Omarchy on the old MacBook
I’m not a Linux guy
I’ll say it up front: I am not a Linux guy. But I’ve been getting more and more tired of Windows, and at some point I said so out loud at work.
My colleague had a one-word answer: Omarchy.
Omarchy is a ready-made Arch Linux setup built around the Hyprland window manager. Someone else has already done the part where you spend a weekend assembling a desktop out of parts and regret it. I’d never touched anything like it, which made it a perfect candidate for a “what’s the worst that could happen” experiment.
The perfect victim
The obvious problem with trying a new operating system is that I’d rather not break the PC I actually use. My gaming PC is where WoW lives. I was not going to experiment on it.
Then I remembered the old MacBook Pro in the closet: a 2015 13″ Retina, unused for years, with a dual-core i5, an Intel Iris 6100 and not much RAM. Nothing on it mattered. I wiped it completely and put Omarchy on it.
If it all went wrong, I’d have a paperweight that was already gathering dust in my closet anyway.
The install was easy. The AI part was the surprise.
Installing Omarchy was easy. It’s built on Arch Linux, which apparently has a reputation for being a pain to set up, so the fact that mine was painless felt like a small miracle.
What really got me is how naturally AI fits into it, if you choose to use it. Omarchy is set up to work with AI as a normal part of the system, and I chose to run Claude Code right in the terminal. If something breaks, or I want something changed, I can just tell it. The system can more or less fit itself around me. When I hit a snag, I don’t go down a forum rabbit hole. I describe the problem and we fix it.
For someone who is not a Linux guy, that is the difference between “I’ll give up in an hour” and “I’ll keep poking at this.”
Cue the screensaver
Once a computer is yours, you start tweaking it. First up was the screensaver.
I’m a huge Matrix fan, so there was only ever going to be one answer: Matrix rain. Omarchy already ships with a screensaver, but it’s a grab bag of random effects, and I wanted that one specific Matrix rain and nothing else. So we made it the only screensaver: green code falling for a minute, then a hand-drawn block-letter CLAUDECOP logo (that name is a story for another day) held for a few seconds, then it loops. It even has its own entry in the Omarchy menu. I liked it the moment I saw the preview.
A wallpaper by conversation
The wallpaper is my favourite part. I didn’t open an image editor or browse wallpaper sites. I just talked to Claude about what I might want, and we settled on a traditional Synthwave sunset. It generated the image through Higgsfield and set it as my background.
Once the image was set, Claude asked if it should match the theme to it. I said yes, naturally, and the whole desktop changed to fit the picture. On the laptop that became a custom Synthwave theme, with hot pink, cyan and a deep purple background pulled from a neon sunset. I didn’t have to touch a thing.
Then I got ambitious
After a few days I started wondering: if this works on a 2015 dual-core laptop, what would it do on my main rig? So I wanted to know if Omarchy could live on my gaming PC. That needed a fresh drive, because I wasn’t going to touch the Windows ones.
Luckily I had a 2 TB Samsung SSD in the closet, left over from my old PC. All I had to buy was a SATA cable, which meant waiting until Monday. Claude, naturally, came up with three nearby stores that might sell one, and told me exactly what to do at the counter: “Just go in and say ‘SATA 3 data cable’.” It’s as if it knew I need help with even the basics of human interaction.
Windows stayed on its own drives, so it’s a dual boot: I pick which one to start from the boot menu.
Within an hour I was up and running, and that included installing the games and programs I use every day: Discord, Steam, Tidal, Battle.net and WoW with its addons, even my Plex server. And WoW? It starts quicker, reloads addons quicker, and the frame rate averages higher than it ever did on Windows.
Of course the PC got its own wallpaper, a gryphon rider at sunset, and its own theme, Azeroth Dusk: amber and dusky violet, pulled from the picture.
Still a “test”
I’ve already run my first WoW raid on it. The only hiccup was the shortcut for muting my Discord mic, and Claude fixed that while I kept raiding. I still topped the healing meters, so that’s a good start.
I still call it a test period. But honestly, it feels like Omarchy is staying on my PC.
I haven’t formatted the Windows drive yet. At this rate, it won’t be long.
I haven’t missed Windows yet.