Video summary: this article comments on and complements the video “A New Linux Flavor Of The Week”, from the channel UFD Tech, who spent a week using the Omarchy Quattro in daily life.
Video URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0TKuxFU8Vn0
We already explained what Omarchy is — DHH's distro based on Arch and Hyprland that became a phenomenon on 2026. This post is the other half of the story: what it's like to use the thing for a week, told by someone who isn't a Linux enthusiast and came from outside, with gaming hardware and limited patience.
The account matters because the reviewer has no stake in this fight. And the fight exists: in his words, he's never seen the Linux community so divided over a single distro — half calls it the best thing to happen to the desktop, half calls it “the archdemon itself”.
Installation: 43 seconds
The project promises installation in about 60 seconds. On the test machine — a Ryzen 9800X3D with a Radeon — the timer stopped at 43 seconds after answering the account questions. On a more modest machine the documentation says up to five minutes, which is still another level compared to normal.
The price of this is a fat ISO: about 6 GB. It's not minimalist Arch — it's the entire system already put together.
The first impression: cohesion
The point that caught his attention most was aesthetic, and it's an old criticism of the Linux desktop: lack of cohesion. Windows and macOS, with all their flaws, look like a single product. Many distros look like an aggregate of parts that never spoke to each other.
Omarchy solves this from the root — changing the theme restyles the entire system at once: terminal, bar, notifications, wallpaper. The result, in his description, is “that movie hacker scene, but without becoming unusable”.
The keyboard in place of the mouse
Here is the habit change that divides the most. Practically everything is a shortcut: opening the menu, moving a window, closing an application. And a good part of the windows the X is no longer in the corner to close with the mouse.
The account is honest: it's a completely different mindset from his — and he didn't hate it. After a few days of memorizing the combinations, he started using it instinctively, and switching workspaces at the speed of thought became a gain he didn't know was missing. The lifesaving shortcut on the first day is Super + K, which lists all the others.
The caveat is worth repeating: this is preference, not universal virtue. If you like working with the mouse, Omarchy will fight with you for an entire week.
The pre-installed apps: bloat or convenience?
The community's second fight. Arch attracts precisely those who want to build piece by piece — and Omarchy delivers everything ready, chosen by someone else.
His position is pragmatic: he liked most of what came pre-installed and took ten minutes reading what each thing was to uninstall the rest, with the option to remove it right there in the menu itself. And he adds: after decades of living with what Microsoft pushes, removing half a dozen programs doesn't ruin anyone's experience.
It's a good expectation test. If “I chose every package on my machine” is part of your pleasure, this distro isn't for you — and that's not a flaw of it.
The agentic part, in practice
Omarchy describes itself as “malleable OS for the agent era.” In practice, what the test showed:
- It doesn't bother those who don't want to be bothered. After the initial question about which agent to use as default, the topic disappears. It's an explicit contrast with what Microsoft has been doing.
- Those who want it, gain quite a bit. Customize the system's look, diagnose why an application crashed, create a custom widget — all through system-level integration.
- The concrete case that closes the argument: the RGB of Lian Li fans wasn't working. He opened Claude, asked it to fix it, received an app recommendation and the lines to paste in the terminal — and got out of the “involuntary rainbow”. It's exactly the type of problem that makes beginners give up on Linux, resolved in minutes.
And the caveat he himself makes, and we agree with: “doing vibe coding on your operating system until death has built-in risk”. Fun it is; not always prudent.
The plugin marketplace
Perhaps the most underestimated part. There are over 2.000 plugins from the community — resource monitor, virtual pet, smart home control, Spotify client, multi-monitor manager, quick web search. Installing and removing is an option in the system menu.
The first plugin competition, in August of 2026, distributed US$ 4 thousand — money that DHH himself received for speaking about Omarchy on X. The podium: Radio Atlas (US$ 2.500), which spins a globe and plays the radio of the city where you stop; Omagotchi (US$ 1.000), a 1 bit pet that lives in the toolbar; and a plugin of AirPods (US$ 500), with battery and device switching.
The alert he raises is legitimate and worth repeating here: the community plugin is third-party code running in your session. The recent scare with malicious packages in the AUR left everyone wary, and the same caution applies. The project mentions automated security review by agents; until that's mature, treat each plugin like you would treat a script found on the internet.
And the games?
One sentence sums it up: everything worked. He himself jokes that, if he had used an AMD card from the start of the series, the videos would be two minutes long because nothing would go wrong.
This is not the Omarchy's merit — it's the state of Linux in 2026 with AMD GPU and Proton. But it confirms that the distro doesn't ruin anything along the way. We covered this in detail in what still disappoints those who migrate to Linux.
His verdict — and ours
What remains from the account is not a list of features, it's a phrase: the system made him want to sit in front of the PC again, something difficult for someone who has done this as a profession for decades. He stayed up until one in the morning tinkering, chasing that feeling of the first computer that was really his.
From our side, three practical tips for those who will test after watching:
- Reserve a week before judging. The keyboard flow only makes sense after your fingers learn. Judging on the first day is judging the discomfort, not the tool.
- Test on a secondary machine or in a VM first. The installation requires turning off Secure Boot and, in the whole disk option, erases everything.
- Go slow with plugins and with agents in automatic mode. The two most fun things in the system are also the two with the greatest potential for damage.
To understand the structure behind — the foundation, the funding of Hyprland and Quickshell, the fight over “is this really a distro?” and the step-by-step installation —, read the companion post: Omarchy: DHH's distro that became an agentic operating system.