Omarchy News And Something Special - Quattro On An M2 Mac

The Omarchy machine keeps rolling — a security team, Rangers to help new users, 100,000 downloads a week, and £10 million in the foundation pot now funding Quickshell and Hyprland development. I run through all the news, the plugin competition winners, and my new lava lamp plugin. Then the main event: installing Omarchy on an Apple M2 Mac. How usable is it? Can it game? Stick around — there's a twist.

THE NEWS ROUNDUP

There's now a proper security team with responsible disclosure — find a vulnerability, report it to them, get credited, don't splash it across Discord. The Omarchy Rangers have arrived on Discourse to help new users. Two more patrons joined, taking the foundation to ten backers and £10 million, now sponsoring the Quickshell developers — the shell that powers the whole of Quattro. There are official meetups worldwide on Luma (London, 24th September — I might see you there). And my favourite: Hankor and OldJoeBobo, the theme artists behind Lumen, Miasma, Solitude and more, are now official artists in residence — six months, funded, with a token account that never dries up. Thoroughly deserved.

PLUGIN COMPETITION WINNERS

First place: Radio Balance — a spinning globe where you pick any online radio station anywhere in the world. Genius and beautiful. Also placing: a Tamagotchi for your toolbar (hugely addictive, total productivity killer) and an AirPods plugin with full transparency and noise cancellation controls. Honourable mention to the GitHub notifier — which I now use daily, because with 70-80 repos I kept missing your issues. No excuses now.

And I built a lava lamp. OmaLava — proper physics, theme-aware colours, adjustable blob sizes and speed, multi-display support. It's on the store. I built it because I wanted something alive on my desktop. Maths equation visualisers coming next.

HEYMAIL CLI

37signals released the Heymail CLI — type "hey" in terminal and your agent can talk to your email. On Omarchy it installs with a bar widget too. Mine's wired up so Claude spots when someone raises a PR on my repos and can process it. If you're a content creator drowning in spam, the screener feature alone is worth it.

OMARCHY ON APPLE SILICON — THE MAIN EVENT

Omarchy now installs on M1 and M2 Macs via Asahi Linux, and the process is stupidly simple. One terminal command from macOS, a guided setup, reboot, connect Wi-Fi, run the omarchy-mac installer, and go for a walk. You come back to full Omarchy on Apple hardware — pulling the correct AArch64 packages on every update, completely seamless.

How does it hold up as a daily machine? Watch and see.

GAMING ON ARM — PROTON MEETS FEX

Here's the interesting layer. Proton translates the API calls; FEX — which Valve is funding for their ARM VR headsets — translates the hardware calls. My analogy: Proton is the plug adapter, FEX is the voltage converter. Stack them and x86 Windows games run on an ARM Mac under Linux.

It feels like the early days of Steam on Ubuntu — limited, glitchy, but working. I test Half Life 2 and Portal on camera and the results genuinely surprised me. Steam windows do strange Wayland things, GeForce Now crashed FEX, and DeckShift won't port yet. But Valve's money is behind this, and ARM is the future of chips.

THE CAVEATS

No Resolve, no OBS — anything not compiled for ARM won't run, so stick to the Omarchy repos and be careful with the AUR. Graphics translation is the weak spot. And once you're in, plan on staying — shrink your Mac partition and commit. But for coding, agents, and daily work? Genuinely usable workstation.

I'm on X now too — link below.

ABOUT THIS CHANNEL

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

00:00 - Start
00:09 - PREAMBLE
01:09 - NEWS
07:34 - PLUGINS
11:14 - HEY MAIL CLI
14:44 - M2
21:57 - GAMING
26:03 - FINAL THOUGHTS

Watch on YouTube →

← All videos