Omarchy Explained: DHH's Agentic Linux, Every Built-In App, and How It Plugs Into Claude Code

Most Linux distributions treat AI like any other app: install it yourself and work out how it fits. Omarchy does the opposite. AI coding agents are part of the operating system. They have their own hotkey, their own panel in the top bar, their own terminal layouts, and an agent skill that teaches them how to change the system itself.

This guide covers what Omarchy is, what makes it unusual, every app it ships with and how each one helps your workflow, and the agent features that make people call it "agentic Linux."

What Omarchy actually is

Omarchy is a free, MIT-licensed Linux distribution created by DHH (David Heinemeier Hansson, creator of Ruby on Rails and co-founder of 37signals). Its own description is "a beautiful, fun & agentic Linux distribution." Under the hood it combines three things:

• Arch Linux as the base: a rolling-release distro, so security patches and new versions arrive quickly.
• Hyprland, a tiling window manager. Windows arrange themselves into a grid instead of piling up on top of each other.
• Quickshell, a desktop toolkit Omarchy uses to build its own top bar, menus, notifications, panels, and lock screen.

The project calls itself omakase computing, after the Japanese practice of letting the chef choose your meal. Instead of handing you a blank system and a thousand decisions, Omarchy picks the apps, the configuration, the hotkeys, and the look, and makes them all work together. You can change anything, but you don't have to change anything to be productive on day one.

You can read more, see screenshots, and download the installer at the official site, omarchy.org.

What makes it unique

Plenty of people have published their Arch and Hyprland "dotfiles." What sets Omarchy apart:

• It's a full distribution, not a config dump. You install it from an ISO, it maintains its own package repository and Arch mirror, and updates run migrations that keep your system in step with each release.
• Keyboard first, everywhere. Nearly everything has a hotkey. Super + Space opens the Omarchy Menu, and from there you can install, configure, theme, and update the whole machine.
• Beauty as a feature. It ships with over twenty themes, and switching one restyles the desktop, the terminal, Neovim, the browser, the system monitor, the lock screen, and even your AI agents in one go. The project's argument is simple: a beautiful system is a motivating system.
• Secure by default. Full-disk encryption is on by default, the firewall blocks all incoming traffic out of the box, and SSH stays off until you turn it on.
• Safe to experiment with. It takes a bootable snapshot of the system on every update, so a bad update (or a bad agent edit) can be rolled back from the boot menu.
• Agents are built in. This is the big one, and it gets its own section below.

Installing and getting around

You download the ISO from omarchy.org, write it to a USB stick, and boot from it. The installer asks a few questions, then finishes in one to five minutes depending on the machine. You can take over the whole drive or install into free space to dual boot with Windows. There's also a mode for setting up a machine for someone else, and an unattended mode for VMs and fleets.

Two things to know before you start: you'll need to turn off Secure Boot in your BIOS, and you'll want a wired or 2.4GHz wireless keyboard, since a Bluetooth keyboard can't type the disk encryption password at boot.

Once you're in, the basics are:

The interface is translated into 50 languages, and the installer offers Japanese, Chinese, and Korean input methods.

The agentic part: AI built into the OS

This is why Omarchy belongs in our AI section. It goes well beyond preinstalling a chatbot.

Two dozen agents, one command each

Omarchy includes launchers for about two dozen coding agents. Each one is a single command, and nothing is downloaded until you use it: the first run installs the agent through a tool manager and asks you to sign in. The current lineup in the manual includes:

• Claude Code (claude), Anthropic's terminal agent
• OpenAI Codex (codex)
• OpenCode (opencode)
• GitHub Copilot CLI, Cursor CLI, Google Antigravity CLI, Grok Build, Amp, Crush, Kiro CLI, Devin CLI, Kimi Code, Qwen Code, Kilo, MiniMax Code, Meta's Muse Code, DeepSeek Harness, Freebuff, Command Code, Pi, Oh My Pi, Hermes, and Ori

That means you can connect to your favorite LLM, whether it's Claude, GPT, Gemini, Grok, Kimi, Qwen, or DeepSeek, without hunting down installers. Ori, OpenRouter's harness, goes further: it can run Claude Code, Codex, or OpenCode against any model in OpenRouter's catalog.

Updates are handled for you too. Omarchy checks installed agents for new releases and updates them along with the rest of the system.

Pick a default agent and summon it anywhere

During setup Omarchy invites you to choose a default agent. After that:

• Super + Shift + Ctrl + A opens it in its own terminal window.
• omarchy agent prompt "Review this project" launches it straight into a task.
• In any terminal, a runs your default agent inline, and c, cx, and cy start OpenCode, Claude Code, and Codex directly.

Claude Code gets special treatment

If you choose Claude as your default, Omarchy also tries to set up Claude's browser extension for Chromium, Chrome, Brave, and Edge, so Claude Code can work with your browser (run /chrome inside Claude to check the connection). Your Omarchy theme syncs into Claude Code, so it matches the rest of the desktop. The Claude desktop app (Anthropic's Linux beta, with Chat, Cowork, and Claude Code tabs) is one click away under Install > AI in the 4.5 release.

If you're new to Claude Code itself, our Claude Code security workflows guide and Cursor vs Copilot vs Claude Code comparison are good starting points.

The agents panel: every subscription on one screen

The top bar has an agents icon. Before you've set anything up, its panel walks you through signing in to Claude, Codex, or Grok. After that it becomes a dashboard for all your AI subscriptions:

• Each account and plan, with meters for 5-hour session and weekly limits and when they reset
• Prepaid balances for pay-as-you-go providers like OpenRouter and DeepSeek
• Usage stats across all of them, like tokens this week and your most-used model
• Models you run on your own hardware, under Local models

It also has a Make something area with starter prompts that hand your default agent the job of building a new theme, a bar plugin, or even a native app.

Juggling several subscriptions

Have a personal Claude Max plan and a work one? Omarchy can keep several Claude, Codex, and Grok accounts signed in and switch between them with omarchy agent account use work. It warns you when the active account passes 95% of a limit, and with Autoswitch on it moves you to the account with the most headroom by itself. You can even copy your agent logins to another Omarchy machine over SSH. (The multi-account switching and SSH copying arrive with the 4.5 release.)

Agent workspaces in the terminal

Omarchy ships tmux layout shortcuts designed around agents:

• tdl cx opens an IDE-style split: your editor on the left, Claude Code on the right, a terminal along the bottom.
• tdl c cx adds a second agent, so you can run OpenCode and Claude Code side by side.
• tds gives you a four-pane square with an editor, a live diff watcher, a terminal, and an agent.
• tdlm creates that layout for every subfolder in a project, one tab each.
• tsl 4 c starts a swarm: a grid of four agents working in parallel.

The Omarchy skill: agents that can tune your system

Omarchy ships an agent skill that teaches agents how the system is put together, so you can ask in plain English to tweak your Hyprland config, change the top bar, or design a new theme. It's linked into the skill folders for Claude Code, Codex, Pi, Antigravity, and Hermes, so most agents pick it up automatically.

The project itself calls this experimental. Different models use it with different results. Run it in plan mode first so you can see what the agent wants to change, and remember that system snapshots and omarchy reinstall configs are there if it makes a mess.

Crash diagnosis by agent

When a program crashes, Omarchy shows a "Process crashed" notification. Click it and the crash is handed to your default agent along with a diagnose-crash skill, which works through the core dump to figure out what happened and whether it's worth reporting upstream.

Local models, too

Not everything needs the cloud. Omarchy recommends LM Studio (a friendly app for finding and running open-weight models) and Ollama (a command-line tool for the same thing), both one click away under Install > AI. For how local models now power agents like Claude Code, see our Ollama agentic workflows guide.

Desktop AI apps and voice

Beyond the coding agents, Install > AI also offers desktop apps for ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Grok Bot, Hermes Desktop, OpenClaw, and T3 Code. ChatGPT and Grok are also included as web apps on their own hotkeys.

Dictation is built in too: hold Right Alt or F9 and speak, and the text appears wherever you're typing. You can choose Superwhisper (cloud processing by default) or Voxtype (runs locally). Dictating a long, detailed prompt to an agent is often faster than typing it.

Every included app, and how it helps your workflow

Omarchy's pitch is "zero bloat, just everything I use." Here's what comes in the box, grouped by job.

Writing, notes, and documents

• Neovim, preconfigured on top of LazyVim. A full editor with fuzzy file search, project-wide search, and Git built in, with no configuration required. Prefer something familiar? VS Code, Cursor, Zed, Sublime Text, Helix, and Emacs are one menu click away.
• Obsidian, a note-taking app that stores everything as plain Markdown files. Plain files matter here, because AI agents can read and edit your notes as easily as your code.
• Omawrite, Omarchy's own distraction-free Markdown writing app. No vaults, no plugins, just you and the words.
• LibreOffice, a full office suite for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files.
• Signed (new in 4.5), Omarchy's own tool for signing and filling in PDFs. Drop in your saved signature, text, and the date, and save a signed copy beside the original.
• Document Viewer for opening PDFs.

Presentations and video

• Hype (new in 4.5), a presentation app where your whole deck is one Markdown file. Write slides next to a live preview, present full screen, or export to PDF or PowerPoint. Because it's Markdown, an agent can draft the deck for you.
• Monologue (new in 4.5), a webcam recorder with a built-in editor. Press Space to record, then trim and split clips and save an MP4. Handy for demos, async updates, and course videos.
• Omacut, a simple video trimmer for cutting the start and end off a clip without opening a full editor.
• mpv, a fast media player that plays almost anything.

Screenshots, capture, and text grabbing

• Omasnap (new in 4.5) takes screenshots with Print Screen: regions, windows, full screens, or scrolling captures. Its editor adds arrows, highlights, numbered markers, and secure redactions. Perfect for bug reports and for showing an agent exactly what's wrong on screen.
• Screen recording with Alt + Print Screen, plus a color picker.
• Text extraction with Super + Ctrl + Print Screen: select any part of the screen and its text lands on your clipboard, read by on-device OCR.

Files, sharing, and storage

• Files (Nautilus), the graphical file manager, with automatic mounting of USB sticks and SD cards.
• Disktree (new in 4.5) shows what's filling your drive as a visual treemap, so you can find and clear space safely.
• LocalSend, an AirDrop-style tool for sending files, folders, or your clipboard to phones and computers on the same network, on any operating system.
• Disks for formatting drives and checking their health.

Images and theming

• Pinta, a simple image editor for cropping, resizing, and quick fixes, with layers.
• Aether, which turns a wallpaper into a complete matching theme for your whole system.
• imv, a lightweight image viewer.

System and everyday utilities

• Activity (btop), a good-looking monitor for CPU, memory, disk, network, and processes.
• Omacalc, a small floating calculator.
• Elsewhen (new in 4.5), a world clock for working across time zones.
• Clipboard history with Super + Ctrl + V for text and images, plus universal copy and paste shortcuts that work the same in the terminal and everywhere else.
• Reminders on a countdown timer (Super + Ctrl + R), and quick date, weather, and battery pop-ups.
• Notifications that stack by sender, with snooze, Do Not Disturb, and history, so a noisy chat channel doesn't bury your build failure.
• About (Fastfetch), which shows your system details at a glance.

Terminal and developer tools

• Foot, the default terminal: fast and light. Alacritty, Ghostty, and Kitty are available if you want tabs and splits built in.
• tmux and Herdr, which give you persistent terminal sessions, workspaces, tabs, and panes you can detach from and come back to. This is what makes long-running agent sessions practical.
• Lazygit, a visual Git interface inside the terminal. Staging, committing, and reviewing what an agent changed becomes quick and readable.
• mise, a version manager that sets up Ruby, Node.js, Bun, Deno, Python, Go, Rust, Java, Elixir, PHP, .NET, Zig, and more from one menu.
• Modern command-line tools: fzf for fuzzy finding, zoxide for jumping between folders, ripgrep for searching code, fd for finding files, eza for richer file listings, bat for syntax-highlighted file viewing, and tldr for short, example-first command help.
• GitHub CLI (gh) and uv for Python, installed on first use.
• Docker-aware firewall rules that stop containers from being exposed to the internet by accident.

Browser and web apps

• Chromium is the default browser, themed to match the system. Chrome, Edge, Brave, Firefox, and Zen are one click away.
• Two Omarchy browser extensions: Copy URL (Alt + Shift + L) and Download Video (Alt + Shift + D).
• Built-in web apps that open in clean, frameless windows on their own hotkeys: HEY email and calendar, Basecamp, ChatGPT, Grok, WhatsApp, Google Messages, Google Photos, Google Maps, Google Contacts, X, and YouTube. You can add any website as a web app from the menu.

Fun

• Cliamp, a retro, Winamp-style music player that runs in the terminal, with built-in lo-fi radio stations.

Optional extras, one click away

Not installed by default, but set up for you if you want them: 1Password, Bitwarden, Spotify, Slack, Dropbox, Tailscale, and Signal. There's also support for gaming, a Windows virtual machine, and Omarchy on Macs.

Putting it together: what a day on Omarchy looks like

Here's how the pieces combine in practice:

1. Start a project. Open a terminal with Super + Return, jump to your project with cd and zoxide, and run tdl cx. Neovim, Claude Code, and a shell open side by side.
2. Brief the agent. Hold F9 and dictate what you need. Grab an error message off a screenshot with text extraction, or capture the broken UI with Omasnap and paste it in.
3. Let it work, then review. Watch changes come in, then open Lazygit to read the diff before committing. Snapshots have your back if anything goes badly wrong.
4. Keep an eye on limits. The agents panel shows how much of your Claude or Codex allowance is left, and switches accounts if you hit a wall.
5. Ship the rest. Draft release notes in Omawrite, record a quick demo in Monologue, build a deck in Hype, and send files to your phone with LocalSend.

Every step stays on the keyboard, in one consistent theme, without installing or configuring anything.

Who it's for (and who it isn't)

Great fit:

• Developers who already spend most of their day in a terminal and use AI coding agents
• People who want Linux without spending a week configuring it
• Anyone who wants to run several AI subscriptions and local models side by side

Think twice if:

• You want an OS that behaves like Windows or macOS. The project says plainly it isn't trying to be familiar.
• You rely on a mouse-first workflow or apps that only run on Windows or macOS.
• You need Secure Boot left on, for example on a locked-down work laptop.

Want to contribute?

Omarchy is open source, and its code, issue tracker, release notes, and the full manual all live in the official GitHub repository: github.com/omacom/omarchy.

A few pointers for developers:

• The repo includes AGENTS.md and CLAUDE.md files plus a set of task guides, so you can point Claude Code at the codebase and it will follow the project's conventions.
• Much of Omarchy is Bash scripts and Hyprland and Quickshell configuration, so it's easier to get into than a typical OS codebase.
• If you're working on Omarchy itself, the dev channel (Update > Channel) links your system to a Git checkout of the source. Use it only on a machine you can afford to break.
• The project's Discord, linked from omarchy.org, is where release-candidate testing and help happen.

Brush up on Git and GitHub first

If you want to contribute to Omarchy, or just want a solid handle on the version control that keeps AI agents' changes reviewable and reversible, IBM's beginner course Getting Started with Git and GitHub on Coursera is a good place to start. It covers repositories, branching, forking, cloning, pull requests, and merging, with hands-on labs and a final project where you publish your own open-source GitHub repo. No software installation is needed to take it.

The bottom line

Omarchy is what happens when someone builds a Linux desktop on the assumption that you'll be working alongside AI agents every day. Agents install on first use, launch from a hotkey, sit in tmux layouts made for them, share one usage dashboard, follow your theme, and can even reconfigure the system with the built-in skill. Around that sits a carefully chosen set of apps that cover writing, presenting, recording, sharing, and building, all driven from the keyboard.

It's opinionated, terminal-heavy, and not for everyone. But if Claude Code or another agent is already your main tool, Omarchy is the most integrated home for it we've seen. Start at omarchy.org, and if you like it, help make it better on GitHub.