Daemonarchy

Daemonarchy is the Omarchy desktop on FreeBSD: DHH's opinionated Hyprland desktop, ported to FreeBSD and installed the way the Omarchy ISO installs it on Arch. The name is a homage: Omarchy's -archy, ruled by the BSD daemon.

This repository builds a bootable FreeBSD 16.0-CURRENT image with the Daemonarchy installer: the same welcome screen, keyboard, account, hostname, and timezone questions as the Omarchy ISO, then an installation onto a whole disk, a selected GPT partition, or existing free space that boots into the desktop (partition selection is new in 1.1). Daemonarchy is not affiliated with Omarchy; the Omarchy software itself comes, unchanged apart from FreeBSD compatibility, from the x11-wm/omarchy port.

Each release is built from a FreeBSD 16.0-CURRENT snapshot. CURRENT moves daily, so an image is tied to the snapshot it was built from.

Product goals and adoption status are in PROJECT.md. The active work queue tracks stable tasks and evidence; the architecture maps Component contracts to the retained implementation.

CHANGELOG.md records the changes, publication state and migration limits for every release, including the initial installer snapshots.

The latest stable release is Daemonarchy 1.3.1 (x86-64, BIOS or UEFI), published October 25, 2026, on FreeBSD 16.0-CURRENT, OSVERSION 1600029. Version 1.2.0 was not published; 1.3.1 follows 1.1.1.

• ISO: 2,041,176,064 bytes, under 2 GiB.
• Checksum: ef5b1bec2189350e1ae194d251c35b959a39d7e4993b6a0f4deb7dcb30365735.
• The release also carries the signed Secure Boot bundle (daemonarchy-1.3.1-boot.txz and its .sig) and the public certificate in PEM and DER form. The package-signing key was rotated for 1.3.1; see the key rotation record.
• Read the 1.3.1 release notes and their hardware status and limits before installing. The MacBookPro16,1 passed pre-production checks by operator confirmation; an additional physical run of the final ISO was waived. The MSI Raider 18 HX still resets during early kernel startup.

Write it to a USB stick with dd if=daemonarchy-1.3.1-amd64.iso of=/dev/<usb-device> bs=1m (bs=1M on Linux). Boot with Secure Boot off, or follow the manual enrollment guide to enable verified boot. The installer needs a network connection. Whole-disk installation erases the selected disk; partition mode replaces only the explicitly selected partition.

New to Daemonarchy? Getting started walks through writing the stick, installing, and your first hour on the desktop: Wi-Fi, sound, Bluetooth, updates, and what FreeBSD adds. To build an image yourself or work on Daemonarchy, see HACKING.md.

Check the hardware quirks for known boot blockers and diagnostic notes, including the MSI Raider 18 HX AI A2XWIG early installer reset.

The current stable release is 1.3.1. Its base is the Daemonarchy FreeBSD source fork at d63d77f4 (FreeBSD CURRENT through a3d1d4e8, OSVERSION 1600029), with ports at b7857842. The release notes cover everything since 1.1.1, including MacBookPro16,1 support (Navi14 graphics, T2 keyboard and trackpad, and BCM4364 Wi-Fi with firmware acquired from Apple recovery media), remote-debugging approval that survives reboot, and the rotated package-signing key. CHANGELOG.md keeps the detailed history, and the previous release's 1.1.1 qualification record remains available.

Moving an older installation to the 1.3.1 application feed requires a coordinated base, kernel and driver upgrade; changing the package URL alone is insufficient. Physical GPU, firmware, radio and retained-OS qualification remains explicitly recorded rather than inferred from VM tests.

Daemonarchy is the Omarchy desktop with FreeBSD underneath, and it puts FreeBSD's strengths in the Omarchy menu under System > FreeBSD:

• Boot environments. The system lives on ZFS, and every Omarchy update first saves a boot environment: a bootable copy of the whole system. Roll back to any of them from the menu or the boot loader.
• Restore files. Hourly and daily ZFS snapshots of home directories, kept for a day and a week; open one in the file manager and copy back what you lost.
• Jails. Lightweight FreeBSD containers, each with its own FreeBSD system and packages.
• Virtual machines. Run Linux, Windows, or the BSDs with bhyve, FreeBSD's hypervisor.
• Trace the system. Live views of what the system is doing, through DTrace.
• Hack on Daemonarchy. Fetch the sources and run the desktop from your own checkout of Omarchy; see HACKING.md.

Omarchy's panels work on FreeBSD too. Wi-Fi runs through FreeBSD's wpa_supplicant, sound through PipeWire, and Bluetooth keyboards and mice through FreeBSD's own Bluetooth stack:

Install software from FreeBSD's package collection through OctoPkg (Install > Packages) or pkg. Chromium is installed by default. Linux-only applications and automatic agent downloads are withheld until their exact versions pass native Linuxulator qualification; see the application policy.

• A live FreeBSD system (from the snapshot) that logs root in on the first console and starts the installer.
• The installer: configurator asks the questions, install installs, dashboard shows its progress, launch ties them together.
• The snapshot's base.txz, kernel.txz and lib32.txz, which become the installed system. The 32-bit compatibility libraries also satisfy native package dependencies such as LLVM/Mesa.
• A package repository with what pkg.FreeBSD.org does not publish: the Omarchy ports from the release's ports fork (daemonarchy-ports b7857842 for 1.3.1), and the GPU and Wi-Fi kernel modules (drm-612-kmod, gpu-firmware-*-kmod, wifi-firmware-*-kmod) built for the snapshot kernel.

Other desktop dependencies are downloaded during installation. Compatible official packages come from pkg.FreeBSD.org; the release's versioned feed also supplies ordinary dependencies rebuilt for its newer ports/base selection. Network access is required. Keeping those downloads off the ISO keeps each release asset below GitHub's 2 GiB limit; a complete offline desktop payload would exceed that budget.

Application packages update with pkg upgrade (which Omarchy's update runs). This does not update the FreeBSD base/kernel or make kernel modules compatible with another snapshot. FreeBSD's packages come from pkg.FreeBSD.org. Daemonarchy's own packages (the Omarchy ports and the patched Quickshell) come from a signed repository published as the assets of the packages-16-amd64 release. The installer adds its key as /usr/local/etc/pkg/keys/daemonarchy.pub, so fixes reach you without a new ISO. The image's own packages stay on the disk as a fallback repository, Daemonarchy-ISO, since the GPU and Wi-Fi modules built for its kernel are only there.

A system installed from an image dated 2026-10-02 or earlier has only the on-disk repository. To move it to the online one, run as root:

mkdir -p /usr/local/etc/pkg/keys
fetch -o /usr/local/etc/pkg/keys/daemonarchy.pub https://raw.githubusercontent.com/jordanhubbard/daemonarchy/main/overlay/usr/local/share/daemonarchy-installer/daemonarchy.pub
cat >/usr/local/etc/pkg/repos/Daemonarchy.conf <<'EOF'
Daemonarchy: {
  url: "https://github.com/jordanhubbard/daemonarchy/releases/download/packages-16-amd64",
  signature_type: "pubkey",
  pubkey: "/usr/local/etc/pkg/keys/daemonarchy.pub",
  priority: 10,
  enabled: yes
}
Daemonarchy-ISO: {
  url: "file:///var/db/daemonarchy/repo",
  signature_type: "none",
  priority: 5,
  enabled: yes
}
EOF
pkg upgrade

1.3.1 is available with documented qualification gaps; 1.4.0 is in development. See the roadmap for remaining graphics, Bluetooth, enterprise Wi-Fi, installation and boot support, upstream ports work, and the checks required before release. The partition preview guide covers installing into an existing OS/data partition or creating a new one in free space.

The 1.1 installer retains installation output on the target disk and provide a console rescue menu when installation is interrupted or graphical login fails. It offers logs, a local shell, and the same console-approved remote debugging used by the installer. Recovery actions require the password selected during installation. In the 1.1.1 refresh, option 2 toggles pairing and unpairing, including removal of stale pairing state after a reset; see the rescue guide.

The 1.1 development installer includes Remote agent debug in its welcome menu. It displays an IP address and configurable SSH port (default 2222), then asks you to approve the agent's temporary key fingerprint. This lets an agent inspect or operate a machine booted from USB before installation. See the remote debug guide for the handoff and pairing steps.

overlay/usr/local/libexec/daemonarchy-installer/configurator keeps the Omarchy ISO configurator's screens and look, and sources Omarchy's own setup form (install/provisioning/setup-form.sh, taken from the omarchy package at build time) so the questions and validation are identical. Two steps are FreeBSD's own: a network step, since packages are downloaded during the install (wired networks are configured by DHCP at boot; otherwise it scans for Wi-Fi, joins the chosen network, and carries the setting over to the installed system), and the disk step: pick a disk, optionally encrypt it.

overlay/usr/local/libexec/daemonarchy-installer/install lays the disk out as an EFI system partition, swap, and a ZFS pool (GELI-encrypted with the user's password when asked) using bsdinstall's dataset layout, so ZFS boot environments take the place of Omarchy's Snapper snapshots. It extracts the base system, installs the FreeBSD loader with a Daemonarchy brand, and writes the system configuration that the x11-wm/omarchy port's install message asks for: D-Bus, seatd and SDDM enabled, the DRM driver for the detected Intel or AMD GPU, fdescfs and linprocfs mounts, the user in wheel, video, audio, and operator, and /etc/vconsole.conf for Omarchy's Hyprland keyboard layout. Then pkg installs daemonarchy, the meta-port for the whole desktop. As on Arch, an encrypted install logs straight into the desktop; otherwise SDDM asks for the password.

Like the Arch ISO, the installer runs without a keyboard when it finds its answers on a second drive labeled CIDATA (an MS-DOS, ISO 9660, or UFS volume). Put an daemonarchy-install.conf on it:

disk=nda0
encrypt_installation=false
keyboard=us
username=tester
password=changeme
full_name="Daemonarchy User"
email_address=user@example.com
hostname=daemonarchy
timezone=America/Los_Angeles

The machine powers off when the install finishes.

Before touching the disk, an unattended install runs the same network check as the interactive installer, without asking anything. The check probes every cabled port for DHCP and checks DNS with direct lookups and the clock with network time. It uses Wi-Fi only if no cable works. It honors these optional answers:

net_mode=static            # or dhcp (the default) or wifi
net_if=em0                 # the port to use; for wifi, the radio, for example iwlwifi0
net_addr=192.168.1.50/24   # static only
net_gw=192.168.1.1         # static only
net_dns=192.168.1.53       # tried first; it is used only if it answers
wifi_ssid="Home"           # joined when no cable works, or with net_mode=wifi
wifi_psk="password"
wifi_hidden=false

If no connection, DNS server or clock works, the install stops before any disk change. It says why and points to /tmp/daemonarchy-network/log. Enterprise Wi-Fi is joined from the interactive installer only.

The development installer offers /usr/ports and /usr/src separately, both off by default. These are shallow Git checkouts (depth 1), pinned to the release ports tree and kernel sources. They support fetching updates and making commits; fetch more history explicitly with git fetch --deepen=100 when needed. Set install_ports=true and/or install_src=true for unattended installation.

On a system installed with this development image, they can also be added later:

sudo daemonarchy-checkouts ports "$USER"
sudo daemonarchy-checkouts src "$USER"

Existing nonempty directories are preserved. The installer displays each option's download size and additional space allowance. See the packaging instructions for release pinning and validation details.

Daemonarchy is built from these repositories:

• jordanhubbard/daemonarchy (this one): the installer image, its build and test scripts, and these docs.
• jordanhubbard/daemonarchy-desktop: Daemonarchy's artwork and login theme, and the System > FreeBSD tools. Its tags are Daemonarchy's version numbers.
• jordanhubbard/omarchy-freebsd: the FreeBSD compatibility layer that lets Omarchy run unchanged.
• jordanhubbard/daemonarchy-src: the owned FreeBSD source fork the image's base system and kernel are built from. 1.3.1 uses d63d77f4; review work lands on its daemonarchy integration branch.
• jordanhubbard/daemonarchy-ports: the ports fork that packages all of it. 1.3.1 uses b7857842; review work lands on its daemonarchy integration branch. Releases through 1.1.1 used jordanhubbard/freebsd-ports (daemonarchy-1.1.1, and daemonarchy-1.1-package-baseline for the 1.1 candidate). Upstream submissions continue independently of Daemonarchy releases.

On a FreeBSD 16.0-CURRENT host with poudriere: build the ports, build the image with ./build-iso.sh, test it with ./test-bhyve.sh (or ./test-qemu.sh on a host without bhyve), and publish it. HACKING.md walks through each step, the faster loops for changing the installer, the ports, and the artwork, and the pitfalls met so far.

• jordanhubbard

• Whole-disk installs only; no dual boot.
• UEFI machines only, with Secure Boot turned off: the FreeBSD loader is not signed, and the installed disk has no BIOS boot code.
• The install needs a network connection (wired, or Wi-Fi with WPA-PSK or no password; no enterprise Wi-Fi). The desktop has FreeBSD Wi-Fi and Bluetooth panels; Bluetooth supports input devices only.
• NVIDIA GPUs get no driver.
• Virtual machines install and boot, but Hyprland needs a DRM driver, which FreeBSD VMs lack.

Daemonarchy is a union of two projects and claims to be neither. Omarchy is the desktop and FreeBSD is the operating system underneath; both are credited by name wherever the system describes what it is (the About screen reads "Omarchy on FreeBSD "). Daemonarchy's own identity — the wordmark, the horned "A", the wallpaper, and the login theme's logo — is original artwork that lives in the x11-wm/daemonarchy port, apart from Omarchy's files, which are installed as Omarchy ships them. No FreeBSD or Arch Linux logo is used.

Daemonarchy is not affiliated with or endorsed by Omarchy, the FreeBSD Project, or The FreeBSD Foundation. FreeBSD is a registered trademark of The FreeBSD Foundation. Omarchy is used under the MIT license.