what is omarchy?
in its makers' words: "beautiful, fun & agentic linux by dhh". a desktop operating system that installs fast, looks finished out of the box, and is built to be reshaped — by you, and by the agents you work with.
the malleable os for the age of agents.
omarchy is a linux desktop created by dhh and incubated at 37signals. it's open source, and its home is omarchy.org, the project's own site, which puts the pitch in one line: the malleable os for the age of agents.
the problem it sets out to solve is an old one. linux has long been a chore to set up, hard to debug, and full of decisions you're asked to make before you know enough to make them. omarchy's answer is to make those decisions well, up front: a fast install, agents that help you work out what's wrong when something breaks, and defaults good enough that the system is fully working — and good-looking — the first time it boots.
that last part matters more than it sounds. most setups ask you to spend a weekend making them usable. omarchy hands you a finished desktop and invites you to change it, rather than a kit of parts and an instruction to assemble.
five ideas, in the project's own headings.
it runs on almost anything
omarchy isn't picky about hardware. the project points to the latest laptops, vintage macs, and a 2011 thinkpad x220 with 2gb of ram. installing it means writing an image to a usb stick, answering a handful of questions, and getting a finished desktop back — in under two minutes on most computers, by the project's own count.
a plugin for every dream, every desire
the defaults are a starting point, not a fence. omarchy is built to be extended, and its community builds plugins for whatever the defaults don't cover. if you want your desktop to do something it doesn't, the expectation is that you — or someone before you — can make it.
the agentic os for the age of agents
this is the idea omarchy leads with. your coding agent should feel at home on your computer, and omarchy gives it the tools and skills to help you understand the system, fix it, and reshape it. the agent isn't a chat window bolted to the side; it's expected to work on the os itself, alongside you.
pick a theme, change everything
themes in omarchy aren't a wallpaper and an accent colour. choose one and the whole desktop follows — the look of every surface changes together, so the system stays coherent however you dress it.
developed by developers for developers
omarchy is made by people who write software all day, for people who do the same. that shows in the defaults it chooses for you, and in an open-source project that takes its contributions, and its plugins, in the open.
it runs on almost anything. you might not want it to run on yours.
we should be straight about this: omarchy doesn't need us. it installs quickly and runs on old hardware, and if you have a spare machine you're happy to hand over to it, that's a great way to use it. go to omarchy.org and do that.
omacloud is for the other case. your laptop is your work machine, and it runs macos or windows for reasons that aren't going away — a job, a team, software you depend on. you'd have to wipe it or dual-boot it to try omarchy, and you don't want to buy a second computer to find out whether you like it.
so we don't ask you to change your machine at all. you keep your current computer and your current os, and omarchy runs on a machine of its own in a data centre, streamed to your screen. how omarchy in the cloud works walks through every step, from payment to the first stream.
the same omarchy, on a machine that isn't on your desk.
every omacloud machine starts from a pinned, tested omarchy release. we add what streaming needs — a streaming server, and a fixed display for it to capture — and remove the hosting provider's own tools. the rest is omarchy as its makers ship it: your themes, your plugins, your dotfiles, your agent.
a few things are different, because it's a virtual machine rather than hardware you own. there's no gpu, so the desktop is drawn and the stream is encoded in software on the machine's own cores. it has no usb ports of yours to plug into. and its responsiveness depends on the distance between you and the data centre. the machine sizes and regions we offer are listed in full, as is what each plan costs.
an independent gateway. a fan, not an affiliate.
omacloud isn't part of the omarchy project and doesn't speak for it. we run omarchy in the cloud because we like it and think more people should get to try it. omarchy's direction, releases and documentation belong to its makers — for any of those, the source is omarchy.org.
if you try omarchy on omacloud and decide you want it on your own hardware, that's a good outcome too. your dotfiles come with you — they're yours.