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Kris Springer's Tech Blog - Omarchy Eval
| Omarchy Linux Eval |
9-3-26
Kris Springer |
Last week I started seeing numerous Linux internet personalities talking about Omarchy, which was being promoted as the best new Arch desktop distro that would make you love your computer again. Of course this intrigued me, so I downloaded it and loaded it up in a Proxmox VM. But that didn't work very well because Omarchy heavily uses the keyboard Super key and the Proxmox console was hindering that. So I tried again and installed it as a Qemu VM on my laptop. This worked much better, and I could make the VM go full screen and the Super key would work as expected. I played with it a bit and decided to give it a try on my 4-screen Beelink SER7 desktop that I use for work at my standing desk. I have a seperate 3-screen Beelink desktop that I also use for working at my sitting desk, so trying Omarchy on my 4-screen machine wasn't going to prevent me from doing work. If it had problems I could just move over to my other desk and continue being productive. Anyway, I also decided to not just blow away my existig Mint installation, so I pulled the NVMe drive out and put another in for installing Omarchy. That way if it didn't work out I could just swap the drives and not have to rebuild anything.
So, first things first. It installed in 68 seconds. I know because at the final screen it says how long it took to install. That was cool.
Now is when I should say that I use a mouse for everything. I don't find it hindering or inneficient as some have stated, because I have so many different things open accross 4 screens that I am interfacing with. I can easily see how the Omarchy keyboard controls would be better on a laptop because you're constrained by one small screen, but if you have a large workspace that's simply not the case. So, for me the mouse is essential.
Omarchy pushes you to connect to Skynet, and I'm not going to do that right now.
To use Omarchy as my desktop I needed the 4 screens to be configured. A package called 'nwg-displays' took care of that easy enough. Next I needed the apps I use, so I tried the GUI 'Install' feature to do everything. But I discovered there's basically 4 installation paths I would need to get everything I wanted. Official Omarchy Package repo, Arch User Repo (AUR), Plugins, and Github. Packages, AUR, and Plugins were handled in the GUI menu, but Github had to be terminal. I installed Edge, Chrome, Brave Origin, Firefox. Then Linkquisition because I need that layer of browser choice when I click links in emails and files because I work for multiple companies and need to keep them separated. I then connected my NAS via fstab, and quickly discovered that I didn't like the default file manager. So I installed Nemo and moved forward. I'm also not a fan of Vim, so I installed nano. At this point I started hitting some issues. Although Omarchy let me install whatever I wanted, it did not automatically recongnise the new apps, so it didn't offer them as choices when I tried to change my defaults using the Gui menu. I was able to resolve my issues by editing the config files manually. That had to be done to make Linkquisition the default browser also. I installed Thunderbird and imported my profiles, and I was up and running. With multiple browsers, my NAS connected, and my emails, I could now move on to using it and seeing how I liked it.
The apps on my Mint desktop are manually placed and stationary all the time, so Omarchy being a tile-heavy desktop was fine for me. I opened up all the windows and apps I normally use and moved them around where I like them, and everything was working fine. I started playing around with the key commands and discovered that the windows only default to tiles, they can easily be popped out and moved around like floating windows whenever necessary. Full screen too. So learning the few essential keybinding commands really makes things awesome.
There was a few things that annoyed me, so I asked Skynet for help and found that most of my issues were just options in some settings files that I could adjust. Once I made those adjustments it felt much more natural for me. There are some things that still need work in my opinion, but Skynet says that those issues are already defined in the official Omarchy bugs and features lists, so I'm not gonna bother mentioning them here because in time I'm sure they'll all be fixed.
There is one thing that I really like, and that's the themes. In Mint the themes are boring. It's a few colored buttons and that's about it. But Omarchy wants things to look beautiful, and it does. I like that. The very simple feature that the active window in Omarchy is highlighted with the theme color may be the single thing that gets me to abandon Mint as my daily driver. I have spent way too much time and AI conversations trying to get Mint's theme to highlight windows with a color, but can't get it done. It sounds kinda stupid, but when everything is a shade of grey I need to see the seperation between windows, and Mint doesn't allow that for some reason. So, I'm going to use Omarchy as my work machine for a decent period of time and see if it becomes my favorite or if I move back to Mint. The one thing I'm still unsure about is if things will randomally break after updates because Omarchy is built on Arch. Time will tell.
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