Omarchy 4 on Apple Silicon, alongside macOS: Asahi Alarm + Omarchy, installed in one command, full-disk encryption included.
Already running Omarchy 3.x? This page is the fresh install — to upgrade in place, see docs/upgrade-to-quattro.md.
- A recent backup of macOS (Time Machine or similar).
- An Apple Silicon Mac (M1/M2 family). Verify compatibility: https://asahilinux.org/fedora/#device-support
- At least 50 GB free on the internal SSD (100 GB recommended).
- Internet access.
curl https://asahi-alarm.org/installer-bootstrap.sh | shChoose Asahi Alarm Minimal (BTRFS) and allocate at least 50 GB for Linux.
The plain Asahi Alarm Minimal (ext4) works too — the setup below converts
it — but the BTRFS image already has the right shape.
Log in as root (username: root, password: root) and connect first —
everything from here starts with a download:
nmtuiChoose Activate a connection and connect to a WiFi network. Optionally
Set a system hostname or set it during install below. Choose Quit when done
to return to the prompt.
If nmtui shows an error right after activating the connection, reboot and try
again.
Still as root:
curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/omarchy-mac/omarchy-mac/quattro/bin/omarchy-mac-setup | bashThere is nothing to prepare beyond the network: no pacman update, no locale setup, no user creation. The script installs what it needs, creates your user and sets up sudo itself. To read it before running it, or to pass options:
curl -LO https://raw.githubusercontent.com/omarchy-mac/omarchy-mac/quattro/bin/omarchy-mac-setup
bash omarchy-mac-setup --no-encrypt(--repo <owner/repo> installs from a fork the same way. quattro is the
repository's default branch and the script installs from it by default; it
checks the version it is about to install and stops rather than giving you
Omarchy 3 by accident.)
It asks whether to encrypt (yes by default), then for a hostname, username and
password, then carries the machine the rest of the way on its own — moving
/boot onto the EFI partition, encrypting the root, installing Omarchy —
rebooting between steps and resuming itself each time on tty1.
Expect about fifteen minutes, three reboots, and two questions along the way:
- A gum dialog offering to build packages with no known aarch64 build. Say
no.
obs-studioalone compiles for about three hours and then fails an architecture check. It defaults to no. - The disk passphrase, chosen at the console on the boot that does the encryption. That boot rewrites every block of the partition, printing cryptsetup's own progress as it goes; on an M2 Max it runs at about 1 GiB/s. It is safe to interrupt: the next boot resumes where it stopped.
Encrypted machines log straight into the desktop afterwards: the passphrase at boot is the authentication, and a second password immediately after it protects nothing the first one did not.
Other flags: --no-encrypt skips the encryption and the boot-layout move it
needs, --status reports where a machine has got to, --step <name> re-runs
one step, --abort stops the guided run without undoing anything, and
--keep-root-password leaves root's password as Asahi Alarm shipped it instead
of locking it once your user has sudo.
Every step the script drives can be run separately. The boot-layout move,
btrfs conversion, snapper snapshots and encryption are covered in
docs/btrfs.md. Once a regular user with sudo exists —
the minimal image ships without git or sudo, so as root first:
pacman -S --needed sudo git — installing Omarchy itself is:
git clone https://github.com/omarchy-mac/omarchy-mac.git ~/.local/share/omarchy
cd ~/.local/share/omarchy
cat version # 4.x — if this says 3.x you are on the wrong branch
bash install.shMind the branch. A plain clone gets quattro, the default branch and the
Omarchy 4 line. main still carries Omarchy 3.x, and its install.sh installs
Omarchy 3 without saying which generation it is putting on the machine — an
easy hour to lose. cat version is how you check before committing to it.
The install takes under ten minutes on a good connection — most of the default
set comes prebuilt from the aarch64 package repo rather than being compiled
here. A few packages have no ARM build at all and are reported at the end
rather than failing the install; where building one would take hours and still
fail, the installer asks before trying, and OMARCHY_TRY_UNAVAILABLE=1 bash install.sh forces the attempt.
Asahi Alarm ships openssh enabled — the images are built for headless boards — and Omarchy's install turns on a default-deny firewall that never opens port 22. Nothing is uninstalled; the machine simply stops answering, which looks exactly like sshd having been removed. Turn it back on deliberately:
omarchy-setup-security-sshdIt enables sshd, adds ufw limit 22/tcp, and offers to fetch your public keys
from https://github.com/<user>.keys. The same thing lives in the menu under
Setup → Security → SSH.
GRUB kept its modules and kernel on the root filesystem, and the root was
encrypted underneath it. See docs/btrfs.md — /boot has to be
the EFI partition before encrypting, which omarchy-system-boot-to-esp
arranges and omarchy-system-btrfs-migrate refuses to proceed without.
omarchy snapshot restore works on Apple Silicon. It offers snapper's
snapshots alongside @fresh — the system before Omarchy was installed — and
@factory, the installed system before it was yours, and says what you are
about to restore before doing anything. /boot is the EFI partition and sits
outside every snapshot; the tool warns when the restored root has no modules
for the running kernel.
Run bash fix-mirrors.sh from the repository root and retry.
There is no automatic uninstaller. Removal is done from macOS by deleting the
Linux partitions and growing the macOS container back over them. Follow the
Asahi Linux partitioning cheatsheet
exactly — it identifies which partitions are Asahi's and which are macOS's own,
and the wrong diskutil target can take macOS with it. If unsure, open an
issue.
Consider supporting the project:
- The Omarchy manual — manual/
- Btrfs snapshots and disk encryption — docs/btrfs.md
- Upgrading from 3.x to Quattro — docs/upgrade-to-quattro.md
- Asahi Linux (device support) — https://asahilinux.org/fedora/#device-support
- Asahi Alarm — https://asahi-alarm.org/
- Discord — https://discord.gg/KNQRk7dMzy
Thanks to Asahi Linux and Asahi Alarm for enabling Linux on Apple Silicon, and to DHH for creating Omarchy.
If this guide helped you, please star the repository and share feedback in issues or discussions. If you enjoy Omarchy Mac, please share your experience on Twitter/X by tagging @OmarchyMac.
Partial contributor list:
- tayowrld — https://github.com/tayowrld
- Owen Singh (itsOwen) — https://github.com/itsOwen
- Matthias Millhoff (embeatz) — https://github.com/embeatz
- George Dobreff — https://github.com/georgedobreff
- Luke Van — https://github.com/lukevanlukevan
- Wésley Guimarães — https://github.com/wesguima
- Vince Picone — https://github.com/vpicone
- Oleh Khomei — https://github.com/varyform
- Mike Deufel — https://github.com/MDeufel13
- Gwynspring — https://github.com/Gwynspring
- DinMon — https://github.com/DinMon
- Aslkhon — https://github.com/Aslkhon
- Marcelo Alcantara — https://github.com/maralcbr
- Scott Jones — https://github.com/scottjones