A house newsletter · weekly on Sundays · researched and written by the Kurzia AI
Sunday 8 November 2026 · Issue 8 · 3 min read
Omarchy 4.5 is here: floating workspaces, native Macs, 50 languages
Headline
omarchy.org · 4 days ago
Omarchy 4.5
Takeaway: over 740 pull requests
The first big feature release since Quattro arrived Wednesday: over 740 pull requests from more than 180 contributors in twelve weeks. It adds a traditional desktop mode next to the tiling default, native installs on M1/M2/M3/Neo MacBooks via a macOS app or one Homebrew line, a first ARM ISO with early NVIDIA DGX Spark and N1X support, and 50 languages with input methods for Japanese, Korean and Chinese. Already on Omarchy? Update > Omarchy.
This is the release the Mac and ARM work you've read here was building toward, and it changes how the desktop feels day to day: titlebars and a dock on floating workspaces, rebuilt notifications with keyboard control, and an agents panel tracking 23 agents. New installs also swap OBS and Kdenlive for Monologue and Omacut, and Superwhisper becomes the default dictation engine. The new F1 installer unpacks a prebuilt root image instead of fetching 940 packages one by one, roughly halving install times — a full install was clocked at 7 seconds on an AMD laptop.
Features & Workflow
Remove menu — The Super+Space menu's Remove → Heroic entry deletes ~/Games/Heroic, ~/.config/heroic and Proton prefixes behind a single password prompt — one user lost a full GOG library. The same pattern hits Steam, Minecraft and Lutris; only RetroArch's remover spares roms and BIOS. Until it's redesigned, hide the Remove tree via omarchy-menu.jsonc and uninstall with pacman.
Floating workspaces — A Mac-migrant asks two floating-mode changes: scroll the window under the pointer (follow_mouse = 2) and remember a floated window's size and position across workspace hops. Today a returning window lands centered at the default 64% × 68% box, at most 1100×760; the author offers to test fixes in workspace-modes.lua.
Themes & Ricing
Omarchy Pulse — a live wallpaper for 4.5 by Marco Porro: your desktop becomes a city driven by your own data, with CPU-load towers, real weather, network devices as cars, and AI agents flying as drones. It takes your current theme's colours and stays light: 20 fps on an empty desktop, 8 with windows open. Install the theme, then run extras/install-live to make it move. github.com
Shinsekai — an anime-aesthetic theme whose dynamic color engine retints borders, bar, launcher and browser to match whichever of its twelve 4K/8K wallpapers you pick. A shin CLI manages wallpapers with trash-undo, day/sunset/night auto-cycling, and music-reactive window borders driven by PipeWire. The most elaborate theme repo of the week, if you like your desktop loud. github.com
BlackTurq — deep black with turquoise accents, inspired by an Evo80 keyboard's colours, with matching files for Waybar, Hyprland, neovim and VS Code plus an optional turquoise particle-wave video background. github.com
Catppuccin Mocha — a darker take on the favourite palette for Omarchy Quattro, with deeper backgrounds and vibrant accents. Install with omarchy theme install, and pair it with the matching Plymouth unlock screen via omarchy plymouth set by theme catppuccin-mocha. A young repo, but the unlock screen alone is worth a look. github.com
DHH & Direction
Omarchy Core — grew by the two people taking Omarchy beyond x86. Marcelo Alcantara built the native Mac installer and now coordinates the sixteen-person Omarchy M team, already pushing toward M4, M5 and M6. Birk Skyum, upstream patches in Arch Linux ARM, libcamera, PipeWire, systemd and the kernel behind him, now coordinates the entire Snapdragon bring-up. omarchy.org
Ecosystem
Quiet-boot migration — 4.5's migration adds quiet: yes unconditionally, hiding the Limine menu on dual-boot machines where you'd set your own timeout — Windows-only boots after updating from 4.0.6. Set quiet: no in /boot/limine.conf; updates leave an existing quiet: line alone.
Per-monitor workspaces — Super+number now targets the focused monitor's local workspace slot, breaking old global bindings and cloned workspace widgets on multi-monitor setups. Workaround: rebind with the o.workspaces.focus helper and translate rules to the new block-based internal IDs (1-10, 11-20, 21-30 on three monitors).
Stable mirror lag — The stable mirror still serves brotli 1.2.0 and pre-fix Node.js builds for CVE-2026-111497 (9.2 Critical, remote code execution); omarchy-update reports nothing. Arch shipped the fixes on 2026-10-23; until the mirror syncs, install brotli 1.2.1-1 and your Node line via pacman -U from archive.archlinux.org.
OpenSSH 10.6p2 — Ships a workaround for an sshd password-auth bypass on Linux systems using musl without PAM; Arch's glibc builds are not exposed. The team will now release more often, after AI-assisted security reports kept matching independent rediscoveries of the same bugs.
Community & Discourse
OmaPicks — ranks Omarchy plugins by task category, picking a champion and runner-up from public adoption, community, maintenance and verification signals. Rankings publish every Monday, install availability updates daily, and the static site has no accounts, votes or cookies. Unaffiliated with Omarchy or 37signals — a useful filter for the plugin flood. github.com
Worth Trying
Cycle a workspace into floating mode. Windows get titlebars in your theme's colours, the dock shows pinned and running apps plus an app grid, and Super+M minimizes a window down to the dock. Keep your workhorse workspaces tiled and give one over to sprawl — it's also the best on-ramp for macOS friends you've been nudging toward Linux. omarchy.org