Apple still ships some of the best laptop silicon on the planet. Plenty of Omarchy converts already know that — they just want the hardware without the walled garden. On September 11, DHH made that bet official: Omarchy M, a named team to finish Asahi-class Apple Silicon support and make “keep the Mac, lose macOS” a first-class install path.
Plant the flag on M1 and M2
The first release target is intentional and conservative: perfect compatibility on M1 and M2, including Pro and Max variants. That means full GPU, external monitors over USB-C, Touch ID via the Secure Enclave, disk encryption, and MLX on Linux through Vulkan — not a half-broken demo that dies when you dock a display. Newer chips (M3/M4/M5 and the Neo bring-up) run in parallel, but M1/M2 is where they draw the line for “done.”
From a netops view, that checklist matters. USB-C display paths, Wi-Fi/BT on Apple’s N1 silicon, hardware video encode/decode, and Secure Enclave Touch ID are exactly the pieces that decide whether Apple Silicon Linux is a daily driver or a weekend science project. Omarchy M is staffing those gaps instead of hoping Asahi leftovers cover them forever.
Installer and Try Omarchy — no USB ritual
Two on-ramps sit next to the driver work. Marcelo Alcantara’s native Mac installer downloads a signed Omarchy release from macOS, carves partitions, and dual-boots beside the existing system — no USB stick, no terminal incantations. Eduardo Martinez’s Try Omarchy runs the real desktop as a hardware-accelerated native Mac app with camera, audio, clipboard, and a shared folder wired through. Partition nothing; poke the UX first.
That’s the right order for security-minded operators: try the shell and agent story in a contained app, then commit to dual-boot when the GPU and dock paths look sane. Dual-boot still means you own the firmware and recovery story — plan encryption and backup before you carve disks — but the friction to evaluate Omarchy just dropped hard.
Fifteen people, agents, and an open invite
The announcement reads like a roster, not a press release. Omarchy Mac maintainers who already ran M1/M2 communities, GPU and Secure Enclave work, SPTM tracing for M4+, package and aarch64 image ownership, Touch Bar and T2 reverse-engineering for older Intel Macs — fifteen people who were already shipping before the nameplate went up. Agents show up in the narrative as pace multipliers on driver bring-up, which fits Omarchy’s broader agentic-desktop bet without pretending reverse-engineering is a chat prompt.
If you’ve been doing Linux on Apple hardware — kernel, firmware, packaging, installers, ML — they want contact at apple@omarchy.org. For EtherNinja readers sitting on retired MacBooks that Apple’s latest macOS already left behind: those machines are suddenly on a roadmap with an installer, a try path, and a published M1/M2 compatibility bar. Keep the aluminum. Lose the OS on your terms.