, Colemak, or AZERTY, just like on Windows and macOS. And tapping Shift on its own steps out of an input method into Latin letters and back again, the way Sogou, Microsoft Pinyin, and macOS work.

Sign in to captive Wi-Fi portals

Hotel, airport, and coffee shop Wi-Fi finally just works. Omarchy now notices when a network wants you to sign in or accept its terms before letting you online. The network icon warns you, and the network panel shows a big Open Captive Portal button that takes you straight to the login page. Once you’re through, everything goes back to normal on its own.

Five new default apps

Hype makes presentations from a single Markdown file, with a visual slide editor beside the source, and exports to PDF or PowerPoint.

Signed replaces Xournal++ for the paperwork: open a PDF, place your saved signature, text, and dates, and save a signed copy.

Disktree draws a treemap of what’s filling your disk, colored by kind, calls out the caches that are safe to regenerate, and lets you mark what should go.

Monologue records your camera with one key, themed to match your desktop.

Gliff gives you a remote desktop over SSH. Connect to another Omarchy machine and drive its full desktop from a window on yours, with a tab for each machine. And because it rides on SSH, there’s nothing extra to set up or expose. The machine being controlled shows a remote session indicator in the bar, so it’s always clear when someone is on it.

And there’s Elsewhen, a world clock that lives right next to the clock in the bar. Tap a city on the globe to set where you are, search for real places, and name the people who live in each city, so you always know whether it’s a decent hour to call. Flip between 12 and 24 hours with t, between °F and °C with Alt + T, and summon it anytime with Super + Ctrl + Alt + E.

With Monologue for recording and Omacut for trimming, new installs no longer ship OBS Studio and Kdenlive. Lazydocker is gone from new installs too, though Docker and Docker Compose are still included. Machines that already have any of them keep them.

Microsoft 365

Need to work with people who live in Office? Install > Service > Microsoft now sets up Outlook, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Teams, and OneDrive as web apps. Each one gets its own window and launcher entry, so they feel right at home next to everything else. No more excuses for not switching to Omarchy at work!

Superwhisper for dictation

Superwhisper is now Omarchy’s default dictation engine, and it’s set up out of the box. Tap Alt + Space to start talking and again to stop, or hold Right Alt for push-to-talk. It’s incredibly fast and very accurate.

It starts in the cloud, so it works the moment you install, and the first 10,000 words are free. But you can switch to a downloadable model that’s entirely free and runs completely locally, without sending a word to anyone. And if you’d rather go with another local model, Voxtype is still on offer as an alternative.

Install in less than ten seconds

Omarchy used to install some 940 packages one by one. The new F1 installer instead unpacks a prebuilt root image and adds just this machine’s packages on top. That cuts install times roughly in half on any machine.

And on fast hardware, it’s absurd. Anush Elangovan from AMD set the world record with a full Omarchy install in 7 seconds on his AMD laptop. Seven seconds! I remember when five minutes seemed like an ambitious goal.

Faster everywhere else

It’s not just the installer. Startup no longer stalls on binfmt registration. The theme picker opens right away instead of after a quarter of a second. Menus and panels open straight from Hyprland shortcuts, skipping the 60 ms it took to start a process first. The Omarchy menu’s slowest checks went from 200 ms to 16 ms, a new terminal shows its prompt 30 ms sooner, and the whole desktop now reacts to changes instead of polling for them. Even logging out, rebooting, and shutting down happen the moment your apps finish closing.

Agent upgrades

Omarchy is the agentic OS, and 4.5 brings a big round of upgrades for working with agents. The agents panel now tracks 23 agents and providers, up from 6, including Cursor, OpenCode, GitHub Copilot, Antigravity, Hermes, Amp, Kiro, Devin, Qwen, DeepSeek, OpenRouter, and Ollama. Every limit gets its own meter with the time until it resets, so you can see exactly how much runway you have left. And Grok is now a full provider alongside Claude and Codex.

And your agent is always one keystroke away. Super + ~ drops down a Quake-style console over a dimmed desktop, and the first time you open it, it starts your default agent. Press it again to tuck it away, and your session is right where you left it.

If you juggle more than one subscription, you can now keep several Claude, Codex, and Grok logins on the same machine and pick which one new sessions start with, using omarchy agent account. History, settings, and skills are shared between them, so claude --continue picks up right where you left off after a switch. Near a limit, Omarchy can either offer a one-click switch or move new sessions over to the account with the most headroom on its own. And when you set up another machine, omarchy agent account copy brings all your logins over SSH, so you don’t have to sign in to everything again.

Kimi and Ori, OpenRouter’s agent harness, join the choices under Setup > Defaults > Agent, and Google’s Antigravity replaces the obsolete Gemini CLI (gemini still works as an alias). Prefer a window to a terminal? The Claude and Amp desktop apps are now a click away under Install > AI.

Notifications, rebuilt

Notifications now stack by sender, follow your theme, and collapse identical repeats. Action buttons, verification codes, and links all work right from the card. Super + Comma acts on the newest one (dismiss, open, or press its button), and Super + Ctrl + Comma hands you the keyboard to drive them all. The bell in the bar turns on Do Not Disturb.

Video backgrounds and theme intros

Backgrounds can now be videos. Drop one in, and your desktop comes alive with rolling waves or whatever else you fancy, while the lock screen shows a still frame from it. And themes now make an entrance: each one can play a short, silent intro when you log in or switch to it. (Rather keep it calm? Turn intros off under Appearance > Animations.)

Jade Horse joins the default themes

Jade Horse is all misty greens, with carved-jade backgrounds that make the whole desktop look like a scroll painting. It replaces Osaka Jade among the bundled themes, and it’s joined by Starship as the other new default theme. If you’re on Osaka Jade, you keep your copy, and it lives on as a third-party theme for anyone who wants to install it fresh.

Liftoff is the new default background

New installs now greet you with Liftoff, a gorgeous sunset launch that’s the new default background for Tokyo Night. It was made by Tom Ballard, who first created it for his Liftoff theme. Thanks, Tom!

Boot menu now quiet

Omarchy used to show the boot menu for about six seconds on every start, just in case you needed to roll back to an earlier snapshot. But almost nobody ever did. So now Limine waits just one second and boots quietly, and most of the time you won’t see the menu at all.

When you do need a different entry or a snapshot, keep tapping any key (the down arrow works) while the machine starts, and it’ll stop at the menu. And if you’d rather keep the menu up longer for good, set your own timeout: in /boot/limine.conf (like timeout: 5). Updates will leave a timeout you set alone.

Changed hotkeys

Some shortcuts moved:

• Calculator: Super + Ctrl + Q is now Super + Shift + Q.
• Activity: Super + Ctrl + T is now Super + Shift + T, and Super + Ctrl + T opens themes.
• Network: Super + Ctrl + W is now Super + Ctrl + N, and Super + Ctrl + W opens backgrounds.
• Nightlight no longer has a shortcut (it was Super + Ctrl + N); it’s in Trigger > Toggle.
• Super + Alt + Space opens Apps from the dock instead of the Apps menu.

Notification shortcuts changed:

• Super + Comma acts on the newest card (dismisses it, opens it, or presses its one button) instead of only dismissing it.
• Dismissing the last one moved to Super + Alt + Comma, which used to open it.
• Silencing moved from Super + Ctrl + Comma to Super + Ctrl + Alt + Comma; Super + Ctrl + Comma now hands you keyboard control.

A few keys work differently:

• Super + Tab, Super + Shift + Tab, Super + Ctrl + Tab, and Super + scroll stay on the current monitor’s workspaces, since every monitor has its own.
• In a terminal, Super + C and Super + V send Ctrl + Shift + C and Ctrl + Shift + V instead of Ctrl + Insert and Shift + Insert.

New defaults that could collide with bindings of your own: Super + Q (close window, alongside Super + W), Super + A (select all), Super + M (minimize to the dock), Super + ~ and Super + Shift + ~ (Quake console), Super + Alt + L (previous layout), Super + Shift + Ctrl + Arrows (move a window to another monitor), Super + Ctrl + Alt + C (screenshot), Super + Ctrl + Alt + E (world clock), Super + Ctrl + Alt + F (full screen desktop), and holding Right Alt for push-to-talk dictation.

More features

• Give every monitor its own workspaces: Super + 1-0 goes to the workspaces of the monitor you’re on, and Super + Arrows moves to and from the other displays by @ryanrhughes in #15655
• Gather everything about how the desktop looks into a new Appearance menu, replacing Style: theme, background, font, bar, windows, branding, the dock, workspace layouts, animations, and the unlock screen by @dhh in #15973
• Pick Opaque, Transparent, or Glassy windows under Appearance > Window Transparency, plus a Glassy bar background by @dhh in #14991
• Pick theme, sharp, or rounded window corners under Appearance > Window Corners by @dhh in #14990
• Add a no-animations mode, on by default in VMs by @dhh in #13550
• Make apps opaque by default, keeping terminals transparent by @dhh in #14253
• Add Slack to Install > Service by @dhh in #14434
• Make Alt + Space toggle dictation on every backend by @dhh in #17188
• Add Open and Edit buttons to screenshot notifications, and Open and Cut to screen recordings and yt-dlp downloads by @dhh in #16505
• Add an Update > Kernel menu for switching the default kernel by @dhh in #15966
• Add theme sync to herdr machines by @dhh in #13430
• Add o.rebind for replacing Hyprland keybindings by @ryanrhughes in #10537
• Ask for your git identity after first login instead of in the installer, with GitHub sign-in by @omarchybot in #16288
• Allow install media to preset the language, keyboard, and timezone by @omarchybot in #15522
• Allow bar widgets to live in the tray’s drawer by @dhh in #15281
• Allow removing a bar widget by dragging it off the bar by @ryanrhughes in #6782
• Allow scrolling through workspaces from the bar by @outfoxxed in #15256
• Allow deleting extra themes from the theme picker by @dhh in #14713
• Add hey, basecamp, and Cloudflare CLIs as lazy-installed tools by @monorkin in #7626
• Add SSH Agent as an optional service by @carletex in #9399
• Allow choosing how long passwordless sudo lasts by @dhh in #14435
• Add a hover close button to notification toasts by @dhh in #6946
• Allow muting a program’s notifications from its crash diagnosis by @omarchybot in #8549
• Allow omarchy-notification-send to add action buttons by @dhh in #16466
• Add a clock format with live seconds by @omarchybot in #7586
• Adjust the keyboard backlight with Ctrl and the brightness keys by @ludagoo in #16650
• Print the OEM Windows product key from firmware by @dhh in #7480
• Add original vi as a terminal editor choice by @dhh in #10307
• Add the Roadster Starlight background to Ethereal by @bjarneo, @tcballard in #15878

Security

• Keep the Windows VM password out of the RDP client’s arguments by @dicemans in #7902
• Move screen-recording state out of world-writable /tmp by @Chessing234 in #8374
• Harden passwordless sudo expiry across suspend by @AFOliveira in #9457
• Bind update inhibitor cleanup to the process that created it by @AFOliveira in #9467
• Isolate OCaml cleanup authorization by @ErikMelton in #10217
• Pin factory-reset elevation to the packaged command by @AFOliveira in #13047
• Remove saved fingerprint templates for the invoking user on reset by @AFOliveira in #13049
• Refuse hook and state names that are paths by @Adolanium in #8170
• Defer to system-auth in the polkit stack written by fingerprint and FIDO2 setup by @Wheel-Smith in #9873
• Remove fingerprints from the reader’s own storage when removing them by @scottjones in #16403
• Prevent SSH setup from leaving sshd running with password logins when no key gets added by @omarchybot, @thebytorsnowdog in #14667
• Prevent another local user from swapping in their own program during a Voxtype upgrade by @Vladkarok in omacom/omarchy-pkgs#937
• Harden how factory reset passes your gum settings through sudo by @AFOliveira in #13316

Fixes

• Fix Hyprland crashing when a monitor is unplugged, disabled, or turned off by closing the lid by @falkoro in #16750
• Fix upgrades that could leave a kernel image without its root= parameter by @dhh in #6951
• Fix factory reset erasing other systems’ boot entries by @omarchybot in #14949
• Fix an install next to another Omarchy removing that install’s boot entry by @emirb in omacom/omarchy-iso@716bc15
• Fix free-space installs that could take an existing partition for a new one by @emirb in omacom/omarchy-iso#307
• Fix resuming an interrupted drive password change removing the wrong key by @scottjones in #14874
• Ask for the sudo password once per Omarchy update by @dhh in #13323
• Ask for the sudo password once for ten minutes instead of again on every command by @dhh in #17000
• Cover AUR updates and the boot check with the update’s single sudo prompt by @omarchybot in #16568
• Keep package updates safe from logging out mid-transaction by @dhh in #11651
• Log out, reboot, and shut down as soon as apps finish closing by @dhh in #15231
• Replace Tensaku with Omasnap for screenshots by @ryanrhughes in #9446
• Grow panels out of the bar and morph between them, with press feedback on buttons and bar icons by @dhh in #16470
• Slide notifications in from under the bar and back out the way they came by @dhh in #16469
• Check connectivity against Omarchy’s own endpoint, and fix signing in to captive portals by @dhh in #16186
• Fix switching from edge to stable or RC leaving the machine on an old build by @emirb in #15903
• Fix the update to 4.5 stopping when the shell is slow to answer by @AnPod in #13468
• Fix updates failing silently when started outside the desktop session by @dhh in #17420
• Fix a failed mise tool download stopping the rest of a system update by @sanjyay in #16318
• Fix updates failing when omarchy-nvim isn’t installed by @imzihuailin in #15141
• Fix dual-boot installs failing to mount the EFI partition by @Damian626 in omacom/omarchy-iso#111
• Fix installs stopping when the firmware won’t take a new boot entry by @ryanio in omacom/omarchy-iso@238bb33
• Fix installs stopping on disks with an old RAID member or volume group by @omarchybot in omacom/omarchy-iso#327
• Start the installer sooner by not waiting on every USB device and boot job by @emirb in omacom/omarchy-iso#314
• Speed up disk encryption with 4096-byte sectors on new installs by @emirb in omacom/omarchy-iso#336
• List internal disks first and open the install screens on the safe choice by @emirb in omacom/omarchy-iso#320
• List Full disk install first in the installer, and go back with Esc on the disk screens by @emirb in omacom/omarchy-iso#348
• Fix scaling one monitor changing the scale of every other monitor by @dhh in #16923
• Fix XWayland apps coming out too big when monitors use different scales by @dhh in #16950
• Fix HDR displays switching to a washed-out HDR picture when a window goes fullscreen by @dhh in #17157
• Fix blurry menus and pickers on fractionally scaled displays by @dhh in #13419
• Fix the laptop display staying off after unplugging the external display by @Hamza0101, @dhiasalhiQ in #16310
• Fix re-enabling a display resetting its position, scale, and mode by @zihaomu in #16147
• Fix menus and pickers not reopening after a monitor is disconnected by @dhh in #14458
• Fix per-monitor workspaces moving after a monitor is unplugged by @ryanrhughes in #15867
• Fix the shell crashing when an audio device disconnects with the audio panel open by @omarchybot in #7783
• Fix fullscreen windows losing fullscreen after the screensaver by @MGross21 in #3284
• Fix the cursor disappearing at startup after Hyprland reloads by @spencerbull in #14935
• Fix the cursor turning invisible over XWayland apps by @Sebo1411 in #14580
• Fix clipboard capture hangs by @maxcroy1 in #9488
• Fix keyring access through the XDG Secret portal by @pkwagner in #9594
• Fix fingerprint enrollment and lock-screen recovery by @GeertJohan in #7158
• Guide fingerprint enrollment step by step by @scottjones in #15512
• Fix key auto-repeat in the lock screen password field by @berndb in #7806
• Fix the lock screen wallpaper loading after the password field on wake by @dhh in #13431
• Fix screen lock timeouts when the session names a display that’s gone by @dhh in #15226
• Speed up opening a terminal in the current window’s directory by @dhh in #13423
• Make VS Code-family editors follow theme changes live by @Macho0x in #10134
• Retheme running Hunk sessions on theme change by @dhh in #13518
• Remember the selected wallpaper for each theme by @OldJobobo in #7718
• Keep the image picker fast and sharp with large collections and HiDPI by @keylimesoda in #14117
• Cut the CPU and memory the transparent bar spends sampling the wallpaper by @ryanyogan, @aholbreich in #8307
• Speed up the Tailscale panel on tailnets with thousands of machines by @iskakaushik in #7623
• Bring Grok up to par with Claude and Codex in the agents panel by @dhh in #13992
• Apply agent account selection to CLI subprocesses by @dhh in #14233
• Show Codex individual spend limits and their reset times by @Stegi56 in #15722
• Set up browser integration when choosing Claude by @dhh in #11934
• Fix agents not finding mise tools installed after they started by @dhh in #16593
• Fix pasting screenshots into agents in herdr panes started over SSH by @dhh in #16572
• Fix the agents panel missing compressed Codex sessions by @omarchybot in #16385
• Return Caps Lock to normal and make Shift + Caps Lock the compose key by @dhh in #14939
• Apply the system keyboard layout to the login screen by @g-desoutter in #6896
• Fix layout switching skipping every other press with a non-Latin keyboard layout by @manuaudio in #14076
• Turn on hardware video decoding in mpv by @dhh in #15172
• Switch TCP congestion control to BBR and use the kyber I/O scheduler on real disks by @dhh in #11658
• Install T3 Code as its self-updating AppImage by @ryanrhughes in #15907
• Improve PHP and Laravel installation by @nunomaduro in #12141
• Install Node lazily and leave your mise config alone by @ryanrhughes in #15876
• Install missing apps when choosing defaults by @dhh in #6950
• Dim installed software in the Install menus instead of hiding it by @dhh in #6955
• Register password manager and other native messaging hosts for Brave Origin by @dhh in #10292
• Group Brave Origin web notifications by site, and open the right tab when clicked by @ryanrhughes in #16296
• Approve orphan package removal automatically during updates by @dhh in #14428
• Update Omarchy’s keyring before every update by @emirb in #17311
• Offer to reboot after switching channels by @dhh in #17251
• Offer the first-run update only when there’s something to update by @emirb in #16211
• Find the weather location and the installer’s timezone with Omarchy’s own geo service by @emirb in #16240
• Set the clock from ntp.omarchy.org instead of Arch’s NTP pool by @emirb in #16247
• Measure network speed with Omarchy’s own speed test by @emirb in #16681
• Show a traced-icon progress screen during first boot by @dhh, @DjDeveloperr in #17156
• Boot the live ISO on the Omarchy kernel, and on the T2 kernel only on Macs by @emirb in omacom/omarchy-iso#310
• Stop offline installs waiting on mise version lookups by @emirb in omacom/omarchy-iso#323
• Fix offline installs defaulting the timezone to Africa/Abidjan by @emirb in omacom/omarchy-iso#329
• Fix the installer’s timezone picker not letting you type to search by @emirb in #17040
• Fix the live ISO hanging behind the splash when booted from a Ventoy stick by @emirb in omacom/omarchy-iso#348
• Fix German and French console keymaps in the installer’s setup form by @omarchybot in #14684
• Hide gum’s English key hints in the installer and git setup by @dhh in omacom/omarchy-iso#325
• Drop the English-only jokes from the install progress screen by @dhh in omacom/omarchy-iso#326
• Fix installer output landing unpadded on the screen while it prepares the disk by @emirb in omacom/omarchy-iso#338
• Fix the Quattro upgrade resetting the default browser to Chromium by @omarchybot in #15074
• Fix the Quattro upgrade stopping on background names with non-ASCII characters by @Pitchfork-and-Torch in #15277
• Fix the kernel migration stopping on machines that boot with GRUB or systemd-boot by @manuaudio in #14188
• Fix hibernation on unencrypted machines with more than one NVMe disk by @emirb in #16658
• Fix the FIDO2 migration being marked done before it was resolved by @ErikMelton in #16421
• Fix a floating workspace taking over the first window your own float rule covers by @zihaomu in #16143
• Fix the compositor stalling when Super + L cycles a workspace in and out of floating by @omarchybot in #16397
• Fix Alt + Shift + Tab not cycling backwards through every window by @omarchybot in #8576
• Fix popped-out windows not centering when moved to another monitor by @omarchybot in #14549
• Fix new terminals opening outside your home folder when a non-terminal window is focused by @omarchybot in #15007
• Fix 1Password and Bitwarden windows not floating by @dhh in #11704
• Fix 1Password closing when the installer terminal exits by @dhh in #12402
• Fix DaVinci Resolve dialogs stealing pointer focus by @AksharP5 in #6919
• Fix the desktop showing through Windows VM displays by @jmwall in #8162
• Fix legacy Windows VM passwords containing $$ after the Quattro migration by @omarchybot in #13432
• Stop Hyprland’s donation popup from showing after upgrades by @dhh in #17153
• Improve dragging and arranging bar widgets by @outfoxxed in #15517
• Normalize bar icon size and alignment by @bjarneo in #15065
• Reveal the hidden bar indicators only when hovering left of the clock by @dhh in #16293
• Align tray icons with the bar’s other icons by @ayoubdya in #16089
• Show the next bar tooltip right away while one is already up by @dhh in #16488
• Open the clock and weather panels under their widgets by @scottjones in #8942
• Keep the network panel open after picking a DNS provider by @dhh in #16485
• Fix a closing popup leaving bar widgets unresponsive by @omarchybot in #15111
• Fix the hidden bar catching clicks along the top of fullscreen windows by @dhh in #16991
• Fix dark tray icons disappearing into the bar by @omarchybot in #14661
• Fix bar icons sitting uneven or off-center by @dhh in #17003
• Fix bar tooltips drawing their first frame at the wrong size by @omarchybot in #16243
• Fix notification history showing every card as just now by @dhh in #16277
• Fix first-login notifications collapsing into a single stack by @dhh in #16515
• Fix notification clicks not focusing apps with multi-word names by @omarchybot in #16380
• Fix Taildrop notifications showing empty text and missing previews by @dhh in #16301
• Fix the battery notification showing an empty time and 0W on a full battery by @dhh in #16272
• Fix the low battery warning staying up after plugging in and coming back after reboots by @omarchybot in #16562
• Fix battery draw reading 0W on some laptops by @dhh in #17265
• Fix a full battery on AC showing as draining by @omarchybot in #16278
• Fix Hibernate showing when the kernel won’t hibernate by @omarchybot in #7779
• Fix gvfs mounts going missing after resume by @omarchybot in #14496
• Fix the keyboard backlight staying off after the lock blanks twice by @omarchybot in #15908
• Fix the fingerprint reader waking while the lock has displays off by @dhh in #15294
• Fix the boot password prompt off-center when a display appears late by @dhh in #11641
• Fix the screensaver’s exit key flashing in the corner by @dhh in #16596
• Fix the Wi-Fi icon flickering on OWE transition-mode networks by @dhh in #14133
• Fix an OWE error printed in the terminal after installing a theme by @dhh in #16872
• Fix a flicker when switching from a still to a video background by @bjarneo in #17082
• Update Hackerman to an upscaled geometric background by @dhh in #16892
• Fix themes with cyclic color references hanging the theme switch by @AFOliveira in #13046
• Fix Neovim failing to start with the Catppuccin theme by @anandude in #12864
• Fix OpenCode 2 starting on its stock theme instead of Omarchy’s by @dhh in #17293
• Fix low-contrast inline code in the generated VS Code theme by @omarchybot in #15818
• Fix T3 Code installs stopping while matching the current theme by @emirb in #16962
• Fix the terminal font size resetting when changing font family by @sbalbalosa in #6958
• Fix changing fonts printing a terminal’s process ID by @omarchybot in #15820
• Fix switching languages rebuilding every locale and losing them on a nearly full disk by @omarchybot in #16414
• Fix the shell showing raw translation keys before its translations load by @zihaomu in #16059
• Speed up translated text in Omarchy’s scripts by @dhh in #16584
• Update translations for 686 strings, 392 of them in the manual by @ryanrhughes in 2550970
• Fix volume and output controls in non-English locales by @Sebo1411 in #14855
• Fix CPU usage readings in non-English locales by @omarchybot in #15109
• Fix the fcitx5 service restarting forever when fcitx5 isn’t installed by @therk in #11694
• Fix the keyboard layout widget switching devices nobody types on by @bjarneo in #10670
• Fix the keyboard layout widget switching to vendor hotkey devices by @yashranaway in #9129
• Fix the keybindings menu leaving a Lua process running at 100% CPU by @tobi in #7564
• Fix the clock flooding the log every millisecond when daylight saving time ends by @falkoro in #16684
• Fix the shell replacing a shell.json it couldn’t read with the defaults by @omarchybot in #14534
• Fix the Omarchy menu losing its rows while its file is being updated by @dhh in #16268
• Fix re-enabling a plugin not bringing back its bar widget by @berrimi in #12540
• Fix local plugins reloading in a loop on their own Python bytecode by @omarchybot in #15093
• Fix hidden buttons in plugins collapsing to their padding by @dmkenney in #15786
• Fix dropdowns cutting off their last item by @sprajs in #13916
• Fix dropdowns not closing on a second click by @felixzsh in #6725
• Fix slider knobs stopping short of the end of the track by @erikrjohansson in #9345

• Fix Update > Hardware > Trackpad missing most touchpads and resetting the keyboard by @dhh in #17280

  It now releases a stuck button on every touchpad, and resets only the touchpad instead of the keyboard and touchscreen with it.

• Make the webcam menu check for cameras without turning them on by @omarchybot in #15910
• Fix Omasnap’s scroll capture grabbing only black frames by @falkoro in #16715
• Fix the screenshot picker unbinding your own keys by @omarchybot in #15126
• Fix stopping a recording announcing an empty saved recording by @omarchybot in #15073
• Fix the image picker showing stale thumbnails for images saved over by @omarchybot in #15079
• Fix night light not fully resetting when turned off by @omarchybot in #14489
• Fix the media widget leaving a paused track for an idle player by @omarchybot in #14585
• Fix repeated display scans on monitors that don’t report brightness by @omarchybot in #14525
• Fix Super + Shift + Return failing when the configured browser was uninstalled by @vitally in #16422
• Fix calculator shortcuts staying after removing preinstalled apps by @OldJobobo in #7716
• Fix the Copy URL shortcut in Brave Origin profiles by @dhh in #10308
• Fix the Bitwarden extension popout opening at the wrong size by @omarchybot in #14514
• Fix Battle.net opening at 100% scale on HiDPI monitors by @ryanrhughes in #17418
• Fix Inkscape’s file choosers opening tiled by @omarchybot in #15792
• Fix Go AUR packages failing to build during updates when mise manages Go by @shbernal in #16388
• Fix ONCE installation when you’re not in the docker group by @kevinmcconnell in #8224
• Fix agent panel clicks opening the tray by @dhh in #15501
• Fix agent account setup tripping on a dangling shared symlink by @manuaudio in #14103
• Fix --reauth adding a new agent account when there isn’t one by @manuaudio in #14100
• Make the agent account rename hint name its provider by @manuaudio in #14099
• Fix keyring updates claiming success when key operations fail by @Adolanium in #7807
• Fix a blank factory reset prompt when run under sudo by @ryanrhughes in #16032
• Fix the pending-migrations reminder piling up once per login by @emirb in #16981
• Fix OS Age in About counting from the ISO’s build instead of the install by @emirb in #16828
• Fix Dropbox showing “0y ago” for files 360 to 364 days old by @manuaudio in #14183
• Fix the Dropbox status check expiring a pending login link by @omarchybot in #15135
• Fix installing Dropbox’s tray icon library by @omarchybot in #15076
• Enable overlay scrollbars in Chromium by @robzolkos in #14456
• Ask before turning on Touch ID on Apple Silicon Macs by @scottjones in #16360
• Offer the RC channel on Apple Silicon Macs by @maralcbr in #16986
• Offer the stable channel on Apple Silicon Macs by @maralcbr in #17498
• Fix Omarchy’s aliases, functions, and environment missing from new terminals on Apple Silicon by @dhh in #17041
• Set up installed NVIDIA applications by @jdvmi00 in #12723
• Fix installs failing on the Lenovo Pro 9 with NVIDIA N1x by @breymander in #16423
• Fix missing internal speakers and microphones on N1x laptops that ran the earlier audio profiles by @ryanrhughes in #16233
• Fix a sluggish desktop on NVIDIA GB10 machines like the DGX Spark by @dhh in #17264

• Fix typing into the lock screen after resume on NVIDIA by @dhh in #17277

  The lock also no longer goes dark again just as the panel lights up.

• Fix Lutris and Battle.net installing another GPU’s 32-bit Vulkan driver by @zihaomu in #16046
• Stop asking for a reboot after every update on ARM by @birkskyum in #14447
• Offer the stable and RC channels on aarch64 by @emirb in #16065
• Make power profiles work on ARM laptops by @dhh in #14737
• Offer Dropbox on ARM machines with 4K pages, and Spotify as a web app on ARM by @birkskyum in #15757
• Hide GeForce NOW, Battle.net, and Lutris installs on ARM by @birkskyum in #15753
• Fix the Hermes app not updating in place on ARM by @ryanrhughes in #16124
• Fix Snapdragon laptop keyboards not typing at the disk unlock prompt by @emirb in #16688
• Fix cameras missing at login on Snapdragon laptops by @birkskyum in #16856
• Fix a black screen before disk unlock on Snapdragon X2 laptops by @jdvmi00 in #16940
• Decode video in hardware on Intel Wildcat Lake by @dhh in #17150
• Fix live ISO crashes on Arrow Lake-H laptops by @emirb in omacom/omarchy-iso#311
• Fix the HP EliteBook Ultra G1q internal microphone by @bprendie in #15574
• Use upstream support for Motorcomm YT6801 Ethernet by @AFOliveira in #9682
• Relay the Elgato Cam Link 4K as a 16:9 virtual camera by @dhh in #10809
• Support fingerprint readers that a platform names by @scottjones in #14675

HANCORE was one of the first two artists we invited into the residency, and it quickly became clear that what he’s doing for Omarchy is a full-time job.

Start with the plugins. When Quattro opened the floodgates, HANCORE started the marketplace that gave all those plugins a home, and it has since grown into the official Omarchy plugin catalogue, now with six thousand plugins. Games you can play from the bar, panels that track your coding agents, music players, and all the other wonderful experiments that make the malleable computer real. Keeping that ecosystem healthy, helping authors make their work great, and making sure the best of it gets seen is a big part of what he’ll be doing.

Then there’s design. Solitude and Last Horizon both ship with Omarchy, and another twenty of his themes are on the extras page. That’s more than anyone else has contributed. He’s a mechanical engineer who became one of the defining aesthetic forces in this community, and now he gets to bring that eye to everything Omarchy puts out into the world, not just the palettes.

And it all comes back to community. Omarchy is beautiful because so many people have poured their taste and time into it. The theme makers, the plugin authors, the people running meetups around the world. HANCORE is one of them, and now he’ll be dedicated to making sure they get the support, feedback, and recognition they deserve. He’ll keep serving on Omarchy Core too.

Going forward, his work will also include merchandise and apparel. Omarchy has a look, and it’s about time you could wear it. Expect it to get the same care as everything else he designs. More on that soon!

HANCORE’s move opens up a seat in AIR, which remains by invitation.

Thanks to everyone funding this work, we can turn the people who’ve been making Omarchy beautiful on their own time into people who get to do it full time. We’re grateful for their patronage.

Welcome aboard, HANCORE! Let’s make Omarchy look as good as it works.

And it’s not like we’re starting from scratch. Greptile has already reviewed almost 1,500 pull requests for Omarchy. Nearly all of them since the launch of Quattro in August, and almost 700 in the first half of October alone! That’s the kind of volume you get when hundreds of thousands of users start sending in their fixes, and no team of human reviewers could keep up with that on their own.

But volume doesn’t mean much if the reviews are just noise. What makes Greptile great is how often it finds real issues. Across our 60 most recently merged PRs that it reviewed, Greptile flagged 39 problems it rated as serious. And not lint-style nitpicks either, but the kind of bugs that would have bitten real users.

Like when Birk added a way to match laptop models by their device tree, and Greptile pointed out that under a Turkish locale, Bash lowercases I to a dotless ı, so MICROSOFT,Denali-OLED would never match microsoft,denali-oled. Who would have caught that?! It was fixed before merging. Or when I wrote a command to reset empty workspaces to a new default layout, and Greptile noticed that if hyprctl ever returned garbage, my script would happily delete every saved layout, including the ones in use. Fixed too! Nobody gets a pass, least of all me.

This is what agentic peer review should feel like. A reviewer who reads every line of every PR, at any hour, explains exactly what will go wrong and why, and often hands you the patch to fix it. It doesn’t replace the judgment of the Omarchy teams, but it means that by the time a human looks at a PR, the sharp edges have usually already been filed down. That’s how we get through a backlog of thousands of PRs without letting quality slip.

Greptile joins 1Password, 37signals, Four Technologies, Fireworks, OpenAI, OpenRouter, OrcaRouter, and Namespace as a Distinguished Corporate Patron. Their pledge brings our total backing to approximately $23.7 million. We’re grateful for their patronage.

Welcome aboard, Greptile! Let’s keep reviewing every PR like it matters, because it does.

If your company would like to join our patrons, write david@omarchy.org.

Omarchy grew up on x86. That’s where most of our users are today, and that’s what all our testing was built around. But ARM is coming fast. Omarchy M is bringing Omarchy to Apple Silicon, Omarchy Dragon is doing the same for Snapdragon laptops, Alibaba’s Qwen Book is launching on ARM first, and there’s a whole crop of ARM laptops on the way that deserve better than whatever they’ll ship with.

If Omarchy is going to be great on all of these new machines, every change has to work on ARM before it ships. Compiling isn’t enough. We have to actually install the thing and watch it boot.

And that’s where it gets annoying. You can rent plenty of ARM machines in the cloud, and they’ll compile ARM software all day long. But most of them won’t let you run a virtual machine, and you can’t test an installer without one. So you’re stuck emulating the whole processor in software. Booting our ARM ISO that way took over three minutes. Three minutes! Just to boot!

Namespace has a much better answer: They run Linux on Apple Silicon. On their runners, that same ISO boots in four seconds. Four! That’s the kind of speed a distro backed by an actual rocket company needs to hit.

Namespace already runs the builds for Zed and DuckDB, and for mise, which the foundation also sponsors. Great company to be in!

Namespace joins 1Password, 37signals, Four Technologies, Fireworks, OpenAI, OpenRouter, and OrcaRouter as a Distinguished Corporate Patron. Their pledge brings our total backing to approximately $23.5 million.

Thank you, Hugo and everyone at Namespace! And to Emir, our new Head of Infrastructure, for making the connection. Let’s make Omarchy run beautifully on every ARM machine out there.

If your company would like to join our patrons, write david@omarchy.org.

Grok 4.7 and beyond will be helping power our automated agents, like Omabot, who’s been reviewing the flood of PRs that keep pouring in. And it has its work cut out. We’re closing in on 7,000 pull requests from more than 550 contributors, and every one of them deserves a proper look. That’s not a job for mere humans!

But it’s not just the bots: every Omarchy team is going to get to tap into these tokens, whether they’re hunting bugs, polishing themes, porting to new hardware, or tackling whatever crazy idea comes next. More tokens means more of the backlog getting cleared, faster.

What an honor it is to have SpaceXSI on board! I mean, what’s cooler than partnering with a literal rocket-science space company? These are the folks catching boosters with chopsticks. And given where they’re headed, there’s a real chance we’ll soon be consuming tokens beamed down from data centers in space. “Omarchy, now powered by intelligence from orbit” — I can’t think of a more fitting future for the Year of Linux on the Desktop.

SpaceXSI joins Meta Superintelligence Labs, DigitalOcean, and Alibaba Cloud as a Founding Corporate Patron. Their pledge brings our total backing to approximately $23.2 million. Which means even more room to invest in the people, infrastructure, and open-source projects that make Omarchy possible. Not bad for a project that started as a pile of dotfiles.

Thank you to the whole Grok team at SpaceXSI for making this happen.

HackerOne gives researchers a familiar place to submit their findings, follow along as we work on a fix, and collect their bounty. It also gives the Omarchy Security Team a proper workflow for triaging all the reports coming in. If you’d rather not create a HackerOne account, you can still email security@omarchy.org. The security page has all the details on what we consider a vulnerability and how to report one.

To lead all of this, I’m thrilled to announce that Mehmet İnce is joining Omarchy Core as our head of security! Mehmet has been a key member of the Omarchy Security Team, and now he’ll be setting the direction for how we keep Omarchy safe, from running the bounty program to making sure security is built into everything we ship.

Thanks to our patrons, we can put real money behind making Omarchy secure. We’re grateful for their patronage.

Welcome to Omarchy Core, Mehmet! Let’s make Omarchy as secure as it is beautiful.

This one is coming full circle for me. It was Prime who got me onto Neovim, after spending twenty years with TextMate. And his keyboard-focused Linux setup was a huge inspiration for Omarchy in general. His Vim tutorials are still an excellent entry point for anyone wanting to learn Omarchy’s default editor.

And he’s not arriving empty-handed. Over the past month, Prime has been building Oligarchy, a custom agent harness that boots Omarchy in QEMU virtual machines and lets agents drive them just like a person would. They send keystrokes, move and click the mouse, take screenshots, and record whether things did what they were supposed to. Each test is a ticket that boots from a freshly minted disk, and a fleet of automation clients picks up the work and reports back. He’s been diagnosing the harness live and inviting his interns to come “Brownbaggin, Teabaggin, Lunabaggin, Frodobaggins this AGI” with him. Naturally.

This is exactly what an agentic OS needs. Omarchy will be shipping across x86, Apple hardware, Snapdragon, Nvidia, Pi, and any other platform we can get our hands on, with thousands of plugins, endless themes, and a growing suite of native applications. No human QA team could click through all of that for every release. But a fleet of agents running on the DigitalOcean Droplets that power our pipeline can. They can walk through the installer, update the system, try the keybindings, open the menus, and flag what broke long before you ever see it.

Leading Agentic QA means turning Oligarchy from a fun experiment into a routine part of how we build, test, and ship Omarchy.

Welcome to Omarchy Core, Prime! You helped get me here. Now let’s go make it bulletproof.

We’re going to collaborate on making local models work beautifully out of the box on Omarchy. Picking a model that fits your machine, tuning it to make the most of the hardware, and getting it connected to your agents should be a great first experience. Today, there’s still too much homework between buying a powerful computer and putting its intelligence to work. We want to close that gap.

Sero is already working on exactly these problems. His Local AI Registry brings together model configurations, hardware-specific recipes, and performance measurements. That’s the kind of practical knowledge we need to turn into good defaults. You shouldn’t have to become an inference engineer to get a useful local model running on your own computer.

And your own computer doesn’t have to do all the work alone. We also want to make it easy to connect the hardware you own into a mesh of intelligence. Your laptop, the powerful desktop in your office, a machine tucked away at home. Let your agents draw on the computers available to you, without making you manage a small data center first.

This is a big part of how I see the promise of the agentic OS being fulfilled. With hardware like NVIDIA’s N1x and Alibaba’s upcoming Qwen Book, we’re moving toward a world where powerful local AI machines are ordinary personal computers. The operating system should make that power available from the moment you start using it.

I think we’re getting close to everyone having access to solid intelligence at home. Models that can help you write code, work with your documents, and carry out useful tasks on hardware you control. A great alternative to frontier models and subscription-based intelligence for more and more of the work people actually do.

I love what the frontier models can do, and Omarchy will continue to make them easy to use. But I also want the choice to run intelligence that doesn’t depend on a monthly subscription or sending my work to someone else’s servers. Being able to buy a computer and keep putting it to work is one of the great things about personal computing. That should apply to agents too.

Backing Sero for three years gives us time to work on the whole experience: the models, the tuning, the connections between machines, and the defaults that make it all approachable. I’m excited to see how much better we can make this together.

Thank you to our patrons for making this sponsorship possible. Their support lets us give developers the time and resources to work on the future we want for Linux. We’re grateful for their patronage.

Let’s put more intelligence in the hands of the people who own the computers!

But this partnership goes well beyond the money. Alibaba Cloud is going to help us build Omarchy China: the local CDN, hosting, website, meetups, and community that Chinese users need to adopt Omarchy without hassle. Downloading Linux, installing packages, and keeping your computer up to date should be straightforward wherever you live. We’re going to work together on making that true in China too.

And the timing couldn’t be better. With the announcement of Qwen Book, Alibaba is putting its ambition for the agentic computer into hardware. We’re going to collaborate on making Omarchy the ideal agentic operating system for that computer. A beautiful, fun Linux desktop where people and agents can work together, and where the owner remains in charge.

Here’s how Alibaba Cloud describes the upcoming Qwen Book:

Qwen Book aims to create a native AI agent computer. Its core philosophy, “OS as Harness,” simply put, involves deeply integrating models, the operating system, applications, cloud services, and hardware. This builds a computing environment that agents can understand, invoke, remember, and run in continuously, upgrading the computer from a passive tool into a constantly evolving personal assistant.

The Qwen Book system is compatible with both ARM and x86 architectures, with the first release based on the ARM architecture. At the system level, we have built a low-power Agent Engine and a Continuous Context Engine. With the Qwen model family as the intelligent foundation, we provide model services for the Qwen Book system through cloud-device integration. We look forward to exploring more innovations together with Omarchy OS in the future.

That means tuning Omarchy for Qwen models out of the box and working toward full integration with the Chinese services people depend on. The models, the operating system, and the services should work together from the moment you start the machine. Getting your computer ready to work with an agent shouldn’t be a project in itself.

This is exactly the kind of collaboration I want the foundation to make possible. People who build models, people who build computers, and people who build operating systems working together to make the whole experience better. We have a shared ambition for what the personal computer can become, and now we’re putting resources behind it.

Alibaba Cloud joins DigitalOcean and Meta Superintelligence Labs as a Founding Corporate Patron. Their pledge brings our total backing to approximately $21.7 million. That’s more room to invest in the people, infrastructure, and open-source projects that make Omarchy possible.

Thank you to everyone at Alibaba Cloud, and especially to CTO LI feifei, who made this possible. Your backing lets us think bigger and put more people to work on making Linux better for everyone.

Let’s build the ideal agentic operating system for the agentic computer. In China and everywhere else!

PS: I’m going to China to speak at the GOSIM conference, and will be attending the Omarchy Meetup in Shenzhen too. I’ll also be visiting Alibaba in Hangzhou, and going to Beijing. Can’t wait!

The goal is to turn these thin-and-light laptops into dependable everyday Linux machines. Getting a desktop to boot is a start. Getting the machine to sleep, wake up, play video efficiently, update its firmware, and last through a day of work is what makes it a computer you can rely on.

Five people are already working on the pieces:

Jim Martin (GitHub) is bringing up Linux on a Surface Laptop 8 with the Snapdragon X2 Elite. He’s been working on Omarchy for DGX Spark and has already contributed a graphical disk-unlock fix to the ARM installer. For Dragon, he’s focused on Surface and X2 Elite support, testing installation and recovery on real hardware, and getting useful ARM fixes into the shared Omarchy projects.

Birk Skyum (X) is a geoinformatics and graphics engineer and co-founder of MapLibre. His machine is a Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x with Snapdragon X Elite. He’s landed upstream fixes in Arch Linux ARM, submitted patches to libcamera, PipeWire, and systemd, and worked on kernel patches for fan and temperature monitoring. Now he’s looking at battery life, reliable sleep, KVM virtualization, hardware-accelerated video, BIOS updates from Linux, and USB4 performance. He’s also in touch with Lenovo about improving firmware support for Linux.

Matt Gilg (GitHub) has already gotten a working Omarchy desktop, Hyprland and all, onto a Snapdragon X Yoga and DGX Spark. He built and hosted the aarch64 packages to get there before moving to the Omarchy Package Repository. Matt runs SignalRGB and brings experience with cross-vendor hardware compatibility, embedded systems, and low-level Linux work. He’s also bringing up an OmniBook X16 with Snapdragon X2 Elite, with a particular interest in gaming and helping more people find a route out of Windows.

Bob Prendergast (GitHub) is a solution architect and Linux veteran who’s built his own Omarchy Snapdragon setup using agents and the Ubuntu kernel. He’s working with an HP EliteBook 14 G1q and a Lenovo ThinkPad T14s Gen 6. More machines, more testing, and more of the practical work it takes to turn a promising platform into something people can install and use.

Miguel Cruz (X) is already part of Omarchy M and is bringing his experience with Apple Silicon boot and hardware compatibility to the Qualcomm side. His background spans OS internals, reverse engineering, and embedded systems, with contributions to Linux, QEMU, and Virtio. He’s joining the effort with an ASUS Zenbook A16 powered by Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme, focusing on boot and firmware bring-up, driver issues (especially the GPU), and testing fixes on real hardware.

There’s useful overlap with the rest of our ARM work, too. Packages, installer improvements, and fixes developed for one machine can help another. Jim and Matt are both interested in extending that work to Raspberry Pi and other ARM platforms as well.

I’m also working to establish a direct line to Qualcomm. An engineer working on Linux compatibility there has already reached out. Let’s see if we can’t get some proper support behind this effort.

This is work in progress, with compatibility being worked through machine by machine. But we now have a team taking responsibility for it, testing on real hardware, and pushing fixes upstream. Welcome, Jim, Birk, Matt, Bob, and Miguel. Let’s bring beautiful, fun & agentic Linux to Snapdragon!

We’ll primarily be using these tokens in OrcaRouter for their security-tuned models, helping our security and kernel teams in particular. First up is OrcaCyber Zero 1.0, a coding model post-trained for vulnerability analysis, reproduction, and security research.

OrcaRouter reports that Zero 1.0 reproduces 1,478 of 1,507 real-world vulnerabilities on the first attempt in CyberGym Level 1, a benchmark drawn from 188 open source projects. That’s a 98.07% pass rate. We’re looking forward to seeing how it performs on the security and kernel problems in front of our teams.

Here’s how the OrcaRouter team describes their work:

OrcaRouter is a security-first AI gateway and execution layer for AI agents, using adaptive routing to select the right model for each workload while providing guardrails, an agent firewall for tool/MCP calls and egress, ZDR/privacy controls, and end-to-end observability across cloud and local agent execution.

OrcaRouter is also a major publisher of open-weight cybersecurity models, with 1.5M+ downloads on Hugging Face in the past 30 days. Its flagship cyber model, OrcaCyber Zero 1.0, is currently in closed beta for trusted security research, vulnerability analysis and reproduction, and red-team workflows.

Thank you to the OrcaRouter team for putting these tools behind our mission. We’re looking forward to putting their models to work finding and fixing the problems that matter to everyone running Omarchy.

If your company would like to join our patrons, write david@omarchy.org.

First, I’m delighted to welcome Brian Cartmell as a Distinguished Patron with a $100,000 contribution. Brian has been building on the internet since the nineties, and he’s backing this mission for exactly the right reasons. Here’s how he puts it:

Your computer should answer to you. With a growing push toward closed platforms and restricted AI models, I’m supporting the Omacom Foundation because Omarchy is helping keep the future open, hackable, and under the user’s control.

Then there’s American Cloud, joining with $25,088 for the year. Aron Wagner and his team wanted a patronage sized between open patronage and the Distinguished Corporate tier, so we made one! There’s now a 25K tier under All Patrons for companies that want to put real money behind beautiful, fun & agentic Linux without waiting until they’re big enough for the $100,000 a year commitment. And $25,088 is a multiple of 256, naturally, to keep with the theme. American Cloud has also offered up compute, which we may well take them up on for redundancy.

And since we last counted, open patronage has doubled! We’ve now received more than $120,000 from 826 patrons through open patronage. That includes an $8,192 pledge from Zeno, who wired it directly when the donation form wouldn’t take his card. Ten days ago, it was roughly $60,000 from nearly 500 donors. Every contribution adds to what we can do together, and together it adds up fast.

Money from individuals who want their computer to answer to them. Money from companies growing on Linux. Money from hundreds of people who just want the prophecy fulfilled. This is how we keep going!

Thank you to Brian, American Cloud, and everyone who’s become a patron. If you’d like to join them, write david@omarchy.org for founding and distinguished patronage, and donate directly to the open patronage.

That work already has a team behind it. Today we’re making it official: Omarchy M, our team for Macs with Apple Silicon (plus a few members keeping older Macs in the fold).

Allow me to introduce the members.

The installer. Marcelo Alcantara is building the native Mac installer. You download an app on macOS, it fetches the signed Omarchy release, carves out the partitions, and boots you into Omarchy alongside your existing macOS. No USB stick, no incantations in the terminal. He also cut the build that lit up external monitors over USB-C.

Omarchy Mac. Naeem Malik has maintained Omarchy Mac for a year, getting Omarchy onto M1 and M2 machines long before any of this was official, and building a Discord community of over 800 people around it. Scott Jones is the other half of that project on the Linux side of the install. He recently got the M3 Air’s display running on Apple’s hardware display controller, which took that machine from unusable to usable in a night.

Try Omarchy. Eduardo Martinez built Try Omarchy: the real Omarchy desktop running as a native, hardware-accelerated app on your Mac, with your camera, audio, clipboard, and a shared folder wired through. Nothing to partition. Just download it and see what the fuss is about.

Packages. Shun Li is making sure everything Omarchy needs exists as an aarch64 package, along with generic ARM64 disk images for virtual machines and the guest tools that make them pleasant to use.

Drivers and the kernel. Ryan Murray is bringing up the Neo and building the foundations the rest of the team works from. He’s developing an SPTM emulator that makes it possible to trace macOS on M4 and newer chips. Those traces are essential to getting displays, GPUs, audio, wireless, and Bluetooth working. Dj is writing the GPU drivers, and got Touch ID working by talking directly to the Secure Enclave. Miguel Cruz specialises in M5 work: he reverse-engineered Apple’s proprietary N1 chip and got its Wi-Fi and Bluetooth working in Linux. He’s also contributed hardware video encoding and decoding, Bluetooth, and desktop improvements on the Neo. Liam is bringing up the Neo’s trackpad, power management, speakers, and headphone output, with Ryan’s macOS traces providing essential groundwork. Eryk Wieliczko maintains M4 support and clean-room implementations, and works on integration and packaging. Jaidip Subedi enabled external displays over USB-C on the M2 MacBook Air.

MLX. Joshua Warren is building mlx-omarchy, which brings Apple’s MLX machine learning framework to Linux on Apple GPUs through Vulkan. Your code still says import mlx.core as mx, but now it runs on Omarchy.

Older Macs. Shawn Yeager has a stack of pull requests for the 2016 and 2017 Touch Bar MacBook Pros: speakers, Wi-Fi, the ambient light sensor, the Touch Bar itself. Randy is reverse-engineering the T2 security chip to bring Touch ID to Intel Macs, and documenting every fix for the 2019 MacBook Pro along the way. Jon Kinney was chipping away at ARM support for Omarchy a year ago, and now keeps the whole team coordinated on who’s doing what.

Together, they’re a formidable group. Fifteen people who didn’t wait for permission, and who’ve been using agents to move at a pace that would have seemed absurd a year ago.

The target for the first release is perfect compatibility with M1 and M2, including the Pro and Max variants:

• A seamless installer, with both install and try options
• Full GPU support
• External monitors over USB-C
• Touch ID
• MLX
• Disk encryption

Newer machines are being worked on in parallel, but M1 and M2 are where we plant the flag first. In addition to the M machines, there are millions of vintage laptops out there, many of them already retired from Apple’s latest macOS ambitions, and every one of them is a wonderful Omarchy computer waiting to happen.

You don’t have to wait for the polished release to get started. Try Omarchy will have you looking at the real desktop on your Mac in minutes. And if you’re ready to commit, the installer will put Omarchy next to macOS on an M1 or M2 today.

Finally, a request. If you’ve been working on Linux for Apple hardware, whether that’s kernel drivers, firmware, packaging, installers, or machine learning, we’d love to hear from you. There’s a good chance you’ve solved something we’re still chasing, or vice versa. Get in touch at apple@omarchy.org.

Let’s finish what Asahi started.

Here’s how Emir describes his own journey to Omarchy:

My love of Linux goes back more than twenty years. I became an Ubuntu developer while still a teenager and was deeply involved in the local community. My career has taken me through three countries, working on reliability and performance in startups and scaleups and leading teams. I spent nearly seven years in Booking.com’s SRE department, leading work on build systems and CI infrastructure. Most recently, I built Isorun, where I’ve been working on microVMs, snapshots, isolation, scheduling, and disposable compute. Now I’m bringing that experience back to my first love.

What really caught my attention about Emir was TryOmarchy. He took the Omarchy desktop, put it in the browser (not a reimplementation, but the real thing), and had it booting in seconds on ordinary CPU infrastructure at Cloudflare. We started talking about that silly experiment, and the conversation quickly expanded to laptops, new architectures, OEMs, and the infrastructure we’ll need if Omarchy is going to run everywhere we want it to. We realized we shared the same vision.

That’s what Emir is coming aboard to lead.

Infrastructure for Omarchy means much more than running servers. It’s what we use to build, test, and ship Omarchy, and to keep the system working reliably as we expand to more hardware and more architectures. It’s making releases dependable, making failures reproducible, and giving everyone else on the project a solid foundation so they can move quickly.

And there’s plenty to explore! Omarchy should work beautifully on the machine sitting on your desk, but there’s no reason it should stop there. TryOmarchy gave us a glimpse of what happens when starting a Linux computer becomes as easy as opening a web page, putting a taste of Linux just one click away. We’re going to see where that leads.

Thanks to everyone funding this work, we can give people like Emir the time to go all in on Omarchy. Our patrons make it possible to turn ambitious experiments into lasting work, with full-time people dedicated to making the whole system better. We’re grateful for their patronage.

Welcome aboard, Emir! Let’s make Omarchy run everywhere.

I’ve used DigitalOcean Droplets for over a decade. They’re a wonderfully straightforward way to put a Linux machine on the internet and get on with building something. We use them to run contributors.rubyonrails.org, the site that celebrates the thousands of people who’ve helped make Rails what it is. This is infrastructure I’ve relied on for years, so having the company behind it join us feels especially good.

And they’re the perfect patron for an agentic OS. DigitalOcean already offers one-click Droplets for Hermes and OpenClaw. You can have an agent at home on your Omarchy desktop and another working around the clock on a Droplet.

But the part of this patronage that really made me smile was how quickly it all came together. I reached out to Paddy Srinivasan, DigitalOcean’s CEO, on X on Wednesday. We had a call that same night. I sent a proposal on Saturday. By Sunday, we’d finalized everything.

That’s the speed of collaboration that’s possible with X, agents, and boundless ambition! When people see the same opportunity and want to make something happen, there’s no reason to spend months getting to yes. We can move at the pace of the possibilities in front of us.

DigitalOcean joins Meta Superintelligence Labs as a Founding Corporate Patron, alongside all the individuals and companies who’ve already stepped up to fund this mission. Their pledge brings our total backing to approximately $18.35 million. More room to invest in the people, projects, and infrastructure that make Omarchy better for everyone.

Like hiring more amazing people! We’ve just brought on Krzysztof Wilczyński as Head of Omarchy Kernel and outfoxxed, the creator of Quickshell, as Head of Omarchy Shell. Giving people like these the chance to work full time on making Omarchy faster, more reliable, and more capable is only possible with patrons like DigitalOcean. Their backing turns our ambitions into actual jobs for the people who can make them happen.

Thank you, Paddy and everyone at DigitalOcean. Let’s put this backing to work and make the beautiful, fun, agentic future of Linux happen!

This supersedes the three-year Quickshell sponsorship we announced in August. Instead of that sponsorship, outfoxxed will be a full-time employee of the Omacom Foundation, leading our work on Omarchy Shell. We’re putting the creator right at the center of what we’re building.

Shell is pivotal to the agentic OS we’re making. It’s the bar, the menus, the notifications, the widgets, and all the little interactions that make the computer feel like yours. Quickshell gives us the building blocks to shape that experience in QML. Combine that with agents that are incredibly good at writing QML, and suddenly changing your desktop is something you can ask for, try, and share.

The proof is in the plugins! When we announced the sponsorship, the community had already created over a thousand in Quattro’s first week. Now the catalogue has close to three thousand plugins. Games you can play right from the bar, panels that track your coding agents, music players, and even a cat that wanders along your bar waiting to be petted. People are taking a system that used to feel fixed and making it their own. That’s the malleable computer coming to life.

Having the creator of Quickshell on board means we can work on the whole stack together. Make the shell faster and more reliable. Make it easier to build a great plugin. Improve the foundations when a plugin author runs into a limitation. Turn what we’re learning from thousands of experiments into a better experience for everyone who boots Omarchy. And ensure the whole thing is safe and secure.

And by joining Omarchy Core, outfoxxed will help set the direction for the distro as a whole. Shell is too central to the experience to be an afterthought. It’s where so much of the beauty, the fun, and the possibilities of an agentic OS become something you can actually see and use.

outfoxxed is the Omacom Foundation’s second full-time hire, following Krzysztof Wilczyński, our Head of Omarchy Kernel. With the people leading both Kernel and Shell on board, we’re investing in the foundations of the whole experience. You can meet the foundation’s staff on the site.

We’ll continue to hire by invitation as we find the right people through their work in the community. (Please don’t flood my inbox with CVs!)

This is what the foundation’s backing lets us do: give exceptional open-source developers the time to go all in. Thanks to everyone funding that work, we’re turning more of our ambitions into full-time jobs.

Welcome aboard, outfoxxed! Let’s make this computer even more malleable.

First, we’re welcoming OpenRouter as a Distinguished Corporate Patron with $150,000 in tokens. Once that allotment is spent, we can renew the arrangement by mutual agreement. These tokens will power the agents that build, test, and maintain Omarchy. The more we can put agents to work fixing bugs, reviewing contributions, and improving the distro, the faster we can make everyone’s computer better. More fuel for the mission!

We’re also going to flow the millions of dollars in tokens that have been donated through the excellent OpenRouter platform. So we can apportion the right tokens to the right teams from the right models.

Then there’s Four Technologies, joining as a Distinguished Corporate Patron with a pledge of $100,000 a year for three years. That’s $300,000 to support the community projects Omarchy depends on, the infrastructure that keeps it running, and the work of bringing beautiful Linux to more people. Having companies commit for years gives us the confidence to do the same.

Here’s how the Four Technologies team puts it:

We’re an AI-forward fintech company, and companies like Four Technologies only get to build the way we do because of open-source infrastructure other people built first. Supporting the Omacom Foundation is how we put money behind that. We think the next stage for AI isn’t another app layered on top of the operating system, it’s AI built directly into the operating system, and that’s the bet Omarchy is making. We wanted to be part of the community making that bet, not just benefiting from it later.

And since opening patronage to everyone, we’ve received roughly $60,000 from nearly 500 donors through open patronage. That’s an incredible response from people who want to help make this happen. Every contribution adds to what we can do together.

Tokens to build with. Money to back the projects we depend on. People and companies willing to put something behind their belief in Linux on the desktop. This is how we keep going!

Thank you to OpenRouter, Four Technologies, and everyone who’s become a patron. If you’d like to join them, write david@omarchy.org for founding and distinguished patronage, and donate directly to the open patronage.

This is a website that wants you to play with your computer! The pixels, colors, and animations carry the spirit of Omarchy straight into the browser. You can get a feel for the place before you’ve downloaded a single ISO. It’s also my own personal connection to those formative years in the pre-internet online world of ASCII art, the Amiga demoscene, and that vibrant aesthetic of the 90s. More color, less polish. More pixels, fewer soft gradients.

There’s now room to show off the editors, terminals, agents, games, Windows VM, and hardware that make Omarchy useful every day. Browse community themes, find a plugin, see real workstations, or discover a meetup near you. Meet the people building it and the patrons funding it. We finally have a front door with enough room for everything happening inside.

And that front door now speaks your language. Arabic, Bengali, Catalan, Danish, English, Filipino, Finnish, French, Greek, Hindi, Hungarian, Icelandic, Irish, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Lithuanian, Polish, Portuguese, Simplified Chinese, Sinhala, Spanish, Swedish, Tamil, Thai, Turkish, Urdu, Uzbek, and Vietnamese. The main site and every news story are translated. The manual is still in English; we’ll tackle that next. These are initial translations, and corrections from native speakers are very welcome through the site repository.

We have local domains too: omarchy.ae, omarchy.dk, omarchy.fi, omarchy.fr, omarchy.gr, omarchy.hu, omarchy.in, omarchy.is, omarchy.jp, omarchy.kr, omarchy.mx, omarchy.ph, omarchy.pt, omarchy.se, and omarchy.tr.

Community members have generously registered more domains and offered to point them our way. While we connect the remaining local names, you can use bn.omarchy.org, ca.omarchy.org, ga.omarchy.org, it.omarchy.org, lt.omarchy.org, pl.omarchy.org, si.omarchy.org, ta.omarchy.org, th.omarchy.org, ur.omarchy.org, uz.omarchy.org, vi.omarchy.org, and zh.omarchy.org. Use the globe beside the theme picker to jump between languages.

This redesign grew out of a wonderful burst of work in the Omarchy Design group. Barış Girişmen created the design that became the foundation of the new site, built the pixel-grid shader, and drove an enormous amount of the implementation and polish. Christoffer Hallas brought prototypes, animation work, theme transitions, and a steady stream of refinements. Daniel Schmier contributed designs and implementation for the logo, news, install, team, foundation, and testimonial sections.

Thanks as well to Andrés Villagrán, Ryan Hughes, Yam Catzenelson, Eric Carmichael, Wes Oudshoorn, Taha, Aloïs Deniel, Adrian Rangel, Niklas Jul, HANCORE, OldJobobo, and Rick Blalock for the concepts, experiments, ideas, and feedback shared along the way. And to everyone helping secure local domains and welcome people in their own language. It’s been a joy watching all this come together.

So pick a theme. Poke the pixels. Computers should be fun!

To continue to make Omarchy better now that we’ve attracted hundreds of thousands of users and cocreators, we need to keep the tokens flowing. This is how we accelerate, improve, and deliver on all the amazing contributions that have been pouring out. We already have a backlog of 1,600+ PRs from just a few weeks after launch! Ain’t nobody getting through that without agentic assistance.

Thus, I’m thrilled to announce that we’ve secured a motherload of tokens from most of the major labs for this mission! First is Meta Superintelligence Labs who is coming on as a Founding Token Patron with $1.5m in tokens! Their new Meta Muse Spark model is putting down great numbers at an awesome price. So $1.5m is basically unlimited tokens! (We’ll try to exhaust them nonetheless!)

But we’re also thrilled to welcome another leading frontier lab, OpenAI, as a Distinguished Token Patron with $150,000 in token donations. These will become particularly handy when paired with the security clearance needed to strip the guardrails we need for security research and fixes.

And for open-weight models, I’m equally thrilled to announce Fireworks as a Distinguished Token Patron as well with $150,000 in tokens pledged. I’ve been a frequent user of the Kimi K models in particular, and especially when running at fast mode. We will put these speedy tokens to great use as well!

Combined, this is another $1.8 million pledged to the Omacom Foundation. Which then puts our total pledges to $14.8 million dollars. What a crazy number to type out for a distro that early detractors dismissed as a bunch of dotfiles (which to be fair wasn’t entirely wrong at the time, but then we just kept fixing everything!).

With all these tokens, we can fix everything. And that’s what we’re going to do!

So the Omacom Foundation is accelerating its spending goals. Everything raised this year will be spent over the next three. Not parked in an endowment. Not dripped out over a decade. Spent!

With $13 million already committed, that means yearly budgets in excess of $4 million for 2027, 2028, and 2029. And more as money comes in from patrons of all types. Founding, Distinguished, Corporate, and everyone who joined the mission today.

That money goes to the open-source projects Omarchy is built on. To the artists who make it beautiful. To the developers who make it fast, compatible, and secure. To competitions, grants, and infrastructure. To everything it takes to fulfill the Linux on the Desktop prophecy.

The money is not the point. The mission is. But it sure helps to have both!

Want to be part of it? Become a patron through our new open patronage. And if you’re interested in the Founding Patron or Distinguished Patron options, for individuals or corporations alike, write david@omarchy.org.

But the foundation is not just for the Oligarchy and the Corporate Patrons. It’s for everyone. Anyone who can get behind beautiful, fun & agentic Linux.

So as of today, patronage is open to everyone. There are four tiers: $16, $256, $2,048, and $8,192. Power of the bits, naturally! Every patron is part of the same mission, and every dollar buys the same thing: a real shot at fulfilling the Linux on the Desktop prophecy!

And every patron gets a digital rally credential to show for it. Each tier has its own badge, social card, and wallpapers, designed by our Artist in Residence OldJobobo. Class 016 takes you through the Forest Stage. Class 8K runs the Night Stage. Pick your class! And more variations from other artists are coming soon.

The money is already hard at work. The foundation is the exclusive sponsor of Hyprland and the premier sponsor of Quickshell and mise, three of the pillars Omarchy is built on. It funds the Artists in Residence who make the distro beautiful. It keeps the lights on for all the infrastructure a Linux distribution needs. It runs the plugin competitions, with a new $10,000 one coming soon with more winners than the first. And as of today, it has its first full-time employee: a Linux kernel developer leading the work on the Omarchy Kernel. There’s more of all of it on the way!

Because this money is not being raised to start the Iron Bank. We’re aiming to spend everything raised this year over the next three years. More patrons, more spending. Everyone can be part of this.

Become a patron today.

Krzysztof is a longtime Linux kernel developer. He co-maintains the PCI Endpoint subsystem along with the native PCI host bridge and endpoint drivers. That’s the plumbing that connects Linux to your GPU, your NVMe drive, and your WiFi card. He’s also a reviewer on the kernel’s new Rust PCI work. Before going deep on the kernel, he spent years in systems engineering, working on Kubernetes and container runtimes.

Now he’ll bring all that experience to the Omarchy Kernel. The focus: performance, compatibility, and security. We want Linux to fly on brand-new laptops and ancient ThinkPads alike. We want it to work out of the box on more machines. And we want it locked down tight.

Krzysztof is also joining Omarchy Core, so he’ll help set the direction for the distro as a whole.

Welcome aboard, Krzysztof! Let’s make the kernel scream.

Downloads come from 215 countries and territories. That’s more places than the UN has members! Over half the downloads come from outside the top five countries. And on a per-capita basis, the Nordics are leading the charge: Iceland, Norway, and Denmark all pull Omarchy at more than twice the American rate. Vikings for the win! (But the US is still 28% of downloads in absolute numbers.)

Another great way to see the momentum: 1Password knows which Linux distros their users run, and during the week, Omarchy is now their #2 distro, ahead of Fedora. On the weekends? We’re #1! People run Omarchy for fun. When nobody is telling them what to use, this is what they pick.

So let’s extrapolate wildly: At the current pace of the last week, we pull the millionth Quattro ISO on November 4. And that’s the conservative count on installs: it’s completed-download equivalents from our own servers, before you add people using the same ISO twice.

The Year of Linux on the Desktop!

Ryan R. Hughes needs no introduction around here. He’s a member of Omarchy Core, my wingman on the distro since day one, and a partner at Oodle. Now he’s backing the foundation with his own money too. That’s conviction!

Ed Huang is the cofounder and CTO of PingCAP, the company behind TiDB, the distributed SQL database. He’s spent a decade proving that serious open-source infrastructure can also be a serious business.

Adrien Treccani founded Metaco, the Swiss digital-asset custody platform that Ripple acquired. Another crypto pioneer joining the mission of making Omarchy a great place for crypto.

Max Schoening is Head of Product at Notion, and before that he ran design at Heroku and was VP of Design at GitHub. He’s shaped more of the tools developers love than most people will ever know.

Together with the twelve Founding Patrons and our two Distinguished Corporate Patrons, that’s eighteen backers and $13 million committed in under two weeks.

Welcome aboard, all four. The mission grows!

1Password has been part of Omarchy from day one (and part of Omakub before that!). Because it’s kept my credentials safe for many years before switching to Linux was even a twinkle in my eye.

Like Dropbox, it’s one of the essential tools to enable the no backup, no cry method. Whenever I set up a new machine (which is about three times a week these days!), the first thing I do is Install > Service > 1Password. Then setting up my agents, logging into Basecamp and HEY, and everything else is just trivial. Yet perfectly safe, perfectly secure.

37signals has been the incubation station for Omarchy since before it had a name. We’ve already switched the whole technical team over to Omarchy, and we’ve been footing all manner of bills on the road to Quattro (and before). Now the support is formal, through the foundation, on the same terms as everyone else.

It’s worth noting, too, that corporate money and individual money all buy the same thing: recognition for being part of the mission. There’s no quid pro quo here.

Omarchy will always base its decisions on what makes for the very best malleable OS in the world. And that’s even more specifically defined with the “by DHH” byline when you install the system. Before this can be an amazing system for everyone, it first has to be an amazing system for me, personally. Put your own mask on first and all that!

Want your company to be part of this historic transformation of the operating system? Write david@omarchy.org.

Brian Armstrong is cofounder and CEO of Coinbase, which was born using Ruby on Rails, and grew into the top spot for crypto with over a hundred million users. Brian was also early to say no to political nonsense at work when he declared Coinbase a mission-focused company back in 2020. He took a ton of heat for that stance at the time, but has since been thoroughly vindicated (a true man of the Night’s Watch!).

And on crypto, well, I changed my mind years ago. With Brian on board, we’re going to make Omarchy a great place for crypto. Because we can fix everything!

Yunjie Dai is a games entrepreneur from China who runs TapTap, one of the country’s largest game discovery and distribution platforms. One that takes no revenue share from developers. But I’ll let him introduce himself, because the letter he sent was wonderful:

21 years ago, in 2005, I had just graduated from college when I watched your video building a blog with Ruby on Rails and TextMate on Mac OS X in about 15 minutes. I bought a white MacBook soon after, left Windows behind, bought TextMate, and started learning Ruby. It dramatically changed how much I enjoyed coding.

I’m a games entrepreneur from China, and my family and I now live in the U.S. We build games, and we also run TapTap… Unlike the App Store or Google Play, we take no revenue share from developers, while still operating at meaningful scale and profitably. That instinct feels close to what I’ve always admired about 37signals: stay independent, earn your keep, don’t extract rent just because you can, and build something useful enough that people choose to stay.

20 years ago, Apple made the coolest software in the world. Today, that sense of ambition feels largely gone. I think a lot of us are waiting for an operating system that feels exciting again — modern, opinionated, and truly made for developers. And now, with AI making software increasingly malleable, openness matters more than ever: the system itself should be something we can understand, change, and make our own. Omarchy feels like it could be that.

When Steve Jobs was building the Mac, he saw his team as pirates — they even flew a pirate flag over their building. “Better to be a pirate than join the navy.” Omarchy gives me a little of that same feeling. Maybe it’s time for the pirates again. 🏴‍☠️🏴‍☠️🏴‍☠️

Couldn’t have said it better. Welcome aboard, Brian and Yunjie. Hoist that rebel flag and let’s set sail for fulfilling the prophecy!

🥇 First place: Radio Atlas by Akshar Patel. Spin a globe, land on a city, and listen to what they’re listening to. It takes $2,500.

🥈 Second place: Omagotchi by SLcode777. A little creature that lives in your bar and needs you. Absolutely nobody needed this and everybody wants it. That’s $1,000.

🥉 Third place: AirPods by GM. Battery levels and one-click switching for your AirPods, right in the bar. The kind of thing you only miss when you come from a Mac. $500 for that.

Honorable mention to GitHub by Rob Zolkos, which puts your notifications and pull requests in the bar. No prize money, but a lot of votes!

Congratulations to all four, and thank you to everyone who submitted. Going through them was genuinely hard, which is the best possible problem to have.

And we’re doing this again! More competitions, more prize money, more excuses to build something ridiculous for a Linux desktop. Watch this space.

In terms of bandwidth, we flung nearly one petabyte in those same seven days. A thousand terabytes of Linux in a week between ISOs and package updates!

This would surely have taken Omarchy down in another age. Sent us scrambling for mirrors or torrents (and thinking about needing another mortgage on the house to pay the hosting bill). But we didn’t need to.

That’s because Cloudflare sits in front of all of it: the ISOs, the Omarchy packages, and our Arch mirror. It’s all on R2 and behind their CDN. Neither of which of course ever broke a sweat. And that’s the reason a hundred thousand people had a fast, boring, uneventful download from anywhere in the world in the past week.

Thank you to everyone at Cloudflare, and to Matthew Prince in particular. Matthew is also one of the Founding Patrons, which means he’s backing this project with both the infrastructure and his own money. Muchas gracias, señor!

A hundred thousand ISOs in a week. Wow.

So we’re starting Omarchy AIR — Artists in Residence — to support the best of them. A six-month residency for artists to work freely on themes, plugins, and whatever else they think Omarchy needs next. No roadmap, no tickets. The point is to let creativity flow with the support of the Omacom Foundation.

Each residency comes with $2,500 a month for the full six months, a token account so the agents never need to stop, and permanent recognition as AIR alumni once the six months are up.

There are up to three seats available at any one time, and two of them are now taken for this first season.

HANCORE has two themes shipping with Omarchy — Solitude and Last Horizon — and another twenty on the extras page, more than anyone else has contributed: Batou, Oxo Carbon, Velvet Night, Rose of Dune, Shades of Jade, and it keeps going. He’s a mechanical engineer who became one of the defining aesthetic forces in this community, sits on Omarchy Core, and helps steward the plugin ecosystem.

OldJobobo is responsible for three of the themes that ship with Omarchy — Lumon, Miasma, and Retro 82 — plus another ten on the extras page, from Batman to City-783 to Sakura Mochi. He works in whole palettes rather than one-off colour schemes, which is why his themes hold together across the terminal, Neovim, btop, and the shell instead of only looking good in a screenshot.

The last seat is by invitation. The program begins in October.

I like Vitruvius’ three requirements for good architecture: firmitas, utilitas, venustas. It must stand up, it must be useful, and it must be beautiful. Not two out of three. We will invest in all of it. We can fix everything.

Enter Omarchy Rangers: A new official team setup to help people find their way.

The inaugural three members (and their Discord handles):

• Mihai @Michael91, Romania
• Mateo Vaz @m4teo, Uruguay
• Nira @.+ N1R4 .+, Nepal

Three people, three continents, which is roughly the point. Omarchy’s community doesn’t keep office hours in a single time zone, and neither should the people helping it. The Discord is always buzzing.

Because almost nobody switches to Linux alone. And they often stay because somebody made the first week feel welcoming. Some then return the favor by doing the same for the next person. That’s how this whole thing grows.

If you’d like to help new users find their way, consider joining Omarchy Rangers. Apply to rangers@omarchy.org.

If you’ve used Omarchy, you’ve used mise, whether or not you noticed. It’s what manages the language runtimes, so mise use -g ruby gets you Ruby without a single line of PATH archaeology. But the part I care most about right now is the agents.

Every major coding-agent CLI in Omarchy ships as a lazy-loading mise stub in ~/.local/bin/. Claude Code, Codex, OpenCode, Antigravity, Copilot, Crush, Grok, Pi, Oh My Pi — all sitting there, costing you nothing until the first time you actually type one. Then it installs itself and you’re working. No package to hunt down, no version to pin, no toolchain to reason about. omarchy-mise-install <package> wraps any other CLI the same way, and omarchy update keeps every last one current.

That’s the fast track. In The Age of Agents, the gap between hearing about a tool and running it needs to be about four seconds, and mise delivers that. Nobody had to package anything for a distro first.

The interest runs both ways, too: traffic to mise is up 24% since Omarchy launched! A lot of people are meeting this tool for the first time through us, which is exactly the kind of thing a sponsorship should recognize rather than take for granted.

Once again, special thanks to Tobi Lütke, Patrick Collison, Michael Dell, Jack Dorsey, Matthew Prince, Brendan Iribe, Jason Fried, Drew Houston, and Peter Steinberger for making this possible. If it wasn’t for Oligarchy, we wouldn’t be able to fund open-source developers like this!

These are community-run events. You don’t need permission to organize one, nobody owns a city, and anyone can put one together anywhere. Talk about Omarchy, Linux, open source, programming, customization, or whatever adjacent hacker culture gets people excited about making computers fun again.

Keep it open to everyone, disclose any sponsorships, and don’t turn the Omarchy name into an events business or a sales pitch. Beyond that, behave like civilized adults (with child-like wonder), and have a great time.

Bring your laptop. Show off your setup. Swap themes and plugins. Help someone through their first installation. The point is to get the people who care about personal, programmable, beautiful computers together in the same room.

You can find an upcoming meetup or submit your own through the global Omarchy calendar on Luma. Let’s make this a worldwide movement!

More money in, more money out! Our second major sponsorship from the Omacom Foundation is going to outfoxxed for his superb work on Quickshell. It’s only been part of the public release for a week, but it’s already crystal clear that it was the missing, pivotal piece for us to truly achieve The Malleable Computer.

The proof is in the plugins! Over one thousand plugins have been created in the week that Quattro has been out. That’s an absolutely astounding testament to the technical flexibility of Quickshell, and how much agents love to write QML code.

This sponsorship thus rewards outfoxxed for his outstanding contribution to Omarchy, and helps cement the connection to our long-term plans for The Age of Agents (don’t post that on Bluesky, they’ll go nuts!). It’s termed for three years out the gate.

A special thanks to Tobi Lütke, Patrick Collison, Michael Dell, Jack Dorsey, Matthew Prince, Brendan Iribe, Jason Fried, Drew Houston, and Peter Steinberger for making this possible. If it wasn’t for Oligarchy, we wouldn’t be able to fund open-source developers like this!

Like the original eight Founding Patrons, Drew and Peter are each contributing $1 million. That gives the foundation ten patrons and a clean TEN MILLION DOLLARS to propel our audacious mission to make Linux on the desktop happen in a much bigger way.

It’s extra sweet to have Drew and Peter on board because I’ve personally been such a big fan of both of them and their accomplishments. I’ve been an enthusiastic customer of Dropbox for nearly two decades, and it’s central to how I’m able to live with no backup, no cry yet constantly switch computers.

That’s why Omarchy ships with great Dropbox integration out of the box. Just go to Install > Service > Dropbox, and you’ll have file manager integration and a bespoke menu panel for controls.

And OpenClaw has essentially provided the roadmap for how Omarchy should tackle its explosive growth. How do you deal with PR backlogs that suddenly go parabolic? What about security around plugins? How should meetups in the project’s name be handled? I’ve already had the pleasure of drawing on Peter’s advice and experience on several of these topics.

Beyond that, they both represent exactly the kind of technical ambition I want around Omarchy. Drew turned a personal itch about moving files between computers into Dropbox. Peter turned a weekend project into OpenClaw, and in the process reminded everyone just how much appetite there is for computers that feel personal, programmable, and fun.

That’s the spirit behind the Omacom Foundation too. We’re here to fund the infrastructure, open-source projects, and developers needed to make the Linux desktop a delightful home for the next generation of computer users.

Welcome, Drew and Peter. Ten Founding Patrons. Ten million dollars. The prophecy just got another $2 million closer!

To do just that, I’m incorporating the Omacom Foundation to ensure that this mission is fully funded, durable, and ready to accelerate.

This nonprofit foundation will hold the trademarks, fund the infrastructure, promote the work, and support the open-source projects and developers Omarchy depends on.

These twelve Founding Patrons are each contributing $1 million to this mission:

• Tobi Lütke, CEO of Shopify
• Patrick Collison, CEO of Stripe
• Michael Dell, Chairman and CEO of Dell Technologies
• Jack Dorsey, Block Head and Chairman of Block
• Matthew Prince, CEO of Cloudflare
• Brendan Iribe, Cofounder of Sesame and Oculus
• Jason Fried, CEO of 37signals
• Drew Houston, cofounder and co-CEO of Dropbox
• Peter Steinberger, creator of OpenClaw
• Brian Armstrong, CEO of Coinbase
• Yunjie Dai, cofounder of TapTap
• Yours truly

These Founding Corporate Patrons are each contributing $1 million a year for three years or $1.5 million in tokens, with renewal by mutual agreement:

• Meta Superintelligence Labs
• DigitalOcean
• Alibaba Cloud
• SpaceXSI

These Distinguished Patrons are each contributing $100,000 to the mission:

• Ryan R. Hughes, partner at Oodle
• Ed Huang, cofounder and CTO of PingCAP
• Adrien Treccani, founder of Metaco
• Max Schoening, Head of Product at Notion

And these Distinguished Corporate Patrons are each contributing $100,000 a year for three years or $150,000 in tokens, with renewal by mutual agreement:

• 1Password
• 37signals
• Four Technologies
• Fireworks
• OpenAI
• OpenRouter
• OrcaRouter
• Namespace
• Greptile

Over 800 donors have also raised over $120,000 through open patronage, bringing the total in pledges and donations to approximately $23.7 million.

This is a ridiculous sum of money, so I intend to make sure it lasts a long time, and that we make the most of it. But just as important as the incredible cushion is the vote of confidence delivered by these pledges.

We’re going to make the prophecy of The Year of Linux on the Desktop come true. All the pieces are now in place. Time to go all in!

UPDATE: Drew and Peter joined as Founding Patrons on August 24.

UPDATE: Brian and Yunjie joined as Founding Patrons on August 31.

UPDATE: 1Password and 37signals joined as Distinguished Corporate Patrons on August 31.

UPDATE: Ryan, Ed, Adrien, and Max joined as Distinguished Patrons on September 2.

UPDATE: Meta Superintelligence Labs, OpenAI, and Fireworks joined as Token Patrons on September 3.

UPDATE: OpenRouter, Four Technologies, and nearly 500 donors added another half a million dollars on September 7.

UPDATE: DigitalOcean joined as a Founding Corporate Patron with $1 million a year for three years.

UPDATE: Brian Cartmell and American Cloud joined as open patronage doubled on September 17.

UPDATE: OrcaRouter joined as a Distinguished Corporate Patron with $150,000 in tokens on September 17.

UPDATE: Alibaba Cloud joined as a Founding Corporate Patron with $1 million a year for three years on September 22.

UPDATE: SpaceXSI joined as a Founding Corporate Patron with $1.5 million in Grok tokens on October 8.

UPDATE: Namespace joined as a Distinguished Corporate Patron with $100,000 a year in compute on October 9.

UPDATE: Greptile joined as a Distinguished Corporate Patron with $150,000 in tokens for PR reviews on October 15.

As the creator of Hyprland, he’s responsible for one of the three core technologies in Omarchy (Arch Linux/Hyprland/Quickshell), and I’m thrilled to announce an exclusive sponsorship that lets him focus fully on developing it further without any need to think about commercial development or fundraising.

We’re signing up for the long term with Vaxry to support the long term future of Omarchy. Our exclusive sponsorship deal is set for three years, with an option for another two.

The deal also allows for Hyprland’s existing Hyprperks program to be released for free, for everyone, as the paid subscriptions will end. But Hyprland will still accept personal donations to let individuals buy into the project’s development and to support Vaxry and the team.

Many thanks to 37signals (hello self! 😂), Butterfly, and Framework for helping Hyprland get to this point. Thrilled that the Omacom Foundation can take over from October 10, and give one of the best developers in this new Linux moment the chance to go all-in.

(* This deal does not include any direct assistance in getting Vaxry a girlfriend, but I’ll personally be available as a reference for any inquiries on the matter.)

So in celebration of this huge outburst of creativity, we’ll be hosting the first plugin competition using the four grand that I received from yapping endlessly about Omarchy on X last week.

The rules are as follows:

1. All plugins submitted to the repository before Monday August 24 at 9am CEST are eligible (including the ones already listed).
2. The winners will be selected by the new Omarchy Core, which will vote to find a podium.
3. The prize money will be $2,500 for first, $1,000 for second, and $500 for third.
4. You must be able to receive payment by Zelle, Venmo, PayPal, or EU IBAN to collect the prize money.

The winners will be announced next week when we’re done reviewing all submissions, but no later than Friday, August 28.

Have fun and may the best ideas and execution win!

Allow me to present the inaugural Core Team:

Ryan Hughes has been my wingman on Omarchy since day one. We fought the 3am emergency AUR outages together in the early days, and we conspired to build our own package repository. Ryan’s contributions span every layer of the distro: installation, packaging, hardware support, gaming, theming, CLI tooling, and now Quattro. He helped drive the move to Quickshell, the plugin system, and much of the infrastructure that turned Omarchy from a carefully assembled Linux setup into a proper operating system. When he’s not hacking on Omarchy, Ryan is a partner at Oodle.

Tobi Lütke is the only person who’s made both of my core teams! As a member of the first Rails Core Team started in 2004, he drove not only a serious record of contributions to the framework, but also authored Liquid, Delayed Job, and Active Merchant. That work eventually turned into a little company called Shopify, have you heard of them? Now he’s a prolific contributor to Omarchy with projects like try, Omasnap, Wi-Fi QR codes, and the Quake-style agent console. He also happens to be my co-driver in the #11 Shopify Racing LMP2 car racing in IMSA.

Bjarne Øverli is the CTO of Unite AS and the creator of Aether, the visual theme builder we ship in Omarchy, and cliamp, our TUI-based music player. He’s helped turn our theming system from a collection of configuration files into something far more systematic, with semantic colors and generated themes across Neovim, VS Code, btop, and the rest of the stack. He’s also responsible for themes like Ethereal, Hackerman, and Lupine. Bjarne has that rare combination of programmer rigor and visual taste that fits Omarchy perfectly.

HANCORE is a mechanical engineer who somehow ended up becoming one of the defining aesthetic forces in the Omarchy community. He’s produced an absurd number of themes, including Last Horizon and Solitude, which ships by default in Omarchy. Now he’s helping steward the plugin ecosystem around Quattro. Omarchy has always insisted that a computer should be beautiful as well as useful, and HANCORE has pushed that premise further than almost anyone.

Spencer Bull is a Distinguished Engineer at Dell working on Linux client enablement, AI, and platform software. He’s been our bridge into the messy reality of brand-new hardware, helping Omarchy work properly on Panther Lake and the latest XPS machines before the usual Linux lag could set in. Kernel issues, drivers, displays, Wi-Fi, speakers, power management: Spencer operates in the layer where software meets atoms, and having that expertise inside the Core Team is invaluable.

These five have already been doing the work. This just makes it official. Together with me, it’s a phenomenal inaugural Core Team. But it’s also not going to be the only team. Stay tuned for an announcement on Omarchy Rangers!

Together we’re going to build Omarchy into the premier Linux distribution for people who are excited about the age of agents, the malleable computer, and beautiful, modern, opinionated computing.

To infinity and beyond!