Omarchy: DHH's distro that became an agentic operating system

Video summary: this article is based on the video “Omarchy Agentic OS — This Changes EVERYTHING For AI-Native Founders”, from the channel Simon Høiberg, and goes beyond it with the project's official documentation.
Video URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JjjecbwrioA

A SaaS founder installs a Linux distribution, asks an AI agent to reconfigure the system's own shortcuts and window rules, reloads the environment, and continues working within the version the agent just customized. His reaction in the video is: “I want to build my entire company within this”.

The distro is Omarchy, and it is today the loudest phenomenon in Linux desktop. This post explains what it actually is, where it came from, how to install, the first steps that matter — and where the excitement deserves a brake.

What is Omarchy

Omarchy is an omakase Linux distribution based on Arch Linux, the Hyprland tiling window manager, and the Quickshell desktop building kit. “Omakase” is the Japanese term for “chef’s choice”: the chef puts together the menu, but you can always send a dish back. Translated into software — the decisions are already made, and you reconfigure whatever you want afterward.

It's not just a handful of pre-installed packages. It comes with an entire thought-out system: Neovim, Chromium, Obsidian, LibreOffice, Kdenlive, OBS Studio, a bunch of TUIs and even a Winamp-style music player. The thesis, in the creator's own words, is that a beautiful system is a motivating system, and productivity comes after motivation.

Project numbers today: repository omacom/omarchy, licensed under MIT, written mostly in Shell, with almost 39 thousand stars and more than 4 thousand forks. The latest version at the time of this post (September 2026) is 4.0.2, from the series nicknamed Quattro.

Where it came from: DHH, Omakub, and a love letter to Linux

The creator is David Heinemeier Hansson — the DHH: creator of Ruby on Rails, partner at 37signals (Basecamp, HEY), and in recent years, one of the most vocal critics of public cloud dependency.

The repository was created on June 1st, 2025. In the announcement, DHH described the project as “my latest love letter to Linux” and was honest about the audience: the Omarchy didn't replace Omakub, his Ubuntu setup — was a sibling project, because Ubuntu is a softer landing for outsiders than Arch. In 2026 things changed: Omakub was retired and had its repositories archived. Anyone wanting the same idea about Ubuntu should look at the community fork, Omabuntu.

The problem it solves has a name: Hyprland is wonderful and comes completely barebones from the factory. You have to figure out on your own how to have a lock screen, idle timer, menu bar, Bluetooth panel. Omarchy is the answer to that — a set of good and beautiful defaults, plus all the tools you'd normally install.

2026: when the personal project became an institution

What started as a developer's dotfiles turned into something else in 2026:

• Omarchy Quattro (4.0) — released in August of 2026, crossed 100 thousand ISO downloads in one week and 200 thousand in 18 days: on average, a new ISO every 8 seconds, with a peak of 1.165 downloads in one hour.
• Omacom Foundation — nonprofit foundation announced on 21/08/2026 with US$ 8 million, which reached US$ 14,95 million in commitments until 3 September 2026 — of which US$ 1,95 million is not money, but rather token credit donated by Meta Superintelligence Labs, Anthropic, OpenAI and Fireworks. Among the twelve Founding Patrons (US$ 1 million each) are Drew Houston (Dropbox) and Peter Steinberger (creator of OpenClaw); 1Password and 37signals joined as Distinguished Corporate Patrons, with US$ 100 thousand per year for three years each.
• Money returning to the ecosystem — the foundation became the exclusive sponsor of Hyprland (Vaxry) and the primary sponsor of Quickshell (outfoxxed) and mise (jdx), and made its first full-time hire: kernel developer Krzysztof Wilczyński, to work on the Omarchy kernel.
• Plugin marketplace — thousands of community plugins (there were 500 in August of 2026, when the first competition took place), with competitions and prizes.
• Structure — a formalized Core Team, ~35 thousand members on Discord, meetups around the world, and a “Rangers” program to help people coming from macOS and Windows.

It's worth noting what this means: a distro just over a year old is funding three of the upstream projects it depends on. That's rare and it's good.

The video's point: the “agentic OS”

What hooked Simon Høiberg wasn't the window mosaic. He was already running most of his company operations with AI agents — a code agent on a dedicated server, another monitoring infrastructure, another triaging support tickets — and he had built his own harness (which he calls OpsLayer) plus an Electron app and another in React Native just to have a place to see and control all of it.

When installing Omarchy, his conclusion was that he was rebuilding in Electron something the operating system already delivered natively. The agent inspected the system configuration, manipulated shortcuts and window rules, reloaded the environment, and continued working within the modified version.

He also raises the most important self-criticism from the video, and it deserves highlighting: all of this can become the perfect excuse for a technical founder to spend months improving the productivity system and avoid the actual business. Before AI was the perfect workspace in Notion, the “second brain,” the Zapier flow. The criterion he proposes is simple and applies to you: the system has to help you do more, improve the work, or make the work more pleasant — preferably all three.

How AI is actually embedded

This is where the official documentation surpasses the video. Omarchy doesn't choose a favorite agent for you: all major agent CLIs come pre-connected as stubs managed by mise in ~/.local/bin/, with lazy loading — nothing is downloaded until you run it for the first time.

Command	Agent
claude	Claude Code
codex	OpenAI Codex
opencode	OpenCode
copilot	GitHub Copilot CLI
grok	Grok CLI (xAI)
crush	Crush
agy	Google Antigravity CLI
ori	Ori, the OpenRouter harness
pi	Pi, Mario Zechner's harness
omp	Oh My Pi

You choose the default with omarchy default agent <nome> (or under Setup → Defaults → Agent in the menu). After that, Super + Shift + Ctrl + A launches the default agent in a dedicated terminal window — or opens the picker if you have not chosen one yet. You can also launch it with a task:

omarchy agent prompt "Revise este projeto"

Read this sentence twice: agents launched this way run in do not ask, just do it mode. They will actually change things. For safety, since agents refuse to trust the entire home directory, launches from $HOME start in ~/Work.

Three integrations deserve mention:

• Agent panel in the bar — appears when the system detects agent use on the machine and brings together the plan, percentage consumed of the 5-hour and weekly limits, and token consumption by day and by model. The data is regenerated every 15 minutes.
• Crash diagnostics — Omarchy watches systemd-coredump. When something segfaults, you get a notification; clicking it hands the core dump to the agent along with a skill that guides it to gather facts and decide whether an upstream report is worthwhile. You can silence it per program with omarchy crash mute hyprland.
• The Omarchy skill — a skill installed in the skill directories of Claude Code, Codex, Pi, and Antigravity, teaching the agent how to work with Hyprland, the bar, and themes. The documentation itself classifies it as experimental and recommends running in planning mode first, with omarchy reinstall configs up your sleeve in case the agent makes a mess.

Installing

Installation uses an ISO, and the project takes pride in its speed: less than a minute on the fastest machines, rarely more than five on an old computer.

1. Download the ISO in omarchy.org and check the SHA-256 and signature published alongside the file.
2. Write it to a USB drive — on Linux, use caligula; on Mac or Windows, balenaEtcher.
3. Disable Secure Boot and/or TPM in the BIOS. This is not optional: installation will not run without it.
4. Choose the installation type — entire disk (erases everything: if the disk is not empty, back it up before) or free space, which is how you dual-boot with Windows. For dual boot, disable BitLocker in Windows first.
5. Answer five questions and watch the installation.

Three details that prevent headaches:

• Use a wired keyboard or a 2.4 GHz dongle. The installation includes disk encryption by default, and a Bluetooth keyboard does not work on the boot password screen — the same reason it does not work in the BIOS.
• Installing for someone else? Press Ctrl + C on the first screen (keyboard selection) and the installer prepares the machine for another owner: the system installs immediately, but keyboard, user, and password are deferred to the first boot — and the password the person chooses becomes the encryption password.
• No encryption — for disposable installations or protected remote machines, Ctrl + C at the formatting confirmation switches to unencrypted mode. Do not do this on any laptop that could be lost or stolen.

There is also unattended installation, where the ISO installs itself by reading configuration from a second drive — the way to use Omarchy as a base image for VMs and fleets.

First steps: the shortcuts that matter

The first command to memorize is Super + K, which lists every shortcut. After that, these are the ones you will use on day one:

Shortcut	What it does
Super + Space	Omarchy menu — apps, settings, installing software, almost everything
Super + Return	Opens the terminal
Super + Shift + Return	Opens the browser
Super + W or Super + Q	Closes the window
Super + Seta	Moves focus to the window in that direction
Super + Shift + Seta	Swaps the window with its neighbor
Super + 1/2/3/4	Jumps to the workspace
Super + Shift + 1/2/3/4	Sends the window to that workspace
Super + T	Toggles the window between tiled and floating
Super + F	Full screen
Super + Escape	System menu (suspend, restart…)
Super + Ctrl + L	Locks the computer
Super + Ctrl + V	Clipboard history (with images)
Super + Shift + Ctrl + A	Launches the default AI agent

Coming from macOS or Windows

The mental translation is simpler than it seems — and the manual has an entire chapter devoted to it:

• Everything revolves around Super (the Windows key). The reflex for Spotlight, Raycast, or the Start menu becomes Super + Space.
• There is no dock or desktop icon. Applications open through shortcuts or the menu. The only permanent interface is the top bar, and almost every widget on it does different things with left, right, and middle clicks.
• Windows position themselves. Open one and it fills the screen; open a second and they split the space. You never fish a window out from beneath another again, because they do not overlap. That is the mindset shift — and it is worth sticking with it before making everything float with Super + T.
• Copy and paste work everywhere, including the terminal: Super + C and Super + V — cut, Super + X, works outside the terminal. No separate reflex for the shell.

Updates, channels, and snapshots

This is where Omarchy departs furthest from “just a bunch of dotfiles.” It installs as pacman packages from its own repository, and updating is a process, not a standalone command:

omarchy update     # ou o alias: mup

This installs the new version, runs pending migrations to bring your configuration up to date, and updates system packages through the project's Arch mirror. When a new release is available, a circular-arrow icon appears beside the clock.

Do not run pacman -Syu or yay -Syu directly. You would lose the snapshot, migrations, and configuration updates — and Omarchy even blocks direct updating and points you to the right command.

There are four channels: stable (default; the mirror intentionally runs one month behind Arch, to catch incompatibilities before you do), RC, edge (latest Arch, only for those who know how to recover a broken system) and dev (points to a git checkout in ~/omarchy). Switch under Update → Channel or with omarchy-channel-set.

And every update generates a Btrfs snapshot automatically. If something breaks, reboot and choose the previous snapshot in the Limine bootloader:

omarchy-snapshot create     # snapshot manual
omarchy-snapshot restore    # restaurar de dentro do snapshot inicializado

Two important caveats: restoration rolls back the root file system, not your /home — it is for reversing broken updates, not recovering personal files. And the feature exists only on installations with Limine, the default since Omarchy 2.0.

The CLI omarchy

Almost everything the menu does is also available through a CLI — precisely what makes the system manageable by an agent:

omarchy                      # lista todos os comandos e grupos
omarchy update               # atualizar Omarchy e pacotes
omarchy theme list           # listar temas
omarchy theme set tokyo-night
omarchy font list
omarchy screenshot
omarchy debug                # informações de diagnóstico

The groups cover agent, audio, bar, bluetooth, brightness, capture, channel, clipboard, config and a long list of others. Changing themes, incidentally, restyles the entire system at once — terminal, bar, notifications, and wallpaper — and there are more than twenty official themes, from Catppuccin to Gruvbox, Nord, and Tokyo Night.

Is it worth it? The honest part

The video's enthusiasm is legitimate, but a technical post owes the reader the other side:

• “Is it really a distro?” The argument exists, and the video itself mentions it: part of the Linux community argues that Omarchy is mostly a collection of configurations on top of Arch, and that DHH gets credit for packaging other people's projects. It is a fair criticism in spirit — but today the project has its own ISO, package repository, mirror, migrations, snapshots, and configured bootloader. It moved beyond the dotfiles stage long ago.
• It is Arch, and Arch is a rolling release. The stable channel's one-month delay reduces risk but does not eliminate it. You are choosing a system that changes constantly.
• Disabling Secure Boot has a real cost. Accept it consciously, not by accident.
• An agent changing your system with automatic approval is a double-edged sword. The documentation is explicit: the skill is experimental, run in planning mode first, and keep the rollback path handy. An agent that gets hyprland.conf wrong leaves you without a desktop.
• Learning curve. A tiling window manager is not a pretty theme for your current desktop: it is a different way of using the computer. Two weeks for your fingers to learn is normal.

For those who spend the day in a terminal, write code, and like keyboards, Omarchy is probably the fastest way available today to get a complete, attractive Hyprland setup without spending two weeks assembling one. For those who want a desktop that simply stays put, Ubuntu or Fedora remain the right answer.

Closing

What Omarchy gets right is not window tiling — it is accepting that the computer has become malleable again and providing tools to shape it, whether by your hands or an agent's. The agentic part is still experimental and you should treat it that way. The rest is already mature enough to become your work machine.

To continue here: see how to run local AI on Linux with Ollama (Omarchy's own manual recommends LM Studio and Ollama for local models), discover the AI assistants on the Linux terminal, the same family of CLIs the distro already wires up, and read about vibe coding on Linux with AI skills in the CLI.

Official links: omarchy.org · manual · installation guide · github.com/omacom/omarchy