The next Omarchy downloads packages from its China mirrors on installs in China
A new region marker puts Omarchy’s China replicas first, with the .org servers kept as the fallback and nothing changing for the rest of the world.
Image: omacom/omarchy PR #16256 (GitHub)
Installing and updating Omarchy from mainland China is about to get a lot faster. A pull request by @emirb, merged into the quattro branch on October 22, 2026, makes Omarchy download its packages from its China mirrors on installs in China. It’s coming in the next version.
The numbers in the PR explain why. Measured from 20 Globalping probes in mainland China, pkgs.omarchy.org answered in 909 ms at the median and 1,440 ms at worst, while its China replica pkgs.omarchy.cn answered in 364 ms and 1,181 ms. The work answers discussion #7858, which asks for an Omarchy set up for China.
It all hinges on a small region marker. The file /etc/omarchy/region holds cn, or is absent for the rest of the world, and it is read as plain data, never sourced. With the marker, the channel’s Arch mirror leads with its China replica (mirror.omarchy.cn, stable-mirror.omarchy.cn or rc-mirror.omarchy.cn) and the [omarchy] repository with pkgs.omarchy.cn/<channel>. The .org servers stay in the list as the fallback.
There’s no new trust to hand out either. According to the PR, the China mirrors serve the same signed packages as .org, so no repository or key is added. A new omarchy-apply-pacman command now renders pacman.conf and the mirrorlist from the channel templates plus the machine’s regional additions, and both install finalization and omarchy-refresh-pacman use it.
Outside China, nothing changes. Without the marker, the rendered files are the channel templates byte for byte, so no existing install moves until something writes a marker. Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan belong to no region under any timezone name, and a test keeps it that way.
This is the first part of @xdanger’s larger PR #13690, split out so it could be reviewed and merged on its own. A few pieces are still to come: ARM platforms keep their own templates for now, and switching regions, developer tool registries and China’s preinstalls will follow as separate PRs.
Picking the region automatically at install time depends on omarchy-iso PR #241, which is still open. It derives the region from the timezone the user already picks, so Asia/Shanghai maps to cn, with no extra prompt and a single ISO for every region.
