This is the install I wish I had written down the first time I put Omarchy 4 Quattro on a machine. The channel videos show the desktop. Omarchy 4 Quattro is awesome is the tour, and Omarchy 4 Quattro vs Fedora 44 is the comparison. This page is the procedure that comes after you have already decided the disk is getting Quattro.

If you are still choosing, read Omarchy 4 Quattro vs Fedora 44 first. That post is the map of which homelab box should run which OS. I am not going to walk that decision again here, and I am not going to invent frame rates to decorate an install guide. Checksums, menu paths, and failure modes are the details that belong on this page.

I kept the upstream docs open while writing: the Quattro v4.0.0 release, the getting started manual, plus the chapters on updates, dual boot, and troubleshooting. If a later 4.x ISO replaces 4.0.0, trust the checksum printed next to the file you actually downloaded.

What Quattro is, in one sitting

Omarchy is Arch Linux with a finished Hyprland workstation on top. Quattro, version 4, is the release that retired the pile of separate bar and launcher tools. Waybar, Walker, Mako, SwayOSD, hyprlock, and the rest of that stack are gone. One Quickshell process draws the bar, the menu, notifications, the lock screen, and the panels. The installer can dual-boot when you leave it free space. New installs land on the stable update channel. The bootloader on the installed system is Limine. The live ISO still boots with GRUB, which only matters when the USB never shows a picture.

You are not assembling Hyprland from the Arch wiki on a Saturday. You are accepting a set of keybinds, then adjusting the few things that are wrong for your screen, your GPU, and your hands.

Before you touch the disk

Take a backup. A full-disk install wipes the drive you select. A free-space install is kinder, and it still encrypts the Omarchy partition by default. Either way, “I thought that partition was empty” is not a recovery plan.

Turn off Secure Boot, and turn off TPM if the firmware ties the two together. The Omarchy manual is blunt about this. Those switches exist for Windows and for the Linux distributions Microsoft signs. Leave them on and the ISO does not get a fair chance to install.

If Windows is staying on the machine, turn off BitLocker before you shrink the volume. Windows labels the toggle Device encryption, under Privacy and security. BitLocker covers the whole disk, and the free-space installer will not share a drive with it. In Disk Management, shrink the Windows volume and leave the freed space unallocated. Do not format that gap as NTFS so Linux can “see it.” Unallocated is what the installer is looking for. The Windows 11 comparison is the longer version of what to test before you wipe a BitLocker disk. This paragraph is only the install prerequisite.

Use a wired keyboard, or one with a 2.4 GHz dongle. Full-disk encryption asks for the passphrase before Bluetooth is alive. A Bluetooth keyboard cannot unlock the disk, the same way it cannot type a firmware password.

Download the ISO from omarchy.org. The image published with the v4.0.0 Quattro release is omarchy-4.0.0.iso. The SHA256 printed on that release is:

9224fab3720560f771969a99a499e5f7e0f8e2d6a0681d872d52f05fb5003da4

On Linux, check it before you flash anything:

sha256sum omarchy-4.0.0.iso

The line should match. If it does not, do not write that file to a stick. If the download page has moved on to a newer 4.x image, use the checksum published beside that newer file. A blog is a bad place to freeze an old hash and pretend it still describes today’s ISO.

Put the image on a USB stick with balenaEtcher (the manual’s pick for Mac and Windows) or caligula on Linux. dd works if you already know how to read lsblk and you refuse to guess the device node. I am not pasting a dd line here, because the interesting failure is “that was the internal drive.” If you later rebuild an ISO to add a Safe Graphics menu, the nomodeset post already covers dd and the xorriso flags. A stock Quattro USB does not need that post yet.

The installer

Boot the stick from the UEFI firmware menu. Answer the questions. Confirm them. Pick the drive.

You get two real choices.

Full disk takes the entire drive. It is the right pick for a spare SSD, a wiped laptop, or a machine that is allowed to forget its old OS. It will destroy what is on that disk. Read the confirmation.

Free space puts Omarchy in the unallocated region. That is the dual-boot path, next to Windows or another Linux install. After you select the disk, choose Free space install. When the install finishes, Limine is the default bootloader. From the new system, run limine-scan and follow the prompts if Windows Boot Manager did not show up on its own. Reboot once and confirm both entries actually start, not just that their names appear in the menu.

Encryption is the default, and it is the setting I leave on for any laptop that can leave the house. The manual documents two Ctrl+C escapes, and they do different jobs:

  • On the very first screen (keyboard layout), Ctrl+C offers to install for someone else. The system installs without your username. The new owner picks the keyboard, account, hostname, and timezone on first boot. On an encrypted disk, the password they choose becomes the encryption password.
  • On the disk-format confirmation, Ctrl+C switches to an install without encryption. I would only do that for a throwaway VM or a machine that never holds anything you would mind losing. A homelab laptop is not that machine.

Then wait. The Quattro installer is fast. The release notes talk about installs finishing in about a minute on quick hardware, and the getting-started manual says even an older computer should be done in a few minutes. I am not going to quote a stopwatch from my box as if it were yours. If the installer sits for half an hour, something else is wrong: a dying USB stick, a drive the firmware will not write, or a mirror the live session cannot reach. Reboot the ISO before you start repartitioning by hand.

First boot

Limine comes up. Pick the Linux entry. Type the encryption passphrase with that wired keyboard. You land in a Hyprland session that is already configured. That is the product. The first login is supposed to greet you with a toast that opens the keybindings. Click it. Super+Space is the Omarchy menu, and it is also the launcher. Learn that one chord before you install anything else.

If the live USB was a black screen and you never reached the installer, you are not in this section yet. Go to How to install the Omarchy ISO with nomodeset, add a Safe Graphics entry to the ISO, and come back. nomodeset is a live-session workaround. After the installed system boots, install the real GPU driver and take nomodeset back off. A daily driver left on a fallback framebuffer will look “up” and then fall over the first time you open a browser on a high-refresh panel or try Resolve.

If the installed system boots to black, that is Limine and the kernel command line on disk, not the ISO patch. Add nomodeset once to prove the GPU driver is the problem, then fix the driver and remove the flag. The nomodeset post says the same thing at more length. I am pointing at it so this guide does not grow a second copy of the xorriso procedure.

Wi-Fi on a fresh Quattro install is NetworkManager, with a panel on Super+Ctrl+W. The older iwd-and-impala habit from earlier Omarchy is not the path here. Ethernet is still the least dramatic way to fetch the first update.

The first update, and the one command to avoid

When the desktop is up and the network is actually up, run the update from the menu: Update > Omarchy. The same job from a terminal is:

omarchy update

A circle-arrow on the bar, to the right of the clock, means an update is waiting. Click it.

That command is doing more than pacman -Syu. Omarchy ships as pacman packages, then runs migrations and takes a snapshot with the package transaction. A raw pacman -Syu or yay -Syu skips that work, which is why the system stops a direct full upgrade and points you back at omarchy update. If you already know you want to bypass the guard for a single transaction, the error text tells you how. I do not bypass it in week one. Week one is when the snapshot earns its keep.

New installs start on the stable channel. Stable tracks official releases and an Arch mirror that runs behind upstream, so a bad combination can be caught before it is your problem. Edge tracks development builds and newer Arch packages. RC is the polish window before a major release. Dev is a git checkout, for people working on Omarchy itself. Switch with Update > Channel, or omarchy-channel-set if you live in the terminal. Stay on stable until you have rebooted a few times and you know how to pick a snapshot. Edge is a hobby for a second machine, not for the laptop that holds your SSH keys and has no spare seat.

Update > Firmware installs fwupd the first time and pulls BIOS, SSD, and dock firmware from the Linux Vendor Firmware Service. A lot of those updates apply only on the next reboot. Do firmware after a successful Omarchy update and a snapshot you could roll back to, not in the same breath as a channel change.

Already on Omarchy 3

Do not download the ISO just to chase Quattro if the current install is healthy and you want to keep it. The release notes are specific: Update > Omarchy, then Update > Omarchy to Quattro. Take a backup first. The upgrade path is stricter than a normal update because it has to keep the boot command line intact, and some machines hit a first boot that never mounted root. If that is you, the snapshot entry in Limine is the way back onto the old system. I would rather you read the upstream report than paste a kernel command line copied out of someone else’s broken image. Once a snapshot or a repaired entry actually reaches a desktop, run omarchy update again only from that working session.

Tweaks I make in the first week

These are the changes that stop the desktop feeling like a borrowed laptop. None of them are required to boot.

Scale. Omarchy assumes a 2x display. On a 1x screen, apps look huge because GDK_SCALE is 2. In ~/.config/hypr/monitors.lua, change local omarchy_gdk_scale = 2 to 1, then restart the apps that ignored the edit. There is also one text-size control, omarchy display text size, and a slider in the display panel on Super+Ctrl+D. That control moves the shell font, GTK text scale, and the terminal size together. Use the scale fix when everything is enormous. Use the text-size slider when the scale is right and the type is simply small.

Cursor. The default pointer is fine until a bright theme or a large panel hides it. I switch to Bibata Modern Classic. The procedure, including the GTK and Hyprland mismatches that make the theme look like it “did not apply,” is its own post. Do that after the first update, so you are not theming a session you are about to replace.

Gaps and the bar. Square corners are the default. Rounded corners are a few lines in ~/.config/hypr/looknfeel.lua (rounding = 8 under decoration). Gaps and borders toggle off with Super+Shift+Backspace, which I use on a 14-inch panel where the gaps are just missing pixels. The manual lists Super+Shift+Space as the bar toggle. The menu itself stays on Super+Space. If a config edit goes wrong, Update > Config restores individual files. omarchy reinstall resets packages and configs and will overwrite those tweaks. The troubleshooting page also writes that rescue as omarchy-reinstall. Treat either form as a rescue, not as a style button. If your build only has one of them, omarchy with no arguments lists what is actually installed.

Tray icons. Dropbox, 1Password, Steam, and similar apps hide behind the tray arrow. Right-click that arrow and pin the ones you want visible.

Caps Lock. It is the compose key, not caps. That is how the quick emoji and completion chords work. If you want caps behavior back, the troubleshooting manual shows a remap in ~/.config/hypr/input.lua. Their example sets kb_options = "compose:ralt", which moves compose to right Alt. I leave compose where it is. I do not type in all caps on purpose.

Apps, without repeating their posts

Week one is a browser, a terminal (Foot is the Quattro default), and proof that an update still reboots into a session. The heavy apps have their own writeups because the failure mode is the whole article:

I install Docker later, from the Omarchy install menu or from pacman, when a lab container needs a home on the desktop. A DNS appliance does not belong on this machine. That job is Fedora CoreOS and Quadlets.

When something breaks

Keep this list short and use it as a map.

The update will not boot. Reboot, and in Limine pick the snapshot from before the update. The snapshots chapter is the picture of that menu. If the snapshot is good, stay there until you know what the update changed. If config files are the damaged part, omarchy reinstall puts back the default packages and configs and returns you to the stable channel. It also removes your local edits to those defaults.

Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, audio, or the trackpad died after suspend. Before you reboot the whole box, open Update > Hardware and restart the one subsystem that failed. The speaker icon on the bar is where you pick the output device, for the case where sound is “fine” and the speakers are simply not selected. omarchy audio tuning status tells you whether a laptop speaker tuning is active. omarchy audio tuning off turns it off if the tuning sounds worse than the raw speakers.

The password worked, then suddenly it does not. You may be locked out after too many tries. Ctrl+Alt+F2 gets a text console. Log in as root and run:

faillock --reset --user YOUR_USER

Replace YOUR_USER with the account you created in the installer, then go back to the graphical session.

You need a person. #omarchy-help on the Omarchy Discord is the channel the manual points at. omarchy debug prints the support info they will ask for. The troubleshooting page also names omarchy-debug. If one of those is missing on your build, omarchy with no arguments lists the commands that exist.

You wanted a different Arch. Omarchy vs CachyOS is that argument. It does not belong in the middle of the install steps.

End of week one

A finished first week looks boring, which is the goal. The disk is encrypted, or you wrote down why it is not. Secure Boot stayed off on purpose. You ran omarchy update from the menu, rebooted, and still had a session. Scale matches the panel. You can find the cursor. You know which Limine entry is the snapshot. Windows, if it is still on the disk, boots from the limine-scan entry, and BitLocker is still off.

Then stop tinkering and use the machine for a few days. The comparison, the cursor, Resolve, and the black-screen ISO already have their own pages. Open those when you hit that specific problem, and leave the rest of the defaults alone until they actually bother you.

Related on the channel: Omarchy 4 Quattro is awesome and Omarchy 4 Quattro vs Fedora 44. Related on the site: Quattro vs Fedora 44, nomodeset ISO, Bibata cursor, Resolve, CachyOS, Windows 11.