Back and forth with Omarchy

I no longer use Omarchy and Hyprland.

A QUICK NOTE: While I appreciate the technical merits of Omarchy and Hyprland, I do not align with or endorse the political views of their creators. This post is strictly focused on the software and how it fits my workflow.

The code itself might be apolitical, but the communities and governance are not.

Omarchy is an opinionated distro based on Arch Linux and uses Hyprland as its tiling window manager. And when Omarchy 2.0 was announced a few months back, it was the first time I heard about this distro. I mean its quite easy to dismiss that as “oh mate, another hyprland dotfiles repo as distro, give me a break” , but I also happened to have enough free time to watch the YouTube video uploaded to showcase Omarchy 2.0, and considering all the hype and first impressions, it was good. Good enough to try the next time I got my laptop serviced again, because the Acer technicians will wipe my hard drive to reinstall the Acer themed Windows. : (

Initial installation

Omarchy provides its own ISO with everything already present offline for a smooth install, sized above 6 GB in total. The ISO has its own installer which lets you setup your credentials and some details, and *just* does its job. Which I would happily use if I only wanted to use Linux on my laptop.

However, a lot of my work is still tied to Windows, let it be Microsoft Office, or using a Windows only software sometimes (eg. Keil uVision IDE) which I do not want to go through hiccups of installing VMs. So I keep two partitions of Windows and my Linux distro of choice. Thankfully, Omarchy has an option of manual installation which is possible by installing Arch first from the Arch Linux ISO and then running the Omarchy install script on top of it.

Archinstall configuration

I use btrfs on the partition which I want to install, with this layout:

It’s the bare minimum required, Omarchy installer will also add one for /.snapshots so no need to create one.

Beware that you must setup disk encryption to use Omarchy as designed! The setup relies exclusively on disk encryption to secure your device, as it’ll auto-login the user after the disk has been decrypted at boot.

Its really not necessary to have Limine as a bootloader, but if you don’t, then Omarchy’s snapshots won’t work and you will need to setup something yourself.

On the Network configuration, I selected “NetworkManager (iwd backend)” as my preferred choice. I use Ethernet with the laptop in my home so don’t need to copy the network configuration for the install. If you select to copy the network config from the ISO, Arch will install systemd-networkd, which it uses by default. But I prefer NetworkManager, so I choose that.

You do not need to select any window manager in the Profile section. What you need is to select Pipewire and bluetooth configuration in Archinstall.

Everything installed perfectly.

Post-install fix if something’s up

NOTE: I figured this out on my later re-installs, not my original install.

On my recent install, after running the Omarchy install command, I guess the Arch Linux repository was ahead of Omarchy repository, and backdating packages back on Arch does not work good because its a rolling release, you will get “error : failed to commit transaction (conflicting files)” errors. In that case, follow what the thread says, or be bold and:

sudo pacman -Syuu --overwrite '*'

My suggestion would be to do this before running the Omarchy install command, because its kinda brittle if it fails mid install, you do that, and then install again, sometimes hiccups occur. I do not think this will happen every time, only in some cases like it did with me.

Daily driving

Well short words, Omarchy is well thought out. The keybindings make sense, most of the things work out of the box. Some things which I like about it are:

• Most of the stuff is accessible through keybinds. Browser, terminal, code editor, is what I need most of the time.
• Hyprland is an amazing window manager. Although I probably won’t use the effects and shaders anytime soon, base works fine for me.
• I love the TUIs and Walker menus for almost everything and how easily I can access anything from them. Add keyboard friendly to that as well.
• It does not get in my way. Well most of the time.

As far as I can remember, the moment something customizable lands in my hands, let it be i3, Sway, XFCE, whatever, it will take an easy 2-3 weeks off my time trying to rice the living shit out of it till I am satisfied. That means endless documentation, Reddit research, YouTube videos, and trying out every combination possible until I get something that looks good and suits me. I have fell into this trap far too many times, and I do not want to fall into that again.

Let me be clear though, Omarchy, and Hyprland are super customizable, but the baseline which it already provides is good enough to be functional and good-looking, that means I do not need to start ricing a Hyprland system from 0 and waste my time trying to fight an uphill battle. All I need is a little customization and be able to feel the need to never touch the config again.

What “back and forth?”

“Well you already seem to enjoy Omarchy so much! What is the back and forth you’re talking about?”

Well I was already on cloud nine with my Omarchy setup, some little issues were still visible, like this one persistent issue from the start. It had to do with Chromium, whenever I visited YouTube or Reddit, the browser would just start lagging, screen tearing would happen, to the point I was not able to use the browser at all! And this has already been put up as an issue on the repository, however all roads lead to dead ends. I tried everything from changing Chromium flags, disabling hardware acceleration, nothing works properly. Only disabling hardware acceleration would make the browser usable, but barely usable. Every animation sucked the soul out of my eyes because of how janky and laggy it felt.

Also, there is some issue with my audio card’s driver in the Linux kernel which makes any microphone connected to the 3.5mm jack completely unusable. Only the internal laptop mic works. The wiki page for my laptop provides a fix which makes the external mic work, but, the internal mic stops working. This supposed “friction” and wanting to have a perfect setup made me look other ways. I did try a couple of distros and configs, but something was off about them. Listing some things which I tried:

• Pop OS: I was a Pop user for a long time, so it was my obvious first choice. The latest version 24.04 now ships with COSMIC, which I was very happy to try and use because I was following it ever since it was announced (when I was still using Pop OS). COSMIC works great no doubt, but some things still need polishing, and I was not able to customize anything yet (colors and stuff), so I wasn’t really happy with how it looked.
• Dusky: Its also an opinionated distro based on Arch Linux, took me a couple of times to install it correctly by referring to the YouTube video. It worked great, however, now my muscle memory was kinda redundant because all the keybindings were different. And I kinda not liked the way it looked. We’re looking at a potential 2 week ricing stint, so I immediately distanced.
• Fedora: The third option was good ol’ Fedora, which I also used to daily drive way on my old laptop. However I forgot how resource intensive GNOME is, and strangely it had a lot of delay in opening any application, or Settings, or even the launcher. Felt more sluggish than Windows for some reason.

All of this took place in a span of couple of weeks, but thankfully I did not have anything major going on so that’s fine. I reinstalled Omarchy, hoping the Chromium issue would be gone.

“Just use a different browser”. I would, but other stuff still use Chromium, like the Web Apps, so it affected almost everything. This was the biggest issue which prompted the switch in the first place.

But thankfully, I tried every website which I got the issue on, and luckily it is gone. Which means I can finally keep using Omarchy normally without wanting to switch up anything soon.

My customizations on Omarchy

Like I said, I have a very bad habit of obsessively ricing, but since I already like most of the stuff already present in Omarchy, things to tweak/adjust are far less.

WiFi TUI and WiFi hotspot

Omarchy ships with Impala by default, which is a good TUI for managing WiFi. However, I saw someone use nmtui-go instead of Impala, and I liked how nmtui-go worked and operated, felt more intuitive to me. I switched to nmtui-go to manage my WiFi, and like the name, its just a more beautiful nmtui and works exactly as the name.

As for WiFi hotspot, I need it all the time because my WiFi router is too weak to reach my room, and mobile data is very slow, so I just use my laptop’s ethernet via the hotspot to connect my phone and use the Internet. However, it requires installing dnsmasq, and after that a lot of configuration with ufw rules, which takes a lot of time to set up. I really miss this from other OSes who usually have GNOME Control Center which has GUI functionality to quickly setup a hotspot. Instead, I use linux-wifi-hotspot to turn the hotspot on and off. The only minor inconvenience is to restart it after you suspend the laptop and then turn it back on.

Color scheme

If you browse my website, you’ll know damn well what color scheme I like. So, I used Aether which comes pre-installed in Omarchy, and put in my wallpaper to generate a color scheme which was already close to what I wanted, and a few tweaks later I got the perfect theme which I wanted.

Omarchy’s theming system with Aether is genuinely very good as it also supports other applications (Chromium, Ghostty) along with window manager stuff, which overall makes for a very cohesive and pleasing setup to use.

DNS

After I installed Omarchy and rebooted, I noticed my ethernet would not work. This is because even though I ticked NetworkManager, Omarchy probably uses systemd-networkd so managing the DNS through its menu does nothing. And it was true because I saw /etc/resolv.conf was symlinked to a systemd-resolvd stub file. A quick nameserver change by creating a new file there solves the issue.

Lockscreen

Omarchy uses Hyprlock for when you lock the desktop or close the lid or when the system remains inactive. I made a quick few changes to the config to show the date and time on the lockscreen. I think it looks beautiful now. And Aether’s theme also influences the lockscreen so that’s an added bonus.

Dotfiles

After the various re-installs, I figured out it is a bad idea to not back up any customizations I do to the OS, because its time consuming to do them everytime I reinstall. That’s why I created a dotfiles setup with stow to backup my configuration to a private GitHub repository (might go public in the future).

The dotfiles live in ~/.dotfiles. In that folder, I have segregated dotfiles into their own folders, for now they have only three folders

~ ❯ ls ~/.dotfiles
Permissions Size User   Date Modified Name
drwxr-xr-x     - pranav 17 Feb 11:53  omarchy
drwxr-xr-x     - pranav 17 Feb 11:39  system
drwxr-xr-x     - pranav 17 Feb 11:39  zed

~ ❯ tree -d ~/.dotfiles/omarchy/.config/
/home/pranav/.dotfiles/omarchy/.config/
├── alacritty
├── hypr
├── omarchy
│   ├── branding
│   ├── current
│   │   └── theme
│   │       └── backgrounds
│   ├── extensions
│   ├── hooks
│   ├── themed
│   └── themes
│       ├── omarchy-retronav-theme
│       │   └── backgrounds
│       └── synthwave84
└── waybar

16 directories

To set this up, I moved the current installed config folders to the respective category in ~/.dotfiles/<config>/.config/. And after that all I need to do is:

cd ~/.dotfiles
stow omarchy

And it will create symlinks for everything in that folder. It makes me easier to edit the configuration and back up everything.

Removing unnecessary stuff, and Suspend option in Power menu

This beautiful tool called A la Carchy is a utility which allows you to remove preinstalled apps which you don’t want, and also has some other options to streamline the OS more. I used it to remove some pre-installed apps and web apps, and also brought back the Suspend option which was removed despite some calls for reconsideration. I use suspend a lot on my laptop, because sleep -> suspend cycle doesn’t work really well and sometimes the laptop eats through the whole battery and dies.

Why Omarchy worked the best for me

I don’t really have a concrete list of things that make me prefer Omarchy over other distros. I think to say the best, Omarchy is a meticulously configured collection of software and a great starting point for someone to delve in tiling window managers like Hyprland and making the gap between traditional WMs like GNOME or KDE really close. I can still do most of the stuff and configuration like its done in the other two I mentioned, however I feel I have a greater control over customization of things, and it helps me create a personal environment which I enjoy working whatever time I spend on the system.

In the past I have used Sway and i3, and I absolutely loved using keyboard oriented and tiling window managers because the window organization and keybind navigation around windows and workspaces felt much more frictionless than say dragging around with the mouse.

Other more conventional window managers lack that aspect which does add a bit of distaste for me using them. However they provide a cohesive experience in terms of shipping with apps dealing with core things like managing WiFi, Bluetooth, keyboards, mouse, display, etc. which I think tiling window managers lack a starting point for. We have to compensate for the convenience by installing applications that allow us to do those same tasks more conveniently. Also, its rarely that their defaults will work for you and you always crave a little customization to fit your habits or preferences, so that adds a lot of friction for someone who just wants to try out if a tiling window manager will suit their workflow.

I think Omarchy hits the nail right in the spot by proving a cohesive experience with a tiling window manager, and a desktop beautiful enough out of the box and still very customizable, along with good practices for managing dotfiles for almost everything.

Like I said, in the past I have spent (or wasted) way too much time configuring my setup to the max to the point it has diminishing returns regards to productivity, and that precious time is lost. The urge for me is hard to resist, and so I had distanced myself from tiling window managers so I will not waste more time doing something else right when I have exams or some important work.

But in the case of Omarchy, everything is already beautifully configured for me out of the box, and also allows me to have my own setup in, which provides far more control than what I would in other desktop environments, and that is what I like for.

Also, since its all Arch, I love the AUR. I can find almost anything I want on it. I miss the AUR the most on other distros. Which is also a major reason why I like Omarchy and could not stand the other OSes.