I Wiped My Perfect Setup
The one I spent two months building. The one I tweaked and refined and broke and fixed dozens of times. The one I understood completely.
Gone.
Fresh Omarchy installation. Someone else’s choices. Someone else’s configs. Someone else’s carefully curated defaults.
And you know what? I feel… relieved.
The Installation (So Easy It Felt Wrong)
Omarchy’s installer is interesting. It’s not hand-holding like Ubuntu. It’s not as bare-bones as base Arch. It’s somewhere in between.
It asks questions. Real questions.
But unlike my base Arch installation where every choice was critical and one mistake meant starting over, this felt… safe. Like it knew what it was doing.
Twenty minutes later, I had a working system. With Hyprland. With waybar. With a file manager, a browser, development tools, everything configured and working.
My manual Arch install took four hours the first time. Ninety minutes the second time after I knew what I was doing.
Omarchy took twenty minutes and included more than I’d set up myself.
Part of me felt like I cheated. Like I took the easy way out.
The rest of me thought: “This is exactly what I needed.”
First Boot: Not My Setup, But Not Bad
The default theme wasn’t my color scheme. The keybindings were slightly different. The status bar layout wasn’t exactly how I had it.
Old me would’ve immediately opened config files and started changing everything.
New me decided to just… try it. Use their defaults for a day. See what they chose and why.
The keybindings were actually pretty logical. Super + Return for terminal (same as mine). Workspace switching made sense.
The colors were clean. Professional.
The status bar showed everything I needed: time, CPU, network, battery. In a layout that actually made sense.
I spent thirty minutes with the default setup and realized: they made good choices. Choices I probably would’ve arrived at myself after another month of tweaking.
Why not just trust them?
Swallowing My Pride
Here’s what was hard: admitting I didn’t need to customize everything.
I’d spent months learning to configure every piece of my system. I understood dotfiles, config syntax, package management. I’d earned that knowledge through hours of reading documentation and fixing broken configs.
And now I was using someone else’s work instead of my own.
It felt like giving up. Like admitting I couldn’t handle “real” Arch.
But then I reminded myself why I switched: I wanted to build things, not maintain configs.
Omarchy isn’t a different distro. It’s still Arch. Still the same package manager. Still the same rolling release. Still the same level of control if I want it.
They just made the defaults good enough that I don’t need to change everything.
That’s not giving up. That’s being smart.
Recreating My Dotfiles (The Minimalist Version)
I still wanted some of my custom configs. Specific aliases. Certain scripts. My development environment setup.
But this time, I approached it differently.
Instead of rebuilding my entire custom setup, I asked: “What do I actually need to change from Omarchy’s defaults?”
The list was short:
- A few shell aliases I use constantly
- My Git configuration
- Some development environment variables
- One or two keybinding adjustments
That’s it.
Everything else? Omarchy’s defaults were fine. Good, even.
My new dotfiles repo is about 20% the size of my old one. Focused on the things that matter to my workflow, not customizing every possible aspect of the system.
Simpler. Cleaner. Easier to maintain.
The Philosophy Shift
Building my own Arch setup taught me: I can do it. I can understand the system. I can configure everything from scratch.
Using Omarchy taught me: just because I can doesn’t mean I should.
There’s a difference between understanding your tools and obsessing over them.
I understand how Hyprland works. How window managers function. How configs interact with the system. That knowledge doesn’t go away just because I’m using someone else’s defaults.
But now I can use that knowledge when it matters - when something actually needs customization - instead of constantly tweaking things that already work fine.
Good enough is actually good enough.
What Omarchy Gets Right
After a week, here’s what I appreciate:
Maintained configs. When Hyprland updates and breaks something, Omarchy maintainers fix it. I just update and it works. No more spending evenings debugging config syntax changes.
Curated packages. They’ve already figured out which packages work well together. Which terminal emulator plays nice with which shell. Which tools complement each other. I don’t have to discover that through trial and error.
Sane defaults. Everything “just works” out of the box. Not in a dumbed-down Ubuntu way. In a “someone with taste and experience made these choices” way.
Still Arch. I have the AUR. I have pacman. I have full control if I need it. But I don’t have to exercise that control over every single aspect of the system.
Community support. There’s a Discord. An active community. When I have questions, there are people who’ve solved the same problems. On base Arch, every issue felt like I was figuring it out alone.
What I Actually Miss
Honestly? Not much.
I miss the satisfaction of “I built this myself.” But I already had that satisfaction. Two months of it. I proved I could do it.
I miss some specific color choices. But not enough to spend hours tweaking the theme.
What I don’t miss: the constant maintenance. The breaking updates. The time spent configuring instead of building.
Where I Am Now
Seven days into Omarchy and I’ve shipped more code than I did in the last month of my custom setup.
Not because Omarchy is faster. Not because it has better tools.
Because I’m not spending my evenings fixing config files.
Yesterday, Hyprland and NVIDIA drivers both updated. On my old setup, that would’ve meant hours of debugging. On Omarchy? I updated, rebooted, everything worked. Someone else already figured out the NVIDIA-specific configs.
I opened my editor and kept working.
That’s the dream, right? A system that gets out of your way and lets you build things?
My setup isn’t perfect anymore. It’s not exactly tailored to every preference I have.
But it’s 90% of what I want with 10% of the maintenance burden.
And that 10% of effort I’m saving? I’m putting it into actual projects now.
The Lesson
Building my own Arch setup from scratch was valuable. Essential, even. I learned more in those two months than I would’ve learned in a year of using pre-made distros.
But there’s a time to learn by doing everything yourself, and a time to use what you’ve learned to make smarter choices.
I learned the hard way. Now I’m working the smart way.
Omarchy isn’t giving up on Arch. It’s graduating from “learning Arch” to “using Arch productively.”
And honestly? That feels better than any perfectly customized config ever did.
The arch.log series: My journey from Windows to Arch, from building everything to building what matters. Sometimes the smartest move is knowing when to let go. Still learning. Still shipping. Still brutally honest.