The Omarchy shell on a plain Arch install you set up yourself: no official installer, no disk takeover, and only the packages the shell actually calls.
Omarchy is an opinionated distribution, and its installer is right to own the machine: it takes the disk and the bootloader and brings its full package set, and in return everything fits together. This project is for the other case. You already have an Arch install you like (or want a minimal one), and you want the shell: the bar, the menu, the overlays and the plugin ecosystem around them.
It builds on omarchy-guest, which runs the same shell on top of an existing desktop setup. This repository covers the case with no host at all.
Measured on a real install (Intel i7-8750H laptop, systemd-boot), counting
pacman -Q as each layer went in:
| layer | packages | added |
|---|---|---|
pacstrap base |
150 | |
| the shell running | 299 | +149 |
kitty, installed unasked on first login (install.sh now prevents it) |
304 | +5 |
jq, which the shell needs and nothing asked for |
306 | +2 |
| sound (PipeWire) | 328 | +22 |
| NetworkManager | 340 | +12 |
| login screen (sddm) and boot splash (plymouth) | 351 | +11 |
| a file manager (Dolphin) | 525 | +174 |
For reference, upstream's install/omarchy-base.packages names 151 packages
before dependencies. Here the shell itself costs 149 packages over base, and
the single most expensive piece of a full desktop is the file manager, because
Dolphin pulls in KDE Frameworks. --no-dolphin leaves it out.
Boot on that machine: 11.1 s to the login screen (systemd-analyze: firmware
4.0, loader 1.0, kernel 1.4, initrd 2.1, userspace 2.5).
Start from a working Arch install with a user who has sudo, then:
git clone https://github.com/zednaked/omarchy-zero
cd omarchy-zero
./install.sh --dry-run # every action, printed; nothing changes
./install.sh
The installer runs as your user and asks for sudo one action at a time, so
the dry run shows exactly what would run as root. It is safe to run again: each
step checks before acting, and every file it replaces is copied to
<file>.bak.<timestamp> first. That also makes it the way to repair an install
that stopped halfway.
| option | effect |
|---|---|
--no-login |
no sddm; log in on tty1 and run uwsm start hyprland.desktop |
--no-splash |
no plymouth |
--no-dolphin |
no file manager |
--server |
never sleep: ignore lid and idle, and turn off the idle plugin |
--split-network |
the cable stays with systemd-networkd; NetworkManager only manages Wi-Fi |
--terminal NAME |
terminal for xdg-terminals.list (default foot) |
--theme NAME |
Omarchy theme applied without a running session (default tokyo-night) |
What it does, in order:
- Packages, by layer, each with a reason (below).
- Checkouts: omarchy-guest, and Omarchy itself in
~/.local/share/omarchy, pinned to the ref omarchy-guest last verified. - Migrations: marks every existing migration as done, which is what Omarchy's own installer does at the end of a fresh install. Without it, the first update runs the entire history, and one migration installs Omarchy's kernel as the first Limine entry.
- User config: copies
hypr,omarchyandfootfrom the checkout if you don't have them, and writesxdg-terminals.list. Without that file Omarchy picks a terminal itself and installs kitty to do it. - Environment: the three files the Omarchy package would normally provide
through
/usr/share(uwsm/env,environment.d, a block in.bash_profile). - Update guard (see Updating).
- User units: crash watch, sleep lock and internal-monitor recovery.
- omarchy-guest install: its plugins and menu overrides, and its commands
(
omarchy-guest,omarchy-guest-update, ...) linked into~/.local/bin. - System services, login screen and boot splash, with Omarchy's own sddm and plymouth themes from the checkout, so nothing comes from the AUR. A custom splash theme you already set is left alone.
- Theme and the root-once helper
omarchy-apply-lock, which writes the lock screen's PAM file.
Two things stay manual on purpose: adding splash to the kernel command line
(that is your bootloader), and omarchy-done mark first-run-user once the
first login works. A first run that fails repeats on every login and re-arms
the update notification.
| layer | packages | why |
|---|---|---|
| shell | hyprland quickshell uwsm git |
compositor, shell, session, checkout |
| what the shell calls | gum xdg-terminal-exec qrencode wtype jq gtk3 |
jq is called by 76 commands in Omarchy's bin/; gtk3 provides gtk-launch, which the launcher uses to open any app |
| terminal and font | foot ttf-jetbrains-mono-nerd |
foot is the lightest terminal Omarchy supports |
| sound | pipewire pipewire-pulse wireplumber |
the audio panel calls pactl and wpctl |
| network | networkmanager |
the network panel calls nmcli |
| desktop | udiskie wl-clipboard slurp grim hyprpicker brightnessctl hyprsunset less imagemagick |
autostart, screenshots, clipboard, brightness, night light, color picker |
| login, splash | sddm, plymouth |
on by default; --no-login, --no-splash |
| files | dolphin |
on by default; --no-dolphin |
Left out on purpose: the screensaver (ttfx exists only in the AUR and in
Omarchy's own repository), hypridle, fcitx5, and Omarchy's app configs
(Chromium, Obsidian and others). Install what you use.
This install does not run omarchy-update. That command pulls, runs migrations
and refreshes config, boot, login and pacman settings, and on this install
several of those are yours.
The guard is a directory of symlinks placed ahead of Omarchy's bin/ on
PATH and outside the checkout, so a git pull cannot remove it. It covers 16
commands (omarchy-update, omarchy-migrate, and the refresh-* and
reinstall* families, among others). Each one explains why it stopped and
sends a notification. OMARCHY_GUEST_ALLOW=1 <command> lets a call through.
Its limit, accepted on purpose: it protects against clicks and calls by name.
sudo resets PATH, so a root call with the full path into the checkout goes
through. Nothing in the session does that.
To update Omarchy, pull omarchy-guest first (its contract and migration policy
are what decide), then let omarchy-guest update walk the gates:
git -C ~/.local/src/omarchy-guest pull --ff-only
omarchy-guest update # read-only: contract, migrations, verdict
omarchy-guest update --apply # in a terminal: pull, migrations, shell restart, doctor
omarchy-guest update --rollback # if the shell did not come back
On a machine installed before the commands were linked, run
omarchy-guest install once from ~/.local/src/omarchy-guest/bin/ first.
--apply refuses to start while any gate is closed: a break in the contract, a
migration with no policy, or migrations that call sudo without a TTY. It calls
the real omarchy-migrate from the checkout, not through the guard, and only
after the policy has marked what this install skips.
pacman -Syu is safe: no Omarchy repository is added to pacman.conf.
omarchy-guest solves the Omarchy shell on top of a host (another Hyprland config manager, for example). This solves the Omarchy shell with no host. Anything that applies to both cases (the guard, the doctor, the upstream contract, migration policy, menu overrides) belongs there. This repository keeps only what is specific to a machine with no host: the environment files, the session and the install order.
The full account of the first install, including everything that broke and what
the doctor did not see, is in omarchy-guest's
docs/NO-HOST.md.
Version 0.1.0, tested on one machine. That install was done by hand, step by step, before this script existed, and the script's dry run against it reports every step as already done or as an equivalent file. A run on a second, fresh machine has not happened yet. Reports are welcome.
MIT