loading . . . Year of the Linux Laptop: Omarchy on XPS Co-author: **David****Heinemeier Hansson** is the **creator of Ruby on Rails** , **creator of Omarchy** , **co-owner of 37signals** , **best-selling author** , **Le Mans class-winning racing driver** , **investor in Danish startups** , **Shopify board member** , **frequent podcast guest** , and **family man**. He writes regularly on **HEY World** and speaks on **The REWORK Podcast**. You can also find DHH on **X** , **LinkedIn** , **Instagram** , and **YouTube**.
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**Key takeaways:** This is what it looks like when Linux support starts before hardware ships: Dell, Intel and Omarchy collaborated to make XPS usable on Day One—no waiting, no workarounds.
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New silicon ships and Linux catches up 6-8 months later with support. That’s been the pattern for as long as most of us have been doing this. You buy the hardware, wait for kernel support, piece together workarounds from forum posts until someone upstream gets to it. Three months if you’re lucky. Eight to twelve if you’re not.
We at Dell do not accept that timeline. That’s what this collaboration between Dell, Intel and DHH is about to bring Omarchy on XPS Day One, and it’s built on over twenty years of work most people didn’t realize Dell had its hands in.
Dell has a long history of supporting Linux on our server and client workstations since 1998. In 2003, Gary Lerhaupt on Dell’s Linux Engineering team created DKMS. Dynamic Kernel Module Support. Proprietary kernel modules were breaking on every kernel upgrade. DKMS rebuilds them automatically against new headers. Dell realized how crucial this was for the future support on Linux on all platforms, so Dell open-sourced it. Today we can see it’s how driver management works across every major distribution. NVIDIA drivers, ZFS, wireless chipsets, camera, audio, etc. All running through solutions we, Dell, built and contributed to the open source community.
And in 2015, we became one of the earliest adopters of Red Hat’s LVFS, starting with our IoT Gateway products. We pushed our firmware capsules in and then pushed our component vendors to follow. Today Dell is responsible for over ~8,600 firmware files on the service. BIOS, Thunderbolt, SSD, dock firmware. All updatable natively through fwupd without leaving Linux.
This isn’t side-project work. It’s how we think about the problem. Our silicon and component vendors should get their drivers into the mainline kernel. Not out-of-tree blobs. Mainline. That’s the standard we hold ourselves and our partners to.
With this foundation, we still wanted to go faster, so we partnered with DHH and the Omarchy team to deliver Day One support for Omarchy on XPS.
## New vibes, new expectations – David Heinemeier Hansson
_I came to Linux after twenty years on the Mac with a lot of expectations about what “works out of the box” was supposed to feel like. And while Linux has some great advantages in all its varieties, there’s also long been a high tolerance for “you have to look that up on the wiki” or “maybe if you recompile this package yourself it’ll work”. That just never sat right with my temperament. Neither did having to deal with old, outdated versions of libraries and applications — frozen many months or even years ago — on some of the popular flavors._
_That’s why I built Omarchy: to create a stellar, developer-focused Linux system using the beautiful Hyprland tiling window manager on up-to-date Arch underpinnings. One that would have me productive in less than five minutes from a fresh install on a new machine._
_The goal wasn’t just to match what I had on the Mac, but to exceed it for the target audience: people who love computers and want to use something that looks and feels special (and not like a cheap copy of Windows or macOS). This meant a strong emphasis on keyboard-centric navigation, terminal interfaces and gorgeous, consistent theming to tie everything together._
_Since its release less than a year ago, hundreds of thousands of people have given Omarchy a chance. Some coming from existing Linux distributions, but many more from Windows or macOS._
_That has helped bring a new vibe to the air around Linux. And along with the surging adoption, a lot of it is down to the increased focus on making it compatible with everything from the tens of thousands of games on Steam to the latest chipsets as soon as they drop._
_This is why I couldn’t be happier to collaborate with Dell on the XPS Day One compatibility with Panther Lake in Omarchy. It’s exactly this kind of direct engagement that turns curiosity into adoption. When people can get inspired by a new way of running Linux, and pairing it with fantastic hardware like the 2026 XPS lineup._
_We’ve taken the step fully at my company, 37signals. The entire technical team is moving to Omarchy and the Dell XPS laptops have become our standard issue equipment for new hires._
___That transition to Dell has been extra satisfying because we’ve always run PowerEdge servers in our data centers. Our grand cloud exit from a few years ago was powered by pallets of these magnificent machines. And now we get to run the same brand for our developer machines._
___I simply love the turnaround Dell has pulled off with this new generation of XPS machines. It’s not easy to go back on decisions like capacitive-touch escape and function keys so quickly, but the new team clearly heard the feedback, listened to what developers wanted and shipped a lineup with sublime screens, cutting-edge battery tech and a build quality that leaves nobody wishing for more._
___The future has never looked brighter for Linux on the desktop!_
## Journey of XPS on Omarchy – Spencer Bull
We get access to new silicon six to eight months before it ships. That window is where everything happens. We run pre-production chips on pre-production boards with pre-release kernel builds, and we find every place where the hardware and the kernel disagree. When we find issues, we go back to the vendor. Fix this. Upstream that. Get it into mainline before this hardware reaches anyone’s desk.
When we started bringing Omarchy to the XPS 14 and 16 on Panther Lake, here’s what worked out of the box: almost nothing. It booted, but it couldn’t be a daily driver.
Mic. Broken. Speakers. Broken. Camera. Broken. Display VRR, panel self-refresh, power optimization, performance tuning, WiFi, the NPU, OpenVINO GenAI. All needed work.
Anyone who has tried Linux on new hardware knows this moment. You’re staring at a beautiful machine that can’t hear you, can’t see you and is burning battery because the power management layer doesn’t know the silicon exists yet.
That wasn’t going to be the experience for this launch.
We pulled patches from release candidate builds of the Linux 7 kernel across audio, camera, display, WiFi and NPU subsystems. Where the RC builds didn’t have what we needed, we wrote fixes and started pushing them upstream. None of this is sitting in a Dell-proprietary tree. It’s all going back into mainline.
The result is a temporary linux-ptl package for Omarchy to get Day One enablement. A custom kernel named for Panther Lake, packaging roughly 20 backports into a single build shipped through the Omarchy mirror until Linux 7.0 drops. If you install Omarchy on a new XPS, that’s why you see “linux-ptl” in your limine bootloader. We also had to solve the MIPI camera architecture through v4l2-replayd and tune power management through lpmd and thermald for the XPS thermal profile specifically.
Three parties made this work. Intel providing silicon expertise and early driver support. Dell doing integration, testing and the backport engineering. Omarchy handling packaging and distribution. This falls apart if any one of those three isn’t at the table. All three showed up.
Every component. Working. Out of the box. Day one.
## Linux on Dell: The history – Spencer Bull
We’ve done this before and are still doing this today. Project Sputnik put Ubuntu on the XPS 13 Developer Edition over a decade ago. Linus Torvalds ran an XPS. Those moments signaled something real: there’s a version of Dell that understands how software gets built and wants to support it at the hardware level.
We lost some of that signal. We made decisions with the XPS line that moved away from what the developer community needed. A rebranding that confused more people than it helped. Keyboard choices that prioritize aesthetics over the tactile feedback developers depend on. The community called it out, and we listened.
The 2026 XPS corrected the hardware. Physical function keys. A product identity that makes sense. Listening to the customer feedback and making changes to the platform shows in the newest XPS 14 and 16.
Download the ISO from **omarchy.org** , create a bootable USB and install in about 4 minutes. You get full disk encryption on by default. You open the laptop and you start building. You can see the full details of the release on the GitHub Release page of **Omarchy 3.5.0**.
This is what it looks like when an OEM stops treating Linux support as an afterthought and starts treating it as engineering. Not a checkbox on a spec sheet. Not a “works with Linux” footnote. Actual kernel work, actual upstream contributions, actual collaboration with the people building the tools developers use every day and helping the Linux community as a whole.
We’re done watching this ground go to someone else. And with Day One support in Omarchy, we now have an OS made by developers for developers that is fully customizable, but also works out of the box.
_The Dell XPS 14 and XPS 16 on XPS are available now._**https://www.dell.com/en-us/shop/dell-laptops/xps-14-laptop/spd/xps-da14260-laptop**
Learn more about Omarchy at **https://omarchy.org**
DHH LinkedIn: **https://www.linkedin.com/in/david-heinemeier-hansson-374b18221**
Spencer Bull LinkedIn: **https://www.linkedin.com/in/sgbull/**
https://www.dell.com/en-us/blog/year-of-the-linux-laptop-omarchy-on-xps/
