It started with a laptop nobody wanted anymore. A 2017 MacBook Air, Intel, 8 GB of RAM, sitting in my office running an old version of macOS. My son had been using it, and had mostly stopped — because it had become the kind of slow where you think twice before opening a browser tab.
So I wiped it and put Omarchy on it: “Beautiful, fun & agentic Linux by DHH.”
Five minutes, and the Air came back
What got my attention first wasn’t the theming or the philosophy. It was the clock.
From starting the installer to a working desktop was under five minutes, on a nine-year-old dual-core machine. And then it felt fast again. Not “fast for old hardware” — fast. The laptop that had been struggling to be a browser was suddenly a perfectly reasonable computer.
Then came the part I genuinely didn’t expect, because it’s historically where Linux on Apple hardware goes to die:
- Speakers — sound, immediately, correct output device
- Wi-Fi — connected during setup, no firmware hunting
- Bluetooth — paired without ceremony
- The keyboard brightness keys — dimming the screen with the actual F-keys, the way they do in macOS
That last one sounds trivial. It isn’t. Function-key handling on Apple hardware is the classic Linux papercut — the thing that works in every distro’s marketing screenshot and in none of its installations. It worked here on the first boot.
What Omarchy is
It’s not a desktop environment or a theme pack. It’s a full Arch Linux distribution with every decision already made for you: Hyprland as the tiling window manager, Neovim as the editor, Foot as the terminal, Quickshell driving the bar. Windows tile themselves as you open them, and a single theme retints the terminal, the bar, the editor and the lock screen together — which is more visual consistency than my Mac manages across Apple’s own apps.
The word its author keeps using is omakase — chef’s choice. You don’t get a menu. You get what the kitchen sends out, and the bet is that it’s better than what you’d have ordered.
Here’s what a Mac user should notice immediately: macOS is omakase too. Apple has been making all your decisions for decades. The difference isn’t whether someone else picked your defaults — it’s whether you can read the source of those decisions and change the ones you disagree with.
There’s a nice symmetry in that being the OS I wiped off the Air.
So I did it to the good machine too
The Air was supposed to be the experiment. It went well enough that I stopped treating it as one.
Next to it sits a machine I built myself — a small-form-factor AMD box that had been living as a Bazzite Steam Machine: a Ryzen 7 9800X3D and a Radeon RX 9070 XT in a mini-ITX case, doing nothing but gaming. I put Omarchy on that too.
The box that was a games console in the corner is now the one I work on.
Does .NET actually work on it?
The real question for anyone reading this blog. Short answer: yes, and it’s boring — which is the highest compliment available.
dotnet --version
# 10.0.401
.NET 10 via mise, Docker running containers, dev containers building without complaint. I’m using it for work and for personal projects — this site among them. Nothing about Omarchy gets in the way, because underneath the theming it’s Arch: the AUR is right there, and dotnet is a tarball with a PATH entry like it is everywhere else.
If you already develop .NET on a Mac, there is genuinely less to relearn than you’d think. dotnet build, dotnet test, Docker, Rider or VS Code — all of it moves across unchanged. What you’re changing is the window manager and the package manager, not the stack.
One thing gets strictly better: Docker runs natively. No VM, no file-sharing layer between you and your bind mounts. On the Mac, containers are always a polite fiction. Here they’re just processes.
Built for agents
Coding agents are treated as part of the system rather than an app you install. When something crashes, there’s a path for an agent to read the core dump and explain it. It’s implemented as scripts and context files — legible, greppable, deletable.
And the pace is genuinely bizarre. Features land constantly, in a direction nobody else is seriously pointed: an operating system built on the assumption that an AI agent is a normal user of it.
That’s the part I find exciting. We’re at the start of something where this kind of thing is possible — where a small team can ship an entire opinionated OS at this speed, precisely because AI changes what a small team can do. Omarchy isn’t just using agents. It’s evidence of what building with them looks like.
The verdict, for now
I’m not going to write a conversion story three days in. My MacBook Pro is still my daily driver, and I’d be lying if I pretended otherwise. Tiling is a real adjustment — Hyprland is keyboard-first, and for the first day you will not know how to move a window. Coming from a Mac, the muscle memory that dies hardest isn’t ⌘-Tab, it’s the trackpad gestures. And it’s Arch underneath: rolling release, updates constantly, occasionally something moves.
What I will say is this: I’m committed to giving it the coming weeks. Real work, real projects, and an honest look at how I hold up on Linux full-time — not as a weekend experiment I abandon quietly.
Because what Omarchy gets right is the thing the Linux desktop has been worst at: having taste, and committing to it. The usual failure mode is infinite configurability and no defaults worth keeping — a thousand knobs and nobody willing to turn any of them for you. This inverts it. It hands you someone’s finished setup and says: start here, change what you disagree with.
If you’re curious, there’s an ISO for a real install and virtual machine images for Mac and Windows — a spare laptop or a VM is a cheap way to find out, with zero risk to the machine you actually ship from.
It was never .NET standing between you and Linux. It was the weekend you’d have to spend making Linux nice. Omarchy spent that weekend already — and on a nine-year-old MacBook Air, it spent about five minutes.
That Air is still in my office, still running it. My son still uses it. For a machine we’d both written off, that’s the part I keep thinking about.