Omarchy 4.5 On An M2 Mac - Download A DMG, Click Install, Done In Five Minutes

Omarchy 4.5 now has an official Apple Silicon installer, and it is the simplest OS install I have ever done on a Mac. In this video I put it on a 16GB M2 Mac Mini from a DMG — no terminal, no weird key combos, no script you have to babysit — and it took about five minutes plus a 67-second first boot. Then we have a look around and talk about the one thing still standing between me and dropping macOS on Apple hardware completely.

WHY BOTHER

A lot of us invested heavily in Mac hardware — M1, M2, M3 — and it feels like every macOS update makes it slower. I just did the upgrade to the latest macOS on this M2 and it was an hour, 25 minutes to download and 30 to install, and you can feel the machine getting heavier afterwards. Put Linux on the same box and it flies. Omarchy has brought x86, Snapdragon and Apple Silicon under one umbrella, and the M-series team deserve a lot of credit — I did this install a while back when it was a terminal script and you had to pay attention to every step. This is a different world.

THE INSTALL

Go to the Omarchy site, Install, pick the ARM build. It downloads as a DMG. Drag it to Applications, launch it, let it check disk compatibility, then drag a slider to decide how much space to give Omarchy — I gave it half. It asks if you've backed up, takes your password, and does its thing in about four minutes. Then it tells you exactly what to do: shut down, hold the power button to get the boot picker (no more alt-key dance), choose Omarchy, sign in with your macOS account to authorise the volume, restart. Secure boot sorted, encrypted volume, straight into the normal Omarchy installer — keyboard, hostname, Wi-Fi — and first boot was one minute seven. Same as my desktop. On a Mac.

Then it's the Omarchy you know. Agent setup, system update for aarch64, drop-down terminal, themes, animations, the lot. A couple of things need compiling specifically for ARM but everything else is there. My M2 is a useful computer again and the interface is ridiculously quick next to what it was running last week.

THE LAST BARRIER — PRORES

For coders this is already done. For content creators there's one thing left: hardware video encoding. Macs can decode on Linux but not encode yet, and accelerated ProRes is the whole reason post-production bought into Apple. The M2 and M3 Max chips have the encoders — some M1s do — and once they're unlocked these machines become proper workhorses. Someone's started on the encoders; I've started on ProRes. When that's cracked, the M3 Max laptop here goes over too and there's no reason left to keep macOS on anything.

Apple announced the new M6s today. Great — more hardware for the Omarchy team to take apart and put a proper operating system on. If you've got an old M1 or M2 going slow, give it a new life. Links below.

ABOUT THIS CHANNEL

I make videos about Linux, Omarchy, creative tools, gaming, and self-hosting. Subscribe if that's your thing.
00:00 - Start
00:09 - INTRO
02:39 - DOWNLOAD
04:23 - INSTALL
12:01 - FIRST LAUNCH
15:26 - FINAL WORDS

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