Omarchy 4.0 “Quattro”: the desktop rebuilt from scratch on Quickshell

David Heinemeier Hansson (creator of Ruby on Rails and co-founder of 37signals/Basecamp) has announced the release of Omarchy 4.0.0 — an Arch-based Linux distribution built around the Hyprland compositor. The release is code-named “Quattro” and is billed as the most sweeping in the project's history.

A unified shell

The headline change is that the desktop has been rewritten from scratch on Quickshell. The bar, launcher, menus, notifications, on-screen hints, control panels, lock screen and polkit agent now all live inside a single, always-running process with a plugin architecture. The menagerie of separate tools — Waybar, Walker, Mako, SwayOSD, hyprlock, hypridle, swaybg and polkit-gnome — has been retired and replaced by a single shell: cohesive, fully themeable and scriptable via IPC.

Installing, resetting and handing off a machine

Omarchy's internals have moved out of git and into system packages, so that user tweaks are cleanly separated from the system. When there is free space available, the installer offers a dual-boot install. There is also a curious feature for anyone giving away or selling a computer: during installation the machine can be prepared for its new owner, which will come in handy for manufacturers and gift-givers alike. And fresh Quattro installs support a factory reset — so a device can be resold or given away with peace of mind, leaving none of your data behind.

Lighter and faster

The ISO image has slimmed down by more than a gigabyte and now weighs in at under 6 GB (about 5982 MB, to be precise). Installation itself is roughly 30% faster. All Hyprland configs have been ported to Lua for full compatibility with version 0.56.

As a reminder, Omarchy has been aimed at developers from the outset: the system ships out of the box with a toolkit for productive work — Neovim, Chromium, Alacritty, LibreOffice and more. The project is moving fast: the spring release 3.7.0 brought a “gaming” edition with Steam and launchers, while this update shifts the focus to rethinking the shell itself. The full list of changes is available in the release notes.

Source: DistroWatch