Support installing Omarchy as an overlay/update on existing Arch Linux installation without wiping partitions

[mulhamfetna]

Hello,

I really appreciate the work on Omarchy as a beautiful, modern, and opinionated Linux distribution based on Arch. I currently have a dual-boot system with Arch Linux already installed and my disk partitioned and mounted according to my needs.

My request is to add support or provide a streamlined method to install Omarchy on top of an existing Arch Linux system without wiping or repartitioning disks. Similar to how I previously installed a preconfigured Hyprland setup via a script on my existing Arch, I would love to have Omarchy work as an incremental installation or update that respects the existing mounting and partition layout, avoiding data loss on my other partitions.

Currently, it seems the Omarchy installer requires a fresh install with LUKS encryption and overwrites the root partition and bootloader. This makes it difficult to integrate Omarchy into an existing Arch setup without wiping important data or redoing the whole disk partitioning and encryption process.

Having an official or documented method (perhaps an installation script or an “overlay” install approach) that allows users like me to:

• Retain the current dual boot and partition layout
• Reuse existing mount points and encrypted partitions
• Install Omarchy packages, configurations, and utilities on top of current Arch without a full reinstall

would greatly enhance the accessibility and adoption of Omarchy for users with advanced setups.

Thank you for considering this feature request. I believe this capability would be valuable for many users who want to benefit from Omarchy's features without losing their customized existing system configurations.

Best regards.

[remanifest]

I was looking for this as well. I think I can just snag the configs from this git repo. I'll see if I can play around with it this weekend.

[FlorianFritz]

This is the installer you‘re looking for:

curl -fsSL https://omarchy.org/install | bash

Taken from the manual installation entry in the docs, which starts from a plain arch installer:
https://learn.omacom.io/2/the-omarchy-manual/96/manual-installation

But beware: Omarchy has no login screen/prompt/authentication other than just disk encryption!

[Mr-Quinn]

I have tried several times with no joy. It runs but fails with "No such file or directory" after creating the /install. Both wget & curl. Reinstalled Arch after then run the wget, no love.

[shfattig]

Has anyone tested the above script for this use case? I'm curious whether it does in fact satisfy the OP's requirement to fully respect existing files and filesystem configuration on an already established Arch system. What would be the pitfalls or concerns with this method?

[jorgenorena]

I tried it about a week ago, so the details of how I managed are a bit foggy. It was a bit of a mess. But it's probably my fault.

I dual-boot with Debian since having Omarchy/Debian was my solution to the urge of distro-hopping. When I want stability I fire up Debian, when I want rolling release hackable fun I fire up Omarchy (before that it was an eternally unfinished config of Arch/Hyprland). I like Debian due to stability and fallback when I accidentally break something and need to get work done instead of spending time configuring. Since it is my pillar of stability, I want it to control the boot loader. I should be able to access Debian no matter what happens.

So I installed Arch fresh inside a partition, and installed Omarchy on it.

I didn't want Omarchy to install a boot loader, so I naively cloned the git repo and removed the offending line from ~/.local/share/omarchy/install/login/all.sh. I tried installing and it didn't find the packages that it needed. I then ran the script with curl -fsSL https://omarchy.org/install | bash as intended, and it broke again because there were some duplicate links or something like that. I went inside the relevant directories again, removed every artifact created by the installer that I could see, removed the line that installs limine from the install script again, and tried once more. It then worked and I'm writing this from Omarchy which has been my daily driver for a week.

I don't exactly know what happened and I don't have time to look up the details (again, I like to hack away but my available time for that is very short).

Omarchy is great for people like me with experience tinkering but no available time to do it anymore!

Please support us intermediate-level users who know how to partition etc, and need the other partitions, but don't have the ~60 hours needed to learn and configure before we can start using Hyprland comfortably!