Start Here

What Oniomarchy Is

Oniomarchy is a beautiful, opinionated Linux workstation for cybersecurity. It is the operating system for security people — not a live CD you boot to run one tool and throw away, and not a plain Arch install with a package list pasted over it. It is a workstation you live in.

It is built on Omarchy, the Arch-based desktop DHH made — Hyprland and a Quickshell bar tuned into something fast, keyboard-driven, and genuinely nice to look at. Omarchy’s whole point is that a Linux desktop can be considered: themed down to the terminal colors, arranged so the common thing is one keystroke away, opinionated so you don’t spend your first week configuring instead of working. Those are great choices, already made. Oniomarchy doesn’t argue with them — it takes that exact sensibility and points it at offensive security. Oniomarchy is the hacker’s choice, sitting on top of DHH’s.

The name

“Oni” (鬼) is the Japanese demon or ogre — the mask you have probably seen: horns, bared teeth, a face carved to look dangerous. Set it next to “Omarchy” and you get Oniomarchy: the same well-made desktop, wearing the mask. The oni shows up throughout the system — the installer banner, the login art, the wallpapers — not as decoration for its own sake, but because the whole project has a point of view, and the mask is it.

The idea

The hacker’s omakase.

Omakase is the sushi counter where you don’t order — you sit down and the chef serves you the good stuff, in order, because they know the menu better than you do. That is the promise here. Every tool in Oniomarchy was chosen and placed on purpose. Nothing is here because a distro three steps upstream happened to ship it. When you open the Security menu you are looking at a hand-picked set: the tool that is actually worth reaching for in each category, wired up, in the menu, ready.

That opinion runs deeper than the package list. The tools are grouped the way you actually work — Information Gathering, Web Application Analysis, Wireless Attacks, Digital Forensics, and the rest. Every command-line tool shows you its own help before it runs, so you are never staring at a blank prompt trying to remember the flag. Your own machine’s IP addresses are printed for you every time, because LHOST is the thing you reach for constantly and never have memorized. The listener, the file server, the proxy trust step — the five-minute rituals that start every engagement — are one menu entry each.

Recon. Research. Reverse. Report.

An overlay, not a fork

Oniomarchy does not replace Omarchy and it does not fork it. If you already run Omarchy, you run one install script and end up with Oniomarchy — the security tooling, the menus, the services, the privacy layers, the branding — added on top of the desktop you already have. Nothing Omarchy owns is touched. Every change lands in your own config, through Omarchy’s own tools, in the places Omarchy leaves for exactly this. When Omarchy updates, your Oniomarchy layer rides along intact.

That is a deliberate choice about how to be a good citizen of someone else’s system. Oniomarchy works with Omarchy’s mission rather than against it: same desktop, same update path, same themes, same feel — plus everything a security workstation needs. You are not giving up the thing that made the desktop good in order to get the tools.

What you get

  • A hand-picked security toolkit, grouped into the categories you work in and added to the menu you already use. See The Toolkit.
  • Privacy and anonymity built in layers — Tor for the whole machine or just the browser, a hardened Firefox that forgets everything on exit and hides who you are, MAC randomization, encrypted disks and a password manager. See Privacy & Anonymity.
  • The machine itself, ready to work — toggleable services, a reverse-shell listener, a file server, and browser-based tools, all a keystroke away. See Working the Machine.

The next page installs it.