Code & Context

Eight Months on Omarchy. Mail and Calendar Are Still the Gap.

5 min read

TL;DR Omarchy has been my main machine for eight months, not a weekend experiment. The remaining pain is not the desktop. It is mail and calendar: Notion Calendar, and Gmail in the browser across a few accounts, because I still have not found Linux clients I trust for that.

I moved to Omarchy as my daily driver about eight months ago. Not a VM I open when I feel restless. The machine in front of me. This week the community got loud again: a long install video, DHH’s Omacom Foundation news, people asking whether they should wipe a Mac. I am not asking that question. I already did the move. What I can talk about is what still pinches after the novelty is gone.

The pinch is not Hyprland. It is not the keybindings. It is mail and calendar.

The week looked different from inside

I passed around DHH’s announcement that the Omacom Foundation is launching with eight million dollars in patron backing. That number is on the project’s own news page: a nonprofit to hold trademarks, fund infrastructure, and support the open-source work Omarchy sits on. 1 From the outside that reads as a launch. From eight months in, it reads as someone paying for the boring parts so the desktop I already use does not depend on one person’s evenings.

I also watched a long Omarchy video. Being in that community has been a pleasure. The screenshots are still sharp. The install stories are getting shorter. I am glad people are finding it. I am no longer the person they should ask “should I try the VM first?” I am the person who can say what the second month feels like, and the eighth.

The Mac-shaped artifacts of the week, try-omarchy and omarchy-mac, are useful for friends who still live on Apple Silicon. 2 3 They are not my setup. I am not dual-booting back into macOS to do the work. If you are still on a Mac and you want a sandbox, those links are the honest on-ramp. I am writing from the other side of that on-ramp.

What actually moved

I run engineering companies, so a desktop is not a hobby island. Browsers, editors, video calls, terminals, the boring glue of running a company: that all had to keep working. Omarchy did. Defaults instead of a ricing checklist. A community with taste, not a forum of competing dotfiles.

Linux on the desktop was “next year” for as long as I have been shipping software. What changed for me was not that Arch became easier. Someone opinionated wrapped Arch, Hyprland, and a coherent shell into a system I could sit down and use, and I sat down and used it. Eight months later I am not going back for the shell, the window manager, or the way the machine stays out of the way.

The money around the project matters less as a headline than as a constraint. A foundation that can pay for infrastructure and upstream maintainers is how a desktop stops being a personality project. I do not need Linux to win a culture war. I need it to still boot on a Monday when a client is waiting.

The remaining Mac-shaped hole

I do not miss macOS as a desktop. I miss two applications that were just there: mail and calendar.

I have not found a Linux email client I want to live in, especially across a few Gmail accounts. So I still open the browser, log into each account, and deal with mail as a website. It works. It is also the most 2012 part of an otherwise 2026 setup. Search, labels, and keyboard shortcuts I already know. Multiple profiles. No local client that has earned the right to hold that.

Calendar is the same shape of problem with a slightly better answer. I am using Notion Calendar. It is good enough that I stopped looking every week. It is not the integrated, boring calendar that used to sit in the macOS menu bar. It is a tool I chose because the native options on Linux have not convinced me yet.

That is the honest remaining pain. Not battery. Not HiDPI. Not “but how do you Zoom.” Mail in the browser. Calendar in Notion. If you are deciding whether to move, budget for that. The window manager will feel like a gift. Inbox and the next meeting will feel like a tab.

What I am not doing

I am not framing this as a near-miss migration. The Macs are not waiting in a closet for me to come to my senses. I am not going to debug a compositor instead of taking a call, because that fight is over. I also am not going to pretend web Gmail is a philosophy. It is a gap.

In the same restless week I claimed Colombia on warmap.lol as a personal experiment. That is still the correct scale for curiosity: a map, not the boot disk. The boot disk decision already happened.

What I am actually going to do

  1. Keep Omarchy as the daily driver. The experiment is over. This is the machine.
  2. Stay on Notion Calendar until a Linux calendar is clearly better, not merely more native. Native is not the goal. Showing up on time is.
  3. Keep mail in the Gmail web UI across accounts until a client handles multiple Gmail accounts without making me think. I will try one client at a time, not five in a weekend.
  4. Tell Mac-using friends to start with a VM or a dual boot, not with my setup. My setup assumes the move already stuck.
  5. Stay in the community. The pleasure of being there is real. Belonging is easier when you are not about to wipe a disk.

The Year of Linux on the Desktop is a joke with a long memory. What I have after eight months is smaller and more useful: a desktop I do not think about, and two tabs I still do.

References

1. David Heinemeier Hansson, “Omacom Foundation launches with $8 million,” Omarchy News, August 2026. https://omarchy.org/news/2026/08/omacom-foundation-launches-with-8-million

2. martiano, “try-omarchy: Run Omarchy on macOS without any setup,” GitHub. https://github.com/themartiano/try-omarchy

3. omarchy-mac, “Omarchy Mac — Dual Boot Installation for Apple Silicon,” GitHub. https://github.com/omarchy-mac/omarchy-mac