Omarchy got me moving. NixOS is where I stayed.
DHH’s Omarchy is the thing that finally made me stop treating “Linux desk, but for real” as a someday project.
Omarchy is an omakase Linux: Arch, the Hyprland tiling compositor, and Quickshell as the desktop kit. The manual is blunt about it. Hyprland out of the box is a compositor with almost no furniture. You still have to invent the lock screen, the bar, idle, bluetooth, the rest of a day. Omarchy ships DHH’s answers so you can sit down and work. He said that out loud when he shipped it.
I wanted that energy. Keyboard-first. Agents treated as part of the desk, not a tab you remember later. A machine you can actually enjoy.
I did not stay on Omarchy.
What I actually needed
I am building an AI-agent-first workstation. Hermes is the primary interface. The laptop is hermes-ml, an Inspiron 15 5510, running NixOS 26.05 and Hyprland.
The desk has to survive me. It also has to survive an agent that can type. If the only copy of “how this machine is supposed to look” lives in a pile of ~/.config files that drifted after a weekend of ricing, I cannot reconstruct it, and I cannot tell the agent what is allowed.
Omarchy is honest about being chef’s choice: great defaults, change anything. That is a gift if you want to start. It is the wrong contract if the point of the box is a flake you can read, rebuild, and roll back.
NixOS treats the system as a declaration. Packages land in /nix/store under hashes. nixos-rebuild switch is supposed to produce the same machine from the same inputs. If a generation is bad, you roll back instead of archaeology in /etc. That is the whole pitch. I wanted that pitch more than a two-minute Arch skin.
What is live, without the private flake dump
Day 1 was a boring encrypted TTY. Day 2 was Hyprland. Day 3 was Hermes on a leash. Synergy 3 is a client on this laptop (the KVM server stays on another box). CrossPaste moves clipboard across the LAN. The flake lives in a private repo because it has the kinds of paths you do not paste into a blog.
I am not claiming this is prettier than Omarchy. It is not. Quickshell is on the bar because I needed a tray, not because I shipped a theme. Some of the first generations failed in dumb ways (NVIDIA Prime vs the wrong DRM device env is a story for another week). Rollback is why I did not stay stuck.
The agent may nixos-rebuild switch on this host after a successful build. Disk wipe, Disko, dd stay forbidden. That split is the product for me: useful junior, gated, not trusted to merge the OS by vibes.
What I am not saying
I am not saying Omarchy is a toy. It did its job. It made Hyprland feel like a product instead of a weekend. If you want DHH’s desk today, install Omarchy.
I am saying my constraint is different. I need the workstation in git, with generations I can boot, because I am going to keep handing work to models. An opinionated ISO is a start. A reconstructable system is the job.
Next notes will be the ugly bits: encrypted TTY to Hyprland, then what I forbade the agent to run. This post is just the fork.
Sources: Omarchy, Omarchy manual, DHH on shipping Omarchy, How Nix works.