// ITS FOSS — LINUX & OPEN SOURCE
BSD Users Can Now Enjoy Omarchy Flavor
Jordan Hubbard started FreeBSD in 1993 with two others, and he has now built Daemonarchy with help from OpenAI’s GPT AI model. The name plays on Omarchy, with the BSD daemon taking the place of Arch as the base.
As for Omarchy, it has grown considerably since we initially covered it as a one-command script for Arch. It now installs from an ISO and has managed to pull in massive amounts of funding.
Anyhow, Daemonarchy is only a few weeks old and already has several releases, with v1.3.1 being released a few hours ago.
A few people on LinkedIn were pestering Jordan, saying FreeBSD should be as easy to set up and as pretty as Omarchy. That got him wondering, “Why doesn’t that already exist?”
He was testing GPT Astra 6 at the time and used it to put the project together. The first pass took under two hours. That figure leaves out the Poudriere builds used to validate it. GPT also picked the name for the project.
The ports this distro needed went upstream to FreeBSD’s ports tree for review. The same ports also let you install Daemonarchy on top of an existing FreeBSD system.
Jordan also credits the Wayland, Hyprland, and Arch Linux projects for the layers the desktop sits on.
The installer follows Omarchy’s own, and it asks for the usual basics like keyboard layout, account details, hostname, and timezone.
Daemonarchy can take over a whole disk or settle into a partition or free space you pick, with a minimum of 40 GB of storage required. A whole-disk install wipes the drive, while partition mode overwrites only the partition you select.
Because the installer won’t shrink existing filesystems, anyone dual-booting has to make room from the other OS first. Everything lands on ZFS with rollback support, and encryption is optional.