Update Arcade lets you play Asteroids while omarchy update runs
A brand-new plugin from Ninepointlabs puts a Play Asteroids button on the update terminal, steps aside whenever the update asks you something, and keeps a top-ten table of initials. Its marketplace submission is still waiting on a fix.
Watching omarchy update scroll by is fun the first time. By the fortieth, as the README puts it, “it’s about as gripping as the test pattern after the station signs off.” Update Arcade, from Ninepointlabs, fixes that with a vector Asteroids game you can play right on top of the update terminal. The MIT-licensed repository was created late on October 20, 2026 (UTC) and is already at version 0.1.1.
According to the README, the plugin puts a small Play Asteroids button in the top-right corner of the update terminal, and only while an update is running. Press it and the scrolling output is swapped for the game, drawn in your theme’s colors. The update keeps going underneath, and a strip along the bottom of the game tells you what it’s up to. Arrows or WASD turn and thrust, Space fires, Down or Shift jumps to hyperspace, P pauses, M mutes and Esc takes you back to the update. There’s an extra ship every 10,000 points and flying saucers that drift across taking potshots.
The clever part is that it knows when to get out of the way. When the update needs you, whether it’s a sudo password, a “Remove orphaned packages?” question or a reboot prompt, the game pauses and steps aside on its own. Answer, hit the button again, and you’re back where you left off. A commit pushed on October 21, 2026 extends that detection to a PKGBUILD’s own questions, which start by asking instead of ending with a question mark. And since omarchy update finishes by restarting the shell, which also ends the game, the README calls that the “insert coin” screen.
Crack the top ten and you get “the full arcade treatment”: three blinking letters for your initials, like the Pizza Hut cabinet in 1982. The table shows on the title and game-over screens and lives in ~/.local/state/omarchy-update-arcade/state.json, so it’s waiting for you at the next update. Sound is optional: the pew, boom and the speeding-up heartbeat are synthesized by a script in the repo, but they need Qt Multimedia, which a stock install may not have. Without it, the game plays silent.
Installation is a git clone, ./install.sh and omarchy plugin enable ninepointlabs.update-arcade. It needs the Quickshell shell and Hyprland 0.56 or newer. There’s nothing to place in the bar, and omarchy-shell ninepointlabs.update-arcade toggle can be bound to a key if you’d rather not reach for the mouse. According to the README, the plugin reads /tmp/omarchy-update.log and asks hyprctl where windows are, never writes to the update or types into its terminal, and needs no root.
Ninepointlabs also made a trailer, linked from the README and described there as “two minutes, four voices, one heavy metal soundtrack”. You can watch it on YouTube.
The plugin isn’t in the marketplace yet. The submission was opened on October 20, 2026 (UTC), and the validation bot marked it “Ready for listing review” after checking its structure and Quattro compatibility. The automated security baseline asks for a manual review by a maintainer, and the issue now carries the needs-fixes label. Reviewer HANCORE-linux pointed out that the probe passes the whole hyprctl clients -j output, titles of unrelated browser and document windows included, as a command-line argument to jq, where other processes can read it on systems with unrestricted /proc. They asked for that data to go through stdin instead. The two commits pushed since then fix the silent first round, add the PKGBUILD prompts and bump the version, and the probe at the latest commit still passes the window list the same way. So for now, Update Arcade is something to clone and try yourself, with a listing that depends on that fix.
Source: https://github.com/ninepointlabs/omarchy-update-arcade
