Omarchy on an M4 Max: the agent test hit a black screen

Dated note, 31 October 2026. One install on one Mac, in a virtual machine. No agent task ran, so this note makes no verdict on Omarchy’s agent claims.

Omarchy, DHH’s Arch and Hyprland distribution, now calls itself agentic Linux and says it gives your agent “the tools and skills to help you understand, fix, and shape the whole system”. The plan was five tasks, three runs each, with an agent on a local model. I wrote the plan before starting.

The setup

• Apple M4 Max, 128 GB, macOS 27.0.1.
• Try Omarchy 1.2.0, the Mac app Omarchy’s homepage links to. It runs Omarchy in a QEMU virtual machine, so nothing touches the Mac’s disk layout. Omarchy’s manual says installing directly on an M-series Mac is not supported.
• 8 CPU cores and 8 GB of RAM for the VM. No shared folder, and no microphone, camera or Accessibility permission.

The VM runs ARM builds from Omarchy’s edge channel, the only channel Try Omarchy’s README says Omarchy publishes for ARM. So this is not the 4.0.6 ISO on the homepage, and nothing here speaks to that ISO on real hardware.

What happened

1. The app downloaded a 3.2 GB image and booted to Omarchy’s setup, about five minutes after launch.
2. Setup asked for a keyboard layout, username, password and host name, then installed updates and rebooted.
3. The window came back black, about 25 minutes after launch. I never saw a desktop.
4. A restart from the launcher did not change it.

The VM had not died. Behind the black window it reached a login prompt on the serial console and SSH answered. Its status report showed what the update had done:

The new kernel was installed, and the old one was still the one booting after two restarts.

This is probably a known bug

Issue #429 on the Try Omarchy repository, opened on 29 October and still open when I read it on 31 October, describes the same pattern: update, reboot, black desktop, login prompt on the serial console. One commenter traces the black desktop to a Hyprland 0.57 setting that leaves the top bar and other desktop shell layers without transparency, and others report working fixes. Another reports the VM booting the old kernel after the update, which issue #426 may help explain.

I did not confirm that #429 is my cause. I never logged in, so I don’t have the Hyprland version or a look at its config. The match is in the symptoms only.

Why the agent never got a turn

The agent I was working with did most of this: it checked the download’s signature, installed the app, set the port forward and read the logs. It would not type a password into the new account, by its own rules. So logging in needed me at the keyboard, and with the display black I never got the one login through.

That is my setup more than Omarchy’s, though the shape of it matters for the claim. An agent can only fix a system it can get into. Omarchy’s crash notification and its agent launchers are reached from the desktop, and with no desktop you need some other way in first. In #429, one commenter says they had no terminal inside the VM and fixed it by running an AI tool from outside it.

What I can and can’t say

I can say that on 31 October 2026, a first install of Try Omarchy 1.2.0 on this Mac went to a black screen after its first update, and that a restart did not fix it.

I can’t say whether the agentic claim holds. I ran none of the tasks. I also can’t say how Omarchy behaves on real x86 hardware, how often this bug hits, or whether it will be fixed by the time you read this.

If you try it, keep the snapshot route in mind. A commenter on #429 got back in by booting a snapshot from the boot menu. I haven’t tested that.

The test plan stands, and I’ll run it when this VM gets to a desktop.

Sources

• Omarchy homepage and the AI chapter of its manual.
• Try Omarchy README and issues #429 and #426, read 31 October 2026.

Suhail Mohebi · published 31 October 2026 · the cover is a generated illustration