Should you use Omarchy?

Summary

Omarchy is very good as a skeleton for making your own config. But the iso, not so much. The inflexibility and the bloat that comes pre-installed with it was too much for me to handle. The easy install they offer is pointless because Arch is not the distro for that kind of project.

Complete beginners should avoid Omarchy as the easy install gives the illusion of everything working all the time, but when something breaks beginners lack the experience of reading and interpreting logs and fixing problems.

All other users interested in Omarchy are better off cloning their repo and configuring it to their liking instead of using the iso. Forks like grubomarchy (my fork, that still requires btrfs) offer more flexible, and therefore more manual, Omarchy installations with almost all of the features that make Omarchy special.

Introduction

Hello and welcome to this monologue about Omarchy and my setup of it. Hope i found you feeling well.

Quick notes before I begin:

• I went through every script on their GitHub and I downloaded their iso, unpacked and unsquashed it, and went through all of their scripts not on github. So i consider myself knowledgable about Omarchy.

• I won't be going through every aspect of Omarchy. I will just state my opinion, features relevant to that and the changes I made.

• This post is covering only Omarchy 3.0.

• I won't be comparing it to other 'omakase' distros.

What is Omarchy?

So what is Omarchy?

I think David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH, the main contributor of Omarchy) describes it best.

"Omarchy is an omakase distribution based on Arch Linux and the tiling window manager Hyprland. It ships with just about everything a modern software developer needs to be productive immediately. That's everything from Neovim (btw) to Spotify, Chromium to Typora, and Alacritty to LibreOffice. Hell, even Zoom is there!"

- DHH, Omarchy wiki, 2025-10-03

My initial opinion

MY initial opinion on Omarchy wasn't that positive.

This is how i interpreted DHHs quote first:

"Omarchy is a configuration in which there is a lot of proprietary bloatware and you should use it because I know better than you."

Which isn't really fair to DHH. It does state that it is opinionated, but i couldn't shake off the pre-installed Zoom and Typora with a freemium model.

My final opinion

During the install and configuration phase my opinion changed.

While the default ISO is rigid and includes software I personally wouldn’t want, Omarchy works very well as a starting skeleton that is highly customizable and can be tailored to your preferences.

I can’t really blame Omarchy for being opinionated—it makes that clear from the start.

Should you use it?

Difficult question that depends on what you know and what you want. But i can summarize what I think here,

If you are a:

• New linux user: No.
• New Arch user: Manual install.
• Arch user: Manual install.

Let me explain myself.

Arch

To start off, let me explain briefly explain arch. I won't be going through what it is but if it is beginner friendly or not.

You can make arguments for and against Arch being beginner friendly. On one hand It has great documentation, the ArchWiki and it is a great learning opportunity. On the other hand, the installation is relatively complex, compared to distros like Mint or even other Arch distros like CachyOS, it requires maintenance, which beginners may struggle with and you are expected to read documentation before seeking help. Just to name a few.

Omarchy solves one of these problems, which is the installation, as well as the setup. But the other difficulties remain.

New linux user

As I said before there are arguments for and against arch for beginners. If you are just trying to switch to linux from windows or mac, maybe Omarchy isn't the best choice. As a complete beginner it is much better to start with something like linux mint, that just works. Then again, I may be wrong, but I personally started with mint and I believe that gave me a very good starting ground for getting familiar with linux and how it differs from windows. You can always switch but being familiar with the terminal is a must as Omarchy uses Hyprland. Go easy on yourself and give linux some time to show you what it can do.

New Arch user

If you are unaware, Omarchy offers a manual install. Where you can clone their repo, edit what you want and then install that version on your computer. Of course, that means you have to install arch manually. But that is a good thing. Switching to Arch without installing it manually, at least for the first time, it is like beating Dark Souls with gun mods on your first play through. You have only one first time so make it special. :).

The manual install still requires btrfs, encryption, single disk and other things described in their manual installation guide. And they recommend using the archinstall script.

If you want to skip all of that, except btrfs, you can use my fork of Omarchy, which I will talk about later.

Arch user

I was an existing Arch user and I switched after modifying their script to suit my needs. Omarchy has a lot of scripts I was too lazy to set up so that was perfect for me.

Iso

As you might have noticed I don't recommend using their iso for installing Omarchy. My opinion - it is bad. The install script is nice and everything but it is completely offline. Which, in itself, isn't a bad thing, but even Zoom is pre-installed. Which makes the iso around 8GB large.

The biggest issue I have with the Omarchy iso, that you cannot change in their installer, is the fact that it takes up the whole disk. And if you have two or more disks, you cannot mount home, for example, that is on an another disk. It is so inflexible and I hope it changes. I understand the pre-installed content but forcing actual hardware is something that should have been considered.

I think that this is because of the fact that they rely on archinstall for the installation. They use a template that they pass to archinstall. It is much easier to make that template if you have a simple setup. And, since it is advertised as opinionated they can do whatever they want.

I cannot say for sure but it seems their focus has shifted to the iso installer. I say that because when I first did the manual install of Omarchy it didn't prompt for my name in email, as it said it would in the manual. So after some digging through commits, i found the file that had been deleted, which was made for the manual install. I restored the file in my own fork so now it works correctly. But on Omarchys official master branch the issue persists.

Why I chose Omarchy?

In the end, I chose Omarchy simply because I liked how it looked.

My configuration of Omarchy

I changed some stuff in Omarchy to make it usable for me.

What I changed

The most crucial changes were completely removing their forced encryption, login/decryption screen and changing the bootloader.

Encryption and "login"

Omarchy, by default, has encryption over the whole disk and no display manager. The "login screen" is a fancy window for inputting the disk password. I sometimes dual boot from a single disk so that was a no-no for me. I removed their login screen and everything that had encryption in its name. I also added sddm as the display manager as it just works.

Another reason for wanting a display manager is that i want to be able to install something other than Hyprland. I usually have both Hyprland and Plasma on my computer in case someone else needs to use my computer.

Bootloader

Omarchy uses limine, I went with Grub. I always go with grub as I rarely have any problems with it and I know how to set it up.

I also know for a fact GRUB (sometimes) works with Windows and I need it to write exams.

Fork

I made a fork with these changes. A btrfs file system, including /home, is still a requirement so you will have to modify it if you don't want btrfs or if you want a separate home partition. Of course, you should see the changes I made and decide for yourself if they suit you and what you should change.

Additional changes

More changes were made on the my_config branch of the fork I made. I edited keybinding, installed packages, shell,... And removed most of the unnecessary packages Omarchy has by default, like Zoom.

Nvidia

Perhaps the thing I like the most about default Omarchy is the hardware section of their scripts. Of course, I didn't test everything but I did test installing it on my Desktop with and RTX 3060 and an AMD cpu. It worked without issues. Even cuda was working fine.