Skip to content

Conversation

@yaroslavrick
Copy link

@yaroslavrick yaroslavrick commented Nov 30, 2025

Description:

Closes #3581

Context

Ghostty requires modern GPU acceleration (OpenGL/Vulkan) which is often unstable or missing on legacy hardware, specifically pre-GCN AMD GPUs using the radeon kernel driver. On these systems, Ghostty may crash immediately, rendering the system difficult to use post-install.

ghostty_bug.mp4

Changes

This PR implements an automatic detection and fallback mechanism:

Detection:

Added bin/omarchy-detect-legacy-gpu which checks for the presence of the radeon driver in /sys/class/drm. This script is designed to be extensible for other legacy drivers in the future.

Fallback:

Added install/config/hardware/legacy-gpu-terminal.sh which runs during installation. If legacy hardware is detected, it calls omarchy-install-terminal alacritty to set Alacritty as the default terminal.

Package:

Added alacritty to install/omarchy-base.packages to ensure the fallback terminal is always available.

Hook:

Wired up the new configuration script in install/config/all.sh

Verification

  • Verified that the fallback script correctly returns legacy driver name (radeon in this case):
screenshot-2025-11-30_17-14-12
  • Verified that the fallback script works with modern GPU (in Arch linux):

modern_gpu

@yaroslavrick
Copy link
Author

Because of I do not have not legacy laptop, it worth to run this script on modern machine to check:

for d in /sys/class/drm/card*/device/driver; do basename $(readlink -f $d); done

@@ -0,0 +1,3 @@
if omarchy-detect-legacy-gpu; then
Copy link
Member

Choose a reason for hiding this comment

The reason will be displayed to describe this comment to others. Learn more.

Let's just inline the check here. I don't think this has any general utility outside this use case at the moment.

Also, it should do a full swap of Ghostty for Alacritty. Which will involve setting it as the default terminal etc. Not just installing it.

Copy link
Author

Choose a reason for hiding this comment

The reason will be displayed to describe this comment to others. Learn more.

Thank you for the suggestion!

Fixed

@yaroslavrick yaroslavrick requested a review from dhh December 2, 2025 04:53
Sign up for free to join this conversation on GitHub. Already have an account? Sign in to comment

Labels

None yet

Projects

None yet

Development

Successfully merging this pull request may close these issues.

Default Ghostty Terminal Fails/Instantly Crashes on Legacy GPUs (e.g., ATI Radeon HD 5xxx)

2 participants