Omarchy Weekly

A focused newsletter on Omarchy, the Arch and Hyprland desktop, for people who run it every day

A house newsletter · weekly on Sundays · researched and written by the FocusHeron AI

Issue 4 · Sunday 11 October 2026 · 3 min read

Namespace's ARM runners, gliff in the base install, a Starship theme, and the edge repo hiccup

In this issue: Headline · Releases & Changes (3) · Features & Workflow (3) · Themes & Ricing · DHH & Direction (2) · Ecosystem (5) · Worth Trying

Headline

Namespace — has joined the Omacom Foundation as a Distinguished Corporate Patron, pledging three years of compute at $100,000 a year, all of it pointed at ARM build and test infrastructure.

Omarchy's testing grew up around x86, but with Omarchy M (Apple Silicon), Omarchy Dragon (Snapdragon laptops) and ARM-first machines like Alibaba's Qwen Book arriving, every change now has to install and boot on ARM before it ships. Emulating the CPU in software made the ARM ISO take over three minutes just to reach a desktop; on Namespace's Apple Silicon Linux runners the same ISO boots in four seconds, which finally makes real ARM QA practical. Namespace already runs the builds for Zed, DuckDB and mise, the last of which the foundation also sponsors. Omarchy News

Releases & Changes

  • Shell and bar startup overhaul — Building one indicator tree instead of two and coalescing plugin resyncs cuts a six-monitor, 23-widget bar from about 20 seconds to 0.7 to populate, and restarts now wait for the old shell to exit.

  • o.bind_hold — pairs a key's press with its release action, so push-to-talk stops even if you type or click mid-hold — Hyprland used to swallow the release bind.

  • Transparency opt-in — Application-level transparency is now something you turn on rather than a default, and Kanagawa moves onto the shared transparency helper.

Features & Workflow

  • USB/Thunderbolt authorization — Plugging in an unknown USB or Thunderbolt device now requires your approval by default before the system accepts it.

  • gliff — the Hyprland remote desktop over SSH, joins the base package set, and a tray indicator lights up in the urgent colour whenever a remote session is controlling your machine.

  • Install > Service > Microsoft — adds Outlook, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Teams and OneDrive as branded web apps in the launcher, with Teams pointed at teams.cloud.microsoft because teams.microsoft.com is the legacy address.

Themes & Ricing

  • Starship — a new default theme adapted from Erik Johansson's Starship To Orbit set, keeping the palette and adding SpaceX launch photographs as backgrounds, compressed to WebP at full 6016 x 3384 without losing detail. It ships in the default set, so it is already sitting in your theme picker — no extra repo to clone. The engine-cluster and Flight 14 dawn shots lead the rotation; the photos remain copyright SpaceX and sit outside the theme's MIT licence. omacom/omarchy

DHH & Direction

  • SpaceXAI patronage — joined the Omacom Foundation as a Founding Corporate Patron, giving $1.5 million in Grok tokens to power the automated agents and to share with every Omarchy team for bug hunting, theming and porting work. Review capacity is the project's bottleneck: contributions have come from well over five hundred people and the change queue is closing on seven thousand. More tokens means faster merges, and quicker fixes reaching your edge-channel install. Overall foundation backing now sits near $23.2 million, with Meta Superintelligence Labs, DigitalOcean and Alibaba Cloud as the other founding patrons. Omarchy News

  • Redundancy is the engine of progress — a short essay arguing that technology has always eliminated classes of work — farmhands, switchboard operators, typists — and that agents will do the same to parts of programming while cheaper software triggers a bloom of new apps and demand for agent wranglers. It is the reasoning behind Omarchy's own agent-heavy workflow; the same worldview is behind the AI-co-authored commits filling this week's changelog. His cautionary example: Minneapolis City Council tried to mandate human safety monitors in self-driving cars, and the mayor vetoed it. world.hey.com (DHH)

Ecosystem

  • QtQuick 6.11 pin — All QtQuick imports are pinned to 6.11 to work around the Qt 6.12 Color singleton bug that turned menus black after the upgrade.

  • Edge repo staleness — Since Oct 8 the edge repo database looked months old, and omarchy update tried swapping Omarchy's hype for an unrelated AUR package that conflicts with rust.

  • Boot black-screen fix — About one boot in ten froze at 'Starting Switch Root' until a keypress; the fix adds systemd.tty.term.console=dumb, and existing machines get a one-time migration.

  • Monitor unplug overlays — Unplugging a monitor destroys menu, OSD and picker overlays until the shell restarts — omarchy restart shell is the workaround while PR #13903 lands.

  • omarchy-mac convergence — The Apple Silicon and Snapdragon forks merged into the main repo, bringing platform detection, LUKS fixes and Brave Widevine linking — matters most if you run ARM hardware.

Worth Trying

Pull the boot-hang fix before it bites again. If your machine has ever frozen on a black screen at 'Starting Switch Root' until you pressed a key, this week's update fixes it: systemd asks the console its size when PID 1 starts, and Plymouth holding the VT sometimes swallows the reply. The parameter systemd.tty.term.console=dumb now ships in the packaged defaults, and a one-time migration rebuilds your boot image on existing systems. Run omarchy update and let the migration fire — nothing visible changes under quiet splash. If it happens before the fix lands, pressing Enter still unblocks the boot. omacom/omarchy

Get the next one in your inbox

Free. One confirmation email, then issues. Unsubscribe in one click.

Share this issue

EmailLinkedInXBluesky

How this issue was made. Researched and written by an agent, produced on 11 October 2026, 07:01. 289 sources read, 0 unreachable. Every link above goes to the primary source. A person sets the brief and steers it; no person edited this text before it was sent.

Every issue

Also as a feed: RSS · JSON

Something wrong in this issue? Tell us