The One-Minute Install That Became a 48-Hour Troubleshooting Marathon

The pitch for Omarchy was hard to ignore. A crisp, clean, modern Linux desktop, integrated AI tooling, and an installation that DHH claimed could be completed in under a minute. It looked like a polished experience that was ready to use, with much of the setup already taken care of.

For someone considering Linux as a daily driver, that was an appealing combination. I could try a desktop that looked beautiful without expecting to spend a weekend putting it together.

I knew my plan to keep Windows and set up a dual boot would add some preparation. An hour or so seemed reasonable. Make room, run the installer, and start exploring.

My experience was anything but smooth.

Worth a test drive

For a while, I had been considering Linux as my daily driver. Windows 11 was performing very well for me, but I wanted to build Linux knowledge and experience even when I wasn’t working on a project. As I worked toward cloud, DevOps, and platform engineering, it made sense to spend more of my everyday computing time in the environment I wanted to understand.

The question was which distribution to choose. I kept going back and forth between Ubuntu and Fedora. I could see the differences on paper, but from where I was standing, they looked pretty similar. Different package managers, different defaults... which of those differences would actually matter to me?

Looking at other distributions didn’t make the decision much easier. They seemed functional, but I was searching for a crisp, clean, modern face of Linux. Something I would enjoy using every day.

Then I found Omarchy.

Here was the crisp, modern desktop I had been searching for, with a ready-made setup that interested me. The promise of a quick installation made the decision easier. I could stop debating distributions and actually try one.

This was definitely worth a test drive.

I decided to keep Windows and install Omarchy alongside it on my Lenovo Yoga C940. Before I could try the desktop, though, I had to make room for it. That was where the first detour began.

Surely after this, it’ll straighten out

Windows showed plenty of free space, but Disk Management would not shrink the partition enough to give me the space I wanted. I moved files, verified backups, tried cleanup, and attempted the shrink again. Eventually, I used GParted to prepare the space while preserving Windows.

It took more work than I expected, but at least I could move on to the installation. Surely, after this, it would straighten out.

Omarchy installed. Then the laptop began freezing and stalling. Sometimes it booted to a black screen. The fans were working hard, the machine was hot, and the kernel logs showed storage timeouts and controller resets.

nvme nvme0: I/O tag ... timeout, aborting
nvme nvme0: Identify ... timeout, reset controller

Getting the files onto the laptop had been one step. Getting a dependable computer out of it was turning into something else entirely.

The storage errors were the first thing to investigate. They looked alarming, but the primary drive’s health data did not show an obvious media failure. There was enough evidence to test a power-management compatibility problem, and disabling NVMe APST stopped the timeout and reset pattern during testing. I made that workaround persistent.

# /etc/limine-entry-tool.d/nvme-workaround.conf
KERNEL_CMDLINE[default]+="nvme_core.default_ps_max_latency_us=0"

That was progress. The heat still needed attention, though, and this laptop was about six years old. I had never opened it.

When I finally did, the cooling system contained substantial dust and pet-hair buildup. Some of it had formed mats across the airflow paths. So the Linux installation now included cleaning fans and heatsinks and replacing the old CPU and GPU thermal compound.

The physical maintenance improved the machine’s thermal condition. I cannot say that cleaning and repasting caused any of the Linux-specific failures to disappear, but it removed an obvious hardware concern and gave me a much healthier baseline for everything that followed. Between that and the storage workaround, I had addressed two real problems. But the installation had already been through enough I/O failures that it was difficult to know which remaining symptoms belonged to the original faults and which might be damage left behind.

After backing up and verifying my important files, I decided to start with a clean installation. Windows stayed intact, Omarchy went back into its allocated space, and I applied the storage workaround from the first boot.

Then the fresh installation black-screened.

You’re not going to break me

That was the pattern of the weekend. Every hurdle seemed to have a clean path forward, and I kept approaching the next one with the same thought: surely, after this, it’ll straighten out.

Instead, another roadblock appeared.

By the middle of the second day, I was continuing out of spite. “You’re not going to break me,” I thought. “This is going to happen!”

The fresh installation had at least answered one question. Whatever state the first installation had ended up in, it could not explain all of the boot failures. I still had a problem that could be reproduced on a clean system.

The next useful test was surprisingly small: remove only the graphical splash setting from the boot parameters and try again.

I tested the same fresh installation both ways. With splash present, I could end up staring at a black screen. Removing only splash gave me a text prompt for the encrypted drive password and allowed the machine to reach the desktop. Repeating the A/B test produced the same result.

Finally, there was a clear connection between one change and the behavior I was trying to fix.

I could live with a text password prompt. What I wanted was a machine I could turn on and use. I made the change persistent and added an update hook so the package that owned the defaults would not quietly restore the troublesome setting later.

Now I could reach the desktop reliably. I was getting closer to the experience that had drawn me to Omarchy in the first place.

Then the audio needed its turn.

HDMI audio worked after the reinstall, but powering the television off and back on brought the failure back. The television was still detected, yet the usable audio output could disappear. Restarting the audio services did not bring it back.

Following that problem down into the kernel logs revealed repeated Intel SOF audio firmware boot failures.

Firmware boot failure due to timeout
snd_sof_boot_dsp_firmware: failed to boot DSP firmware: -5

A test using the legacy Intel HDA driver removed that failure pattern. After selecting the HDMI output profile, sound worked again.

# /etc/limine-entry-tool.d/audio-workaround.conf
KERNEL_CMDLINE[default]+="snd_intel_dspcfg.dsp_driver=1"

By this point, hearing audio once was not enough to convince me I was finished. I repeated the scenario that had broken it: television off, wait, television back on, without rebooting Omarchy.

The audio kept working.

I made that workaround persistent, too, and continued checking the things I would need from a daily driver: reboots, updates, and suspend and resume. After so many temporary victories, I wanted the fixes to hold up during ordinary use.

After the dust settled

Eventually, I had a stable Windows and Omarchy dual-boot laptop. Getting there had required separate fixes for storage, the graphical boot splash, and audio, along with physical maintenance of the cooling system. No single discovery explained everything, which was part of what made the experience so exhausting.

It also made the troubleshooting trail worth keeping.

A weekend like that produces a lot of commands, changes, failed attempts, and moments when something finally works. Reconstructing how those pieces fit together matters if the problem returns or if you want to explain the fix to someone else. Writing the postmortem gave me a record I could return to.

That experience also helped inspire WakeTrail, the terminal flight recorder I’m building to preserve commands, failures, and the context surrounding them. It is still in development, but the problem behind it came straight out of an experience I had just lived through.

As for Omarchy itself... I really like it. It is the Linux experience I was searching for: clean, modern, and enjoyable to use. Once the system was stable, I could finally settle into the daily learning that had prompted the installation.

I wanted more Linux experience. Between the logs, the boot configuration, the audio stack, and the work of making each fix survive a reboot or update, I certainly got it.

I’m glad I kept going. I would still have preferred the one-minute install.