Omarchy in a virtual machine

Status on 4.0.4

Omarchy installs and runs inside a virtual machine, and plenty of people trial it that way. It is also the least tended part of the hardware surface. A search of the issue tracker for hypervisor names turns up 106 issues, 55 still open, and none of the ones cited on this page was closed by a code change in Omarchy itself.

The short version by hypervisor, checked against the v4.0.4 source tree and the open reports:

• QEMU/KVM and Proxmox on a Linux host are the smoothest path. People reporting VirtualBox or VMware trouble tend to add that KVM on a Linux host worked (#2028, #1930). virtio-gpu is the only virtual GPU the Omarchy code mentions, and the first boot greeter in bin/omarchy-provision-owner has code that waits for the virtio-gpu KMS handoff before painting.
• VMware Workstation and Fusion are the worst. With 3D acceleration on, the Quickshell bar and panels crash-loop and you get a black or grey desktop with a cursor (#8113, #7835). With 3D acceleration off, Hyprland cannot initialise its renderer at all, per dsuarezv in #8113. There is a workaround, below.
• VirtualBox works for some people and not others. Most reports are 2.x and 3.x era, and the closed ones were closed when a VM setting change worked for the reporter or when the thread went quiet, never by a change in Omarchy (#1176, #2028).
• Parallels, UTM and Hyper-V have nothing in the tree either. The manual’s Omarchy on… chapter links user-driven guides for Parallels, VirtualBox and VMware. The UTM and Hyper-V guides only exist in discussions, which #2251 lists.

One hard requirement: Omarchy 4 boots a UKI at /boot/EFI/Linux/omarchy_linux.efi, managed by limine-entry-tool, and nothing in the install tree handles a legacy BIOS boot. Give the VM UEFI firmware. The manual’s own Proxmox example passes --bios ovmf, and VirtualBox ships with EFI off, so tick it under System before the first boot.

Quattro changed the config format, not the VM story. The 3.x guides that tell you to edit ~/.config/hypr/envs.conf are dead on 4.x, because Hyprland config is Lua now. See the conf to Lua migration.

What Omarchy does automatically

Almost nothing, and that is the single most useful fact on this page.

Grep the v4.0.4 tree for systemd-detect-virt, open-vm-tools, spice-vdagent, qemu-guest-agent or virtualbox-guest-utils and you get no hits. install/hardware/all.sh runs 34 scripts. The ones that look for a device look for physical hardware: ASUS ROG, Framework 16, Dell XPS haptics, Surface, NVIDIA, Intel, Apple. The rest are generic, such as NetworkManager and Bluetooth enablement. There is no VM leaf and no quirk script for this component.

Two consequences worth knowing:

• install/hardware/vulkan.sh only installs a Vulkan driver when lspci shows an Intel, AMD or Apple display device. A VMware SVGA II or VirtualBox adapter matches none of them, so a VM guest gets no Vulkan ICD installed.
• The live ISO runs VMware guest tools during install, but the installed system has none. kevincasier confirmed that on 4.0.2 in #10620: no vmtoolsd, no shared clipboard, no display resize.

What the tree does contain for VMs is all on the host side, for when you run VMs on Omarchy: default/hypr/apps/qemu.lua forces full opacity on QEMU windows, omarchy-windows-vm drives the Dockur Windows container, and the installer can consume a cidata drive for unattended installs, which is aimed squarely at Proxmox and Packer.

Scaling is the other default that bites in a VM. config/hypr/monitors.lua ships omarchy_monitor_scale = "auto" but a hardcoded omarchy_gdk_scale = 2, because Omarchy assumes a retina class display. On a 1280x800 virtual display you get an effectively 640x400 desktop. Auto detection was requested in #127 back in July 2025 and closed in November 2025 without shipping a VM aware default.

Known problems

Issue	Where it hits	Status	Fixed in
#8113 shell crash-loops, black or grey desktop	VMware Workstation and Fusion, 3D acceleration on, vmwgfx	open	not fixed, workaround below
#7835 black screen after entering password	VMware on Windows and Linux hosts	open	not fixed, same workaround as #8113
#10620 no open-vm-tools after install	VMware guests	open	not fixed
#11337 unthemed text LUKS prompt	QEMU and Proxmox with OVMF, UKI boot	open	not fixed
#11011 black screen or plymouthd crash	Proxmox 9.2 with GPU passthrough, q35 5.1	closed by the reporter after a reinstall on a newer q35 worked	no code change
#10282 Sunshine 503, capture never starts	any VM with no physical keyboard or mouse	open	not fixed
#11735 Super+Print during install breaks it	VirtualBox, reported once, no comments yet	open	unverified
#2028, #2761 keystrokes or Super combos ignored after login	VirtualBox and VMware, mostly on Windows hosts, 3.x	closed	no fix committed
#2144 desktop rendered at 2x, edges cut off	VirtualBox	closed as a duplicate of #127	still the 4.0.4 default
#2513 tiny window or low resolution	QEMU with virt-manager	closed	no fix committed
#9505 Chromium dies when a VM shuts down	Omarchy as libvirt host, AMD GPU	open	not fixed
#10617 Brave will not start in the Try Omarchy image	Try Omarchy guest under Hyper-V	open	not fixed

Fixes that work

Work in this order.

1. Firmware first. Set the VM to UEFI, turn Secure Boot off, and give it 4 CPUs and 8 GB if you can. Emulated CPU, as opposed to KVM or a host matched hypervisor, is what made Omarchy unusably slow for the UTM reporter in #1930.

2. VMware graphics. Leave “Accelerate 3D graphics” enabled, then put this in ~/.config/hypr/hyprland.lua:

hl.env("QT_QUICK_BACKEND", "software")

zhaozigu posted that first in #7835 on 2026-08-23, placed right after the dofile(...bootstrap.lua) line, and two other people in that thread confirmed it. nenad82 then measured it against the wider LIBGL_ALWAYS_SOFTWARE=1 in #8113: both stop the crash-loop, but the Qt switch keeps Hyprland itself on the GPU, with idle CPU around 4 percent instead of 12. QSG_RHI_BACKEND=software, which several older guides recommend, does nothing at all here. Kor123 adds hl.env("XWAYLAND_NO_GLAMOR", "1") if XWayland apps such as Spotify take the session down with them.

The underlying bug is upstream, not in Omarchy: vmwgfx imports dmabufs as surface handles, the compositor’s GEM close fails, and the client’s wl_surface.attach is rejected with a fatal protocol error. dsuarezv posted a Hyprland patch in the same thread.

3. VirtualBox graphics. In #1176 the reporter got Hyprland starting by changing the graphics controller and leaving 3D acceleration unchecked. That is 2.x era advice and nobody has reconfirmed it on 4.x, so treat it as a thing to try rather than the answer.

4. Install the guest tools yourself. On VMware, pacman -S open-vm-tools then enable vmtoolsd and vmware-vmblock-fuse. On QEMU, spice-vdagent and qemu-guest-agent. That is what buys you clipboard sharing and window resize, which Omarchy will not set up for you.

5. Fix the scale. Press Super + / and Super + Alt + / to step scaling, which also rewrites monitors.lua so it survives a reboot, or edit omarchy_gdk_scale to 1 yourself. See fractional scaling.

6. Text mode LUKS prompt under QEMU or Proxmox. Add a console parameter so systemd-stub stops adding a serial one:

echo 'KERNEL_CMDLINE[default]+=" console=tty0"' | sudo tee -a /etc/limine-entry-tool.d/omarchy-defaults.conf
sudo limine-update

omarchy refresh limine gets you there too, but it first replaces /boot/limine.conf with the Omarchy default and leaves a .bak, so plain limine-update is the lighter touch. #11337 verified this on QEMU. The #11011 reporter got the graphical prompt back on Proxmox with console=tty0 plus plymouth.enable=0, then found a reinstall on a newer q35 machine type worked with no change at all, so treat the Proxmox half as less settled.

Report it

VM reports get closed as environment problems unless you make the environment legible. Run omarchy debug, upload the log, and put these in the issue:

• hypervisor and exact version, plus host OS
• firmware mode, UEFI or BIOS, and whether Secure Boot is off
• the virtual GPU, its PCI id from lspci -nn, the bound kernel driver, and whether 3D acceleration is on
• cat /proc/cmdline, which is where the QEMU serial console parameter shows up even though it is in no file on disk
• which guest tools you installed, if any

omarchy debug --no-sudo skips the dmesg capture if you would rather not share it. Details on omarchy debug.

Check first whether your case is already one of the issues in the table above. A “me too” with a new hypervisor version on #8113 is worth more than a fresh duplicate.

Related

• Run Omarchy in VMware Workstation or Fusion
• Run Omarchy in VirtualBox
• Run Omarchy in Proxmox, QEMU or KVM
• Run Omarchy in UTM on Apple Silicon
• What breaks in a VM
• Unattended installs with cidata
• Quickshell crashes or bar missing
• Black screen after login
• Limine and boot