Kicking Omarchy's tires
I like what I see in Omarchy Quattro. I obviously and absolutely love the tiling window manager and TUI-like panes, as I am a fan and past user of the concept popularised by dwm. Key bindings clearly seem set by one hard-wired to a Mac keyboard. I like the interface and themes-based bling too. But, not yet ready for it to be my daily driver. Here’s why.
Software
- Omarchy is very young, has a lot of velocity
- Velocity leads to uncertainty, and tail-chasing
- That means insufficient history of issues and workarounds
- I’ve long lived in the battle-tested steady Debian universe
- Never used Arch before; it’s a gunslinger’s distro
- Switching costs are real; don’t want to break my workflow
Hardware
I have an old PC that currently runs Windows 11, has a spare M.2 NVMe SSD slot, and I thought I could pop in a drive there and dual-boot. Two annoyances with this:
- Omarchy needs secure boot turned off
- Windows 11 requires secure boot on
BIOS is fiddly, and much time is wasted at boot every time. I can’t nuke Win11 as it’s for WFH. There’s enough deterrence in the above preventing me from diving-in to make it my daily driver. Sticking to my essentials for now.
That said, I am running it on an old laptop as we speak. Last week I got 32GB DDR4 RAM and a 512 GB NVM.e 2280 SSD, opened the back and stuck them in, which makes Omarchy fly. On a 10-year old laptop, with these above upgrades of course, it installed in under 2 minutes! No operating system to-date, not Windows, not MacOS, not BSD, has ever installed this fast. It’s ready to go before you are. Incredible.
Another thing. The agent is the help system. I set mine as OpenCode and if I have an issue, I ask for help, and it not only diagnoses the issue but fixes the OS for you! For instance, my router had trouble assigning an IP for a WIFI network I was trying to join, and after searching Google and other sources, I turned to OpenCode to use it like Google, little did I know it was literally spitting out the details of my network, assigned a local IP and help me join the network without my intervention. Windows and MacOS are looking like operating systems from stone age now.
Here’s my desktop.
Both MacOS and Windows force users to use their pointing devices and their tired-old interfaces, and we waste time and effort dragging windows around. Both these have been dumbing users down to the point that cognitive capabilities of today’s users seems worse than those from two decades ago.
It’s nice to get out of the rutty old interfaces and out of the comfort zone. Tiling window manager’s interface is brilliant, hands on the keyboard all the time, the system manages window placement, and one can swap positions, and move windows to other workspaces of choice with shortcuts.
Omarchy’s menu system is sparse but alive and intuitive. Uninstalling an app is as simple as navigating to the app in the menu and hit delete key, upon confirmation to uninstall, it’s done. Little niceties sprinkled around makes this a smart OS and interface.
Omarchy reminded me of how much I love dwm, and I had this sudden urge to scavenge for an old Pi 3B+ (from 2016), and load it up with Pi OS lite + dwm on it. For its frugality1, I have a proper desktop — including greeter, screen lock, and some nice CLI tools. It’s glorious!2
