Apple Silicon Macs (M1 to M4) on Omarchy

Verdict

Experimental, and that word is doing real work here. Omarchy’s own installer is x86_64. Through v4.0.4 there is no aarch64 ISO, and the Mac support chapter states that installing on an M-series Mac is not directly supported. Nothing about downloading the current release applies to an M1, M2, M3 or M4.

What changed recently is the effort around that gap. Omarchy M was announced on 11 September 2026 as the team for Apple Silicon, with “perfect compatibility with M1 and M2” as the first release target, including GPU, external monitors over USB-C, Touch ID, MLX and disk encryption, plus a macOS installer that puts Omarchy next to macOS rather than over it. M3 and newer are described as being worked on in parallel.

Three routes already exist, and none of them is the ISO. Try Omarchy runs the real desktop as a hardware-accelerated macOS app and is linked from omarchy.org as “Try on Mac”. omarchy-mac installs Omarchy 4 on top of Asahi Alarm on the metal, on M1 and M2 family machines. The announcement also links Marcelo Alcantara’s macOS installer app, signed and notarized, which fetches a signed release, carves out the partitions and does the same job without the terminal. Buy or keep a Mac for macOS first, then treat Omarchy on it as a project rather than a daily driver you can rely on next week.

What works

In Try Omarchy (v0.4.1, released 15 September 2026): the Quattro desktop with VirGL acceleration, Mac audio in and out, the FaceTime camera exposed as a 720p webcam, two-way clipboard, one shared folder, and loopback port forwarding. It needs macOS 15 or newer and about 8 GB free to start. On M3 and newer with macOS 26 or newer it also exposes EL2, so the guest gets /dev/kvm for nested VMs. The README’s own caveat is that video decoding is CPU-only, so playback is slow at high resolutions.

On the metal with omarchy-mac on an M1 or M2: the Asahi GPU driver and vulkan-asahi are in place, the internal keyboard binds (the fork’s fix-asahi-hid-race.sh documents the internal keyboard and trackpad coming up through dockchannel-hid, with only the trackpad at risk of losing its node), the Asahi audio DSP loads with the model-specific profile (#7872 shows audio_effect.j316-convolver as the live default sink on a MacBook Pro 16-inch M1 Max), full-disk encryption is offered during setup, and omarchy snapshot restore works and offers the pre-Omarchy system as a restore point. The install is one command after Asahi Alarm, with roughly fifteen minutes and three reboots.

Upstream itself contributes one thing: install/hardware/vulkan.sh maps an Apple display device to vulkan-asahi, and migration 1784401744.sh backfills it on existing installs.

What breaks

Everything below is open as of 2026-09-16, and none of it was fixed by a 4.0.x release.

• Wi-Fi never associates after install, #7439. The Intel Mac Broadcom quirk still lists BCM4378 and BCM4387 in v4.0.4 and writes feature_disable=0x82000. The x86_64 gate exists as a commit but is not in the quattro branch or in any released tag. The omarchy-mac fork does carry the gate, so a fresh fork install is clean. Anything installed from upstream since the quirk widened to all Macs on 2026-08-10 keeps the bad file, because the gate only stops the file being written and no update removes one already on disk.
• Wi-Fi wedges after lid-close suspend on BCM4388, #10857, reported on a MacBook Pro 16-inch M2 Pro. The fork’s resume fix deliberately skips that chip ID.
• Audio is stuck muted after resume, #10858. speakersafetyd reinitialises the PCM at resume and wireplumber either wedges or crashes.
• Brightness does nothing, #8125. omarchy-hw-display picks the DSI node instead of apple-panel-bl.
• Closing the lid does nothing, #8418. The bind targets “Lid Switch” while Apple hardware reports “Apple SMC power/lid events”, and the lid state is read from /proc/acpi, which Asahi does not have. The reporter measured 6.61 W with the lid closed and lit against 1.66 W with the panel off.
• Touchpad toggle silently fails on a MacBook Air M2, #8376, because Hyprland names it apple-mtp-multi-touch. The M1 Air is unaffected.
• The built-in HDMI port on 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pros is the worst area. #11914 hangs Hyprland with flip_done timed out, and #8946 flaps the monitor every 16 to 17 seconds once the desktop goes idle, during the screensaver as well as after the lock. Both trace to the apple-dcp kernel driver, not to Omarchy, and the reporter ruled out every lever Omarchy has.
• The Install menu offers packages that cannot exist on aarch64, #8645 and #11591, and the floating terminal can report success anyway.

For the per-bug detail and the current workarounds, see /hardware/apple-silicon-asahi/.

What Omarchy does for this model

Less than you would expect, and not for the reason people assume. DMI is populated on these machines: the upstream commit that tried to narrow the Wi-Fi quirk says an Asahi MacBook “reports Apple Inc. through DMI like any other Mac”, and the confirming comment on #8418 reads chassis_type as 9 on an Asahi MacBookPro18,3. What is missing is a rule that matches an M-series machine on purpose. omarchy-hw-match greps /sys/class/dmi/id/product_name and product_family, and no script in the released tree pairs that with an Apple Silicon model. The fork gates on uname -m and on /proc/device-tree/compatible, which reports strings like apple,j314s, apple,j316c, apple,j416s and apple,t6020.

In the released v4.0.4 tree, install/hardware/apple/ holds four scripts and three of them are Intel-only by construction: fix-t2.sh matches the T2 bridge PCI IDs, and fix-spi-keyboard.sh and fix-suspend-nvme.sh match DMI names such as MacBookPro14,3. The fourth is the Wi-Fi quirk described above. One piece of good news: the 4.0.4 kernel migration that installs linux-omarchy exits immediately unless uname -m is x86_64, so the bespoke kernel never touches an Asahi install.

The Apple Silicon enablement lives in the fork instead. Its install/hardware/apple/ adds audio.sh, fix-wifi-resume.sh, fix-asahi-hid-race.sh, enable-notch.sh, electron-gl.sh and video-decode.sh, listed with their jobs in the frontmatter above. If a page or a video tells you Omarchy handles Apple Silicon audio or the notch out of the box, it means the fork.

Variants

• M1 and M2, including Pro, Max and Ultra: the supported set. Asahi covers all M1 and M2 MacBook, Mac mini, Mac Studio, Mac Pro and iMac models, and omarchy-mac asks for an M1 or M2 family machine with at least 50 GB free, 100 GB recommended.
• M3 and M4: outside what the bare-metal paths ask for. omarchy-mac wants an M1 or M2 family machine, Omarchy M says newer chips are parallel work, and the announcement credits recent progress getting the M3 Air’s internal display onto Apple’s display controller. Asahi’s own device support list is the place to check a specific model, and it did not cover M4 when this page was checked. Try Omarchy runs on M3 and M4 and is the sensible choice there for now.
• MacBook Pro 14-inch and 16-inch: expect trouble on the built-in HDMI port. Prefer USB-C or DisplayPort output, which is what the Omarchy M first release targets.
• Almost every bug report on file is a laptop. The tracker has no Mac mini or Mac Studio reports under Omarchy, so treat desktops as untested rather than working.

Before you install

1. Back up macOS with Time Machine or equivalent first.
2. Run Try Omarchy for a day before touching partitions. It is a normal macOS app and changes nothing on disk beyond its own VM.
3. Check your machine on Asahi’s device support list before planning a bare-metal install.
4. Keep macOS installed. Unlike the Intel Mac path, this is a side-by-side layout, and the Asahi partitioning cheatsheet is what you need to undo it.
5. Leave 50 to 100 GB free and plan for about fifteen minutes plus three reboots.
6. After install, check /etc/modprobe.d/brcmfmac.conf. If it exists on an M-series machine, delete it and reload brcmfmac.
7. Expect the fork to lag upstream. Its newest tagged release is still on the 4.0.3 line while /releases/v4.0.4/ has already shipped.

Related

• /hardware/apple-silicon-asahi/ for the full bug list and workarounds
• /hardware/t2-mac/ and /hardware/apple-macbook-pro-intel/ for Intel Macs, which Omarchy does support
• /run/utm-apple-silicon/ for running Omarchy in a VM on a Mac
• /hardware/multi-monitor/ and /hardware/audio/ for the general versions of the display and sound problems