FreeBSD founder ports Omarchy to FreeBSD in ten days, ten releases

Omarchy has already taken up plenty of our column inches, but a new tentacle is reaching into the hitherto untouched FreeBSD.

Daemonarchy brings Omarchy's Wayland-based desktop to the BSD world. It's an independent effort by Jordan Hubbard, one of the original founders of the FreeBSD project, and it's unaffiliated with the original Linux-based Omarchy.

We looked at Omarchy in August and didn’t like it much. It isn't exactly a Linux distribution. That implies it's a coherent set of packages managed as a whole by uniform tools. Omarchy is a collection of apps and preconfigured settings, packaged up with the help of LLM bots and put up for download. You have to update it using its own special script, rather than the standard tools of the underlying Arch Linux – and in our testing, that update script fell over with error messages when running in a VM.

However, there's no such thing as a bad press, and Omarchy is popular and growing. It keeps on attracting sponsorship as well as new users migrating from Windows and macOS, who seem to relish its bizarre, inconsistent, and ad hoc UI as a challenge: trying to close a window in Hyprland, the tiling compositor that forms the core of Omarchy's UI. In Omarchy, windows don't have title bars, let alone anything as old-fashioned as window control buttons you can click. To close a window, you must use a keystroke. In most Linux windowing environments, that's the standard Alt-F4. Not here. Next, we tried Super+W – on a Mac, that's Command+W, which has meant "close the window" since 1984 or so. Still no. We found an answer on Reddit – it's Super + C.

Daemonarchy is not directly related. It's a collection of FreeBSD ports of the various tools and components that went into Omarchy, individually adapted to run on FreeBSD, and collected together into an installable ISO image. The current release is version 1.3.1.

Remarkably, in approximately 10 days, Daemonarchy has gone through 10 releases. Multiple packages are recent ports by jkh@freebsd.org – the email address of Jordan Hubbard. If the name rings a bell, he was one of the original founders of the FreeBSD project, and has had an interesting career in which he’s worked at various companies.

The Register first mentioned him by name 25 years ago, when Wind River bought BSD/OS vendors BSDi. By the following year, Hubbard was at Apple, where he helped freshen up the BSD-based Unix layer underneath the new Mac OS X. In 2015, he helped launch the NextBSD project to modernize FreeBSD with Apple Darwin components, which as we reported in July was recently restarted.

The new NextBSD effort is being built with the help of LLM coding assistants. As you might surmise from 18 new FreeBSD ports of Linux tools in a month, as well as from ten releases of the new OS bundle in as many days, Hubbard too is using LLMs to assist in this rapid development process: Daemonarchy’s GitHub repository contains both AGENTS.md and SKILL.md files, which point to Hubbard's own Literate AI project, whose repo describes it as a "A meta-harness for coding agents to follow proper Software Development Lifecycle practices", and says it is "Based on literate programming ideas from Donald Knuth".

There’s quite a bit of documentation, including a project specification with a list of goals. Lots of formatted Markdown text is also something of an LLM bot hallmark, though, and it’s not clear to us if this is intended for humans to read, or to guide the bots. Possibly, it's both.

It looks like the germ of inspiration was a LinkedIn post by UK IT consultant Sam Sheridan, in which he criticized the difficulty of configuring a new installation of FreeBSD 15.1 with an Nvidia card. He's right: we have written about how much work is involved ourselves. Sheridan's LinkedIn post provoked a comment from Ralph Kepper saying "I'm just gonna say it… omarchy for FreeBSD, its the ugly truth and no one likes it but there it is. omarchy will get us the youngsters and if we do it right we will inspire some great minds along the way". Hubbard had already commented in the thread, and it looks to us like that passing comment has prompted (if you will forgive us the obvious pun) this effort.

Daemonarchy is based on FreeBSD CURRENT, which means that it's built on top of what will become FreeBSD 16 – planned for December 2027. The intrepid can get run it now, though. Currently it targets the MacBookPro16,1, meaning the 2019 models of the 16-inch MacBook Pro – one of the final generations of Intel-based MacBooks. A couple of years ago, the Reg FOSS desk attended EuroBSDCon and we met several core project members. Apparently, running the development work-in-progress CURRENT branch is quite normal for hardcore FreeBSD types. If you need to ask how to get it or run it, then this is not the version of FreeBSD for you.

We do not personally like Omarchy much. We don't much like the visual design, or the choice of components – and we really didn't get on with the user interface. As mentioned, there are already established keyboard UIs for both macOS and MS Windows, and we’re adept and comfortable with both. As Linux is an OS designed and built on the x86 PC platform, we feel that it should stick to the established Common User Access UI. Its core elements débuted in Windows 1.0, 41 years ago. It's quite a bit older than Linux itself, and led to widespread UI standardization across DOS, OS/2, all subsequent versions of Windows, and more or less all Linux GUIs… at least until the recent rash of Wayland compositors from young hackers who don't know how to drive windows efficiently. We are not saying it can't be improved upon, but re-inventing this particular wheel strikes us as a worked example of XKCD 927.

However, Kepper has a point: Omarchy is trendy, and a FreeBSD version – freed of the direct influence of its controversial creator – might win FreeBSD some new fans. Even if not, the Daemonarchy project could have wider impact.

For one thing, the effort could help the creation of an easy, graphical FreeBSD installer and a friendly desktop version. It’s also very relevant to the ongoing debate about the use of AI coding assistants in the FreeBSD project. We mentioned this in September 2025 and there’s been no public announcement of a decision yet.

In that article, we highlighted Sylve. The project GitHub describes this as a “lightweight GUI for managing Bhyve, Jails, ZFS, networking, and more on FreeBSD”, but the project has even wider ambitions than that. The developers recently shared a video of their new graphical installer for FreeBSD, and we think it looks very good indeed.

We are less keen on the other impact that Daemonarchy seems likely to have. With the FreeBSD project's co-founder busily committing code to the project repositories that he is porting and developing with the assistance of Claude, then it seems highly unlikely that the core team will respond by banning AI contributions. ®

Bootnote

Our thanks to Register reader Graham Perrin for drawing our attention to Daemonarchy – and the thread that inspired it.