Omarchy is a new Linux setup built by DHH and the 37Signals team, mostly powered by Arch & Hyprland.

It’s been getting a lot of hype recently as a development system, and I regret to inform you: the hype is well-deserved. It’s a really lovely experience. I now realize that I had never used a development environment built by someone with good taste.

As it says on the tin, though, it’s a bit of a grind to get it all set up. And I found especially so on my old 2019 MacBook Pro. So I’m putting this out there in case anyone else has the same issue.

The key issue is that for most Macs in the 2018-2020 time period, Apple put a “T2” security chip on them. This creates a bunch of friction for a new Linux install. Thankfully, there is an excellent wiki — t2linux — which largely addresses common issues.

The wiki is your answer for everything, but the biggest roadblock for me was this: I had gotten through the archinstall process and re-partitioned my whole drive, but simply could not get the Wi-Fi to work to take any further actions.

If you’re in that situation and you don’t want to re-flash the whole computer, you’re who I’m writing this for. Here’s what you need to do:

  1. Connect the computer to Ethernet (USB tethering did not work for me — it worked during the archinstall process, but not once I was in the OS)
  2. Go to the Wi-Fi and Bluetooth guide on T2Linux wiki
  3. Find the link to their firmware script (currently here)
  4. Run wget [that script] (you should have installed wget as part of the Omarchy archinstall process), then chmod +x [path/to/script], then ./path/to/script and it will run
  5. Select “Download a macOS Recovery Image from Apple and extract the firmware from there”
  6. Select “macOS Sonoma”
  7. Let it run

Wi-Fi may start working immediately. If not, here are the commands you’ll want to keep in your back pocket (may also be relevant after a reboot):

sudo rfkill unblock all
sudo modprobe brcmfmac

Then you should be good to go! Once I had internet back, I could move through everything else on the T2Linux wiki and get the computer set up perfectly.

If you’re finding this before you start the process, I’d recommend reading the wiki first and just building from a properly patched kernel in the first place. Enjoy Omarchy!

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