The next Omarchy installer asks for your language first and translates itself into 35 languages
A new first screen hands your language to the installed system, preselects a matching keyboard and timezone, and translates the whole install into every language the console can draw.
Image: omacom/omarchy-iso PR #297 (GitHub)
Omarchy already speaks 50 languages once it is installed, but the installer itself only spoke English. That is changing. Pull request #297 on the Omarchy ISO, opened by @omarchybot and merged by DHH on October 24, 2026, makes a language picker the very first screen of the installer and translates the installer from the next screen on. It is coming in the next version.
Pick a language and the installer switches to it: the configurator, the setup form and the install dashboard, including the tips, the finish screen and the failure menu. According to the pull request, 35 languages get a full translation on top of English, from Dansk, Deutsch and Français to Polski, Русский, Ελληνικά, Türkçe and Українська. The translations follow the wording of Omarchy’s own catalog for each language, so a tip that points you to a menu names the menu you will actually see.
The limit is the Linux console. The installer runs on the bare text console, and according to the pull request no 512-glyph console font can draw Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Arabic, Hebrew, the Indic scripts, Thai or Vietnamese. So 14 languages are offered under their English name only: Arabic, Bengali, Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Traditional), Hebrew, Hindi, Japanese, Korean, Persian, Sinhala, Tamil, Thai, Urdu and Vietnamese. Choose one and the installer stays in English, and says so plainly: “The installer stays in English. Omarchy will be in Japanese once installed.” The pull request calls offering them anyway deliberate, since the picker is where the installed system gets its language.
Getting Danish ø, Polish ł, Greek and Cyrillic on screen took some font work too. By default the console only draws the old 256-character IBM PC set, so the installer now loads the Terminus font already on the ISO, which covers Latin, Greek and Cyrillic, after patching in the two half-block characters the Omarchy logo and progress icon are drawn with. If anything goes wrong, the kernel font stays in place and the install carries on.
Your keyboard and timezone now follow the language you pick. Choosing Dansk preselects the Danish layout, and Polski the Polish one. The timezone screen still tries the network’s guess first, but when that fails, offline for example, it falls back to the language’s capital: Europe/Copenhagen for Danish, Europe/Warsaw for Polish. English, Arabic, Swahili and Tamil, spoken across many countries, keep the plain timezone search. Everything stays yours to change.
The choice also follows you into the new system. The installer writes it to /etc/omarchy/language (an English install writes nothing), and omarchy#15522, merged on October 20, 2026, reads that file to generate the locale and set each new user’s desktop language and session LANG. The system locale itself stays English, because the console cannot draw every script.
More polish is already lined up. ISO pull request #299, also merged on October 24, 2026, lets the shared setup form translate itself from Omarchy’s own catalogs instead of having the installer swap in translations from the outside, once the Omarchy runtime the ISO bundles carries the matching change.
