Not a new laptop, a new OS

Beautiful, Modern & Opinionated Linux by DHH

Installing Omarchy 4.0 on a MacBook Pro

Omarchy only supports being the only OS installed at the moment.

• During the installation, the drive will be wiped, and macOS will no longer be bootable.
• You can still restore it later via Internet Recovery if you’d like.
• The Touch Bar will work on machines with the T2 chip, 2017 – 2020.

For the sake of this part, we’ll assume you’ve already reviewed Getting Started and have your USB drive ready. If you don’t go ahead and do that now.

Why did I switch from macOS?

Because the upcoming macOS 27 is incompatible with Intel CPU MacBooks. And the price of a new one is € 3 750. — Thanks, AI, for messing up the memory prices.

Disable Secure Boot

It is necessary to disable Apple’s Secure Boot to boot from a bootable USB as well as the OS. To disable it, perform the following:

1. Turn off your Mac
2. Turn it on and immediately press and hold Command+R
   until you see the loading screen appear
3. Select your user and enter your password if prompted
4. Once in the recovery screen,
   Choose Utilities -> Startup Security utility from the Menubar
5. Enter your password when prompted to authenticate
6. From the Secure Boot options, select No Security
7. From the External Boot options
   Select Allow booting from external or removable media

Start the Installation

1. Insert the USB drive
2. Restart your Mac and immediately press and hold Option
   until you see a screen of boot devices
3. Select the orange EFI Boot device
4. Proceed with the install as normal

The installer detects Mac hardware and applies the needed fixes automatically: Broadcom Wi-Fi drivers and firmware, the SPI keyboard driver on the MacBook models that need it, and an NVMe suspend fix for those same models.

Set up your system

All depend on your choices and preferences, as always in Linux. As I'm a visual person (abstract painter), I spent time choosing visuals like color schemes and fonts and terminal layouts. And of course many apps need to be initialized and personalized.

As the system comes with a lot of stuff, you probably want to delete some of the apps selected by the developer. I did skip some and add some.

My MacBook Pro

MacBook Pro, Technical Specifications link

Display

Retina display, 13.3-inch (diagonal) LED-backlit display with IPS technology; 2560-by-1600 native resolution at 227 pixels per inch with support for millions of colors

• Supported scaled resolutions: 1680 × 1050, 1440 × 900, 1024 × 640
• Setup for 3 screens, 2 on top and the laptop screen below

Expansion

Four Thunderbolt 3 (USB-C) ports with support for charging, DisplayPort, Thunderbolt (up to 40 Gb/s), and USB 3.1 Gen 2 (up to 10 Gb/s)

Added stuff

I added or had to use the following to get my system setup:

• inxi -Gx – To get the display info, part of Omarchy, inxi manual
• wlr-randr – To show full info on the display
• hypermon – TUI for setting up the displays and workspaces
• hyprdynamicmonitors – TUI/GUI for setting up the displays and workspaces
• Added some alias to help run my workflow

Final thoughts

The macOS was great, and everything worked, and I had no issues. But, as it is not possible to upgrade to the newer version coming later this year, I decided to switch now.

Is Omarchy the perfect system? No. A lot of stuff had to be taken out and some taken on, and there are still some issues with the Mac keyboard. Using a normal keyboard is ok, and I have one, but only one.

I have been using Arch Linux for years, and I see this as a quick fix compared to a normal install. But, for me, it's just a tool accelerating the process from a week to a day.

Would a new MacBook be better? A MacBook Air? Yes, but it's too expensive. For now.

References

Omarchy 4.0 ^[1] Manual ^[2] De Bloathing ^[3] Addons ^[4] About IPs ^[5]