Installing Omarchy 4 on a partition you choose, without shrinking Windows or wiping a disk
Omarchy 4 (Quattro) installs from its ISO. It either takes a whole drive, or, for dual booting, installs into unallocated space on the disk you pick, which on a single-disk Windows machine means shrinking Windows first. I already had my own layout, with Arch Linux on a partition I set up myself, and I wanted Omarchy there. The old manual route, curl -fsSL https://omarchy.org/install | bash, now…
To install Omarchy 4 on a partition of your choice in Windows, you'll need to follow a specific process. First, ensure you have Arch Linux on Btrfs with GRUB as your bootloader, along with a minimum of 40 GB on the partition for Omarchy. It's crucial to have a backup before proceeding.
The upgrade route involves installing Omarchy 3.8.4, which is the last compatible version, before upgrading to Omarchy 4 (Quattro). It's important to note that there is no way to downgrade from Omarchy 4. The installer utilizes Limine bootloader, which will replace GRUB after the upgrade.
To begin, you'll install Omarchy 3.8.4 using curl and bash from your home directory. After successful installation, boot into Omarchy 3.8.4, verify that the installer came from the legacy branch, and check the Snapper subvolume to ensure it's ready for the upgrade. If a .snapshots subvolume doesn't exist, you'll need to create it before proceeding with the upgrade.
The upgrade process itself involves downloading and running the upgrade script for Omarchy 4. This script installs Omarchy 4, Limine, and Snapper while replacing iwd with NetworkManager. If the upgrade process encounters issues or warns about missing root, do not proceed with the reboot.
Once the upgrade is complete, you can add Windows to Limine. After rebooting, the Limine menu will replace GRUB, displaying Windows on the boot menu. You can install Windows using Limine without the need for os-prober.
Keep in mind that this upgrade is a one-way process, and there's no going back to Omarchy 3. Additionally, the Super+Space launcher in Omarchy 3.8.4 might not work fully due to the removal of its Elephant backend. Lastly, if Windows has BitLocker encryption, you may be prompted for a recovery key when booting from Limine for the first time.
Written by urgent.news from Dev.to's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
