In the last week Omarchy has quietly run my GPU at half power, left a 165Hz monitor sitting at 60, and been the direct cause of me deleting my own website. Genuinely rough introduction. Both of the first two got their own full autopsy, and the third one was entirely my fault but would not have happened if I hadn’t been reinstalling in the first place.

I’m still running it. I’m going to keep running it. Not out of stubbornness, and not because I’ve talked myself into pretending the problems weren’t real. Because for the first time in a long time my computer feels like mine instead of like a rental.

Thirty-nine seconds

I timed an install at thirty-nine seconds. Full desktop, Hyprland running, tiling, themed, done. Windows took over an hour on comparable hardware and spent a good chunk of that time asking me to sign into things and declining to take no for an answer.

That gap isn’t just a fun number to post. Fast installs change your relationship with the machine. When reinstalling costs you an hour of babysitting plus an evening of putting everything back, you don’t experiment. You get conservative. You leave broken things broken because fixing them might mean starting over, and starting over is a whole weekend.

When it costs thirty-nine seconds, “let me just wipe it and try that differently” stops being a threat and becomes a shrug. That single change quietly unlocks every other good thing here, because it makes being wrong cheap.

The extension surface is actually reachable

I wrote a plugin for this thing. An actual published one, a native system monitor that lives in the bar, reads telemetry straight off the kernel, and pulls every color it draws from the active theme.

I want to be clear about how unusual that is from where I’m standing, because I had zero programming experience not that long ago. On most desktops, “write your own panel widget” is a project you research for a week and then abandon. Here the plugin API was documented, the validator told me what I’d broken before anyone else had to, and installing it was one command. The distance between “I wish this existed” and “this exists and I’m using it” was days, not never.

That’s not the distro being magic. That’s a system that assumed from the start you might want to change it, versus systems built on the assumption you’d better not try.

Everything matches, because everything can

My desktop is a specific set of colors I picked. My terminal matches. My bar matches. My plugin matches, automatically, because it reads the theme rather than hardcoding anything. When I built this blog, the palette came out of my own desktop, and the banner came out of the same aesthetic.

That’s a stupid thing to care about. I care about it a lot. A machine that looks like something you chose rather than something you were assigned is a machine you actually want to sit down at, and I refuse to be embarrassed about that.

The part where it broke everything

Now the honest bit, because a post that only lists the good parts is an advert and I’m not writing one of those.

The GPU thing was genuinely bad. nvidia-powerd never gets enabled on install, so my RTX 5060 sat pinned at 50 watts instead of boosting to 100, silently, with no error and no warning, on a laptop that had been flawless for a year prior. I only found it because I got suspicious enough to check numbers instead of trusting vibes. That’s a real bug with a real cost, and it shipped.

The monitor thing was the same flavor: 165Hz panel running at 60 because the config takes whatever refresh rate the monitor advertises first rather than the highest one available. Two unrelated bugs stacked on top of each other, both invisible, both making the machine feel worse than it was in ways I couldn’t immediately articulate.

And then I reinstalled and lost my entire blog, because I’d been building it locally without a remote. Not Omarchy’s fault in any meaningful sense. But it happened because I was reinstalling, and I was reinstalling because the install is cheap, which is exactly the freedom I just spent three paragraphs praising. Cheap experiments cut both ways.

Why that’s not a contradiction

Here’s the thing though: I could actually fix all of it.

The GPU bug, I proved with a controlled experiment, masking and unmasking the daemon on two different distros until the number moved exactly where I predicted, then filed a bug report with reproduction steps clean enough that there was nothing left to argue about. The monitor bug was a config line. The lost blog got rebuilt from my own notes in fifteen minutes and now has three separate layers of backup that didn’t exist before, which is strictly better than what I had.

None of that is possible on a system that treats you as a consumer. When something’s broken on a sealed appliance, your options are wait, or accept it, or buy a different appliance. Here, every single problem was mine to dig into, understand, and either fix or report properly. Even the failures were interesting.

That’s what I actually mean by fun. Not that nothing goes wrong. Plenty goes wrong. It’s that when something does go wrong, I get to open it up and find out why, and I usually can, and sometimes the fix I send back helps someone else who would’ve hit the same wall.

I had forgotten computers could be like that. Somewhere between work machines I don’t control and phones I’m not allowed to open, I’d drifted into treating my own hardware as something that happens to me rather than something I do things with.

Thirty-nine seconds to install, an afternoon to write a plugin, a week to find a bug nobody else had pinned down. It broke my GPU and I like it anyway.