Omarchy 3.6 - 30 Hours Battery Life On Linux? Panther Lake Changes Everything

Omarchy 3.6 is a laptop update. If you're running Omarchy on a desktop, there's nothing urgent here. If you're on a laptop — especially with Panther Lake or multi-monitor setups — this is a big one.

PANTHER LAKE BATTERY LIFE

The headline is power efficiency. They've backported kernel patches from kernel 7 to get Panther Lake working properly and the results are wild. DHH is showing 2.2 watts at idle with 19 hours of battery life, and a Dell XPS hitting 30 hours. That's Mac territory. Coming from a world where laptops needed plugging in every two and a half hours, this is a genuine shift for Linux laptops.

BATTERY TOOLTIP

DHH appears to have built a battery indicator that isn't released yet — you can see it in screenshots on the Git page. In the meantime, I've written one. Install it from no-signal.uk under battery tooltip, roll over the icon, and you get battery percentage, time remaining, and current wattage. It snapshots your battery capacity on first install — it won't dynamically update if your battery degrades over time because that was a whole extra layer I didn't want to build for something DHH will probably release himself. Same thing happened with my Nvidia installer — I wrote one, he released a better one, job done.

LID CLOSING AND MULTI-MONITOR

This was the one that drove me mad. On my Acer Nitro, closing the laptop lid with an external monitor attached was a nightmare — it would demand you log in on the laptop screen before the external display would work. 3.6 fixes this properly. Close the lid, it switches to the external display. Open it, both screens work. Super+Control+Delete toggles the laptop display on and off. Really slick.

ACER POWER PROFILES

My Acer Nitro and Predator laptops have a known issue where the power button gets stuck on balanced mode — 35 watts max. Try gaming on that. My script on no-signal.uk opens up the full power profile so you get proper performance. I've submitted a PR to get this into Omarchy itself. Hopefully it goes through — if not, the script is there.

OTHER CHANGES

Snapshot storage no longer grabs your entire home directory, so backups are much smaller. Intel QSV media driver support is in for hardware encoding in apps like Kdenlive. Audio normalization for screen recording is set to -14 LUFS which matches YouTube's standard. There are tweaks to the voice typing system and various other bits — check the Git changelog for the full list.

LAPTOP FOCUS

This release shows Omarchy is getting serious about laptops, particularly Intel. The desktop experience has been solid for a while — the laptop side was the weak link and 3.6 addresses it directly. Multi-monitor, lid behaviour, power management, battery life — all the friction points laptop users hit are being smoothed out.

Tested on all my machines including a cut of a commercial project straight after updating. No issues.

I make videos about Linux, Omarchy, gaming, creative tools, and self-hosting. Subscribe if that's your thing.