David Heinemeier HanssonandClaude Opus 5
4f60a18c87
install_progress() mapped each phase to a start%, an end% and a hard-coded
"expected seconds", then interpolated on elapsed time. Those seconds were
calibrated on one machine, so the bar was only ever honest on that machine.
Measured against a real 69s install on an XPS 13, the table expected 145s: 95s
for a phase that took 58.6s, 10s for one that took 2.6s. On slow media it is
wrong the other way — the bar reaches each phase's ceiling in a fraction of the
real time and then sits there. Today's clamp turns that into a 386-second freeze
at 85% on a USB2 install.
Phases do not even scale together: package installation is bound by media read
and disk write, the UKI rebuild is CPU and compression bound. No single seconds
table can be right for both.
So stop predicting durations. Position is now max(floor, work), both
non-decreasing:
floor an asymptote over the phase's band, on time since this process first
saw the phase. tau is a shape constant, not a prediction — wrong by 3x
it changes the pace of a crawl, never the correctness.
work only for "Installing Arch + Omarchy", which is ~85% of the install.
libalpm creates one directory per package under
<target>/var/lib/pacman/local, so counting them counts finished work.
The denominator is resolved at ISO build time by pacman's own resolver
against the offline mirror, so there is no second package list to
drift. phases.py records expected and actual in the timing JSON on
every install, so drift shows up in acceptance runs.
There is deliberately no give-up predicate: two discontinuous curves selected by
a toggle, behind a monotonic clamp, is a freeze generator. If the signal never
appears — no denominator, wrong target, implausible count — the floor alone
still walks the band to its end.
Position moves to per-mille. That is load-bearing, not precision theatre: these
are asymptotes, and in whole percent an asymptote over a 2-point band has two
reachable values and stops moving within seconds.
Time now comes from /proc/uptime. The live ISO runs tzupdate and
systemd-timesyncd, and the old code read EPOCHSECONDS, so a clock step
mid-install jumped every band straight to its ceiling.
Also fixes drift the old table had accumulated: it still weighted five phases
that no longer exist and had no entry at all for "Preparing install target",
which fell through to a 1->99 sweep. Unknown names now derive an even band from
the index the orchestrator already publishes.
bin/omarchy-iso-installer fakes a pacman database so the preview exercises the
package path instead of the fallback; PREVIEW_PACKAGES tunes the count.
Verified by simulation against the real logic: a 69s NVMe install, a 6-minute
USB2 install with a 70s pre-extraction stall, an implausible denominator, an
unknown phase name, and a target that already holds packages. All monotonic, all
reach 100%. Not yet run on real hardware.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Omarchy ISO
The Omarchy ISO is the only supported way to install Omarchy. It ships the Omarchy Configurator, installs Arch Linux, installs the Omarchy packages from the bundled mirror, runs target system setup in the chroot, creates the user, and runs omarchy-setup-user for that user.
Downloading the latest ISO
See the ISO link on omarchy.org.
Creating the ISO
Run ./bin/omarchy-iso-make; output goes into ./release. By default the ISO uses the Omarchy packages and tracks the quattro branch, from the stable mirror. Pass --edge to use omarchy-dev and omarchy-settings-dev from the edge mirror.
For local development, build the ISO from sibling checkouts:
./bin/omarchy-iso-make --local-source ../omarchy-installer ../omarchy-pkgs
Despite the local folder name, the first argument is the Omarchy source checkout (runtime commands, configs, setup scripts, themes, shell, migrations). The installer itself lives in this ISO repo.
Use --dev or --rc to build against those package channels. Both --dev and --edge select the dev packages from the edge mirror.
Testing the ISO
Run ./bin/omarchy-iso-boot [release/omarchy.iso].
To exercise installation alongside existing Windows-style partitions, run
./bin/omarchy-iso-test-windows-disk [release/omarchy.iso]. It creates a
synthetic disk in /tmp with an existing ESP and data partition plus ample
unallocated space, then offers to start an interactive installation on it. The
fixture exercises Windows partition preservation but does not contain Windows.
Acceptance testing the ISO
Run ./bin/omarchy-iso-test [release/omarchy.iso] to install the ISO into a headless VM by driving the real interactive install flow — the harness reads each screen via QMP screendumps + OCR and answers with virtual keystrokes, so the configurator wizard, install dashboard, reboot prompt, and SDDM login are all exercised exactly as a user would. It then boots the installed system, sends real VM keyboard shortcuts for the primary shell and window-management actions, and runs the in-guest acceptance suite (test/acceptance in the omarchy repo). The suite checks session and service health, the complete core-package manifest, user defaults, representative applications, menus, panels, live weather, launchers, visual selectors, notifications, clipboard, and other interactive shell behavior.
Visual checkpoints are saved as success-<step>.png or failure-<step>.png alongside the serial and install logs in test-runs/<iso>/runs/<timestamp>/. Independent test files and applications continue after a failure so one broken surface does not hide the rest of the report. The harness then stops the VM and opens the ordered screenshots in imv for quick visual review.
The harness syncs the acceptance suite from $OMARCHY_PATH when it is available. The install phase produces a reusable base image, so iterating against another checkout is fast:
./bin/omarchy-iso-test release/omarchy.iso --install-only # once per ISO
./bin/omarchy-iso-test release/omarchy.iso --reuse-base \
--sync-omarchy ../omarchy # fast loop against local tests
Pass --encrypt to drive the encrypted install flow (including typing the LUKS passphrase at boot) instead of the unencrypted one. Pass --no-preview to collect the same visual artifacts without opening them in imv when the run finishes.
Signing the ISO
Run ./bin/omarchy-iso-sign [release/omarchy.iso]. The signing key is retrieved from the shared Omarchy vault with the 1Password CLI.
Uploading the ISO
Run ./bin/omarchy-iso-upload [release/omarchy.iso]. This requires rclone configuration (rclone config).
Full release of the ISO
Run ./bin/omarchy-iso-release VERSION to create, test, sign, and upload the ISO in one flow. Add --rc to release an RC build instead.