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Patrik Barsi
Patrik Barsi

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CS College Students Tries Real OS (Omarchy btw)

My Experience Switching to Omarchy

I hate nothing more than using Windows' built-in search functionality. It can't find anything and is slower than me finding memory bugs. I would rather learn combinatorics again than use Windows search.

And that is one of the reasons I wanted to try out a Linux distro. As a young, manipulative, and inexperienced college student, I chose the most hyped distro — Omarchy.


Installation

So, I built in another SSD in my laptop, downloaded the ISO, and installed Omarchy. I already had a Linux Mint install before with i3 and a really nice Neovim config, and I wiped the whole thing for this new OS.

First impressions:

WOW, this is so much better than i3 — the animations, the colors, everything looked perfect.


Realizations and Customizations

After a few days, I realized something was missing:

  • I don’t want to use Chromium — I want Firefox.
  • But I don’t want vanilla Firefox — I want custom Firefox.
  • I don’t want these Hyprland keybindings — I want i3-style keybindings.

Slowly, I realized I would need to change a lot of things, so I got to work.


Firefox Tweaks

Firstly, I riced my Firefox with FF Ultima.

Then I wanted to add custom keybindings to it (I like to use Ctrl + 1 to move right in my tabs and Ctrl + 2 to move left in my tabs) and realized it's not supported natively.

Everyone on the internet said I should upvote a post on Mozilla Connect and wait for the dev team to add the functionality. The post is more than 3 years old 😅.


Hyprland Keybindings

Then I changed my Hyprland keybindings.

SUPER + W closes windows — do you know what's close to SUPER + W? Ctrl + W.

Do you know what that means?

I want to close a browser tab and I accidentally close the whole window 😭.

Fortunately, Firefox allows reopening recently closed tabs with Ctrl + Shift + T.

I also realized there was no way (or at least I didn’t find any) to resize windows, so I added keybindings to resize active windows in any direction.


What’s Next

I still have a long way to go in my ricing journey.

Omarchy comes with LazyVim, but for some reason I don’t like it. So, I’ll probably make my own config with kickstart.nvim**.

Also, the default Waybar looks kinda empty. These two configs are my main focus for the future.


Cya.

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