Scattered posts on X about cheap Chinese mini PCs grew into a movement through 2025, and by year’s end they had changed how many programmers think about their daily computing setup. The catalyst was an opinionated Arch Linux distribution called Omarchy, created by David Heinemeier Hansson of Ruby on Rails and Basecamp fame, and the sub-$500 mini PCs he convinced developers to try.
Through that year, as Apple pushed Mac Studio pricing further into professional territory and the base M4 Mac Mini sat at $599 for a mere 16GB of RAM, DHH started posting about machines that cost half as much and delivered comparable developer performance on work that mostly amounts to a terminal, a browser, and a code editor.
That was the story as it stood at the start of 2026. Since then Omarchy has replaced its entire desktop shell, added a coding-agent setting, acquired a nonprofit foundation with eight-figure backing, and collected a loud public argument about its security defaults. The current buying advice lives in our Omarchy 4 hardware guide; what follows here is the story that produced it.
Omarchy Is Arch Linux With the Decisions Already Made
DHH announced the 1.0 release in late June 2025, calling it “the smoothest, most pleasant operating system I’ve ever had under my fingers.”
DHH @dhhView on XOmarchy is ready! Hyprland + Arch have never been so easy. Everything comes preconfigured, preinstalled, and with six beautiful themes in the box. This is the smoothest, most pleasant operating system I’ve ever had under my fingers. https://omarchy.org
The philosophy behind Omarchy is unapologetically prescriptive. Rather than offering endless configuration options, it makes decisions for you: Hyprland for window management, Neovim for editing, Ghostty as the terminal, a curated set of keyboard shortcuts that prioritize muscle memory over discoverability.
That specific list is a 1.0 snapshot. Hyprland is still the window manager, but version 4 rebuilt everything drawn on top of it, and the one decision the project now hands back to the user is which coding agent to run.
DHH pushed the hardware alongside the distribution, and those recommendations consistently pointed toward budget mini PCs from Chinese manufacturers like Beelink.
The Beelink SER8 Became the $499 Reference Mini PC
At $499 for a configuration with 32GB of RAM and a 1TB NVMe drive, the SER8 was a stark contrast to Apple’s pricing. DHH documented his own setup extensively throughout the summer and fall.
Those Geekbench scores matter because they’re competitive with Apple’s M-series chips in the metrics that affect developer workflows. Compilation, container management, running test suites: these tasks parallelize well and benefit from the Ryzen 8745HS processor’s eight cores and sixteen threads. It was matching the Mac Mini at half the price with double the RAM, not a Mac Studio.
The comparison became more pointed as DHH shared direct benchmarks against Apple hardware. Running the HEY email service test suite, the gap between a $299 Beelink and an M4 Pro Mac was narrow.
DHH @dhhView on XI keep getting blown away by these mini PCs. Just got a $299 @Beelinkofficial EQR5 w/ 32GB RAM + 500GB NVMe. It ran the damn HEY test suite in 2m59s!! That’s only 10s slower than an M4 Pro!! Omarchy feels insanely snappy on it too. How is this possible?? https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09HCCVSJR
That EQR5 represented the budget end of DHH’s recommendations: a $299 machine with an AMD Ryzen 5825U, 32GB RAM, and a 500GB NVMe drive. For developers whose work consists primarily of text editing, git operations, and running test suites, the Beelink EQR5 delivered more than enough performance.
Other Developers Moved to the Same Mini PCs
By the autumn of 2025 the SER8 was showing up in posts from developers weighing it directly against an M4 Mac Mini.
Vic Vijayakumar @VicVijayakumarView on XGuess I’m going to get a Beelink SER8 instead of an M4 Mac Mini. The GTR9 specs are hella nice but also 3x the cost. Good enough to run Omarchy and a local LLM, @dhh?
The posts read as a practical call about a trade-off that had shifted, with the same tools running on cheaper hardware.
Patrick Grenning @pgrennView on XJust installed Omarchy on a new Beelink SER8 (3m 27s). Aiming to use this as my daily driver from my current Macbook M1, Intellij setup. I’m in the process of learning Neovim, Hyprland, and all the new hotkeys to transition over. Love the aesthetics of Omarchy and am a fan of @dhh work. Ruby on Rails was my first introduction to programming and I built OptionCharts with Rails.
Jason Zimdars, a designer at 37signals, described running Omarchy on his main work computer and three old laptops as fun. There’s something almost countercultural about abandoning premium hardware for a $300 box from Amazon, installing an opinionated Linux distribution, and finding the experience enjoyable.
Jason Zimdars @jasonzimdarsView on XOmarchy is, no doubt, the most fun I’ve had with computers since installing pre-release OS X betas on a Bondi Blue iMac. I’m running Omarchy on my main work computer and have installed it on 3 more old laptops I had collecting dust. Once you get used to the speed and clean UI, it’s hard to go back to macOS. Thank you to @dhh for making computers fun again! https://world.hey.com/dhh/a-petabyte-worth-of-omarchy-in-a-month-a1fc538e
ThePrimeagen’s verdict was four words.
Four Hardware Tiers, From the $299 EQR5 to the GTR9 Pro
DHH’s hardware recommendations evolved throughout 2025, and the top machine ended up costing eight times the entry one while running his HEY test suite in 1m23s instead of 2m59s.
At the entry level, the Beelink EQR5 at $299 provides everything a developer needs for basic work. The older Zen3 architecture in its Ryzen 5825U doesn’t match newer chips for raw performance, but for writing code, running tests, and managing containers, it’s more than capable. This is the “just try it” recommendation.
One step up, the Beelink SER8 puts a Ryzen 8745HS with Zen4 architecture, 32GB of RAM, and a 1TB NVMe drive at $499. That covers compilation, container management, and test suites for most developers. DHH says he uses Beelink machines in multiple locations.
The Beelink SER9 steps up to AMD’s HX370 processor for around $929. The HX370 is faster single-threaded and has a stronger integrated GPU. The extra cost makes sense for developers who do occasional creative work or want more integrated graphics performance. It’s also the choice for anyone frustrated with the SER8’s WiFi range, which DHH noted as the machine’s primary weakness before Beelink addressed it in a firmware update.
At the premium end, the Beelink GTR9 Pro and Framework Desktop represent different philosophies for developers who want maximum performance. The GTR9 Pro packs AMD’s Ryzen AI 9 395+ processor with support for up to 128GB of RAM, while Framework’s modular approach appeals to those who value repairability and long-term upgradeability.
DHH @dhhView on XThe AMD 395+ is such a beast! @Beelinkofficial was kind enough to send me their new GTR9 Pro with that chip and 128GB Unified RAM, and it’s just as amazing here as in the Framework Desktop. Unit is dead quiet too, even under massive load.
It’s my favorite chip to run Linux on at the moment, but it’s also pretty overkill for most people. It does 1m23s on my HEY test suite benchmark, which is fantastic, but an HX370 machine (SER9), at less than half the cost, will do it in 2m5s. And a 8745H (SER8) will do it in 2m28s at a quarter the cost.
Everyone talks about the local LLM performance, and it is cool that 128GB of unified memory can run huge models, but how much are you actually going to do that? The frontier models you can rent from OpenAI or Claude are still far ahead and much faster. So you really need a specific use-case for this to justify the expense.
Then again. The Beelink GTR9 Pro is $2,399 for 128GB/2TB. You’d have to spend nearly twice that for a Mac Studio with M4 Max 128GB/2TB (which runs the HEY Test suite benchmark in 2m22s). So the Beelink is still a bargain.
It is, however, $100 more than a similarly specced Framework Desktop. Although I don’t think that matters much at this price range. You’ll likely pick one or the other on aesthetics and availability.
Only nit I have is that the 10gbit ethernet in the GTR9 doesn’t run with 2.5gbit switches. You either get 1gbit or you need 10gbit all the way through. That’s a bit annoying, but you can solve it with a 10gbit switch in front.
So if you want the best small-form factor Linux machine at the moment, I’d strongly recommend the AMD 395+. If you like the aesthetics of the Beelink, or it’s the only option available near you, and the price doesn’t bother you, it’s a no-brainer buy.
Great job @Beelinkofficial 👌
Those four tiers are a 2025 snapshot, and the names on the list have turned over since. DHH’s current hardware page recommends three machines: the Beelink EQ mini Wildcat, which he cites at under $500 with 12GB of RAM and a 512GB NVMe; the Beelink SER10; and the Framework Desktop on the 395+.
Driving a 6K Display Over DisplayPort
Apple’s integrated ecosystem means MacBooks and Mac Minis work with Apple displays, while mini PC users need to think more carefully about their monitor choices.
DHH ran his Beelink SER9 with an Apple 6K XDR display. The machine’s HDMI 2.1 and USB-C with DisplayPort outputs handle high-resolution displays without issue, though running Apple’s Pro Display XDR at full resolution requires the DisplayPort connection.
Gaming, Video Work, and the Arch Learning Curve
Gaming remains weak. Integrated AMD graphics handle casual titles and retro gaming well, but anyone expecting to run modern AAA games at high settings will be disappointed. The mini PC and eGPU combination works but adds cost and complexity that defeats the simplicity argument. If gaming matters to your workflow, keep a dedicated machine or consider cloud gaming services.
Creative professionals working with video or 3D rendering will find mini PCs limiting. The RAM ceiling, typically 64GB to 128GB, restricts complex projects, and integrated graphics can’t match dedicated GPUs for render times. Audio production fares better, with USB audio interfaces providing professional-quality I/O, but video and 3D work remains desktop or Mac Studio territory.
Omarchy is opinionated, but it’s still Linux, and it’s still Arch Linux specifically. Things break occasionally. Updates sometimes require intervention. The community is helpful, but there’s no Apple Store to walk into when something goes wrong. For developers comfortable with the terminal and willing to learn Hyprland’s tiling model, this represents freedom. For those who want their computer to simply disappear into the background, macOS remains easier.
Omarchy 4 Replaced the Desktop Shell in August 2026
Omarchy shipped 4.0, called Quattro, on August 14, 2026, followed by a fix release, 4.0.1, on August 25. The 4.0.0 notes describe a desktop “reimagined in Quickshell,” with “the bar, launcher, menus, notifications, on-screen displays, control panels, lock screen, and polkit agent now all live inside a single long-running shell process with a plugin architecture.” Eight separate programs came out to make room, and the notes name every one: “Waybar, Walker, Mako, SwayOSD, hyprlock, hypridle, swaybg, and polkit-gnome are all gone.”
Every Hyprland config was converted to Lua “for full 0.56 compatibility,” and the network panel moved to NetworkManager “for greater compatibility.” The release also added a plugin system with a public directory at omarchyplugins.com, so third-party bar widgets install with omarchy plugin add. The project’s repository, which moved from Basecamp’s account to omacom/omarchy, carried a little over 38,000 stars on September 4, 2026.
Omarchy 4 Ships With No Coding Agent Selected
The headline features in 4.0.0 include “Add a configurable default coding agent with instant launch shortcuts and crash diagnosis.” The detailed entry spells out the menu: “pick Claude Code, Codex, OpenCode, Pi, Oh My Pi, Gemini, Grok, Copilot, or Crush under Setup > Defaults > Agent, then launch it with SUPER + SHIFT + CTRL + A or the a terminal alias.” The manual, checked on September 4, 2026, lists a longer roster than the release notes did and is explicit that nothing is chosen for you: “A fresh Omarchy will invite you to make this choice with a one-time notification.” Alongside it sits a crash watcher that hands a core dump to whichever agent you picked, and a bar widget that appears “the first time Omarchy finds AI coding usage on the machine.”
The permission posture tightened one release later. The 4.0.1 security list includes “Launch claude and codex agents with auto-review instead of full bypass,” which narrows what those agents can do unsupervised compared with what 4.0.0 shipped eleven days earlier. The manual is equally plain about the setting that goes the other way, describing the 15-minute passwordless sudo window it offers for long agent runs: “while it’s on, anything running as your user can do anything as root without being asked. That’s the whole point, and it’s also the whole risk.”
That combination split the audience. It’s FOSS covered the agent additions on August 13 and quoted the most visible refusal, from developer @IroncladDev.
IroncladDev @IroncladDevView on XIt’s been really cool to see the development of Omarchy, but unfortunately, I will not be updating to v4
Dan Romero read the same release as the point of it.
The Omacom Foundation Put Eight Figures Behind the Project
DHH announced the Omacom Foundation on August 21, 2026, a “nonprofit foundation” that “will hold the trademarks, fund the infrastructure, promote the work, and support the open-source projects and developers Omarchy depends on.” It opened with eight founding patrons contributing $1 million each: Tobi Lütke, Patrick Collison, Michael Dell, Jack Dorsey, Matthew Prince, Brendan Iribe, Jason Fried, and DHH himself. Three days later Drew Houston and Peter Steinberger joined and the running total reached $10 million. The launch post is a living document that has been edited upward since; on September 4, 2026 it read $14.95 million across twelve founding patrons plus corporate and token tiers, so any figure from this stretch needs its date attached.
The first thing the money bought was Hyprland’s lead developer. A companion announcement the same day describes an “exclusive sponsorship deal” that “is set for three years, with an option for another two,” taking over from 37signals, Butterfly, and Framework “from October 10.” Hyprland’s own site has published nothing about the arrangement, so at the time of writing this rests on the Omacom side of the deal alone.
The Security Argument Got Loud in the Same Month
Omarchy 4.0.1 is, in its own words, “mostly for a collection of security fixes that was validated and examined by the new Omarchy Security team.” That list runs to eleven entries, including “Stop an installed theme from running code,” “Stop USB device names from being executed as Hyprland Lua,” “Stop a video title from becoming the Download Video play command,” “Run notification click actions as safe argv,” “Stop the FIDO2 setup staging its authfile at a predictable /tmp path,” “Don’t put the user in the docker group; make it opt-in,” and “Guard plugin-add against git transport-helper URLs.” The teams page names a seven-person security group, and omarchy.org/security sets out a disclosure process asking reporters to “give us a reasonable opportunity to investigate and address the issue before publishing details.”
The counter-argument landed the same day. A post titled “Merchants of Insecurity”, dated August 25, 2026, opens with “Do NOT use Omarchy if you care about security of your machine even a little bit” and argues the problem is upstream of any patch: “We know we should not use AI-generated bash scripts for processing untrusted input, particularly with seemingly no review.” It reached the Hacker News front page on August 26 under the title “Omarchy development practices lead to predictable security issues,” where it stood at 297 points and 302 comments. Its author, posting as thehappyfellow, drew the line at scale rather than existence: “There’s a difference between a few small bugs because software is new and a half dozen eval(untrusted_input) in version 4.0.” Commenter Aurornis made the process version of the same point, that mainstream distributions have “software practices and release cycles designed to be cautious” while this one ships fast.
Reading the two lists against each other, the specific holes the critique names are the ones 4.0.1 closed: the video-title injection and the notification-action execution are both in the fix list, by pull request number. The fixes do not address how those holes got shipped, which is the argument still open. A separate and older complaint set, from a Framework community thread opened in November 2025, has partly gone stale: it faulted a firewall that was configured but not enabled and SSH left open by default, while the current security manual states that the firewall “is enabled by default,” that “even ssh is off until you turn it on,” and that full-disk encryption is mandatory. Framework still lists Omarchy on its Linux page today, in the hardware-seeding tier rather than as an official or community-supported option.
This is the public record on both sides, read against the release notes. Starry Hope audited nothing here.
Upgrading From 3.x Broke Wi-Fi, Keybindings, and mise Shims
The 4.0.0 notes say you upgrade “by first Update > Omarchy, then Update > Omarchy to Quattro,” and there is an ISO for a clean install. What that route cost is legible in the 4.0.1 changelog, which is where the migration complaints were answered. The fix list names “Keep mise wrappers from writing to stdout,” “Fix passwordless OWE Wi-Fi handling,” “Stop a psmouse quirk from failing every install,” “Repair foot.ini configs holding a literal \n[text-bindings] line,” and “Leave an auto-scaled internal panel alone in clamshell recovery.” Read against the 4.0.0 line item moving the network panel to NetworkManager, the Wi-Fi entries are the shape you would expect from a network stack swapped underneath a running install.
Custom keybindings are a different category, and the fix list does not cover them because there is nothing to fix. The Lua conversion is the design, so shortcuts written against the old .conf files stop being read and have to be rewritten rather than repaired.
If an upgrade does go wrong, the manual’s troubleshooting page gives three steps and no more: “First try to rollback your system the version before your recent update. If that doesn’t work, use omarchy-debug to share with your problem on #omarchy-help in the Discord. And if all that fails, you can reinstall the defaults configs and packages using omarchy-reinstall.” There is no documented recovery for the iwd or keybinding cases specifically. The practical read for anyone still on 3.x is that the fast-follow release is the one to upgrade into, and that a clean 4.0.1 install from the ISO remains the shorter path on a machine you can afford to wipe.
The Apple Premium No Longer Looks Justified for Many Developer Workflows
Linux has worked on the desktop for years. Budget mini PCs now cover the compilation, container management, and test-suite work that developers buy Macs for.
A $500 mini PC with 32GB of RAM running a thoughtfully designed Linux distribution provides a developer experience competitive with machines costing twice as much. For companies outfitting engineering teams, ten developers equipped with SER8s and quality monitors cost less than five developers on Mac Studios.
The $599 M4 Mac Mini this article opened with went to $799 in May 2026, and on August 25, 2026 Apple replaced it outright with an M6 model starting at $899 for 16GB and 256GB, alongside an M5 Pro configuration at $1,699, both shipping September 22. Mac Studio starts at $2,499 for M5 Max. So the base Mac Mini costs $300 more than it did when DHH started posting, with the same 16GB of memory, while the mini PC shelf has stayed roughly where it was.
Whether this represents a lasting shift or a moment of enthusiasm that fades as people drift back to familiar ecosystems remains to be seen. For now a $299 Beelink can run a test suite within ten seconds of an M4 Pro Mac.
For those curious to try the setup themselves, the path is still straightforward: grab a Beelink SER8 or SER9, download the Omarchy ISO from omarchy.org, and give it a weekend. Take the 4.0.1 ISO rather than an older one, and if you want the current chip-by-chip picture before you buy, our Omarchy 4 hardware guide covers which graphics land on the clean side of the line. The worst case is you’ve spent a few hundred dollars on a perfectly capable home server. The best case is you’ve found a new way of working that makes computing fun again.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the downside of a mini PC?
Gaming and heavy creative work. Integrated AMD graphics stay in casual and retro territory, and video or 3D rendering hits both that graphics limit and a RAM ceiling of 64GB to 128GB. Omarchy is Arch Linux underneath too, so updates sometimes need intervention and there is no Apple Store to walk into when something breaks.
Can you trust Beelink?
DHH runs Beelink machines in multiple locations and calls them “fantastic machines.” The one weakness he flagged was the SER8’s WiFi range, which Beelink addressed in a firmware update.
Which mini PC is best for Linux?
AMD’s Ryzen AI 9 395+ is the chip DHH names as his favorite to run Linux on, and it ships in the Beelink GTR9 Pro and the Framework Desktop. He calls it overkill for most people in the same post, since the $499 SER8 runs his HEY test suite in 2m28s against the 395+‘s 1m23s.
Are mini PCs good for gaming?
No. Integrated AMD graphics handle casual and retro titles, not modern AAA games at high settings, and bolting on an external GPU adds cost and complexity that defeats the point of a small cheap box.
What changed in Omarchy 4?
The desktop shell. Version 4, called Quattro, moved the bar, launcher, menus, notifications, on-screen displays, control panels, lock screen and polkit agent into a single Quickshell process, which removed Waybar, Walker, Mako, SwayOSD, hyprlock, hypridle, swaybg and polkit-gnome. Hyprland stayed, but its configs were converted to Lua. The release also added a plugin system and a coding-agent setting that ships with nothing selected.
Should I upgrade from Omarchy 3 to 4?
Upgrade into 4.0.1 rather than 4.0.0. The in-place path is Update > Omarchy followed by Update > Omarchy to Quattro, and the 4.0.1 release names fixes for several of the reported migration failures, including mise wrappers, passwordless OWE Wi-Fi and an install-blocking psmouse quirk. Custom keybindings are the exception: the Lua conversion is the design, so shortcuts written against the old config files have to be rewritten.
