try-omarchy

Omarchy is Basecamp's opinionated Arch Linux desktop, and trying it on a Mac used to mean building a VM yourself and fighting the graphics stack. Try Omarchy is a signed, notarized .dmg that does the work for you: an ARM64 Arch image with Omarchy preinstalled, a QEMU runtime on Apple's Hypervisor Framework, and a small Swift launcher, all packaged as one Mac app. MIT licensed.

It behaves like a Mac app rather than a VM console. Hardware-accelerated ARM64 virtualization with VirGL graphics, a resizable native window that pushes resolution and HiDPI scale changes into the guest automatically, two-way clipboard sharing for text and PNG images, Mac audio input and output selectable from inside Linux with live routing, and one optional shared folder that keeps its name across the boundary, so ~/Work on the Mac is ~/Work in Omarchy. Requirements are an Apple Silicon Mac on macOS 15 or newer and about 8GB free to start.

Everything is free and there is no paid version. Solo devs curious about Omarchy, or about a tiling Wayland desktop in general, get the cheapest possible way to find out without touching their Mac install. Teams: treat this as an evaluation sandbox, not a place to do production work.

Two catches. Video decoding is CPU-only right now, so playback drags at higher resolutions, and the maintainer says a better video path is still in development. And this is unofficial: not affiliated with Omarchy or Basecamp, pinned to a specific upstream revision, and you are trusting one maintainer's prebuilt image with accessibility and microphone permissions on your machine. Read what it asks for before you click allow, or build it from source.