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14 July 2026
Discovering OmegaLinux, an Arch-based distro built for old hardware, spotted on DistroWatch.
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Discovering OmegaLinux

14 July 2026

Every so often you stumble onto a distro that hasn't crossed your radar before. That's exactly what happened with OmegaLinux, spotted while browsing DistroWatch, and it turned out to be a genuinely interesting find for anyone into lightweight setups.

What it is

OmegaLinux is an Arch-based distro built specifically for older, lower-powered hardware, running LXDE as its desktop and systemd as its init system. It's a rolling release, free to install and use, and aims to run on genuinely modest specs: as little as 1GB of RAM, a single-core 1.5GHz CPU, and 15GB of storage, figures that cover a decade's worth of aging machines.

Out of the box it keeps things minimal: Firefox, Mousepad, Vim, a handful of other essentials, and pacman for package management, no GUI app store, no bloated software collection to wade through first.

The history behind it

OmegaLinux didn't start out this way. It began life as a Lubuntu respin, and was fully rebased onto Arch back in February 2026, reportedly because the developer wasn't a fan of the direction Canonical has been taking lately. It's maintained by a solo developer going by ohjhas (aka TweakNow on GitHub), based in Chile.

Worth knowing before you install

This isn't a distro aimed at complete beginners when it comes to actually using the system day to day: apps and packages are managed entirely through the terminal. That's not really an OmegaLinux quirk though, it's the norm for most Arch-based distros outside the Manjaro ecosystem, where Pamac comes as standard. Worth flagging if you're coming from a distro where a graphical package manager was the default, but not a red flag in itself. The installation is a different story: OmegaLinux uses Calamares, the same graphical installer found on EndeavourOS, so getting it onto a machine is refreshingly painless, no command line required for that part.

What stood out most was the speed: LibreOffice reportedly launched in under a second, and GIMP, an app notorious for slow startup times, opened in around five seconds on first launch and roughly half that on subsequent ones, all on hardware far more modest than what most people would consider a "true" test rig.

(These specific test results, package manager issues, and speed benchmarks come from a hands-on review by ZDNET, not from my own testing.)

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