Distro-Hopping to Omarchy: Wayland, Hyprland, and a ThinkPad T430

ditikos — Thu, 27 Aug 2026 04:17:13 +0000

After watching NetworkChuck's videos on Omarchy, I decided it was time to wipe my distro-hopping lab notebook (a ThinkPad T430) and give it a spin.

Omarchy is a fairly new Arch Linux distribution gaining serious traction on DistroWatch and within content creator circles. I had installed Arch before—one vanilla version when I first got the laptop, and ArcoLinux a few years ago. The biggest drawback with both was exactly what everyone warns you about: due to rolling updates, you can never quite predict if packages will fail you (and it usually happens when you need them the most).

Installation & The USB Flashing Hurdle

The first thing that impressed me was the installer. It only needed five pieces of information to move forward: keyboard layout, system username/password, display name, an email for git configuration, and the installation drive.

For a modern PC (10th-gen+ Intel with NVMe drives), this takes about 2–3 minutes. For my aging ThinkPad, it took around 20–25 minutes, but the wait was painless.

Prior to that, however, I fought a quick battle just getting the ISO onto a thumb drive. BalenaEtcher on Windows 11 failed to create the proper bootable drive partitions. I had to reformat the drive—which is notoriously stubborn for Linux-partitioned USBs on Windows, though luckily there’s a recipe for that—before successfully writing the image using Rufus.

Thirty minutes later, I was greeted by an Omarchy logo, a lock icon, and a text box. The graphics card and keyboard were detected flawlessly out of the box. I punched in my password and dropped into the main screen.

Taking the Leap: Wayland and Hyprland

Omarchy uses Wayland, a more modern display server approach compared to Xorg. Part of its mystery lies right there. On my work and lab PCs, I usually stick with Xorg because I rely on applications that require it, or simply out of habit. My last distro was Kubuntu 25.10; it shipped with KDE on Wayland, but I had to downgrade it to Xorg because I couldn't get remote control tools (VNC, RDP) to behave.

For this hop, I decided to commit to Wayland and figure out how to make things work. To up the difficulty, I also decided to try my first tiling window manager: Hyprland.

After logging in, I was dropped into a beautiful, open workspace with a minimal top bar and a colorful background—looking almost exactly like the screenshots from the manual.

Networking, SSH, and a Rookie Mistake

First things first: setting up the network. A handy reminder popped up in the top right corner. After selecting my Wi-Fi SSID and entering the password, my new laptop was officially online.

Next on the agenda was running an sshd daemon so I could SSH into the homelab from my other machines. It took me a moment to remember that Arch uses the AUR and pacman (no .deb files here!). I used yay, found openssh, installed it... and then completely failed to log in from my Windows machine.

I spent some time consulting Gemini to troubleshoot, especially since my previous distro handled this flawlessly. In one of the responses, Gemini gently asked, "Why didn't you use the native GUI install?"

I felt like a total rookie reading that. Hitting Super + Space revealed a dedicated Setup -> Security -> SSHD menu that configures the daemon automatically. I also realized why my DIY terminal approach failed: I forgot to configure the firewall rules. I usually turn the firewall off entirely on my Debian-based distros, but this time, I decided to leave it on and force myself to practice better security habits.

Vantablack and ZX Spectrum Nostalgia

With the network running and remote login finally sorted, I realized the default theme was straining my eyes to the max. I explored the Super menu further and switched to a predominantly black-and-white theme called Vantablack.

It instantly reminded me of the old days with my ZX Spectrum, sitting in front of an 8-inch B&W TV at my grandparents' house, waiting hours for Ranarama to load. (I also tried to grab a screenshot of neofetch to celebrate, only to find out it’s been deprecated and I had to use fastfetch instead).

The Remote Desktop Wall & The LUKS Epiphany

One thing I genuinely missed from my KDE experience was seamless remote desktop login. My main PC has two screens, so I like allocating one entirely for remote lab work and programming. Because VNC is historically tricky on Wayland, I assumed xrdp was the protocol to use and started mindlessly installing packages.

I spent hours trying to make it work, ended up learning quite a bit, and ultimately reinstalled the distro by the end of the night.

The biggest technical takeaway from that struggle was realizing that the initial Omarchy lock screen actually hides two entirely different states:

Pre-Boot (LUKS Unlock): When you first reboot, this screen unlocks your LUKS disk encryption to boot the rest of the system. The network is not active here. If you try to SSH into the machine, it will fail because the network drivers and sshd haven't loaded yet.
Session Lock: Any other time you see that screen, the system is fully decrypted and just locked. The network is alive, and you can SSH in freely.

(Edit: As I was writing these lines, I experienced a network freeze, so it seems I still have a few bugs to iron out!)

What’s Next?

That’s it for now. My next adventure will be setting up some local services (Samba) and getting my programming languages and editors configured.

Until then, everything is fluid.