Welcome to Marchyo

Marchyo is an opinionated, beautiful Linux desktop built on NixOS, Hyprland, and a coherent design system — the ideas of omarchy, re-expressed declaratively.

The one idea to hold onto: your desktop is described, not tinkered with. Every app, keybind, theme, and service comes from a configuration you can read, version, and roll back. When you want to change something, you change the description and rebuild. Nothing drifts; nothing is a mystery three months later.

The omakase idea

Marchyo follows omarchy’s omakase philosophy — the chef chooses. Rather than hand you an empty desktop and a thousand decisions, it ships a full set of curated choices that already work together: the compositor, the bar, the launcher, the terminal, the fonts, the keybindings, the color palette. You are meant to enjoy the meal first and season it later.

That curation is the point. The defaults are chosen so the desktop looks good and feels fast on the first boot, not after a weekend of configuration. When you do want something different, every choice is a setting you can change — but you start from a coherent whole, not a blank page.

Described, not tinkered with

Most Linux desktops are shaped by hand: you install a package here, edit a dotfile there, flip a system service, and over time the machine becomes a pile of small decisions nobody wrote down. Marchyo takes the opposite approach. Your whole system lives in a Nix configuration you own. To add an app, change your theme, or enable a feature, you edit that configuration and rebuild.

What you gain is real: every change is reviewable, every machine is reproducible, and every update can be undone by booting the previous generation. Nothing rots silently, because nothing was ever set by hand.

What’s new is honest too: you don’t apt install or drag files into ~/.config anymore. Those dotfiles are generated from your configuration, so editing them by hand gets overwritten on the next rebuild. The rebuild loop replaces the tinkering loop. It takes a little getting used to, and then it’s hard to go back — see Getting Started for the loop itself and Updating for how change and rollback work.

What’s in the box

Enable the desktop and you get a complete, themed environment:

• A Hyprland desktop — a fast, keyboard-driven Wayland compositor, with Waybar across the top, the Vicinae launcher, notifications, clipboard history, and one-key screenshots, recording, and OCR.
• Curated apps — a browser, editor, terminal (Ghostty), file manager, and media players, all chosen for you and all swappable through a single set of options.
• One coherent theme — a design system that colors every surface at once, in a dark or light variant you can switch at runtime.
• The marchyo CLI — one command that drives the whole desktop: toggles, theme switching, capture, menus, and system management.
• More than one machine — the same configuration builds a NixOS workstation, a nix-darwin Mac, or a nix-on-droid Android terminal.

Who it’s for

Marchyo is for people who want a desktop that is beautiful and fast out of the box, and who like the idea of a machine they can describe, version, and reproduce. If you came from omarchy, Arch, macOS, or Windows and want that same curated Hyprland feel with NixOS underneath, you’re in the right place.

It’s a less natural fit if you want to install things imperatively and edit config files live — that’s exactly the workflow Marchyo trades away. You can always drop down to raw Nix, but the whole system assumes you’ll describe your changes rather than make them by hand.

Ready? Getting Started takes you from an install to your first rebuild.