OpenClaw Guide
Running OpenClaw on Omarchy
Omarchy took a genuinely tedious job — assembling a working Arch developer desktop — and reduced it to booting an installer. If you have just installed it and want an AI agent alongside your Hyprland setup, everything works. The one thing worth thinking about first is whether the agent should live on this machine at all.
What Omarchy is
Omarchy is an opinionated Arch-based Linux setup built around Hyprland, a tiling window manager on Wayland. It comes from David Heinemeier Hansson and is maintained under the Basecamp organisation on GitHub, following the same idea as his earlier Omakub project for Ubuntu: rather than spending hours assembling a desktop from parts, you get a complete, configured environment out of the box.
It installs from its own ISO rather than as a script layered onto an existing Arch system. You write the image to a USB stick, boot from it, and choose either a full-disk install or a free-space install alongside an existing operating system. On modern hardware the whole thing finishes in a couple of minutes. Depending on the machine, you may need to disable Secure Boot and/or TPM in the BIOS first.
Installations are encrypted by default, and a curated toolset comes with them — Alacritty, Neovim, tmux, Chromium and a range of productivity applications. The word doing the work is "opinionated": the choices are made for you, which is the entire value proposition.
For our purposes, two of those defaults matter: it ships tmux, and it encrypts the disk.
Installing OpenClaw on it
There is nothing Omarchy-specific to work around. It is Arch underneath, so standard Arch packaging applies and Node.js is available through pacman:
sudo pacman -S nodejs npmFrom there, follow the normal installation guide. If you would rather keep the agent and its dependencies isolated from a rolling-release system — a reasonable instinct on Arch, where packages move quickly — the Docker route avoids any interaction between agent dependencies and system upgrades.
Hyprland is irrelevant to the agent. A compositor manages windows; a headless agent process has none.
tmux is already there, and it is a trap worth naming
Because Omarchy preinstalls tmux, the obvious move is to start the agent in a tmux session and detach. That works, and it survives closing the terminal. It does not survive the agent crashing, and it does not survive a reboot — tmux keeps sessions across disconnects but does not supervise processes or restart anything.
The tmux guide covers this in detail. On Omarchy the second limitation is sharper than usual, for the reason below.
Disk encryption changes what "starts at boot" means
Omarchy encrypts the disk by default, and that is the right choice for a portable machine: lose the laptop and the data is unreadable. It also means a reboot stops at a passphrase prompt before any service starts.
So the usual advice — put the agent under a systemd unit so it starts automatically — only gets you so far on a default install. The unit will start the agent once someone has unlocked the disk. After an unattended reboot the machine sits at the prompt, and the agent is down until you are physically present. That is not a flaw; it is encryption doing its job.
Encryption is a default rather than a requirement — the installer lets you opt out at the disk formatting step, which exists for throwaway machines and remote installs on physically protected hardware. That is worth knowing, but it is a poor trade to make on a laptop just to let an agent survive a reboot. If unattended restart is the goal, moving the agent is the better answer than weakening the disk. Note also that the passphrase prompt will not accept a Bluetooth keyboard, so recovery needs a wired or dongle-based one.
The tension in one line: the properties that make Omarchy an excellent laptop — encrypted at rest, suspends when closed, updates aggressively — are the same properties that make a laptop a poor always-on host.
What to run where
The clean split is to keep both, and give each the work it is good at.
On your Omarchy machine
- Development and experimentation with agent configuration and skills.
- Tasks that operate on files already on that machine.
- Short interactive sessions where you are present anyway.
- Testing changes before they go anywhere permanent.
Somewhere that stays awake
- Anything on a schedule — daily summaries, monitors, reminders.
- Anything other people message.
- Anything that should answer while you are asleep or travelling.
- Anything you would notice being down.
That second list is what a VPS or managed hosting is for. An agent that lives on a server keeps answering while you reboot into a new kernel, take the laptop to a café, or close it for the night — and your Omarchy install stays what it is meant to be, which is a very good desktop rather than a server pretending to be one.
OpenClaw on Omarchy FAQ
What is Omarchy?
Omarchy is an opinionated Arch-based Linux setup built around the Hyprland tiling window manager on Wayland, created by David Heinemeier Hansson and maintained under the Basecamp organisation on GitHub. It installs from its own ISO and lands a fully configured developer desktop — encrypted by default, with a curated toolset including Neovim, Alacritty, tmux and Chromium.
Can I run OpenClaw on Omarchy?
Yes. Omarchy is Arch underneath, so anything that runs on Arch runs here. Node.js is available through pacman, and Docker is a normal package. Nothing about Hyprland or the Omarchy configuration interferes with a headless agent process.
Does disk encryption affect an agent that starts at boot?
On a default install, yes. Omarchy encrypts the disk by default, so a reboot waits at a passphrase prompt before anything starts — which is exactly what you want on a laptop, and exactly what makes the same machine awkward as an unattended always-on host. The installer does allow an unencrypted install, but that is a poor trade to make purely for agent uptime.
Should I host my always-on agent on my Omarchy machine?
Usually not. A developer desktop suspends, reboots for kernel updates, moves between networks and gets closed at the end of the day. Those are desirable laptop behaviours and each one is an outage for an agent expected to answer at any hour.