Installing Omarchy Linux and Getting Started With Claude Code

I just wiped a 2014 MacBook Air and put Linux on it for the first time. Not a dual-boot, not a live USB to poke at for an afternoon. This is the actual daily machine now. The distro is Omarchy, and within a couple of hours I had Claude Code running inside VS Code and was pushing to this blog again. Here’s how it went as a complete Linux beginner, with the parts that tripped me up.

Why Omarchy on a twelve-year-old laptop

The Air had been sitting in a drawer. macOS stopped updating it years ago and every app was starting to complain. Omarchy is an opinionated Arch Linux setup. The window manager, terminal, fonts, and keybindings are already chosen for you, so you’re not assembling a desktop from parts on day one. That is exactly what I wanted, because I don’t know enough yet to have opinions about a compositor.

Old Intel Mac hardware turns out to be a good target for Linux. It’s plain, ordinary x86 hardware under the fruit logo, so most things just work. The trackpad, display, and battery were all fine out of the box.

Making the install USB

You install from a bootable USB stick, so the first step is getting the Omarchy ISO onto one. I used a 16GB stick, which is more than enough. Anything 8GB or larger works, and whatever is on it gets erased, so don’t use one with files you want to keep.

The ISO is a single download from the Omarchy site. To write it to the stick I used balenaEtcher, a free tool that runs on Mac, Windows, and Linux. It does one job and makes it hard to get wrong: pick the ISO file, pick the USB drive, click Flash. It verifies the write when it finishes. The whole thing took a few minutes.

You can do the same job from the command line with dd, but Etcher won’t let you accidentally target your main drive, which is worth a lot when you’re new to this.

Once it was done I plugged the stick into the Air, held the Option key while it powered on, and picked the USB drive from the Mac’s boot menu.

First impressions

It’s fast, which I did not expect from a machine this old. The whole thing is keyboard driven. That was confusing for about a day and then it clicked. Windows tile themselves instead of floating in a pile, and there’s no dock to dig through. The learning curve is real, but most of it is in the first day or two.

Getting Claude Code into VS Code

VS Code installed without any trouble. Claude Code runs as an extension inside it. Once it’s activated you get a chat panel that can run commands, edit files, and read your project, not just suggest snippets.

Here’s the beginner mistake that cost me time. Signing into GitHub inside VS Code is not the same as logging in on the terminal. I clicked the Accounts button in VS Code, authorized GitHub, saw a green checkmark, and assumed I was done. I wasn’t. That sign-in only covers VS Code’s own features. The command line, where git push and cloning actually happen, has a separate login. You do that one in the integrated terminal:

gh auth login

Pick GitHub.com, then HTTPS, say yes to authenticating git operations, and choose login with a web browser. It shows you a one-time code, you paste it into the browser, and you’re done. After that git push works from the terminal with no extra prompts. Two separate logins, one for the editor and one for the shell, and the checkmarks look identical. Nobody warned me about that.

Reviving this blog on the new machine

This site is built with Jekyll, and it’s an old version of it. The Ruby that ships on a current Linux install is newer than the site expects, and newer Ruby has quietly dropped a handful of small libraries that old Jekyll still depends on. The first build failed with a screen full of errors.

I had Claude Code work through it. It added the missing libraries back in the Gemfile, fixed one incompatibility that was crashing the live-preview server, and updated a deprecated setting in the config. None of that changes how GitHub builds the published site, since GitHub runs its own build. It only matters for the preview running locally on this laptop. After that,

bundle exec jekyll serve --livereload

served the whole site at localhost:4000 and rebuilt it every time I saved a file.

Where I landed

A laptop that was headed for a landfill is now my writing machine. Claude Code is in the editor, GitHub is wired up on the command line, and the live preview is running. This post is the first thing I’ve written on the new setup.

If you’re looking at an old Mac and a Linux download, the hardware is not the scary part. The scary part is the hundred small conventions you don’t know yet, and that’s the sort of thing it helps to have an assistant in the editor for.