Omarchy has already taken up plenty of our column inches, but a new tentacle is reaching into the hitherto untouched FreeBSD. Daemonarchy brings Omarchy’s Wayland-based desktop to the BSD world. It’s an independent effort by Jordan Hubbard, one of the original founders of the FreeBSD project, and it’s unaffiliated with the original Linux-based Omarchy. We looked at Omarchy in August and didn’t like it much. It isn’t exactly a Linux distribution. That implies it’s a coherent set of packages managed as a whole by uniform tools. Omarchy is a collection of apps and preconfigured settings, packaged up with the help of LLM bots and put up for download. You have to update it using its own special script, rather than the standard tools of the underlying Arch Linux – and in our testing, that update script fell over with error messages when running in a VM. However, there’s no such thing as a bad press, and Omarchy is popular and growing. It keeps on attracting sponsorship as well as new users migrating from Windows and macOS, who seem to relish its bizarre, inconsistent, and ad hoc UI as a challenge: trying to close a window in Hyprland, the tiling compositor that forms the core of Omarchy’s UI. In Omarchy, windows don’t have title bars, let alone anything as old-fashioned as window control buttons you can click. To close a window, you must use a keystroke. In most Linux windowing environments, that’s the standard Alt-F4 . Not here. Next, we tried Super+W – on a Mac, that’s Command+W , which has meant "close the window" since 1984 or so. Still no. We found an answer on Reddit – it’s Super + C. Daemonarchy is not directly related. It’s a collection of FreeBSD ports of the various tools and components that went into Omarchy, individually adapted to run on FreeBSD, and collected together into an installable ISO image. The current release is version 1. 3. 1 . Remarkably, in approximately 10 days, Daemonarchy has gone through 10 releases . Multiple packages are recent ports by jkh@freebsd. org – the email address of Jordan Hubbard. If the name rings a bell, he was one of the original founders of the FreeBSD project, and has had an interesting career in which he’s worked at various companies. The Register first mentioned him by name 25 years ago, when Wind River bought BSD/OS vendors BSDi . By the following year, Hubbard was at Apple , where he helped freshen up the BSD-based Unix layer underneath the new Mac OS X. In 2015, he helped launch the NextBSD project to modernize FreeBSD with Apple Darwin components, which as we reported in July was recently restarted. The new NextBSD effort is being built with the help of LLM coding assistants. As you might surmise from 18 new FreeBSD ports of Linux tools in a month, as well as from ten releases of the new OS bundle in as many days, Hubbard too is using LLMs to assist in this rapid development process: Daemonarchy’s GitHub repository contains both AGENTS. md and SKILL. md files, which point to Hubbard’s own Literate AI project, whose repo describes it as a "A meta-harness for coding agents to follow proper Software Development Lifecycle practices", and says it is "Based on literate programming ideas from Donald Knuth". There’s quite a bit of documentation, including a project specification with a list of goals. Lots of formatted Markdown text is also something of an LLM bot hallmark, though, and it’s not clear to us if this is intended for humans to read, or to guide the bots. Possibly, it’s both…