Omarchy is the best Linux distro for old laptops

I installed Omarchy on my decade-old MacBook Pro this week, and after distro-hopping through Fedora and Mint on the same machine, I am convinced this is the best Linux distro you can put on old hardware. Fedora needed a lot of surgery just to get Wi-Fi and the webcam working, and Mint managed to break its own Wi-Fi driver on the first update, but Omarchy simply installed cleanly, booted fast, and everything just worked.

It's DHH's Arch-based distribution with the Hyprland tiling window manager and the Quickshell desktop shell, all configured out of the box. It ships with everything a developer needs on day one, from Neovim to Chromium, Obsidian to LibreOffice, and even Kdenlive and OBS Studio. But what surprised me most is how light it runs, and a laptop from 2014 now boots in seconds and apps open instantly. Yes, faster than others I tried.

It also helps that the Omarchy community is thriving. The project crossed 30,000 stars on GitHub within a year, and there is now an Omacom foundation backing it. I already love this distro enough to have been collecting Omarchy themes, setups, and resources in one place for a while.

I took a lot of photos and screenshots during the install, and here they are.

Installation completed in 1 minutes 57 seconds

A beautiful Omarchy theme

A beautiful Omarchy theme

Two tiled windows in a workspace

Beautiful, aren't they?