Joshua Warren gets Omarchy running on the M5 Max PROLED XDR MacBook Pro in three days

Three days, three posts, and a brand-new touch screen MacBook Pro running Omarchy. Joshua Warren, who describes himself on X as part of the Omarchy M team, kicked off his bring-up on November 11, 2026: “Thanks to the work of @edimoldovan, @Acelogic_ and others in less than 8 hours I went from first macOS boot to Omarchy on my new laptop!” The machine is the 14-inch M5 Max MacBook Pro with the PROLED XDR display, which his write-up calls “Apple’s first touch screen laptop.”

That first post ended with a prediction: “My agents are confident we will have the touchscreen working by morning – it uses the same chip as the touchpad.” They were right. In his Day 2 update on November 12, Joshua wrote: “GPU works, touchscreen works! WiFi works. ANE powers up. Some polish left but it’s fully usable.” His agent built a touchscreen calibration tool that revealed the sensor is “laid out upside down so taps were landing mirrored!”

His detailed blog post fills in the rest. According to Joshua, the touch chip needed a new driver, and two bugs ate most of the day: the sensor grid turned out to be 82 by 54 cells rather than 82 by 50, and its rows run bottom to top relative to the panel. The driver is up as a pull request on Aurora Silicon’s kernel. On the GPU side, Mesa reports an “Apple M5 Max (G17C B1)” with OpenGL ES 3.2, Hyprland runs on the GPU, and glmark2 ran “clean with no GPU faults.”

Day 3 brought more hardware online. “Touch ID, the camera and all three USB-C ports work,” Joshua posted on November 13. “Reading the fans and 335 sensors led to a power fix: idle 74 W to 20 W. And dropping.” The blog explains that the power profile was stuck on performance, so every core ran at full clock while idle. Switching to balanced cut the draw from 74 W to 20 W and dropped the fan from 5,350 to 2,200 RPM. He hasn’t found what sets performance at boot yet, so he tells readers to check it after installing.

The blog’s status table also lists sleep with wake on a key press or lid open, the SD card reader at 237 MB/s, all 18 CPU cores, battery reporting and the keyboard backlight. Omarchy runs full screen around the notch at 3024×1986. There’s local AI on the GPU too: Joshua reports Qwen3-Coder-30B-A3B in llama.cpp on Vulkan reading prompts at 231 tokens/s and writing at 20 tokens/s.

It’s not finished. Joshua’s Day 3 post lists “speakers, external displays and the ANE” as next, and the blog adds screen brightness. The camera works but stays off by default: this model has no camera LED and draws the light on screen, so Aurora Silicon is building a kernel-drawn indicator first.

Don’t expect a one-click install yet either. Joshua’s Day 2 post describes the blog as “Info for your agent to replicate this before it goes live in the Omarchy M installer.” The guide requires the macOS 27.3 beta, which according to the blog carries Apple’s fix that lets Linux start every CPU core on the M5 Pro and Max. The steps include partitioning, boot files from his own kernel release and a separate Mesa build.

Joshua is quick to share the credit. His blog lists Edi Moldovan’s T6050 foundation work, Rolando Trevino’s M5 Pro boot stack, betizzel’s install scripts and help from @Acelogic_, among others. Eduárd had already posted “First working GPU run on my M5 Max” on November 8, 2026.

What about other M5 Macs? Asked about it, Joshua replied that “All of the M5 models have volunteers working on them to get them fully supported.” He isn’t sure about the M5 Air since he doesn’t have one, “but I think we will have all of the current models covered by the end of the year if not sooner.”

DHH quote-posted the Day 1 announcement with a one-liner that sums up the Omarchy M effort: “Every model, every variant, all at once.”

Source: https://x.com/JoshuaSWarren/status/2120308548320244150