The Experiment That Refused to Leave
It’s been just over two months since I let Omarchy move into my laptop, and it’s acting like a houseguest who’s overstayed their welcome, but you kind of enjoy having around, like Kramer from Seinfeld.
For the uninitiated, Omarchy is basically Arch Linux with a Hyprland setup handcrafted by DHH. Yes, the Ruby on Rails guy. Apparently building frameworks was not enough, so he also decided to assemble a Linux desktop that looks like it belongs in Mr. Robot.
I did not install it with a manifesto. There was no grand “I am finally free from Windows” moment. No slow-motion partition deletion. No choir of penguins singing in the background. Omarchy was supposed to be my experimental black box: a second system where I could poke things, break things, repair them with questionable confidence, and occasionally stare at a terminal like Batman staring at the Batcomputer after Gotham does something preventable again.
I like having a space like that. A sandbox. A laboratory. A digital abandoned warehouse where I can drag in strange ideas and see which ones catch fire. Omarchy was meant to be exactly that. Something I boot into when curiosity flares up and I feel like temporarily becoming the kind of person who reads ArchWiki pages for leisure.
Then, without asking for permission, it stayed.
At some point, I stopped deciding whether to boot into Omarchy or Windows. I just opened my laptop and selected Omarchy without thinking. Not with conviction. Not with drama. More like muscle memory. The same way people open Instagram after telling themselves they are only checking one notification, or the way a cat finds the one freshly folded pile of laundry in the room and chooses violence.
That was the moment I realized this was no longer an experiment.
Omarchy had quietly become the place I actually wanted to be.
Windows Is Still There, Unfortunately
Before anyone mistakes this for a conversion story written by someone who now wears linen shirts, grows basil indoors, and refers to proprietary software as “spiritually misaligned,” let me be very clear:
Windows is still installed on my laptop.
It is not dead. It is not exiled. It is sitting on another SSD like a difficult relative who cannot be removed from the family group chat because they still occasionally help pay for something.
I am a graphic designer. That means Adobe still has me in what legal scholars might describe as a subscription-based hostage situation. Photoshop, Illustrator, After Effects, and the rest of the Creative Cloud gang remain firmly planted on Windows and macOS, looking at Linux users with the same expression Tony Soprano gives someone who asks for a favor without offering anything in return.
Could Adobe make native Linux apps? Probably. Will Adobe make native Linux apps? That question belongs in the same folder as “Will landlords lower rent out of kindness?” and “Will Elon stop posting?”
Then there is Ableton. I make music, and Ableton is part of that workflow. Linux has respectable audio software. Some of it is genuinely powerful. But software is not just a list of features on a comparison chart. It is habits, plugins, templates, shortcuts, muscle memory, unfinished projects, and the emotional damage accumulated from learning a DAW once already. I am not rebuilding my entire musical workflow from scratch just to earn a decorative badge from the Department of Open Source Purity.
And, of course, there is Valorant. A game whose anti-cheat system behaves like it has watched too many espionage thrillers. Vanguard does not simply check whether you are cheating. It appears to want constitutional authority over the motherboard. Secure Boot must be enabled. The system must be trusted. Linux is treated like a suspicious man in a trench coat standing near a bank vault at midnight.
So Windows stays.
But our relationship has changed. Windows is no longer home. It is a commercial zone I visit for specific services. I go there to use Adobe, produce music in Ableton, or play games that have decided Linux is a public safety threat. Then I leave.
That distinction matters.
Linux did not replace Windows entirely. It replaced my default.
My First Linux Phase Was Mostly Cosmetic
This was not my first encounter with Linux.
I first tried Ubuntu when I was in secondary school. I do not remember the exact version anymore, but I remember the feeling very clearly. Installing Ubuntu made me feel like I had joined a secret society. I was no longer just clicking around Windows like a regular civilian. I had stepped outside the garden wall. I had seen another operating system. I had probably typed one command in a terminal and briefly believed I was about to receive an anonymous message from Morpheus.
In my head, I was Neo.
In reality, I was a teenager opening Firefox on a purple desktop and then returning to Windows because that was where my games, school files, and actual habits lived.
Ubuntu fascinated me, but I did not need it. Not yet. I liked the idea of Linux more than I liked living inside it. It was less an operating system and more a personality test I had given myself. “Look at me,” I told no one in particular, “I installed Linux.” Then I proceeded to use the computer exactly as before.
Looking back, that early phase was similar to buying a skateboard because you watched Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater and suddenly believed gravity would take your side. It suggested a future version of me. It just was not fully real yet.
Still, the curiosity stayed.
Linux did not take over my computer back then. But it lodged itself somewhere in my brain, like the final scene of a season finale setting up a plotline that would not pay off for years.
Arch, Hyprland, and the Keyboard-Pilled Lifestyle
In 2024, I tried Arch Linux for fun.
“Fun” here should be understood in the same way some people call long-distance running fun. It is technically voluntary. It may even become enjoyable. But an outside observer is still allowed to ask whether everyone involved is okay.
I tried Arch partly because I was curious, and partly because the internet has an extraordinary ability to turn inconvenience into a moral philosophy. Spend enough time on Reddit, Linux YouTube, or r/unixporn, and eventually you begin to suspect that real adulthood involves maintaining your own dotfiles and posting screenshots of a terminal beside an anime wallpaper no one asked about.
Naturally, I also tried Hyprland.
Because once you are already installing Arch, you might as well choose the tiling compositor that makes your desktop look like it belongs in a cyberpunk anime where every character has six monitors, unresolved trauma, and at least one glowing cityscape visible through the window.
And to be fair: I loved it.
There is something intoxicating about controlling your entire desktop through the keyboard. Open a terminal. Split the screen. Send a window to another workspace. Resize a pane. Pull up an app launcher. Everything responds instantly, as if the laptop has stopped pretending to be an appliance and started behaving like a musical instrument.
It feels less like using a computer and more like conducting a small orchestra that has finally learned to follow the baton. Clickless. Immediate. Weirdly elegant.
Once that workflow clicks, returning to a mouse-heavy desktop feels faintly absurd. Not unusable. Just clumsy. Like watching someone use a TV remote to type a password one letter at a time. It works, but there is emotional friction.
Hyprland also scratches a different itch: it lets the desktop feel deliberate. The gaps between windows, the animations, the launcher, the bar, the keybindings, the terminal theme, the way everything moves, all of it can be shaped until the system no longer looks like something issued by a corporation’s UX committee. It starts to feel authored.
Of course, that comes with a warning label.
This is not for everyone. Some people want their computer to function like a microwave: press a few buttons, achieve the outcome, and continue living. They do not want to decide which window manager represents their spiritual values. They do not want to troubleshoot a compositor at 12:46 a.m. They do not want a text file to become the gatekeeper to basic visual comfort.
That is normal. Possibly healthy.
Linux desktop culture occasionally forgets this. It has a habit of looking at friction and calling it “freedom.” Sometimes that is true. Sometimes it is simply friction from wearing a beret.
Still, for me, Hyprland worked. Not because I seek hardship as a form of self-improvement, but because I like directness. I like systems where the action and result sit close together. Press the key. The window moves. No negotiations. No vague delay. No operating system briefly considering whether I really meant it.
Just a response.
Omarchy Arrived at the Right Time
What made Omarchy stick was not merely Arch. It was not merely Hyprland. I had already touched both. The difference was that Omarchy arrived as a coherent starting point.
It felt like someone had already completed the exhausting prologue and handed me a saved game right before the good part.
A common Linux trap is that you spend more time preparing your environment than using it. You install a distro, then a window manager, then a bar, then a launcher, then a notification daemon, then a clipboard manager, then a lock screen, then a terminal emulator, then a wallpaper tool, then a screenshot tool, then a font, then a Nerd Font because apparently ordinary glyphs are for civilians, and before long your afternoon has become a bureaucratic simulation titled Configuration Manager 2026.
Omarchy smooths that out.
It gives you a desktop that already feels considered: clean, minimal, keyboard-first, visually composed, and usable from the start. Not finished, necessarily. But habitable. Like moving into a nicely furnished apartment instead of an unfinished concrete unit where the landlord has left you a bucket and a dream.
That mattered more than I expected.
It preserved the part of Linux I enjoy — control, flexibility, customization, a sense that the system belongs to me — without forcing me to spend the first week resurrecting basic civilization from scattered dotfiles.
I could get to the fun part sooner.
And the more I used it, the more Omarchy stopped feeling like a distro I was testing and started feeling like an environment that matched the way I already wanted to work. Fast, sparse, direct. A little theatrical, yes. The desktop occasionally looks like it is about to initiate a stock market hack in a Netflix miniseries. But I can live with that.
In fact, I enjoy it.
Not Everyone Wants Their Computer to Become a Hobby
This is where Linux discourse tends to transform into a hostage negotiation.
Someone says, “I still need Windows for Adobe,” and suddenly, twelve people burst through the ceiling to recommend Krita, GIMP, Inkscape, Kdenlive, DaVinci Resolve, Scribus, LibreOffice, and a monastic retreat where you abandon client work and achieve enlightenment through file format incompatibility.
I respect open-source alternatives. I use many of them. I build my own tools when existing options annoy me enough. But professional software is not just a set of features arranged in a table. It is the accumulated mess of real work: files, revisions, clients, team expectations, plugins, industry habits, templates, old projects, muscle memory, deadlines, and the unholy .psd someone sends at 4:57 p.m. with the message, “Small revision only.”
Linux is excellent for many things. It is not automatically excellent for your things.
That statement should not be controversial, but in certain corners of the internet, nuance is treated like malware. You are either fully liberated or hopelessly compromised. Either you use open source for everything, or Richard Stallman appears in your mirror at midnight and shakes his head slowly.
Reality is more boring and more useful.
I can prefer Omarchy while admitting Windows still performs jobs Linux cannot currently perform in my life. I can daily drive Arch while keeping a Windows SSD nearby like an emergency generator. I can praise the freedom of Linux and still open Adobe Illustrator when a client pays me to do exactly that.
Purity is rarely practical. In computing, it often feels like a hobby invented by people whose income is not affected by receiving a broken font package inside a last-minute brand file.
The Laptop Finally Learned to Shut Up
The reason I keep returning to Omarchy is not only aesthetic. It is physical.
My laptop feels different under Linux.
The fan barely spins during normal use. The chassis feels calmer. The machine is not constantly rustling around in the background like a raccoon inside the walls. Idle RAM usage sits around 10% on my setup. Temperatures are lower. GPU behavior is less dramatic. The computer feels less like it is secretly attending several meetings I did not schedule.
Windows, by comparison, often feels like entering a shopping mall at noon. Music is playing from somewhere. Digital signage is rotating through promotions. Security is patrolling. A kiosk is asking for your phone number. Three background services are doing something classified. And even though you came only to buy socks, the environment insists on becoming an event.
To be fair, Windows has reasons. Security scanning exists because malware exists. Background services support features. Updates matter. I am not suggesting the operating system wakes up every morning and chooses malice while sipping coffee.
But on my machine, the lived experience is different.
Omarchy feels quiet.
Not empty. Not fragile. Quiet.
It does not seem to have a side hustle. It does not constantly hint that it is optimizing, indexing, synchronizing, analyzing, recommending, protecting, preparing, or otherwise behaving like a personal assistant who desperately wants a performance review. When I open a terminal, a browser, or a music player, the system feels like it is simply waiting for me.
That simple feeling is difficult to surrender once you become used to it.
A calmer computer may sound like a small thing. It is not. When you spend hours every day inside a machine, the texture of that machine matters. A noisy OS creates invisible friction. A responsive one disappears in the right way.
Omarchy, most of the time, disappears.
Not in the “where did my Wi-Fi go?” sense. In a good sense.
The NVIDIA Tax
Of course, I have an NVIDIA GPU.
Because every promising Linux story needs a recurring villain, and NVIDIA has been auditioning for that role with the dedication of a Marvel antagonist who keeps surviving post-credit scenes.
NVIDIA occupies a special place in Linux culture. Not always the final boss. More like that one character who returns every season to complicate the plot and then insists they have changed. Drivers are better now, people say. Things are improving, they say. And then, one slightly specific issue later, you are on page four of a forum thread from 2023, reading a comment that begins with, “This worked for me, not sure why.”
Yes. I felt it.
A few problems sent me digging through old Reddit posts, GitHub issues, Arch forums, and troubleshooting pages written by people who clearly had not felt joy since the error first appeared. There is a very particular form of archaeological despair in finding your exact problem described perfectly by a stranger three years ago, only to discover the thread ends with:
“Never mind, fixed it.”
And nothing else.
That sentence should be classified as a minor cybercrime.
Still, I managed to work through most of it. Not every solution was clean. Not every fix was elegant. Some of them felt less like engineering and more like persuading two divorced parents to sit through the same school recital without incident. But they worked.
And more importantly, the problems felt legible.
That is something I value. When Linux breaks, it may be annoying, but there is usually a trail to follow. A log. A config. A package. A driver flag. A forum post from someone equally confused, but one step closer to daylight.
When Windows behaves strangely, it often feels like receiving an email that says, “A decision has been made,” without any information about who made it, why, or whether you are allowed to appeal.
Omarchy has problems. But many of those problems have edges I can see.
That makes them less frightening.
Two Months Later, It Stuck
More than sixty days later, Omarchy is no longer my experimental side room.
It is where I browse, write, research, tinker, manage files, mess with scripts, tune configs, open terminals for reasons that could have been avoided, and spend the ordinary, unglamorous hours that make up most of my relationship with a laptop. Windows remains installed, but now I summon it for specific obligations, like calling a lawyer or visiting the DMV.
Omarchy is where I arrive by default.
That shift surprised me.
I have tried Linux before. I have admired it before. I have installed it before. But this is the first time it has felt less like a curiosity object and more like a daily environment I genuinely prefer. Not a weekend project. Not a screenshot hobby. Not a place to cosplay as the protagonist of Serial Experiments Lain after watching two terminal videos on YouTube.
A real operating system. For my real use.
Not because it is perfect. Not because it replaces every application I need. Not because I have ascended into a terminal-only higher plane of consciousness where GUIs are considered a moral lapse.
It stuck because it makes my laptop feel like my laptop.
Clean. Fast. Minimal. Direct. Customizable without constantly demanding tribute. Quiet when I need quiet. Flexible when I decide that a bar, a launcher, and three keybindings are suddenly matters of personal identity.
What began as a black box for experiments became the place I now choose to live.
Linux did not replace Windows. It replaced my default.