Omarchy on onelegdave.dev

It Broke My GPU and I Like It Anyway

OneLegDave — Thu, 10 Sep 2026 16:00:00 -0700

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.

Half a GPU

OneLegDave — Wed, 02 Sep 2026 14:00:00 -0700

I bought a laptop with an RTX 5060 in it a year ago. It has been, until recently, completely unremarkable — no weird crashes, no thermal bullshit, no gremlins. A full year of just fucking working. Then I put Omarchy on it, and in under a week I owned a laptop with half an RTX 5060 in it, and didn’t know.

Here’s the thing about a hobbled GPU: it doesn’t announce itself. It doesn’t throw an error. It just quietly does less work than it’s capable of, while you sit there thinking “huh, this feels a bit sluggish for the hardware” and blaming everything except the actual cause, because the actual cause is invisible unless you go looking for it with a multimeter’s worth of paranoia.

The vibe was off, fast

This is the part that annoys me most in hindsight: this is a machine with a full year of clean behavior on record. Same laptop, same silicon, same everything, running perfectly fine on a previous install for twelve straight months. Then a new distro goes on, and within days something feels off. The correct instinct there is obvious — suspect the thing you just changed, not the hardware that’s been flawless for a year. I did not have this instinct on day one. I had it by about day four, after several days of increasingly irritated vague dissatisfaction.

New distro, new install, everything looking gorgeous, performance feeling… fine. Not bad. Just fine. Games ran. Renders rendered. Nothing was on fire. Which is exactly the problem with a silent performance regression — there’s no crash to point at, no log line screaming for attention, just a persistent, low-grade sense that something’s leaving performance on the table and you can’t fucking prove it. So you sit there for days quietly resenting your own laptop like an idiot, forgetting it had been perfect for a year right up until you changed the one thing you changed less than a week ago.

So I did what any reasonable person does when they can’t prove a feeling: I went and got numbers.

nvidia-smi while gaming. Power draw sitting at a suspiciously round 50 watts, pinned there like a coward. Not “50 watts because the game is light on the GPU.” Fifty watts flat, under a load that should have been begging for more.

For context: this is a laptop 5060, and 50W is roughly its baseline TGP — the floor, not the ceiling. These chips are supposed to boost well above that under load. Sitting exactly at the floor, permanently, isn’t “conservative,” it’s “someone forgot to flip a fucking switch.”

Proving it wasn’t in my head

Here’s where it stopped being a vibe and became an actual investigation, because “the GPU feels capped” is not a bug report anyone can act on, including me.

I had the same physical laptop running CachyOS not long before this, for that entire clean year. Different distro, different config, identical silicon, a full year of prior history saying this hardware has zero problems. So I had something no bug report ever gets: a perfect A/B test on the same chip.

Booted CachyOS. Same game, same settings, same everything. nvidia-smi again.

85 to 93 watts, 78 to 80°C under load. Same chip. Same cooler. Same room temperature. Nearly double the power draw, just from being a different pile of software sitting on top of it.

So it wasn’t the silicon. It wasn’t age. It wasn’t thermal throttling. It wasn’t my imagination, my expectations, or a shit game engine. It was Omarchy specifically doing something — or rather, not doing something — that CachyOS was doing right, and that this exact laptop had apparently been quietly capable of for a year without complaint.

Finding the leash

The actual culprit, once I went hunting: nvidia-powerd, a background service Nvidia ships specifically to manage Dynamic Boost — the mechanism that lets the GPU actually claim higher power states under load instead of sitting at its conservative default. CachyOS enables it automatically on install. Omarchy just… doesn’t. No warning, no prompt, no “hey, you might want this.” It simply isn’t part of the install, so the GPU spends its entire life politely capped at whatever the silicon defaults to out of the box, and nobody bothers to tell you.

I didn’t want to believe a missing background daemon was really the whole fucking story, so I did the only thing that would actually settle it: I broke the working install on purpose. Masked nvidia-powerd on CachyOS, the one that had been running fine for a year.

Power draw dropped to exactly 50 watts. Same number, same ceiling, same everything as Omarchy.

Then I went back to Omarchy and forced the daemon on by hand.

100 watts. Unlocked, on command, on the exact install that had spent less than a week quietly ripping me off while I sat there blaming a laptop that had done nothing wrong for a year.

That’s as close to a controlled experiment as you get outside an actual lab: flip one service off, lose the performance. Flip it on, get it back. Do it in both directions, on both distros, and watch the number move exactly where you told it to. At that point it’s not a theory anymore, it’s just a fact you’ve now personally reproduced four times.

The compounding bug that made it so much worse

While I was in there, I found a second, completely unrelated problem stacked right on top, because apparently the universe wanted this diagnosis to be as fucking annoying as possible.

My external monitor does 165Hz. Omarchy had it running at 60Hz. Not because of the wattage nonsense — because its config picks whatever refresh rate the monitor advertises first in its own list, rather than the highest one available, and apparently this monitor’s firmware lists 60Hz before 165Hz for reasons known only to whoever wrote its EDID data at 2am on a Friday and never thought about it again.

So for a good chunk of that week I was troubleshooting “why does everything feel underpowered” while actually looking at two completely independent bugs at once — a genuinely underpowered GPU, and a display quietly running at over a third of its actual refresh rate. Neither one caused the other. Both made the machine feel like garbage, which was extra insulting given it had been flawless for a year before this install existed. Untangling “is this the wattage or is this the refresh rate” took longer than either fix did once I’d actually separated the two idiots living in the same house.

Filing the report

Once I had reproducible numbers in both directions, I wrote it up properly and filed it against Omarchy’s own tracker on GitHub. Exact steps to reproduce, exact wattage numbers, the masking test, all of it — not “this feels slow,” but “do X, get 50W, do Y, get 100W, here’s the log,” cross-linked to the existing discussion thread so nobody has to go hunting for context.

A bug report that says “performance seems bad” gets ignored, correctly, because it’s unfalsifiable and everyone who’s ever run a helpdesk has learned to tune it the fuck out. A bug report that says “here is a lever, here is what happens when you pull it, twice, in both directions” gets fixed, because there’s nothing left to argue with.

The actual takeaway

Modern hardware doesn’t fail loud anymore. It fails by quietly doing less than it’s capable of and daring you to notice, and it can do it in under a week flat if you let it. When a machine that’s been rock solid for a year suddenly feels off right after you changed exactly one thing, trust that math immediately. Don’t spend four days doubting a laptop that’s earned better than that.

Check anyway. Pull the lever. Watch the number move.

Whoopsie

OneLegDave — Tue, 01 Sep 2026 17:30:00 -0700

So I built this whole site the other day. Hugo, PaperMod, a custom stylesheet with colours I sampled straight out of the banner image, a hero banner that behaves itself when you shrink the window. Took hours. Committed it to git twice, felt very pleased with myself, went to bed.

Then I reinstalled my distro.

You already know how this ends.

The part where I find out

Fresh install, home directory looked fine. My notes vault was there. Pictures were there. Downloads, full of the usual crap, also there. My Projects folder was sitting right where I left it, containing exactly two things, both belonging to a different project entirely.

No blog.

I ran a find across the entire filesystem for the project directory, because denial is a process and I wanted to watch it return nothing before I’d accept it. It returned nothing. Beautiful. Very quick about it, too.

Then I remembered the migration snapshots on my server. Three of them, taken at various points when I’ve moved this laptop between distros like a man who cannot commit to anything. Surely one of those had it.

The most recent one, taken right before this reinstall, contained: Desktop, Documents, my shell config, my terminal config, and Pictures. No Projects. Fantastic. Really glad I saved my colour scheme.

The one before that did have a Projects folder. My heart did a thing. I opened it. Same two unrelated projects, no blog — because that snapshot predates the blog by weeks. So the site was born and died in the gap between two backups, which is a hell of a way to go.

“But you used git”

I did use git. Two clean commits, nice descriptive messages, branch named main like a well-adjusted adult who has his shit together.

Here’s the thing about a local git repo that nobody enjoys learning the hard way: the entire history lives in a .git folder inside the project directory. Delete the project, delete the history. Git isn’t a backup. Git is a very good undo button that lives in the same building as the thing it’s undoing. Push it somewhere else or it’s just a diary you keep in the glovebox of a car you’re about to set on fire.

Setting up a remote was literally on my todo list from that session. It was item two. I got to item zero.

The banner image went too, since that was sitting in Downloads, and Downloads is where files go to be deleted by a man doing a spring clean at midnight who is absolutely certain he doesn’t need any of this.

What actually protected me: fuck all

Let’s be honest about the failure. It wasn’t bad luck. My server has a genuinely decent backup setup — Restic running twice, once to an external drive and once offsite to Backblaze B2, 7 daily / 4 weekly / 12 monthly retention, integrity checks, failure notifications straight to my phone. It’s good. I’m proud of it. I’d show it to people at parties if I went to parties.

It backs up /srv/appdata, /srv/sync, /srv/backup, and my compose files. All of which live on the server.

The laptop was contributing precisely fuck all to that. Every “backup” of my laptop was me, by hand, going “hmm, I should probably copy some folders before I nuke this thing,” and then copying whichever folders I happened to think of in that moment. Which is exactly why I have a pristine copy of my terminal theme and no copy of my actual work.

Manual backups back up whatever you remembered. Not whatever mattered. Those are very different lists and you only find out how different at the worst possible moment.

The fix

The elegant bit is that I didn’t need any new tooling. Syncthing was already running on both machines, already talking to each other, already doing its job for other folders. So:

My Projects folder is now a synced Syncthing folder, landing at /srv/sync/projects on the server. That path is already inside both Restic jobs. So the moment a file hits Projects on the laptop, it replicates to the server, and the next Restic run sweeps it into the local repo and B2. Nothing to configure in the backup scripts. It just inherited the entire chain.

Staggered file versioning is on at both ends, because plain Syncthing is a mirror, not a backup — delete a file here and it will cheerfully, instantly delete it there, like an over-eager intern. Versioning means the server keeps the old copy in .stversions instead of enthusiastically helping me destroy my own work.

One gotcha, and it cost me a genuinely confusing five minutes: Syncthing on my server runs in Docker, with /srv/sync mounted as /var/syncthing/data inside the container. So when I typed the host path into the web UI, it threw mkdir /srv/sync: permission denied and refused to start the folder. It wasn’t a permissions problem at all — that path simply does not exist from inside the container. You have to give it the container path. Obvious in hindsight. Deeply fucking irritating at the time.

And finally, the thing I should have done first, before any of the rest of it: a bare git repo on the server, sitting inside a path Restic already backs up. git push now sends my history somewhere that isn’t this laptop, which is the entire point of a remote and something I will not be forgetting again.

Rebuilding

Here’s the one genuinely smart thing I did last session: at the end of it, I wrote the whole setup up properly. Every CSS variable with its hex value. The full config file. The exact ImageMagick command. The layout override trick and why it works. All of it in my notes vault, which — being a synced folder — survived without a scratch.

Rebuild took about fifteen minutes. Install Hugo, scaffold the site, add the theme submodule, paste three files in, done.

The thing that took hours the first time was never the typing. It was the working out — the hunting through theme files, the trial and error, the six attempts at centering a div. Working out doesn’t need to be redone if you wrote it down. Typing is cheap. Figuring it out again is not.

The only real casualty was the banner. I had to re-source it, and the copy I got back is 1855px wide instead of the original 3710px. Not the end of the world — I dropped the CSS max-width to match, so it isn’t being upscaled and going soft on big monitors. Half the resolution, none of the blur. You’d never know unless I told you, which I just did, because apparently I can’t help myself.

The lesson, such as it is

Backups you have to remember to run are not backups. They’re a hobby you do occasionally, and the gap between “when I last felt like it” and “right now” is precisely where your work goes to die.

Automate it or accept that you’re going to lose something eventually. There’s no third option where you’re just really diligent about it forever, no matter how much you’d like there to be. I thought I was that guy. I was not that guy.

Anyway. Site’s back. It’s now backed up three separate ways, which feels like wild overkill until you remember I’m the same idiot who deleted it in the first place.