Treating Omarchy as a starting point: a supported path to taking full ownership?

[flaviolivolsi]

First: I love Omarchy. I love the idea, what it represents and what it did for me.

I've been a Linux user for a very long time, with some years of macOS in between, and Omarchy (coupled with the ecosystem gradual growth/convergence) gave me the excuse to come back. I like most of its defaults and many of its updates, but the most valuable thing it gave me was a coherent starting point.

Now I think I may be reaching the point where I want to treat Omarchy as a foundation rather than an ongoing upstream.

Concretely, I would like to:

• Keep the existing Arch/Hyprland system and the Omarchy choices I like
• Continue receiving package updates on the cadence I choose
• Stop automatically receiving changes to Omarchy defaults, configuration, themes, and behavior
• Review and selectively incorporate future Omarchy changes when they interest me
• Gradually move everything I depend on into configuration that I explicitly own

I asked about this on Discord, and the suggested approach was roughly:

• Move the plugins I use into ~/.config/omarchy/plugins/
• Move the keybindings and defaults I want to keep into my own ~/.config/hypr/ configuration
• Switch away from the stable package mirror if I don't want packages held back
• Override omarchy-update in ~/.local/bin/ with behavior I control
• Manually cherry-pick useful changes from Omarchy afterward

That sounds close to what I want, but I wonder if this could become a documented and perhaps supported path rather than an entirely personal workaround.

Maybe this doesn't require a new feature at all. A guide explaining the ownership boundaries - what Omarchy manages, what should be copied or overridden, how package channels interact with updates and how to keep following upstream changes safely - might be enough.

Alternatively, perhaps there is room for an explicit “detach” or “freeze the Omarchy layer” operation that:

1. Identifies the Omarchy-managed configuration currently in use
2. Moves or copies the relevant parts into user-owned configuration
3. Stops applying future Omarchy changes automatically
4. Leaves normal Arch package management working
5. Records the upstream version or commit from which the system diverged

I'm also interested in the philosophical side of this. An opinionated system can succeed precisely because it gives people somewhere excellent to begin. Some users may eventually want to outgrow its update stream while keeping most of its ideas. That doesn't necessarily mean abandoning Omarchy; it can mean that Omarchy successfully helped them create their own Linux system.

Is there already a clean, recommended way to do this? If not, would documentation or a supported ownership-transfer path be useful to other people?

[knifebunny]

I think what you're describing is perfectly reasonable, but it may also mean you have outgrown Omarchy

Omarchy's value isn't the initial Arch+Hyprland setup, it's also the opinionated and continuously evolving layer of defaults, integrations, migrations and experiments. I would expect that layer to change frequently, given Omarchy's frontier nature and Arch's rolling-release model.

Freezing Omarchy while continuing to receive supported system updates would effectively create another product with different compatibility and maintenance requirements. Plain Arch with your own Hyprland config, or a personal Omarchy fork that you maintain yourself might be a better fit.

A documented "graduation" or migration guide could still be useful, but I don't think a detached installation should remain a supported Omarchy mode.

Reaching the point to where you want to own everything yourself can also be seen as Omarchy having done its job successfully.

[flaviolivolsi]

Yeah, I think we're basically aligned. I wouldn't really expect a detached installation to remain a supported Omarchy mode - at that point it's mine to maintain. A documented "graduation" path is probably exactly what I'm looking for, ideally with a clean way to inspect and cherry-pick future upstream changes. And yes, I absolutely see outgrowing Omarchy as Omarchy having done its job successfully!