User expectations in software are shifting, radically.

Installing an operating system used to take a long time. Sometimes hours, once you counted drivers, updates and setup. This week Omarchy 4.5 came out, and on fast hardware a full install now takes less than ten seconds. Anush Elangovan from AMD set the record with a complete Omarchy install in 7 seconds on his AMD laptop. Seven seconds.

How they did it

The trick is not a faster disk or a clever cache. It is a different approach.

Omarchy used to install some 940 packages one by one. The new installer skips that. It unpacks a prebuilt image of the whole system and then adds only the few packages that this specific machine needs. That alone cuts install time roughly in half on any machine, and on fast hardware it gets absurd.

They didn't tune the old process. They asked whether the old process needed to exist at all.

The lesson for everyone else

A lot of organisations still chase gains of "10% here, 15% there". A slightly faster build. A report that loads a bit quicker. A process that needs one less approval.

Those gains are fine, but they are not ambitious enough. When a whole OS installs in seconds, your users start expecting the same from you. Waiting minutes for a deploy, hours for a data export or days for onboarding starts to feel broken.

The better question is not "how do we make this 10% faster?" It is "what would it take to make this 10x, 100x or 1000x faster?" That question usually leads to a different design, like replacing 940 small steps with one prebuilt image.

Try it on your own work

Pick the slowest thing your team or your customers wait for. Then ask:

  • Which steps are we repeating every time that could be done once, ahead of time?
  • What would we build if this had to take seconds instead of hours?
  • Who is already doing it that way?

What is the one thing in your work that still takes hours and should take seconds?

Read the Omarchy 4.5 release notes: https://omarchy.org/news/2026/11/omarchy-4-5/

Originally published on my blog: https://nevolin.be/blog/omarchy-install-seven-seconds