I’ve been a Mac user since 2007. At work we need Windows, but the entire team just runs them in a VM from macOS because nobody wants to stare at Windows all day. So when I say I was ready to jump ship from both Windows and macOS, I mean it. Windows is turning into the ad-riddled dystopia from Ready Player One, and macOS has lost whatever taste it once had. Both are frantically bolting AI slop onto everything. I needed an escape hatch at least for my personal machine.

Enter Omarchy.

I had been hearing about Omarchy all over my X feed. Finally I watched a video put out by DHH about version 2.0, and that was enough for me. I dropped $2,200 on a Framework 13 with the AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370, ordered it, and a week later it was in my hands. There was no official Omarchy ISO yet, so I installed vanilla Arch and ran the install script. I had already ordered the magic WJESOG DisplayPort to USB-C cable that DHH said actually makes Apple and LG 5K displays behave on Linux. I plugged my LG UltraFine 5K into the Framework and… it just worked. Hyprland felt snappier than anything I’d used in years. I was in love.

That lasted about three weeks.

One morning the monitor was black. No signal. Classic Linux adventure time. A lot of Google, a lot of AI chats, and eventually I discovered the fix was in a newer kernel than the one Omarchy was shipping. Updated the kernel, monitor came back. Life was good again.

Then Omarchy 3.0 dropped. I upgraded. Something in the migrations broke and global shortcuts stopped launching anything. Dug through GitHub issues, manually patched a few config files, and got it working again. But now I had that nagging feeling you get with any big upgrade path: cruft. Now that Omarchy 3.1.0 finally shipped with a proper ISO, I decided to nuke it and start clean.

The fresh install took literally two minutes. I rebooted, grinning at how buttery smooth everything felt… and the LG was dead again. Same symptoms. Updated the kernel…still dead. This time the fix was a Framework BIOS update that the excellent people in the Omarchy Discord walked me through. Monitor sprang back to life. High-fives all around.

The very next morning? Black screen again.

At this point the Discord went quiet, and so did I. I’ve run out of google-fu. When everything is working, Omarchy (really Hyprland plus the mountain of thoughtful defaults) is the best desktop experience I’ve ever had. But I’m tired of waking up to a coin flip on whether my $2,000 laptop will acknowledge its $1,200 monitor.

Final Verdict

Omarchy is magical when it’s happy. The problem is it’s moody, and right now my LG 5K and Framework combo is stuck in an unhappy phase that neither I nor the community has solved. I haven’t quite given up yet, but I fear I’m days away from returning to macOS with a slightly defeated sigh.

Linux on the desktop is still an adventure. Sometimes that’s fun. Sometimes you just want your monitor to work.