Omarchy, the Arch-based, Hyprland-tiling Linux setup from Basecamp’s David Heinemeier Hansson, shipped its 4.0 “Quattro” release on August 14 and a 4.0.1 fix release on August 25. The release notes cover the new Quickshell desktop and say nothing about hardware, the official manual has no hardware-compatibility chapter, and the omarchy.org/hardware URL that gets passed around returns a 404. Three sources do exist: a public list of what the project’s installer special-cases, the author’s own recommendation list, and two weeks of owners reporting what happened on their machines. This guide maps all of that onto hardware you can buy, as of 4.0.1 in late August 2026. The project’s repository sits at roughly 35,000 GitHub stars as of late August 2026, and an independent community plugin directory, which the project’s own 4.0 notes point to, has grown alongside it.
Starry Hope covered Omarchy on mini PCs when 1.0 was the story; Omarchy 4 is the current picture.
The clean side of the line is integrated graphics
DHH’s own hardware recommendation page opens the mini PC question with a plain claim: “Most of the new miniPCs from makers such as Beelink and Minisforum work great with Linux,” adding in the same breath that Linux is not necessarily a big priority for those companies. Both halves are true. AMD’s Radeon integrated graphics and Intel’s iGPUs are driven by amdgpu and by Intel’s i915 and newer xe drivers, all living in the mainline kernel with firmware every distro ships, so a Ryzen or Core mini PC boots the Omarchy ISO with nothing to fetch and nothing to sign.
The project’s own code backs this up. Omarchy ships a directory of hardware quirks it applies at install time, and the list is mostly laptops: speaker tunings for the Dell XPS 14 and 16, touchpad and display fixes for specific ASUS models, Surface keyboards, Tuxedo backlights, T2-era Mac suspend, Broadcom Wi-Fi on old MacBooks. The burden is laptop-shaped. It is not zero for small boxes; the same directory carries a fix for the Motorcomm YT6801 2.5GbE Ethernet controller that shows up in budget mini PCs, and vendors do swap in white-label wireless modules: DHH’s July 2025 Beelink writeup noted that the Minisforum UM870 of that era “shipped with a MediaTek bluetooth/wifi card that doesn’t work with Linux!” When a mini PC fights Linux, the cause is usually the cheap radio or NIC the vendor swapped in rather than the silicon driving the desktop.
The newest AMD chips want the newest software. A Strix Halo class machine (Ryzen AI Max+ 395) is best paired with a current kernel and Mesa, which a rolling release like Omarchy provides by design, but it means the very newest silicon is the one place “AMD just works” needs a fresh ISO rather than a six-month-old one.
The boxes to buy
Integrated Radeon graphics on mainline drivers drives these picks, and the project’s author lands on the same shelf. His current list names three mini PCs (the Beelink EQ mini Wildcat at what he cites as under $500, the Beelink SER10, and the Framework Desktop), and his published HEY app test suite numbers include the Ryzen 8745HS class running his full HEY test suite in 2 minutes 28 seconds, which is the same silicon family as the box that anchored our original Omarchy article.
Beelink SER8
- +Ryzen 7 8845HS with Radeon 780M
- +32GB RAM configs
- +everything on mainline drivers
- -Last-generation chip now
- -weak Wi-Fi
Beelink SER9
- +Ryzen AI 9 HX 370
- +32GB LPDDR5X
- +strong iGPU
- +quiet under load
- -Premium price for a box without upgradeable RAM
GMKtec EVO-X2
- +Ryzen AI Max+ 395
- +up to 128GB unified memory
- +256GB/s memory bandwidth for local models
- -Wants a current kernel and Mesa; expensive
There is also direct head-to-head evidence for how these boxes behave once running. In an August test, The Linux IT Guy put Omarchy 4 and Windows 11 on two identical AMD mini PCs (Ryzen 7 PRO 6850H, 24GB) and measured the difference: Omarchy idled at 2.3GB of RAM against Windows’ 4.4 to 4.8GB, booted faster, ran quieter, and posted about ten more frames per second in No Man’s Sky, while Windows narrowly took the Speedometer browser benchmark. No driver problems appear anywhere in the video.
For the budget end, the Beelink EQR6 covers the same all-AMD story from about $329. The NVIDIA machine on DHH’s list, for contrast, is the ASUS Zephyrus G14 with its discrete GPU options; that pick makes sense for someone who wants a gaming laptop first and accepts the tradeoffs in the next section.
Laptops back to the early 2010s install clean, with model-specific quirks
The install-time quirk list is mostly laptops because that is where hardware diversity bites, and the recent field reports are strong. One owner reported on X that on a ThinkPad “everything works out of the box which I did not expect: fingerprint reader, wifi, camera, mic, sound, native display resolution, and even sleep mode.” Another owner’s experience across three ThinkPads draws the age line: an x220 and T470 run it “like a dream,” while a 2006-era x60 failed to boot in a past attempt for lack of graphics support. If you are repurposing rather than buying, business laptops back to the early 2010s are good candidates, and the machines that fail are the pre-2010 ones.
Omarchy 4.0.0 ships speaker tunings specific to those machines, and DHH’s April post on Panther Lake reports a 2026 XPS 14 with an IPS screen idling at 1.4 watts under Omarchy, which he projects as over 47 hours; his real-world number, from mixed use on a different 74-Wh machine, is around 16 hours. Both figures are his measurements, made with engineers Michael Dell and Intel assigned to the work, so treat them as what this pairing can achieve rather than what any laptop will do. An owner of an older XPS 9560 reported getting “the promised battery life” back under Omarchy after failing to see even two hours on Windows.
Omarchy installs open NVIDIA modules for Turing and newer, a legacy driver back to Maxwell
The Arch wiki’s Hyprland page states the position plainly: “Using an NVIDIA GPU with Hyprland is unsupported, but may work.” Omarchy does more for you here than a stock Arch install would. As of 4.0.0, its installer detects NVIDIA hardware, installs the open kernel modules for Turing-and-newer cards or the 580-series legacy driver for Maxwell through Volta, and writes the required modesetting configuration and initramfs module list. That is the setup the Hyprland NVIDIA documentation asks users to do by hand. For anything older than Maxwell, the installer prints a pointer to the Arch documentation and continues without those drivers; NVIDIA abandoned that hardware’s proprietary branch in 2024, and current Omarchy does not package it.
The setup works, but hybrid laptops stay rough. Hyprland’s own documentation warns that on hybrid laptops “NVIDIA doesn’t support important features for Multi-GPU which can result in a broken or slow setup,” and the workarounds are environment variables and BIOS mode switches. The field reports match: one owner found his old NVIDIA card “was not working smoothly” under Omarchy where the same Hyprland setup on EndeavourOS had been fine, though four days later he reported the same machine running fine alongside two other Omarchy installs, so early-days rough edges do get filed down. Omarchy is a rolling release, so the proprietary driver is rebuilt against every kernel update, and every rebuild is a chance for the graphics stack to need attention.
In an April build video, one builder assembled an all-AMD desktop to reclaim desk space and get back the hardware control he missed on a Mac mini, had Omarchy installed in under two minutes, edited the resulting video on the same machine, and said in closing that moving off his NVIDIA card “finally kills the driver headaches” on Linux. Accept NVIDIA only if CUDA or a specific GPU workload is the reason you are here, and budget for the upkeep. Do not put Omarchy on pre-Maxwell NVIDIA hardware at all.
Intel Macs, the Steam Deck, and virtual machines
Intel Macs are supported, a capability added in Omarchy 3, with two hard caveats from the manual: the install wipes the disk and must be the only operating system, and M-series Macs are not directly supported. The Broadcom Wi-Fi quirk that plagued older MacBooks got a specific fix in 4.0.0, though one 2013 MacBook Pro owner still reported the driver only coming up after sign-in rather than at boot.
The manual also documents two ways in that involve buying nothing: Omarchy runs on a Steam Deck, and it runs in virtual machines, with the manual covering VirtualBox, VMware, and a user-driven Parallels guide for a process the manual itself calls cumbersome. A VM will not tell you anything about suspend, battery, or GPU behavior, but it is a fair tour of the desktop itself, and for an M-series Mac owner the manual documents two routes: a virtual machine, or, on an M1 or M2, Asahi Alarm on bare metal with what it calls some effort.
What 4.0.1 just fixed, if you tried earlier and bounced
If you attempted an install in the week after launch and hit a wall, until the 4.0.1 release on August 25, the installer failed outright on machines with any input device named “synaptics”, which is a lot of laptops. The 4.0.1 release also fixed a clamshell bug that rescaled internal panels, and 4.0.0 itself fixed a case where a monitor powered off at boot stayed black until reboot. If your install failed in mid-August, judge the current ISO instead.
For where Omarchy fits in the wider Linux desktop push, our year of the Linux desktop piece covers where Omarchy fits, the Linux laptop buyer’s guide covers the new-hardware market beyond DHH’s picks, and if you are converting a Windows box, the keep-or-wipe decision is the place to start.
