Beelink SER8, SER9 and other Beelink mini PCs on Omarchy

Verdict

Bronze. A Beelink SER is a good, cheap Omarchy desk machine, and it needs nothing special from you at install time. Omarchy 4.0.4 contains no Beelink-specific code at all, which is the compliment it sounds like: the AMD integrated graphics take the generic amdgpu path and just work.

It is bronze rather than silver because one major subsystem is dead and another is unreliable. Suspend is broken at the firmware level on the Ryzen AI HX 370 and Strix Halo units, and Beelink has not fixed it. And the AMD integrated GPUs in these boxes have a long history of wedging or flapping when Omarchy turns the display off for idle or lock. If you want a machine that sleeps when you walk away, this is not it. If you want a box that stays on a desk and stays awake, it is one of the better value choices in the Omarchy community.

Across the tracker, 42 issues mention Beelink hardware, 36 of them closed. The reporting is real and sustained, not a handful of one-off posts.

What works

Day to day, the basics are boring in the good way. Ethernet, the AMD integrated GPU, and multi-monitor output over HDMI and DisplayPort all come up on a plain install. DHH has said he runs a SER9 with the HX 370 and that Wi-Fi is fine on it (#2202).

Thunderbolt and USB4 docks can be made to work, including the awkward cases. A SER8 owner documented a full CalDigit TS4 setup driving an Apple Studio Display 5K over a single cable in discussion #136, though it took a firmware update, raised PCIe resource limits, manual Thunderbolt authorization and a Hyprland monitor tweak to get there. Docked boot on a SER8 used to leave the Plymouth password prompt on a black screen, typing the passphrase blind still worked, because the thunderbolt module was missing from the initramfs; sgruendel reported that as #1893 and fixed it in PR #1894. Omarchy 4.0.4 ships etc/mkinitcpio.conf.d/thunderbolt_module.conf with MODULES+=(thunderbolt), so new installs get it automatically.

What breaks

Suspend, on HX 370 and Strix Halo. This is the big one. Issue #394 has run since July 2025. The machine tries to suspend, the fans spin up, it wakes within seconds, and the network interfaces do not come back. mfornasa took it to an AMD engineer and reported the likely cause as the BIOS failing to configure devices properly, tracked upstream at gitlab.freedesktop.org/drm/amd/-/issues/4519. His conclusion was blunt: without new Beelink firmware, suspend is not going to work. The same behaviour is reported on the GTR9 Pro with the Ryzen AI Max+ 395. DHH commented on the thread that he stopped bothering with suspend and pointed out that idle draw is about 8 watts anyway. See /fix/suspend-wont-resume-s2idle/ and the manual chapter on system sleep.

Wi-Fi that disappears entirely. In #2202 the Intel Wi-Fi 6 card in a SER9 Pro stopped probing, with iwlwifi 0000:c3:00.0: probe with driver iwlwifi failed with error -110 and no device listed at all. Kernel and firmware updates did not help. What did: a full power drain. Shut down, unplug, hold the power button 30 to 90 seconds, reconnect, boot. sudhir-b hit the same probe failure on a GMKtec mini PC and found that advice on a Linux Mint forum; the SER9 Pro owner confirmed it worked on the Beelink. jondkinney reported that Beelink support recommended a CMOS clear through the pinhole for the same symptom. A botched suspend can put the card into this state, which ties the two problems together. More at /fix/wifi-drops-after-kernel-update-iwlwifi/.

Screen blanking wedges the display. In #5910, ordanalabs showed that the DPMS-off path in Omarchy 3.x hung the display controller on Phoenix and Hawk Point integrated GPUs, confirmed on a SER8, with REG_WAIT timeout from optc314_disable_crtc in the kernel log and no recovery short of the power button. DHH closed it because Quattro replaced the old hyprlock and hypridle stack. The symptom did not disappear with it. #8689 is open on Omarchy 4.0.1, on a Beelink EQR7 with a Radeon 660M over HDMI: the new lock plugin blanks the display five seconds after lock, amdgpu emits a spurious disconnect, Hyprland drops and re-adds the output, and the lock screen cycles black roughly every 13.5 seconds. See /hardware/amd-gpu/.

Display freezes with the session still alive. #10852 on a Beelink GTR Pro with Strix Halo describes scanout stopping while SSH and Hyprland IPC kept working, with a DPMS off and on cycle restoring the session. The reporter closed it on 2026-09-14 after six days without a recurrence on Aquamarine 0.15.0, which was a package upgrade rather than a verified fix.

Login greeter crash on amdgpu. In a comment on #11376, sparkrussell reported an AZW SER box with a Ryzen 5 5500U on Omarchy 4.0.3 where the SDDM greeter’s Hyprland segfaulted in libaquamarine on every one of his last five boots, and once took the kernel down with it in an amdgpu hard lockup. Mostly harmless, occasionally not. See /fix/login-loop-or-password-not-accepted-sddm/.

DisplayPort over USB4. #374 on a SER9: a Dell U4025QW at 5120x2160 works over the USB4 port until you reboot, after which the monitor reports no signal. DHH’s advice on the thread was that DisplayPort over USB-C is generally poor on Linux and to use the native DisplayPort output. That still holds. See /hardware/multi-monitor/.

What Omarchy does for this model

Nothing model-specific. There is no Beelink DMI match anywhere in the v4.0.4 tree. omarchy-hw-match greps /sys/class/dmi/id/product_name and product_family, and every caller of it targets Asus, Dell, Framework, Lenovo, Surface or Apple hardware. install/hardware/all.sh never branches for Beelink.

What you actually get is the generic path:

• install/hardware/vulkan.sh sees an AMD display controller in lspci and installs vulkan-radeon.
• install/hardware/bluetooth.sh enables bluetooth.service.
• install/hardware/network.sh retires stale systemd-networkd state and leaves NetworkManager in charge. Quattro moved Wi-Fi management from iwd to NetworkManager, so 3.x advice about iwd.conf no longer applies.
• install/hardware/set-wireless-regdom.sh writes the regulatory domain from your timezone.
• etc/mkinitcpio.conf.d/thunderbolt_module.conf puts thunderbolt in the initramfs.

No firmware blobs, no speaker tuning, no DMI quirk. The DMI strings owners have posted are the vendor AZW and product names like SER8 and SER. Nothing in Omarchy reads them.

Variants

SER8 (Ryzen 7 8745HS or 8845HS, Radeon 780M). The most reported unit and the safest buy. Its weakness is the Hawk Point display wedge in #5910.

SER9 and SER9 Pro (Ryzen AI 9 HX 370). Faster, and the machine with the documented firmware suspend bug. Also the machine in the Wi-Fi thread.

SER10 Max. In #6380 an owner traced a hard suspend hang to the Aquantia AQC113 10GbE controller on the atlantic driver, which logged atlantic: Boot code hanged after resume. Unloading atlantic before sleep and reloading it after fixed suspend and hibernate for them. If you want 10GbE on a Beelink, budget for that workaround.

GTR9 Pro and GTR Pro (Ryzen AI Max+ 395, Strix Halo). Same suspend failure as the SER9, plus the Strix Halo display freeze in #10852.

Older SER5, EQR5 and EQR7 (Ryzen 5 5500U, 7535U). Cheap and fine for light use, but they are where the amdgpu lock screen loop and the greeter segfault show up.

Before you install

• Update the BIOS from Beelink before you install anything. The suspend bug is firmware, and firmware is the only place it can be fixed.
• Install over Ethernet. If Wi-Fi is missing at first boot, do a full power drain before you start debugging drivers.
• Connect your main monitor to the native HDMI or DisplayPort output, not the USB4 port, at least for the install and the first boot.
• If you use a Thunderbolt dock, run the install on a directly attached display, then move to the dock afterwards.
• Expect to disable or lengthen idle screen blanking. That single setting is behind most of the AMD display complaints on these boxes.
• If the screen goes black after the bootloader and never reaches the password prompt, nomodeset on the kernel command line got a SER8 owner to a working install in #1485. Treat it as a temporary crutch, not a setting to keep.

Related

• /hardware/amd-gpu/ for the amdgpu problems that dominate this page
• /hardware/suspend-sleep/ and /fix/suspend-wont-resume-s2idle/
• /hardware/thunderbolt-dock/ for dock and USB4 display behaviour
• /hardware/minisforum/ for the other common AMD mini PC
• /hardware/submit/ if you own one of these and can confirm or correct anything here