how omarchy in the cloud works_

omacloud gives you a virtual machine in a data centre that runs omarchy and nothing else. it isn't a shared desktop and it isn't a container: nobody else logs into it, and it keeps running when you close the lid on the device you were using.

you reach it through a stream. a small streaming server on the machine captures the desktop and encodes it; moonlight, a free and open-source streaming client, decodes it on your mac, windows laptop, ipad, chromebook or linux box, and sends your keyboard and mouse back. your own computer stays exactly as it was — nothing is installed on it except the client, and nothing is wiped.

the desktop you see is omarchy itself — if you're new to it, start with what omarchy is and who makes it. everything below is what happens between signing up and seeing it.

it all happens in the omacloud app at app.omacloud.dev. you sign in, choose one of the two machine sizes, and pay through a stripe checkout. one subscription is one machine. the machine is only built once the payment has gone through, and the app waits for the subscription to be active before it asks for the machine.

then you choose a region — the data centre your machine will live in. pick the one nearest to where you'll be working, because every keystroke makes a round trip there and back. choose carefully: a machine can't be moved to another region once it exists.

when you press create, we start a fresh virtual machine from a pinned omarchy release — one we've tested, not whatever happened to be newest that morning. as it comes up, we strip out the hosting provider's own tools: its browser-based desktop, its agents, its default user. we install the streaming server, close the web ports, and open only the ports the stream and ssh need. the provider never becomes part of your setup: you have no account with them and never see their console.

setup is split in two on purpose. the slow part — building the box — happens first, without you. the part that needs you — naming the machine and choosing your login — happens after, on a box that already exists, so you never fill in a form and then wait to find out whether it worked. the dashboard shows each step as it happens:

every step has a time limit. if one stalls past it — the provider never hands the machine over, or the streaming server never comes up — the machine is marked failed rather than left spinning, so the dashboard tells you something went wrong instead of asking you to keep waiting.

to connect, you need moonlight on the device you're using. it's free, open source, and run by its community rather than a company, with clients for macos, windows, linux, ios, android, chromeos, apple tv and more — download the moonlight client for your device from its own site.

• ›copy your machine's address from the dashboard and add it as a host in moonlight.
• ›moonlight shows a four-digit pin. type that pin into the dashboard.
• ›we hand the pin to the streaming server on your machine. a wrong pin is rejected; a right one pairs the device.
• ›open the desktop from moonlight. every time after that, it's one click.

each device pairs once — your laptop, your tablet, the old desktop in the spare room — and the dashboard lists which ones are paired. there's no web client: moonlight and ssh are the only ways into the machine, which keeps the surface you have to trust small.

a streamed desktop is only as responsive as the round trip between you and the machine, so region is the choice that matters most for how omarchy feels. you choose it when you create the machine, from the list the app offers, and it can't be changed afterwards — moving means a new machine.

we measured our proof of concept — round-trip time, frame rate, encoder load — and those measured numbers are on the home page, scoped to the region they were measured in. which regions are offered at launch is being confirmed, and they'll be listed with the machine sizes when they are.

one more thing you should know: our control plane keeps its own key for root access over ssh. that's how the setup and pairing steps above reach your machine. you log in as your own user, and direct root login is locked.