A Xiaomi XRING VP showed DHH Omarchy running on a Xiaomi 18 Fold, inside Android’s Linux VM
Liqiang Wang runs Omarchy on his foldable through Android 16’s Linux Terminal, presented his setup on stage at the Shenzhen meetup, and published his MIT-licensed install scripts along with an Everest-themed Omarchy theme.
Image: brutoshi_ (X)
One of the more unexpected sights at the Omarchy install party in Shenzhen on Saturday, October 17, 2026 was a flagship foldable phone running Hyprland. Co-organizer brutoshi posted a photo on October 18 of a man holding a half-open Xiaomi 18 Fold while DHH, in an Omarchy T-shirt, leans in to look. “Liqiang Wang (@shujishcn), VP of Xiaomi XRING, showed @dhh his setup at our install party. Later, he shared his Omarchy experience on stage,” brutoshi wrote. One important precision up front: this is not Omarchy on bare metal. The desktop runs inside Android 16’s Linux Terminal virtual machine, with Android still running underneath.
Wang posts on X as “Zen Bard of Suhe”, with a bio describing himself as a semiconductor veteran and product manager; the name and the XRING title come from brutoshi’s posts, not from Wang’s own. XRING is the name of Xiaomi’s in-house silicon, and the 18 Fold is the phone Wang describes in an October 18 post as a “flagship foldable, XRING O3 top-tier flagship chip”. He is careful to frame all of this as a hobby: “These are personal projects I hack on for fun. Feel free to try them.”
The how is spelled out in the omarchy-xiaomi18fold README. Android 16’s Linux Terminal feature boots a Debian 13 aarch64 guest in an AVF virtual machine; inside that guest, the installer sets up an Arch Linux ARM container under systemd-nspawn, and the Omarchy desktop is displayed on the Debian host through seatd. A hypr-switch arch command flips to the Omarchy session, hypr-switch debian flips back. The README targets any aarch64 device with Android 16’s Linux Terminal, asks for at least 20 GB of free space in the VM, and lists the Xiaomi 18 Fold as the device it has been tested on. The project is adapted from Wang’s earlier omarchy-xiaomipad9pm repository, version 0.2.11, and the Fold line starts at v0.1.0, which he announced on October 16.
The foldable-specific work is where it gets interesting. Android’s on-screen keyboard has no Super key, so the repo mirrors nearly every Super binding to Alt (Alt+1 switches workspace, for example), while a physical or Bluetooth keyboard can still use Caps Lock as Super. Chinese input goes through fcitx5 and Rime, toggled with Ctrl+Space rather than Super+Space to avoid colliding with Omarchy’s menus. On the Debian host, the installer adds services that resync touch coordinates when the phone is folded or unfolded, re-send touch-release events that Android swallows, and bridge the clipboard between Android and Omarchy in both directions. Installation is a single curl | bash line, with a Gitee mirror for users in China. Everything is MIT-licensed.
Wang also put the setup through a real-world test. In his October 18 post, written from an Air China flight back to Beijing after the meetup, he said the Fold ran Omarchy for 50 minutes in the air alongside pi and Xiaomi’s MiMo 2.6 Pro UltraSpeed model, “blazing fast”, and attached a video sped up 10x. “On the plane, the foldable is the agent computer in your hand,” he wrote.
One of his lightning-talk slides is titled “Agent computers and the Linux desktop” (slides) and went through his whole fleet. In his own recap on X, Wang said a Xiaomi Pad 9 Pro Max running Omarchy in a VM “is now my daily work machine”, adding that the “keyboard feel is excellent — pairs perfectly with Omarchy’s keyboard workflow.” A 2011 iMac on Omarchy is his main home computer, and a 4090 PC, also on Omarchy, is his “AI shed”, reached remotely over SSH, Herdr and Tailscale. He also said he donated $1,024 to Omarchy, “1024 is Programmer’s Day in China.”
And he made a theme for it. Zhufeng Night (“Everest Night”) pairs a high-altitude night sky background with snow-white text and glacier-blue accents, over Everest wallpapers from Wikimedia Commons. Wang posted a shot of it on the Fold on October 18, calling it “possibly the first China-inspired Omarchy theme.” It installs with omarchy theme install https://github.com/rwanglq-ctrl/omarchy-zhufeng-night-theme; the README lists the colors and config as MIT and the wallpapers as CC BY-SA 4.0 with photographer credits.
As for DHH’s reaction: he was photographed looking at the phone, and we found no public comment from him on it. Wang had his own takeaway. On the morning of October 19, walking through the Xiaomi campus, he said that standing on stage talking about Omarchy brought back the spirit of MIUI’s first build in 2010, which shipped to just 100 users whose names replaced the logo on the boot screen: “make friends with users, build it together.” That is a line the Omarchy community will recognize, coming from what its organizer called the largest Omarchy meetup in the world.
