Teaching Omarchy to feel like a Mac, then un-breaking it
Rounded corners, zero gaps, 10-bit color, a lid light switched off, and a config reset that ate it all. One afternoon on a fresh Omarchy laptop.
Fresh Omarchy install on an ASUS ROG laptop with a Samsung OLED. Everything worked. Nothing felt like home yet. Here is what one afternoon of poking at it looked like, start to finish.
Corners first
Omarchy ships with square windows. Twelve pixels of rounding in looknfeel.lua and suddenly the desktop stopped looking like a spreadsheet. The side effect: rounded corners make the gaps between tiled windows pop, and the wallpaper peeking through every gap reads like a picture-frame mat. So the gaps went to zero, the wallpaper went to solid black, and the whole thing turned into panels of glass on a dark table. Three settings. Big mood change.
The screenshot key that opened Google Maps
This keyboard has no Print Screen. Omarchy’s default for Super + Shift + S, the shortcut every other OS uses for screenshots, was a web app launcher for Google Maps. Two lines in bindings.lua unbound it and pointed it at omarchy-capture-screenshot. Drag for an area, Ctrl+Enter for the whole screen. Prime keyboard real estate, reclaimed.
Banding, and the 10-bit fix
Gradients on this panel showed visible steps that the MacBook next to it did not. Hyprland was driving the OLED at 8 bits per channel (XRGB8888). The panel advertises 10-bit RGB and the Intel driver allows it, so one line in monitors.lua added bitdepth = 10 to the monitor entry. Hyprland came back with XRGB2101010 at 2560x1600 and 240 Hz, and the driver confirmed it. Smoother dark gradients, no refresh-rate penalty.
The light behind the screen
ASUS puts an LED strip on the lid they call Slash Lighting, with its own boot, sleep and shutdown animations. One command, persistent across reboots:
asusctl slash set --disableA quick look at the SSD
The 4 TB NVMe reported a healthy SMART picture: 0% endurance used, zero media errors, 36 degrees. It also listed 87 command errors, which deserved a look. The error log kept only the latest entry: an “Invalid Field in Command” rejection on the admin queue, a parameter the firmware did not like. No I/O errors, no controller resets, no filesystem errors across three boots. Software asking the drive something odd, not a drive going bad. The other 86 are lost to history, since the log holds no timestamps or opcodes.
Then I reset the Hyprland config
A stray reset to defaults wiped the lot. Corners square, gaps back, 8-bit color, screenshot key gone, and the brightness tweak that lets the minus key take the backlight all the way to 0% instead of stopping at 1% was unwired. Everything came back in a few minutes because each change was a line or two in a known file, and Omarchy’s Lua config reloads clean with hyprctl reload. Zero config errors after.
The lesson is boring and true: keep the overrides small, keep them in the files Omarchy expects, and a reset costs minutes instead of an evening.