Omarchy review: why I switched my work machine

I’ve used Linux for a long time, and before Omarchy my desktop was a hand-rolled Arch and Hyprland setup. I liked it, but I built every piece of it myself: the bar, the launcher, the keybindings, the colors, and all the glue that holds them together. It’s fun the first time. After that, every new machine means doing it all over again.

I tried Omarchy on an old MacBook Pro first, mostly out of curiosity. I enjoyed it so much that I wiped my desktop and installed it there too. It’s on my third computer now. Omarchy is an opinionated Arch Linux setup built around Hyprland, and the opinions are good ones. Here are the three things that sold me, plus the one default I’d change.

Theming that touches everything at once

Theming on Linux usually means editing a handful of config files in different formats and hoping the colors match. In Omarchy you run omarchy theme set with a theme name, or pick one from the menu, and it changes everything together: the terminal, the bar, the wallpaper, the lock screen, icons, Neovim and VS Code. My install came with 37 themes.

That sounds cosmetic, and I suppose it is. But when the whole system follows one theme, extending it is easy. I wrote a script that builds Stylus themes for popular websites, based on whatever Omarchy theme I’m running. It’s not perfect by any measure, but it pulls the browser into the same look as the rest of the desktop.

Defaults that make sense

Most of what I’d normally change on day one was already done. Getting three monitors set up the way I like took a little work, but that’s mostly personal preference. Past that, the apps, keybindings and layout feel like someone who works on this machine all day made the calls.

A couple of defaults surprised me. Voxtype, the built-in dictation, is one. I’ve had bad experiences with dictation before, so I was skeptical, and I expected to need a bigger speech model. The default one has worked flawlessly for me on a six-year-old laptop. The other is how much is already built in. I took a screen recording, cropped it, turned it into a GIF and posted it without installing anything.

The one exception for me is vim motion keys. I’m used to moving around with h, j, k and l, and that isn’t how the window keybindings are set up out of the box. It’s easy to add, but for a setup this focused on developer workflow, I was a little surprised it didn’t ship that way.

An AI agent that already knows the system

This is the part I didn’t expect to matter as much as it does. Omarchy has coding agents built in. omarchy agent opens your default one in a terminal. It supports Claude, Codex and Grok subscriptions, and it can switch accounts when you get near a usage limit. Omarchy also ships instructions for the agent that explain how the system is put together: where configs live, how themes work, and how to build an app the way Omarchy’s own apps are built.

In practice, troubleshooting and tinkering turn into a request. I use glow to read markdown in the terminal, and I wanted its colors to change when I switch Omarchy themes. I asked Claude, and it had a clean solution working in about five minutes. It would have taken me hours to figure that out on my own. The same goes for plugins, themes or a small desktop app. I can ask for one, and the agent already knows the conventions it needs to follow. There’s even a command that hands a crashed program to the agent to diagnose.

I think that’s the bigger shift. Linux has always been powerful, but the price was knowing where everything lived. An agent that knows the layout lowers that price a lot, and I don’t think we’ve seen everything that means yet.

Where it’s not a fit

It’s still Arch, and it’s still opinionated. If you want a desktop that looks and works like Windows or macOS, this probably isn’t it, and the keyboard-first habits take a week or two to settle in.

You also want to stay aware of what the agent is doing. I’m cautious about letting AI agents run on my machines, and with good reason. I once ran Claude Code in a locked-down, headless container, and it installed its own copy of Chromium in a cache folder just so it could take a screenshot of the app it was building. It’s capable enough to get itself into trouble, so read what it’s about to change before you let it. I take the same approach in the text support platform I’m building for internet providers, where code, not the AI, sets the rules.

Where I landed

For my own work machine, it’s been worth it. I spend less time maintaining the setup and more time using it, and when something does go sideways, I can usually fix it with a short conversation instead of a long search. I’m curious whether the AI side ends up being the reason more people try Linux at all.

If you’re thinking about trying it and want to compare notes, send me a message.