Take 4 (aka omarchy)

Ten years ago, almost to the week, this blog started with me trying to live in elementary OS instead of macOS. There was an undocumented first attempt, then Take 2, then Take 3. After that came PC-BSD, then TrueOS, then Project Trident, and various versions of Ubuntu (which kind of became my Linux distro of choice, and still is for server VMs I’m running), but every single time I ended up back on my Mac.

 

Over the last 10 years, this is probably more like Take 44, but almost 3 months in, and for the first time, I think it is beginning to stick.

 

Since the 21st of August, I’ve been running Omarchy on an HP EliteBook 6 G1a, and I’ve started to pick that up more than my MacBook Pro M5 Pro, which is very unusual.

 

 

It’s Arch Linux with Hyprland, bundled up and opinionated by David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH) of Ruby on Rails fame, into something you install in less than five minutes and then ‘just use’. Hyprland is a tiling window manager, so windows don’t overlap and get dragged around — they tile themselves, and you move between them with the keyboard. Omarchy wraps that in a bar, a theme system, a set of keybinds and a pile of defaults that DHH uses to get things done from the keyboard, and not using a mouse.  It takes a little getting used to, but once you do it actually makes a lot of sense, and the concept of workspaces for different tasks feels very much like OSX Spaces and Mission Control, well, to me anyway!

 

If that sounds like the opposite of what I said I wanted in 2016, that’s because it is. Back then I chose elementary OS precisely because it looked like macOS — menu bar, dock, consistent apps. I wanted the familiar thing. This time I’ve gone with something that looks nothing like a Mac, and while I think wanting a familiar experience might have been the problem all along, I think there are still things macOS does better, especially if you still like using the mouse or trackpad, which I am for some things.

 

 

Three reasons, I think.

 

The first is that somebody else made the decisions. My previous attempts all died the same death — I’d spend an entire evening theming the rEFInd boot menu (I really did this, in 2016, and it took way too much time) instead of using the computer. Omarchy turns up finished. There’s no ‘which bar shall I use’ phase to get lost in.

 

The second is the trackpad. In ‘Where to begin?’ I wrote that two, three and four-finger gestures were the thing I’d miss most about macOS, and that they were probably what killed the first attempt. I was right then, and it’s still the real test. The difference now is that I didn’t have to go hunting for an app that solved it and hope one existed — I wrote one, or at least I wrote one with the help of Claude Code! Three fingers up on the trackpad gives me a Mission Control-style view of all my workspaces, and moving to the bottom of the screen pops up a macOS-like Dock.

 

Which is really the third reason. In 2016 I was shopping for software and hoping somebody else had built what I needed. In 2026 I have what feels like a very integrated coding agent that not only helps fix issues, but can actually help write the missing pieces myself, in QML.  Some of them are even published in the Omarchy Marketplace as plugins that other people have installed. That isn’t a sentence I ever expected to write on here!

 

 

I haven’t ditched the Mac. I bought a MacBook back in March, which I blogged about here. I’m not going to pretend otherwise, and there’s every chance some of these blogs get edited on that too. I have started using Amethyst on my Mac though, which is a tiling window manager for macOS.  It behaves similarly, although strangely differently, to Hyprland, which I am still preferring and finding easier to use.  My now FreeCORE box is still pretty much the epicentre of everything in the house (you find loads of blogs about that if you look!), but Omarchy works just fine with that and all of the services running on it.  One of those, Uptime Kuma, also has a menu-bar plugin which I downloaded from the Marketplace and is a fantastic way to check everything is still running as it should.

 

10-12 weeks isn’t much of a verdict either. Take 2 lasted a while as well. But the difference I notice is that I’ve stopped evaluating the thing and started just getting on with it, and that’s further than I ever got before.

 

 

A few things I’ve thought might be useful based on my previous Linux and FreeBSD journey’s include:

Feel free to join me on the journey, or, as I put it ten years ago, simply to laugh at my mistakes along the way…