Arch + Hyprland with Omarchy on MacBooks

[malik-na]

Easy step-by-step guide to install Arch Linux on MacBook and then Omarchy

Disclaimer: This guide is intended for Apple Silicon MacBooks and has only been tested on the M1 variant released in 2020. It is advised that you follow the instructions in the manual very carefully lest you risk bricking the MacBook or getting stuck in a Boot Loop (I will provide a fix for that as well in the end).

Step 1:

Visit https://asahi-alarm.org/ and run the following script in your Terminal to start Asahi Alarm Installer:

curl https://asahi-alarm.org/installer-bootstrap.sh | sh

Once inside the Asahi Alarm Installer, please follow the on-screen instructions (very carefully). A few recommendations:

• Ideally, you should have at least 50 GB available on your SSD that you can dedicate to the Linux partition.
• Choose Asahi Arch Minimal from the list of OS options the installer provides.

You won't need to manually create partitions once you're inside Arch. Just run pacman -Syu, add a new user, and add it to sudo.

Step 2:

Log into the new user and install essential packages before installing Omarchy:

sudo pacman -S base-devel git wget gum

Now run the following script in the terminal:

wget -qO- https://omarchy.org/install | bash

Now here's when you'll see the first problem. Once you run the script, and enter your name and email as prompted, the installation will fail because some packages in Omarchy don't have an aarch64 version or at least the default installer can't find them immediately.

Don't panic! All is not lost, yet.

Step 3:

Open this file:

nvim ~/.local/share/omarchy/install.sh

You'll see this on the second line:

set -e

This line stops and terminates the installation as soon as any package fails to install. Once you comment it out, run the following command:

source ~/.local/share/omarchy/install.sh

The installation will continue and will skip the packages that aren't available and make it to the end. That's it — you have Arch + Hyprland on your MacBook M1 2020 running, pre-configured by Omarchy.

Now, of course, a few more configurations/tweaks will be required because Arch is not fully supported on aarch64(ARM64) yet.
But you will end up with a setup that is more than good enough for you to get started with Linux on your MacBook and unleash the true speed of Apple Silicon.

In case you end up in a Boot Loop, here's the solution (don't ask me how I know):

1. Don't panic!
2. And follow this guide here – https://support.apple.com/en-us/108900

New updates coming soon...
Expected fixes:

• Audio drivers
• GPU Acceleration

(Find me on X/Twitter here - https://x.com/tiredkebab )
Buy me a coffee - coff.ee/malik2015no

[ryanyogan]

This is a gem!

[malik-na]

Thanks, Ryan! I'm glad you liked it.

[ben-haas]

This got me to the finish line, thanks!

[malik-na]

Happy to help.
Cheers!

[BANG88]

Have an old Macbook pro intel. can we install arch in it.

[malik-na]

You certainly can, mate. But it's probably a different method that I haven't explored yet. I'll look into it and let you know.

[BANG88]

last night I give it a try and just found it is very easy to install but with a few issues:

1. can not find my wifi(maybe i am far away from the device,i use a android phone with usb network sharing ATM. this can be done via

• ip link check connection
• dhcpcd enpxxxx (connect to the network

2. run archinstall like normal
3. after reboot and then we can install omarchy

Issues:

1. Apple's keyboard not working when type the password for disk decryption ( I have to connect a logic keyboard via usb
2. Can't connect to Wifi when I login the system
3. Chromium display not correct ( Install firefox instead
4. ...

[malik-na]

Hi!
Great to hear you gave it a try.

For wifi, I would recommend using nmcli

nmcli device wifi connect <your SSID> password <your password>

[brink-lab]

I installed Omarchy on my old Macbook Pro from 2012. Runs without issues in its Intel i5 processor.

I had to install the wifi driver manually before I could use Network Manager to find and connect to WiFi. My laptop needs the broadcom-wl firmware. You can install it with "sudo pacman -S broadcom-wl". Then restart your pc to make sure the firmware is loaded and enabled.

[joske]

You are aware we've made a (minimal) Hyprland version? Then you won't need to manually create users, you won't forget to install the meta packages etc...

[joske]

yeah the asahi-desktop-meta package installs all packages needed for audio, bluetooth and GPU. The script should not attempt to install nvidia drivers as this is pointless on apple silicon. Not sure what you mean with 'install drivers manually'? You should not install any drivers, just the meta pacakge.

Forking the repo seems a good option, make the script detect the architecture and not install nvidia drivers on arm64 (and file a PR to the omarchy repo).

[joske]

If you manage to fix the script, we could conceivably have an 'Omarchy' option in the installer with pre-built config (if there is demand for this).

[mkurz]

Or we could even try to upstream the fixes need to the basecamp repo (and maybe still provide our own installer option)?

[joske]

btw, the omarchy script already checks if there is any nvidia hardware, so why would it try to install those drivers?

[joske]

Or we could even try to upstream the fixes need to the basecamp repo (and maybe still provide our own installer option)?

of course, like I said: file a PR with the fixes 👍

[joske]

I ran the script on my system and it didn't try to install nvidia drivers at all. It failed at the last script though, probably because some package is not available for aarch64.

[joske]

But I did notice the wrong mesa package gets installed because of a bug in our PKGBUILD - so you end up with no GPU acceleration. Fixing now.

[malik-na]

Win win situation, eh? 😅

[joske]

ok, fixed. First upgrade sudo pacman -Syu then install our mesa package again: sudo pacman -S asahi-alarm/mesa to get GPU accel back

[malik-na]

Got it, I'll try again.

[mikebronner]

Quick update: yesterday I was able to get Asahi ALArm and Omarchy installed, it was able to work through all the errors and complete the installation process with some caveats:

• no disk encryption because archinstall does not work in Asahi ALArm (and I'm not educated enough in linux yet to do it manually)
• no command/app bar in Omarchy, presumable to failed installations
• there may be other dysfunctional aspects, but I haven't been able to peruse the installation logs as there are 1000s of errors, and being able to discern failed packages from installation errors that fell back to other installation mechanisms is too tedious at the moment
• there are many packages which do not have arm versions

All of the above let me to decide to get a NUC pro and install on intel chips. Was really hoping to be able to reuse my old Apple hardware, but it is apparent that there are inherent problems with drivers on my old Mac mini. I'm hopeful that the M-chip driver issues will be able to be resolved for the future, but am no longer planning on a second life for my Apple hardware, and instead am setting up a dedicated machine to play around with in Linux and other things.

Sorry for rambling, a lot of that went beyond the troubleshooting, but wanted to provide some context. I will be following this thread, looking forward to when I can truly use my M1 machine natively on Omarchy.

:)

[mkurz]

• there are many packages which do not have arm versions

which ones you miss?

[mikebronner]

sorry I don't have concrete examples, they were just flying by so fast, I only glimpsed messages with something like "no arm version available" (I don't have the exact verbiage, sorry)

[mkurz]

Sometimes when you install a package from an AUR on Asahi ALARM (or ALARM in general) you get a warning that the package is not availabe "for your architecture" (aarch64 in our case). However, you can still continue the installation and quite often the software will work. (I am exclusively on Asahi ALARM since more than 3 years now on my MacBook M1 Pro and got more or less everything working in the end, but of course that depends on your needs)

[mikebronner]

I am exclusively on Asahi ALARM since more than 3 years now on my MacBook M1 Pro and got more or less everything working in the end, but of course that depends on your needs

That is very encouraging to hear! As I mentioned, what made it unusable for me was that the command bar (Super + Space) is not working. How did you get that to work?

Another issue with my setup is that I am using a Mac mini, and Asahi Linux does not support display output over the USB-C/Thunderbolt 4 port, so I was also looking for a way to setup xrdp, but was not able to progress because of the missing command bar / app launcher.

[mkurz]

what made it unusable for me was that the command bar (Super + Space) is not working. How did you get that to work?

For me it just works, never had any issues. I am using KDE Plasma however. I guess this is some problem with your compositor/window manager?

And yeah, currently only HDMI is working. For USB-C I think some people got things working with external adapters? Not sure, maybe you can search in https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/ if you find something about that or just ask there.

[felixele217]

Thanks for the setup, I am writing this from a Macbook M1 Air running Omarchy 🔥.

Unfortunately, after installing, the application launcher (I think it is called "walker") does not work, pressing SUPER+Space (SUPER=cmd) does not open it. Anyone having this issue and a fix?

[malik-na]

Go through this thread on discord- https://discord.com/channels/1390012484194275541/1397333443351810210

The dev who made walker was here with some workarounds.

[mikebronner]

thanks for the link, I'll check it out on my M1 mini

[DoppioJP]

If re-installing walker from scratch, instead of using walker-bin package did not help, there is always a workaround:

Check first if that will open the walker app launcher by running it in your terminal:

GSK_RENDERER=ngl walker

If the above works, then add to your ~/.config/hypr/bindings.conf remapping those not working menu keyboard shortcuts with GSK_RENDERER=ngl (unbind them first):
config/hypr/bindings.conf

# Menus
unbind = SUPER, SPACE
bindd = SUPER, SPACE, Launch apps, exec, GSK_RENDERER=ngl walker -p "Start…"

unbind = SUPER ALT, SPACE
bindd = SUPER ALT, SPACE, Omarchy menu, exec, GSK_RENDERER=ngl omarchy-menu

unbind = SUPER, ESCAPE
bindd = SUPER, ESCAPE, Power menu, exec, GSK_RENDERER=ngl omarchy-menu system

unbind = SUPER, K
bindd = SUPER, K, Show key bindings, exec, GSK_RENDERER=ngl omarchy-menu-keybindings

[DoppioJP]

Step 2:

Log into the new user and install essential packages before installing Omarchy:

sudo pacman -S base-devel git neovim wget

1. neovim not needed here, vim is there already. And if neovim is installed at this stage then lazyvim will not be installed by Omarchy, because the $OMARCHY_INSTALL/development/nvim.sh omits the whole script if a command nvim responds
2. gum is required, so the initial dialog box, that we agree not to be assisted in installing on not x86 architecture, could be displayed. Otherwise the install will fail at that point and anywhere where gum is used.

Suggestion:

sudo pacman -S base-devel git wget gum