After I fixed up my Loongson 3A6000 laptop last time, I started thinking about how to actually “put the thing to use.” Performance-wise the 3A6000 isn’t weak, at least not compared to those low-voltage netbook CPUs. It hits roughly the level of a normal all-rounder laptop. The real problem with “using it normally” isn’t the LoongArch software ecosystem — it’s that godawful GPU. Yeah, just like I said before: this GPU performs like it basically doesn’t exist. Even with the official New World drivers released and optimized several times over, its performance just running a desktop environment reminds me of the first time I booted Win98 as a kid — windows leave trails when you drag them, and you have to right-click → Refresh over and over.

The hottest Linux distro lately is obviously Omarchy, hand-built by DHH, the guy behind Ruby on Rails. You can tell from the name: it’s an Arch Linux-based distro with that Omakase, personal-customization flavor. The author built a setup to his own taste, and you’re expected to try to understand and accept it. If it resonates with your own experience, great… In short, this thing is “picky about people.” And yet this picky thing is everywhere right now. Industry big shots keep hyping it up, and it’s even pulling in real donations. Some companies have stopped donating to Flathub and are giving Omarchy their support instead. Its userbase keeps growing, and everyone who’s tried it talks like they joined a cult — “Omarchy is the future, it fully replaces MacOS.” That made me more curious: what is this thing? It looks like an ordinary preconfigured tiling-desktop Arch Linux, so how is it supposedly beating Microsoft and kicking Apple? So I grabbed an unused machine, installed Omarchy, and started a shallow trial run.