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Omarchy vs Omakub: the retired Ubuntu predecessor

Omakub was DHH's Ubuntu and GNOME setup script, now retired and archived. What it was, why Omarchy replaced it, and the two migration paths.

Reference Applies to Omarchy 3.x Last verified 2026-09-16 on 4.0.4
Short answer

Omakub was DHH's one command setup for fresh Ubuntu 24.04 with GNOME. It is retired and its GitHub repos are archived. Omarchy is the successor and a full Arch distro, so moving means a clean ISO install, not an upgrade. If you want to stay on Ubuntu, the community fork Omabuntu continues the Omakub line and ships a migration script.

On this page
  1. What Omakub actually was
  2. Why Omarchy replaced it
  3. Path one: move to Omarchy
  4. Path two: stay on Ubuntu with Omabuntu
  5. Things people get wrong
  6. What to watch for on newer versions
  7. Related

Omakub is the project Omarchy grew out of. It is now retired, its GitHub repositories are archived, and omakub.org redirects to a farewell page at omarchy.org/omakub. If you are running Omakub today you have two honest choices: move to Omarchy, which means a clean install of an Arch based distro, or stay on Ubuntu and follow the community fork Omabuntu. There is no upgrade path between the two, because they are not the same kind of thing.

Checked against Omarchy v4.0.4, released 2026-09-15, and Omakub v1.5.0, the last tagged Omakub release, published 2025-11-09.

What Omakub actually was

Omakub was a shell script, not a distribution. You installed Ubuntu yourself, then ran one command, and it turned a fresh machine into a configured development system. The bootstrap script in the repo is blunt about its requirements. It prints that Omakub is for fresh Ubuntu 24.04 or newer installations only, then clones itself into ~/.local/share/omakub and runs the installer.

The installer checked the desktop environment before doing anything visual. If XDG_CURRENT_DESKTOP did not contain GNOME, it installed the terminal tools and stopped there. That check is the whole story of Omakub in one line. The desktop half was a set of GNOME settings, GNOME extensions, dock and app grid tweaks and a GTK theme. It could only bend GNOME, never replace it.

What it installed is familiar to anyone who has used Omarchy: Alacritty as the terminal, Zellij, Neovim, Docker, mise, lazygit, lazydocker, btop, fastfetch, the GitHub CLI, plus desktop apps like Chrome, VS Code, Obsidian, LibreOffice, Signal, VLC and LocalSend. It shipped ten themes, including catppuccin, everforest, gruvbox, kanagawa, matte-black, nord, osaka-jade, ristretto, rose-pine and tokyo-night. All ten names still exist in Omarchy 4.0.4, which ships twenty two.

It also had a menu. The omakub binary opened a text interface for installing apps, switching themes and running updates. People missed it when they moved. In discussion #207 from July 2025, a new Omarchy user asked whether there was an Omarchy app like the Omakub app. There is. On 4.x it is the Omarchy menu on Super + Space and the omarchy command in a terminal, both documented in the Omarchy CLI chapter.

Why Omarchy replaced it

The retirement page gives the reasoning in DHH’s own words, and it is short. Omakub showed there was demand: tens of thousands of developers installed it. It also showed the limit of the approach. Ubuntu and GNOME each have their own design goals, and a script sitting on top of them could only push so far. The things DHH wanted most, a tiling desktop, keyboard control of everything and a terminal at the centre, needed a base that was built for them rather than one that tolerated them. Hence Arch instead of Ubuntu and Hyprland instead of GNOME, and hence a full distribution instead of a script. The page closes with the line that Omakub walked so Omarchy could run.

That is the practical difference too. Omarchy ships an ISO. You install it as your operating system, with full disk encryption by default, as described in the manual chapter on getting started. It owns the compositor, the shell, the lock screen and the system update path. Omakub owned none of those.

Path one: move to Omarchy

There is no migration tool. A grep of the Omarchy v4.0.4 source tree finds no mention of Omakub anywhere. Plan a clean install:

  1. Back up your home directory, your SSH keys, your GPG keys and any Docker volumes you care about. The ~/.local/share/omakub directory is only a clone of the installer repository, so nothing of yours lives there.
  2. Note your app list. Most Omakub apps exist in Omarchy, but the package names and install method differ, because you are moving from apt and snap to pacman, the AUR and Flatpak.
  3. Install Omarchy from the ISO at omarchy.org and verify the download first. See /verify/.
  4. Expect the desktop to be unfamiliar. Tiling is the default, and the GNOME muscle memory does not carry over. Start with /switch/tiling-window-manager-survival/ and /switch/day-one-checklist/.

One thing to know before you read old tutorials. Omarchy 4.0.0 “Quattro”, released 2026-08-14, replaced Waybar, Walker, Mako, SwayOSD, hyprlock, hypridle, swaybg and polkit-gnome with a single Quickshell based shell, and moved Hyprland configuration from ~/.config/hypr/*.conf to Lua files. Anything written for Omarchy 3.x, which ended at v3.8.4, describes a different config layout. See /reference/hyprland-conf-to-lua-migration/.

Path two: stay on Ubuntu with Omabuntu

If Arch is a step too far, the retirement page points at Omabuntu, a community fork that continues the Ubuntu line. It is maintained by Luca Pattocchio, who posts as Kasui92, and who also wrote the last functional change merged into Omakub itself, a Spotify GPG key fix authored in February 2026 and merged that March.

Omabuntu is not an Omarchy port. It is still Ubuntu and GNOME, taking selected ideas from Omarchy where they fit. The project announced itself in discussion #594 on the Omakub repo in January 2026, and it publishes a migration route for existing Omakub machines:

wget -qO- https://omabuntu.omakasui.org/migrate | bash

The migration script requires an existing ~/.local/share/omakub directory, runs an apt update and upgrade, then backs your current setup up to a timestamped ~/.local/share/omakub-backup-<date> directory and repoints the install at the Omabuntu repository. The Omabuntu manual says the process is not designed to be reversible and asks for roughly 5 GB of free space for the backup, so take your own backup first. A reboot is required afterwards.

If you would rather start clean on Ubuntu 24.04, the fresh install command is wget -qO- https://omabuntu.omakasui.org/install | bash. As with any pipe to bash, read the script before you run it.

Things people get wrong

The old install command is dead. https://omakub.org/install now follows a 301 redirect to the Omarchy retirement page and returns HTML, not a script. Piping it into bash does nothing useful.

Nothing suggests Omarchy will gain an Ubuntu or Debian base. The request comes up, for example in discussion #5042 from March 2026 asking for Debian as an alternative base. As of 2026-09-16 that discussion has no accepted answer, and nothing in the 4.0.4 tree supports a non Arch base.

Omakub is not unsafe to keep running. Ubuntu still patches Ubuntu. What is frozen is the Omakub layer, at v1.5.0, with the last merge into its default branch on 2026-03-07 and a final push to its stable branch on 2026-04-03. The archived repository still had 8,094 stars and 800 forks when checked on 2026-09-16.

What to watch for on newer versions

DHH said on X on 2026-09-08 that the next Omarchy release will be called “Quattro RS 4.5” rather than 4.1. Nothing announced for it changes the Omakub story, since the two projects no longer share code, but it is likely to move more configuration around, so prefer current pages over old blog posts and videos.

On the Ubuntu side, watch which Ubuntu release Omabuntu targets. Its documentation currently names Ubuntu 24.04. In discussion #620 from August 2026, someone asked whether Omakub would be updated with the Quattro look and made compatible with Ubuntu 26.04. The Omabuntu maintainer replied that a Quickshell style desktop on GNOME is unlikely, and pointed at Omabuntu for the closest thing available.

Questions people ask

Can I upgrade an Omakub machine to Omarchy in place?
No. Omakub was a script layered on Ubuntu, and Omarchy is a full Arch based distribution installed from an ISO. You back up your data and do a clean install. There is no import tool, and the Omarchy 4.0.4 source tree contains no references to Omakub at all.
Does the old Omakub install command still work?
No. omakub.org now returns a 301 redirect to omarchy.org/omakub, so the old one liner fetches an HTML page instead of a shell script. Piping that into bash installs nothing.
What happens to my Omakub machine if I do nothing?
It keeps working. Ubuntu still ships its own security updates through apt. Only the Omakub layer itself, meaning its theme files, its app install scripts and its own menu, is frozen. Its last release was v1.5.0 and the last push to its stable branch was in April 2026.
Is there an Omarchy style Quickshell desktop for Ubuntu?
Not an official one. In discussion #620 in August 2026 someone asked for a Quattro style Omakub on Ubuntu 26.04, and the Omabuntu maintainer replied that it is unlikely because Hyprland and Quickshell are different from GNOME.

Sources and credit

Fixes on this page were worked out by Kasui92 (Luca Pattocchio) (Maintaining Omabuntu, the Omakub continuation, and writing the Omakub to Omabuntu migration script). Text here is our own paraphrase; follow the links for the original threads.

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