Daemonarchy puts the Omarchy desktop on FreeBSD, and DHH cheers
Jordan Hubbard’s Daemonarchy installs Omarchy 4.0.4 on FreeBSD 16.0-CURRENT, with ZFS boot environments, jails and bhyve in the menu. DHH called it “so cool.”
Image: jordanhubbard/daemonarchy README (GitHub)
Omarchy has left Linux. Daemonarchy, a project Jordan Hubbard started on GitHub on October 1, 2026, describes itself as “the Omarchy desktop on FreeBSD: DHH’s opinionated Hyprland desktop, ported to FreeBSD and installed the way the Omarchy ISO installs it on Arch.” The name, according to the README, is a homage: “Omarchy’s -archy, ruled by the BSD daemon.”
It reached DHH on October 25, 2026. The Lunduke Journal posted about it on X, calling Hubbard “the Co-Founder of FreeBSD,” and DHH quote-posted it: “Omarchy on FreeBSD! So cool. For many years in the early 2000s, I ran my personal email and web hosting on FreeBSD.”
The current release is Daemonarchy 1.1.1, published on October 18, 2026. It ships Omarchy 4.0.4 on FreeBSD 16.0-CURRENT for x86-64 machines, booting from BIOS or UEFI, as an ISO just under 2 GiB. The installer keeps the Omarchy ISO’s screens and sources Omarchy’s own setup form, so you get the same keyboard, account, hostname and timezone questions. FreeBSD adds two steps of its own: a network step, since packages download during the install, and a disk step with optional encryption.
The fun part is what FreeBSD brings to the desktop. Daemonarchy puts it in the Omarchy menu under System > FreeBSD:
- Boot environments. The system lives on ZFS, and ZFS boot environments take the place of Omarchy’s Snapper snapshots. Every Omarchy update first saves a bootable copy of the whole system that you can roll back to.
- Restore files. Hourly and daily ZFS snapshots of home directories, kept for a day and a week.
- Jails, virtual machines and DTrace. FreeBSD containers, bhyve VMs for Linux, Windows or the BSDs, and live views of the system through DTrace.
Omarchy’s panels are wired up to FreeBSD too: Wi-Fi through wpa_supplicant, sound through PipeWire, and Bluetooth keyboards and mice through FreeBSD’s own Bluetooth stack. Software comes from FreeBSD’s package collection through OctoPkg or pkg, and Chromium is installed by default.
Read the limits before you write that USB stick. According to the README, physical graphics and firmware, Bluetooth audio, enterprise Wi-Fi and the refreshed bhyve “remain unqualified,” and failures on ASRock, MSI Raider and T2 MacBook machines are documented. The older 1.0.1 release had no NVIDIA driver at all. The installer needs a network connection, and a whole-disk install erases the selected disk.
Hubbard is also trying to get it into FreeBSD itself. The release notes list three refreshed submissions to the official ports tree: PR #640 for supporting ports, PR #641 for the Omarchy and Daemonarchy ports, and PR #642 for LinuxKPI configuration headers. All three are still open.
One thing to keep in mind: the README states that Daemonarchy “is not affiliated with or endorsed by Omarchy, the FreeBSD Project, or The FreeBSD Foundation.” It is a community port, and the Omarchy software itself comes unchanged apart from FreeBSD compatibility. If you have been curious about running your Omarchy setup on the BSD daemon’s turf, the getting started guide linked from the README walks you from the USB stick to your first hour on the desktop.
