Opinionated Linux distros aren’t new. ArchBang has been shipping a minimal Arch system with sensible defaults for over fifteen years, and it was never the only one. So when Omarchy arrived, the “beautiful desktop, decisions already made” pitch didn’t impress me much. I’d been doing that for years.
What did catch my attention was something else. DHH hadn’t just made another spin. He had made a different kind of distro.
What was actually new
A traditional spin, ArchBang included, is mostly about what’s on the ISO: which packages, which window manager, which configs in /etc/skel. You install it and then it’s your system.
Omarchy works more like a product sitting on top of Arch:
- Lazy installs. Many extra apps and language runtimes install on demand from a menu when you first want them, so the feature list can keep growing without every user carrying all of it.
- Menus as the interface. Almost everything is a keybind or a menu entry away: themes, installs, settings and updates.
- An update path for the distro itself. The setup layer is versioned and updated alongside the packages, so the system keeps evolving after you install it.
- Theming as a single switch. Terminal, bar, launcher, editor and lock screen all change together.
That is a real idea, and a good one. It treats the distro as an ongoing experience rather than a starting point. I wanted to understand how it worked, keep the parts I liked and change the rest. So I took it apart.
Reverse Agent Engineering
I didn’t do it alone. I worked through Omarchy with AI coding agents: Claude Code doing the heavy lifting, plus a couple of smaller agents for research and review. That’s what I mean by Reverse Agent Engineering: using agents to read a large, opinionated codebase, map out how it hangs together, and then rebuild it to a different set of opinions.
It’s a remarkably fast way to learn someone else’s system. The agents read hundreds of scripts in minutes, summarise what each part does, and point out the assumptions baked into the design. My job was the judgement: what to keep, what to drop, and what I’d do differently. The agents’ job was the grind.
Fittingly, it’s how DHH works too. Listen to him on any recent podcast and he’ll tell you how many agents he had running to build this feature or that one. The difference is the setting. He has a company, a team and a business model behind Omarchy. I have ArchBang, which I’ve run as a hobby for over fifteen years, fitted around a day job, with no income from it at all.
For someone in my position, AI agents are a gift. The heavy lifting that used to eat whole weekends, like tracing a boot failure, rewriting an installer, or testing every BIOS and UEFI combination in a VM, now happens while I get on with something else. That has given me back time, but it has also given me reach. I’m shipping things I’d never have had the hours to attempt before. Omunchy is one of them. A year ago it would have stayed an idea.
Omarchy is MIT-licensed, so forking it is entirely within the rules. I renamed the result to keep clear of the Omarchy name, and Omunchy was born.
What Omunchy does differently
A leaner offline install. Omarchy’s ISO installs offline too, but it does it by carrying a huge package set on the ISO. Omunchy ships a much smaller base as a live system, and its installer copies that live system to disk, the same approach ArchBang has used for years. You can try it before you install it, and what you tried is exactly what you get. Everything else is on demand. It handles LUKS encryption, and I’ve tested BIOS and UEFI installs.
A different shell. Waybar stays as the bar, and Noctalia handles the rest of the desktop shell. Rofi drives the menus, including a keybind cheat sheet, and picks up the current theme’s colours.
AI on request, not by default. Agents built Omunchy, but they don’t come preinstalled on it. OpenCode is one command away on the installed system and deliberately absent from the live session. If you want an AI assistant, it’s there. If you don’t, there’s nothing running.
No plugin system. Omarchy can be extended with plugins. I decided against that because of the attack surface. Customisation in Omunchy goes through agent skills instead: plain, readable instructions rather than third-party code hooked into your desktop.
Optional extras, inactive until you ask. The newest addition is Snapper, shipped but switched off. One command sets it up with a proper @snapshots layout if you want snapshots. It’s fresh and still needs more testing, so treat it as a preview for now. That’s the ArchBang philosophy carried over: offer, never override. Once it’s installed, it’s your system.
A lite build. There’s a trimmed ISO that fits comfortably on a 16GB eMMC Chromebook, because old hardware deserves a nice desktop too.
Credit where it’s due
DHH didn’t invent the opinionated Linux distro. Plenty of us were here first. But he did invent something new on top of it: the distro as a living, menu-driven layer that keeps growing after install. That idea deserved a proper look, and with a few agents helping, taking it apart turned out to be the best way to give it one.
Omunchy is the result: Omarchy’s ideas, ArchBang’s habits, built to my taste. It’s also proof that a one-person hobby project can now move at a pace that used to need a funded team. That might be the bigger story here. Agents don’t only help the people with the biggest platforms. They help the rest of us keep up.
If Omunchy is your taste too, give it a spin.
Stay safe …. 😉