1 Year of Omarchy as My Learning OS, Not Just My Linux Setup | Code by Night Learning to Program Journey Log<br>1 Year of Omarchy as My Learning OS, Not Just My Linux Setup<br>After one year of using Omarchy, the thing I value most is not the Linux setup itself. It is the learning environment I built around it.<br>June 28, 2026 · 12 min · Shivam Chhuneja<br>Table of ContentsI also changed my laptop btw<br>I do not use this as my everything machine<br>Rust, backend, and asking GPT to not give me the answer<br>My AI agents are useful because they have boundaries<br>Obsidian now is the middle layer of this whole system<br>Zotero is still boringly good<br>Blogwatcher and reading feeds help me avoid random reading<br>I still want local models, but they are not really there yet<br>The actual Omarchy part is mostly boring, which is a compliment<br>What still annoys me about Omarchy<br>Yes, I use Arch by the way<br>After one year, the OS is not the main character

I have been using Omarchy for almost a year now.<br>Almost from the day it came out, which is either a sign of curiosity or a sign that I enjoy experiments. Maybe both.<br>Before Omarchy, I was using Omakub for a few months. Before that, I was using Arch as my OS for about two years, along with a Mac because work exists and sadly companies do not run on my Linux feelings.<br>So this is not my first “I installed Arch and now I have opinions” article. Well, technically this is a video that I&rsquo;m turning into an article too since I wanted to share this here as well.<br>if you prefer watching the youtube video instead, you can check it out here.<br>But after a year, I think Omarchy has become one of the best things I have done for my learning setup.<br>That sounds dramatic if I say it like a distro review. I do not mean it that way.<br>The useful thing about Omarchy for me is not that it made me better at Linux. It made Linux boring enough that I could use this machine for the thing I actually care about right now: learning and doing.<br>I also changed my laptop btw#<br>Right before this laptop, I was using an Asus Zephyrus G16.<br>It had a better GPU(RTX 4050) and the processor was bonkers as well, i9 13th gen. It was powerful, beautiful, and slightly too much laptop for how I actually wanted to use this machine.<br>Now I am on a smaller machine (14 inch instead of 16) with an Ada 500 GPU, which I mostly keep off. I use it in integrated mode almost all the time through &ldquo;envycontrol&rdquo; because battery matters more to me here than GPU power.<br>That probably sounds like a downgrade on paper.<br>In practice, it made the laptop more useful and I find myself using it more and more, especially moving around the house with the laptop. Which was tough with a 16 inch one which weighed more than 2kg. I know, I know&mldr;first world problems..boohoo, look at me, how difficult my life is with a premium laptop. But it is what it is, so we deal with it and move on.<br>Anyways, this one is lighter, smaller, easier to move around with, and the battery backup makes a real difference. I can sit somewhere else, read, code, take notes, play around with an agent workflow, close the lid, come back later, and continue.<br>That portability changed how I treat the machine.<br>It stopped being a powerful Linux laptop that I occasionally used. It became the laptop I reach for when I want to learn something properly.

I do not use this as my everything machine#<br>I use a Mac for work. I have a PC for gaming, which these days I rarely do. This laptop is mostly my learning machine.<br>That separation helped more than I expected. I recently wrapped up my master’s in data science and machine learning. I work as a GTM engineer in AI security and governance. I am trying to get better at backend engineering. I am reading more around systems, AI security, model evaluation, prompt injection, benchmarking, and whatever else falls into the “I probably need to understand this better” category.<br>So this machine has a specific job.<br>It is where I learn Rust. It is where I do boot.dev. It is where I learn via CodeCrafters projects. It is where I read papers, save notes, track effort, run small agents, try workflows, and break things in a way that does not threaten my work machine.<br>That is the difference between a setup and an environment.<br>A setup is what you install.<br>An environment is what your machine makes easier to do repeatedly.<br>For me, Omarchy became useful because it helped the second thing happen.<br>Rust, backend, and asking GPT to not give me the answer#<br>A few days ago I started learning Rust through CodeCrafters.<br>I did not start by going through syntax in the cleanest possible order. Maybe I should have. I know there is a correct version of this story where I patiently learn the language fundamentals first and only then touch the project.<br>That is not what I did.<br>I jumped into the actual project - to build an interpreter in Rust.<br>I have gone through Python. I have gone through JavaScript. I play around with APIs anyway. So I wanted to feel the problem first and then let the...