Installing Omarchy on a 2015 Intel MacBook Pro

Disclaimer

I’ve barely touched Linux outside of deployment VMs and Docker—never for personal use. I didn’t even know how to make a bootable USB installer.

Then I fell for the Omarchy hype. Thanks to ThePrimeagen and DHH for the nudge—and a special shout-out to PewDiePie; his Linux and de-Googling videos pushed me over the edge.

As a software developer who’d never actually installed a Linux distro, I felt like I’d been missing out.

Test machine

I wanted to learn on something old first. Enter my first “real” laptop: a 13-inch MacBook Pro (Early 2015). It’s full of memories, which is why I’ll never sell it.

Installing Omarchy

I grabbed the Omarchy ISO and wrote it to an 8GB USB stick with balenaEtcher. Don’t make my mistake — you need a bootable USB, not just a file copy.

On the MacBook, I held Option (⌥) at power-on and selected the USB. After Wi-Fi setup, I launched the installer and went through the prompts.

Boom. Partitioning failed with:

OSError: [Errno 5] Input/output error

Multiple retries, same result. After a little digging, it looked like the internal SSD had died. SMART checks confirmed the drive wasn’t responding.

Weirdly, that became my motivation to finish the install no matter what.

Quick diagnostics I ran

# List block devices with helpful columns
lsblk -o NAME,MODEL,SIZE,TYPE,FSTYPE,MOUNTPOINT

# SMART health check, this should at least show something
# for me it printed nothing
sudo smartctl -a /dev/sda

A photo with dead SSD:

Replacing SSD

I’d only opened a laptop once before to replace a display cable. This time, I was more excited than scared.

Parts I used:

1. NVMe SSD: Samsung 970 EVO Plus, 500 GB.
2. Adapter: M.2 NVMe → Apple blade adapter compatible with 2013–2015 MacBook Pros.
3. Thermal pad: Between SSD and adapter.
4. Screw kit: To remove the back cover and SSD.

I watched a couple of short videos, waited for parts, then swapped the drive. Back off, old SSD out, adapter + NVMe in. Done.

First boot (for real)

I repeated the USB boot and installer. This time the new SSD was detected immediately. The install was a breeze. About six minutes, and I was at the Omarchy desktop.

It felt so good.

Conclusion

A handful of videos from PewDiePie and ThePrimeagen pushed me to try something I’d avoided for years. Waiting for the SSD to arrive felt like forever. I just wanted to keep learning and tinkering.

Riding that momentum, I also ordered an ESP32 dev board and a 64×32 LED matrix to finally build a little project I’ve had in mind for five years. But that’s for another post.