I’ve been in this industry long enough to have installed Slackware from 20 floppies on a 486 with 8MB RAM just to prove a point. I compiled kernels at 3 a.m. because I wanted to learn. I’ve watched every “Year of the Linux Desktop” prediction crash and burn harder than a bad Kubernetes upgrade.
And then DHH dropped Omarchy last summer and the timeline lost its collective mind (in the best way).
This isn’t another distro, or “Arch but prettier.” It’s the ready-to-compose ideal of a developer workstation with the elegant simplicity and pragmatism of what we’ve loved about the Apple experience, without the Apple lock-in.
The Linux Desktop Setup That Finally Stuck
Download the ISO. Burn it. Boot. Answer a few simple questions. Full-disk encryption by default. Done. Seriously, it is a short list of prompts and you’re up and running with a secure, flexible development environment.
No scrolling through Arch Wiki at 2 a.m. wondering why your trackpad gestures are possessed and your GPU configs are all borked. You open the lid and you’re staring at a sleek tiling workspace that looks like it was designed by someone who actually ships products for a living (because it was).
Super + Return = terminal (Alacritty, quick and easy).
Super + Shift + Return = browser (Chromium, familiar and nicely controllable).
Super + Alt + Space = the Omarchy Menu, which acts as your one-stop shop for “I need Ruby” or “give me OpenCode” or “install that thing everyone’s talking about on Discord.”
Multiple themes are shipped out of the box, (e.g. Tokyo Night, Catppuccin, Nord) all the way down to the lock screen and the activity notifier. Change one, everything updates. DHH describes it beautifully in the Omarchy docs: “a beautiful system is a motivating system, and productivity has always been downstream from motivation.”
I felt that in my bones the first time I alt-tabbed between workspaces and didn’t want to carve my eyes out with a rusty spoon. What you need is there. What you want is a click or install command away. Want to have some UI theme fun? Head over to the Omarchy Themes and pick your style.
Arch + Hyprland, But Opinionated
There are rolling releases (3.4.0 just dropped at the time of this writing). Hyprland on Wayland for proper tiling that doesn’t fight you. Unified clipboard that actually works across terminal and GUI (Super + C/V/X, history with Super + Ctrl + V). fzf everywhere (‘ff’ to fuzzy find files, Ctrl-R for history that doesn’t suck). zoxide for ‘cd’ that reads your mind. I could keep going.
The shell functions feel like they were written by someone tired of typing the same seven commands every day: compress, decompress, iso2sd, transcode-video-1080p. Little things that add up to hours saved. Efficiency like this is manna for developer flow.
And yes, it ships Neovim out of the box. Ghostty is also a click away. I’m in heaven!
You can still install VSCode, Cursor, Zed, whatever. The menu has your back. But the default experience is terminal-first, keyboard-first, get-out-of-my-way-first. Exactly what ThePrimeagen types of humans have been screaming for.
The AI That Doesn’t Get In Your Way
This is where it gets wicked good. OpenCode is baked in. Drop into any directory, type `c`, and you’ve got a full AI coding agent that works with every major model (commercial or local open-weight).
Just ‘c’ and go.
Voice dictation via Voxtype? One menu click. Local models. Multi-language. Speak your commit message while you’re walking the dog. It just works.
This isn’t “AI slop” wallpaper. It’s tools that make you faster without making you dumber.
The Community That’s Actually Shipping
Thousands of ISO downloads a week. Thousands of your fellow Omarchy enthusiasts in the Discord. Contributors shipping themes, fixes, and wild new tools faster than most corporate roadmaps move. Ryan Hughes, Bjarne Øverli (who built Aether just for this), TJ DeVries on the Neovim side, to name a few. These are all real humans making real stuff.
37signals made it their default desktop. That’s “we use this to run the company that runs Basecamp and HEY.” in action, not a press release. Something something dog food something something.
And I’ll Be at Omacon!
If you haven’t already seen it, there is a gathering of the herd on April 10, 2026 at the Shopify Space, New York. There were 130 tickets based on the available space, and it was unsurprisingly sold out in a few hours.
DHH is giong to be there to share the vision, We get to join in as ThePrimeagen does his thing. Lightning talks from the people actually building this future. Strong coffee, stronger opinions, and zero tolerance for “that’s just how Linux works.”
I’m one of the lucky 130 thanks to rapidly refreshing my Omacon window at 10 AM when the tickets went on sale. It will be an honor to be in the room with this amazing community. I’ll be the guy who still can’t believe we’re finally here. As much as I want to create content around it, my focus will be the rare opportunity to converse with, and learn from these fantastic humans.
Stop Waiting. Boot It.
Yes, Virginia, there is Linux on the desktop. It’s beautiful. It’s fast. It’s opinionated as hell, which is what we needed all along. And it’s ready right now. I’m excited for the Omacon event, and to turn this into my primary desktop. (btw, I got it running smoothly on 2 Intel NUCs, and even an old school Dell Alienware console desktop).
Download the ISO from omarchy.org. Burn it. Boot it. Spend the next hour laughing at every previous desktop environment you tolerated.
Then thank DHH, the Hyprland crew, and every contributor who decided that compiling and bespoke customizing was over. It was time to ship something that just works.
Hope to see you at this and future Omacon events!
