Trying Omarchy Linux on an Old Laptop
I had an old laptop sitting around doing nothing, so instead of letting it gather dust I decided to put Omarchy on it and see how it held up.
Omarchy is DHH’s opinionated Arch Linux + Hyprland setup — essentially Arch with all the tedious post-install decisions already made for you: a tiling window manager, a curated set of themes, and a sensible default toolset out of the box rather than a blank Arch install you have to build up from scratch yourself.
Putting it on hardware this old felt like a reasonable stress test. If a tiling, GPU-accelerated Wayland compositor is going to fall over anywhere, it’s on a laptop that’s long past its best. Install itself was painless — the installer does the Arch base install and drops you straight into a configured Hyprland desktop, no manual partitioning dance or fumbling through pacstrap required.
Once it was up, the laptop actually felt more usable than it had in years. Hyprland’s tiling means no wrestling with sluggish window compositing, and the reduced overhead compared to a heavier desktop environment goes a long way on older, weaker hardware. It’s not going to turn a decade-old machine into something snappy, but it strips away enough of the fat that what performance is left actually gets used.
Worth a try if you’ve got old hardware kicking around and fancy giving it a second life rather than a trip to the recycling centre.