If you’ve wanted to kick the tires on Omarchy without wiping your Mac, Try Omarchy just hit 1.0.
What’s new
Try Omarchy is the app that runs Omarchy in a virtual machine on any Apple Silicon Mac. Eduardo (@martiano, themartiano on GitHub) shipped v1.0.0 on October 17 as “Try Omarchy One,” and the big change is under the hood:
- The VM now boots the official Omarchy M image and pulls packages from the official ARM mirror, which the notes say gets it “closer to having a matching experience with native Omarchy installations.”
- Updates are fixed. You update Omarchy from inside the VM like a native install, and new app versions no longer mean migrations or VM resets.
- It now ships the complete Omarchy, so missing packages like Omawrite are back.
- The OS image downloads on first launch instead of being bundled, because of GitHub’s 2 GB per-file limit. Grab TryOmarchy.dmg and the app does the rest.
- Coming from an older version? Update the app, boot the VM and search the menu for “Import previous VM.” Hand-installed packages can come back with
try-omarchy-import-previous --packages.
Two things to know. The VM runs Omarchy’s dev channel, so expect the newest features and maybe a few glitches. Stable comes when omarchy-mac is officially released. And v1.0.1 landed two hours later and turns nested virtualization off by default to avoid problems on M3 and newer Macs. You can turn it back on with open --env OMARCHY_QEMU_GPU_NESTED_VIRT=1 "/Applications/Try Omarchy.app".
My take
A VM that updates like the real thing is the difference between a demo and something you’ll actually live in for a week. Eduardo says the Mac image “will soon be released officially for native installs,” so this is also a nice preview of where Omarchy on Apple Silicon is headed.
Have a blessed day! And Happy Hacking!