I was at home, checking which Omarchy theme I was using, when I glanced at the About window and saw the OS age: over a year.
That surprised me more than it probably should have. Not because Omarchy had been difficult, but because it had not been. A year had come and gone with very little fuss, which is about the best review I can give a daily work machine.
I had tweeted it the simple way:
Over a year on Omarchy now. No regrets.
That was not meant as a grand claim about operating systems. I am not here to tell you macOS is bad, Windows is bad, or Linux has somehow won. I used macOS happily for a very long time. My first serious Mac was a 12” PowerBook, about a year before the Intel switch. After that I bought the first 16” Intel MacBook Pro and stayed in the Apple world for years. I converted plenty of friends and family along the way, partly because I liked the machines and partly because I did not want to keep fixing their Windows problems.
I was not looking for a reason to leave. I was always Linux curious though. I had played with Linux From Scratch, Gentoo, Ubuntu, and Asahi on the Mac. My servers were Linux, so the operating system itself was never foreign to me. But desktop Linux was always the experimental machine. The one I poked at. The one I learned things on. Not the one I trusted when I had paid work to do.
That distinction mattered. I could tolerate a half-working Linux system when I was tinkering. I could not tolerate it when I had client work, coding, screenshots, screencasts, email, Basecamp, Slack, and a normal day to get through.
The Mac kept pulling me back for practical reasons. CleanShot was a big one. A lot of my work output involves showing what I built, recording quick demos, documenting bugs, or proving that code works. I also cared about the aesthetics. Fonts, keybindings, polish, the general feel of the machine. I was familiar with it and familiarity is valuable when you have work to do.
Omarchy changed the equation because it was not another blank Linux canvas asking me to spend a month becoming my own desktop environment maintainer. It had opinionated defaults. You could touch nothing after the default install and have a good time. The omakase idea matters there. So does the manual. It gave me a supported path instead of another pile of choices.
It also arrived at the right time. Linux itself has improved tremendously. A lot of the software I use is now web-based or Electron-based. The number of important apps that are only on Mac or Windows keeps shrinking, and the alternatives keep getting better.
So I forced myself to use Omarchy as my daily driver for a week. I still had the Mac next to me. If I needed something, I could swivel over and use it. But as the week went on, I stopped swiveling. Eventually I closed the lid.
I was productive.
That is the whole thing. I could code. I could do client work. I could communicate. I could ship. And then the tiling window manager got me.
Before this, I usually wanted multiple monitors connected to the Mac. With Omarchy, one monitor became enough. I can switch workspaces instantly, and that changed how the machine feels. My normal setup now is usually four workspaces, though it can stretch to eight. Workspace 1 is terminal, running Herdr and my coding sessions, with Pi and Claude Code sessions inside it. Workspace 2 is the browser. Workspace 3 is HEY and Slack. Workspace 4 is Basecamp.
It sounds small until you live in it. The context switching is fast enough that extra monitors feel less necessary. The machine feels snappier. I get more computing for the buck. Less memory pressure, less CPU churn, fewer distractions. Some of that is my hardware, for sure. My main desktop is an Intel 14900 with 96GB of RAM, a 2TB drive, and a 16GB Nvidia card. It is a beast. But Omarchy makes that machine feel like mine in a way I had not felt for a while.
That changed my relationship with hardware too. In the past, my MacBook was the computer. It sat on the desk connected to an external monitor, keyboard, and mouse. Everything orbited around it. Now Omarchy runs on my desktop and on my Framework 13 laptop. The laptop is nothing exotic; I mostly use it to SSH back into the desktop. My old 14” MacBook Pro with 64GB of RAM is still around, but it has been repurposed into an LLM experimentation machine because it can run some models that do not fit nicely on the desktop GPU.
I still like Apple hardware. I just no longer need every serious machine I own to be Apple hardware.
That is a bigger shift than it sounds like. I broke out of the bubble where I believed I needed an Apple computer to be productive. I can build an Intel or AMD machine, put Omarchy on it, and do my work. I can experiment with hardware without paying the Apple hardware tax every time I want a serious computer.
The customization helps. I care that the machine looks good. Omarchy looks good by default, but I can also make it mine. The theme I happened to be using when I noticed the OS age was Retro 82. My favorite is my own version of Synthwave 84. Crisp font rendering matters. Theming matters. It sounds cosmetic, but it is part of whether I enjoy sitting in front of the thing all day.
The other surprise is how well Omarchy pairs with AI agents.
Linux has always been configurable, but much of that configuration lives in text files. That makes it unusually friendly to an agent that can read, explain, and carefully change the system. For someone technical who wants to understand more about their machine, that is extraordinary.
A small example: VoxType, the speech-to-text tool that comes with Omarchy, stopped responding to its keybind one day. I opened Claude Code and asked it to figure out why VoxType was not working. It checked the system, found that the process had gotten stuck, stopped it, restarted it, and the tool came back. That is not a daily event, but when something does go astray, having an assistant that can inspect the system and explain what it is doing changes the experience.
It makes Linux less mysterious without hiding how it works.
That same feeling shows up when I fix Omarchy itself. I have had a handful of small PRs merged upstream: a 60-second inactivity timeout for the Walker launcher, AAC audio for screen recordings so Windows users could actually hear them, a silent screen recording option, update progress that does not look frozen, and audio normalization so screencasts are not absurdly quiet.
None of these are grand architectural contributions. They are daily-driver paper cuts. Screen recording is important to my work, so when something was not quite right, I could figure it out and propose a fix. That is empowering. I can fix my own tools without asking anyone’s permission. If the fix seems useful to other people, I can send it upstream.
You do not get to do that with core macOS or Windows behavior in the same way.
There are still minor annoyances. Some software makers do not think about Linux first. Codex is not available there yet. Claude Code’s app eventually came to Linux, but it was not there on day one. These gaps are real, but they are less frequent than they used to be, and they bother me less than I expected.
I would not tell everyone to switch. If you prefer using the mouse for everything and have no interest in learning keyboard shortcuts, Omarchy may not be for you. If you are not willing to pop the hood now and then, maybe stay where you are.
But if you are technical, semi-technical, curious, a developer, a Mac power user, or just someone who likes computers and wants the machine to feel more like yours, I think it is worth trying. Especially if you tried desktop Linux five or ten years ago and bounced off. It is different now. Omarchy in particular gives you a system that works very well out of the box, with taste, performance, and a path through the rough edges.
Omarchy is the first desktop Linux setup that crossed from interesting experiment to daily work machine for me.
That is the post. Not that everyone should leave their current operating system. Not that I regret my years on the Mac. I do not. But I no longer feel tied to that ecosystem to get serious work done.
A year passed with little fuss. The MacBook lid stayed closed. My work still got done.
No regrets.