26 Sep
Alibaba, local models, and 4,154 plugins
Hey, this is Greg, bringing you the latest news about Omarchy. Later than usual, but I am in Austin, Texas because I attended Rails World.
The conference was a blast, I snapped a picture with DHH and had an amazing time.
The deadline for the song contest was Saturday last week but I have not seen the winners announcement yet, I will keep you guys posted about it once I hear about it.
Now et's move on to the Omarchy Core news.
Alibaba Cloud joins as a Founding Corporate Patron with $3 million
Alibaba Cloud pledged $1 million a year for three years. The same as DigitalOcean's backing, and becomes the third Founding Corporate Patron, including Meta Superintelligence Labs. The post puts total backing at about $21.7 million. On top of the financial contribution, Alibaba Cloud is helping to build Omarchy China: a local CDN, hosting, the website and meetups. So downloading, installing and updating will be ordinary if you live there. The same partnership puts Omarchy on the Qwen Book, Alibaba's upcoming agentic computer.
Slightly related that DHH is going to China, he will be at GOSIM and the Shenzhen Omarchy meetup on Oct 17, then at Alibaba in Hangzhou, and Beijing.
Qwen Book aims to create a native AI agent computer. Its core philosophy, "OS as Harness," simply put, involves deeply integrating models, the operating system, applications, cloud services, and hardware.
Premier sponsor of 0xSero's work on local AI
The Omacom Foundation is sponsoring 0xSero for three years, through his company Sybil Solutions. The goal is to build local models that fit the computer you have. Pick one, tune it, hand it to your agents, without a side project in between. His Local AI Registry is the pile of hardware recipes they want turn into defaults.
Omarchy MX Mac 4.0.4
Marcelo Alcantara shipped 4.0.4 for Apple Silicon, based on upstream 4.0.4. New installs get the Aurora kernel, a Limine boot menu with snapper snapshots, and optional LUKS encryption on first boot among other things.
The Mac fork is now feature-frozen
The convergence spec merged today. New Apple Silicon work goes into omacom/omarchy-mac, and the MX Mac fork takes security and boot fixes only. Aurora is the only kernel on that path, Limine the only bootloader, with a migration for machines already on the fork or on the older omarchy-mac line. DHH's read: a unified installer is not far off, and then they look at the rest of the M range.
PHP and Laravel install in about five seconds
Nuno Maduro's pull request was merged on the 18th, the day the last issue went out, after Taylor Otwell asked for PHP on Omarchy to be fast. PHP leaves the system package and joins Ruby, Node and Python on mise, using Nuno's static builds, the same ones Laravel Herd ships with. He timed a fresh install at 4.82 seconds, and a project can pin its own version. It is merged to quattro branch, so it ships with the next release. He recorded the setup by the way if you want to watch it.
On quattro this week
Omasnap replaces Tensaku as what omarchy screenshot actually runs. The same week, Taha, the artist in residence, published a plugin under the same name, for screenshots with padding, a background and annotations. The core one is the capture tool. Also merged, all of it on quattro with the next release: each theme remembers the wallpaper you picked for it, VS Code-family editors reload the theme when you switch, the terminal grew select-all and the usual clipboard shortcuts, and NVIDIA's VA-API and GLX variables are only forced when NVIDIA is driving the display.
Cua Driver brings a second cursor
Cua shipped a stable driver for Omarchy, built with DHH, Spencer Bull and Vaxry. The agent gets a synthetic cursor inside Hyprland, so it can work in a background window while your own pointer stays on the one in front of you. The Omarchy integration is on the Edge channel. Source is at cua.ai and trycua/cua.
The screensaver, rewritten in assembly
DHH had an agent port ttfx, the Omarchy screensaver engine, from Rust to x86-64 assembly. The pull request is still open. On AVX-512 machines the output matches the Rust engine byte for byte. The pull request's own table, on a Zen 5, puts the geometric mean at 4.1× and the fastest effect, print, at 16.7×. That is the "up to 17×" in his post. Machines without that CPU tier keep the Rust engine.
Now let's see what's new regarding Omarchy plugins. The registry catalog today lists 4,154 plugins, 4,118 of them community-built. Last week's issue had it just shy of 3,000.
Elsewhen ships as a default plugin
The world clock is packaged for stable, RC and edge, and quattro places it just before the clock on a fresh install.
Meeting Recorder
Jankees van Woezik app records the microphone and the computer audio as two tracks, then transcribes them on the machine with whisper.cpp. Nothing joins the call, and nothing is uploaded. If the meeting runs at least three minutes and you have a default coding agent, that agent writes the chapters, with no tools, text back only. It is in the edge package repo for now so this will likely go to the next major release.
disktree
Tobias Lütke's treemap for seeing what filled the disk, and removing it if you want. Rust and GPUI, so it syncs with the Omarchy system theme. It scans your home directory by default, draws each directory as a mosaic sized by the space that actually comes back, and deletes nothing until you review the list.
Omarchy iCloud Photos
Also fromJankees, we got an app for iCloud Photos access.
Pear Passwords
iCloud passwords in a native window. Sign in with an Apple Account, approve this computer once, then unlock with a fingerprint or a password.
iPhone Mirror
Daniel Lemky's mirror is an early alpha. He has tested USB and Wi-Fi on ARM64 Omarchy with an iPhone 13 running iOS 27.
Commit Wallpaper
A live commit heatmap of omacom/omarchy, or any public repo you point it at, drawn in the current theme, with cells that twinkle. Pick a different wallpaper and it steps aside.
Now let's see what's new regarding the themes.
27 new themes on the gallery
Andreas Bylund photographed another 27, which puts Omarchy Gallery at 402. Same screen, same windows, only the theme changes. From this batch: Neon Glow, twelve neon palettes that follow the wallpaper. Green Mosaic and Blue Mosaic, light themes, which are still uncommon. Dracula Reborn, the canonical Dracula colours in Base24, by OldJobobo, who also landed the per-theme wallpaper memory above. There is a Laravel theme in the batch, which is well timed.
Omarchy events are still popping up everywhere.
Omarchy Copenhagen, Monday
DHH is going to the first Copenhagen meetup on Monday 28 Sep, 16:00 to 18:00 at Union. The Luma page is full, 152 going, with a waitlist. It is community-run, not an Omacom event. Shenzhen on Oct 17 is still the other date he has marked, then Alibaba in Hangzhou and Beijing. At Rails World, 37signals handed out hundreds of Omarchy USB sticks. The calendar is on Luma.
Now let's see some miscellaneous Omarchy related stuff in the wild!
DHH was asked If Omarchy Is actually safe
Mischa van den Burg has been a critic of Omarchy. He sat down with DHH this week anyway. DHH said: there was plenty to critique, much of which is fixed, and he enjoyed the conversation.
Omarchy Stories 004, with Bjarne Øverli
Basti's latest guest was Bjarne Øverli from the core team. They talked about how he ended up here, what the work looks like, and CLI-AMP, a Winamp for the terminal. I missed to mention episode 003 in last week's issue. That one is Jankees van Woezik on plugins.
Upload your own Omarchy pet
The site now lets you create a pet, upload it, and install it from the command line. The plugin update is still in review.
That's it for the week!
If you have built or found something that belongs in here, submit it for the next issue.
Until next week!
Greg
