I worked on Omarchy ARM on the side for a full year. Many weeks full time. Some weeks 80+ hours. No one asked me to - I just wanted to run Omarchy on my Apple m-series hardware so I didn't have to buy a new laptop!
When I was done, pre Quattro, it was nearly an identical experience to what x86 had out of the box. And it worked perfectly on m1 and m2 macs via Asahi Linux, and on Parallels and VMWare, too! (virtualization was/is required for anything m3 or newer...for now).
But running Omarchy on ARM required running my fork with over SIX THOUSAND additions to the source! In retrospect, there was no way that PR was ever going to get merged with that much of a diff. And it wasn't even anything I was doing "wrong"...at least, I don't think.
@dhh and
@ryanrhughes can chime in on that.😅
But it did expose a fundamental flaw in how Omarchy pre-Quattro was structured. To support another architecture, I had to put conditional logic all over the place. And the installer had to compile a bunch of aarch64 packages during install time to ensure it was the same Omakase experience that the x86 crowd was getting out of the box. So while
@teej_dv was speed-running x86 installs in under 2 minutes
nitter.siddz.com/dhh/status/19699310542…, the
#omarchy_on_other group in Discord and I were routinely in the 15-30 min time frame. Sometimes much longer if you forgot to allocate enough RAM in a VM!
A big part of that ARM slowness was the lack of pre-compiled binaries hosted by the Omarchy Package Repo (OPR). If x86 had to compile the same things we did at install time, it'd have probably taken just as long.
But there in lies the rub. Until Omarchy fully embraces ARM and hosts packages and has migrations accounting for ARM architecture in the core...all of the new Omarchy on Mac and Omarchy ARM VM projects won't be more than a (really sweet) tech demo. The same one I produced nearly a year ago.
I installed TryOmarchy today on my m4 Max Macbook Pro with 128gb of Ram. The ease with which I was able to get to the same point I was at six months ago in something like Parallels was ASTOUNDING. Kudos to you
@martiano! My jaw dropped with how much I wasn't doing. It was like the original "build a blog in Rails in 15 min" video from
@dhh in ~2005. Wups!
@typecraft_dev touches on some of the architecture changes in his latest video that dropped today
piped.video/watch?v=5JPYJfN7… so definitely give it a watch.
Those changes are going to help propel Omarchy forward to make it so much easier to support ARM and a whole lot of hardware out of the box. The package driven architecture is an amazing step forward, and I'm stoked that it's here.
Though, if I'm being honest, I'm a bit disappointed that all the effort I put into Omarchy ARM was somewhat for not. But on the other hand - I'm thrilled to see the community progress as fast as it has in the last few weeks! And it sounds like Asahi will be shipping m3 support soon, too.
nitter.siddz.com/phoronix/status/209277…
Now, while I was working on trying to get ARM merged into the mainline,
@tiredkebab and
@OmarchyMac were happy to be doing their own thing. A year in, it seems that their bet on separate experimentation has paid off for the better. My only hope is that we can all join forces to get Omarchy on ARM progressing together under one big tent.
So here's the deal...if you're working on Omarchy ARM capabilities, please chime in so we can all be aware of one another! After all, if you want to go fast, go alone...but if you want to go FAR, go together🙌
Here are some of the Omarchy on ARM projects that I know about. I'm sure I'm missing some. Please help me fill in the blanks!
github.com/omarchy-mac/omarc…
nitter.siddz.com/martiano/status/209231…
nitter.siddz.com/trycua/status/20926957…
github.com/maralcbr/omarchy-…
github.com/ggalancs/omarchy-…
github.com/nahime0/omarchy-p…
1/ This week, we worked on something special: bringing Omarchy to Apple Silicon with Lume.
We got the official Omarchy 4.0.1 source running in an ARM64 VM backed by Apple's Virtualization.framework.
Hyprland boots, the Omarchy shell renders, and Cua Driver can operate the desktop. 🧵