After fiddling and searching around, Proton logging etc., still no cause in sight. Then I tried Doom 2016 and it worked! But why? Doom starts with an OpenGL renderer, after switching to Vulkan it behaves like the other games. So there’s something wrong with Vulkan?

Vulkan Tools (Arch package vulkan-tools) to the rescue! After running vulkaninfo it became pretty clear that something important was missing: the Radeon Vulkan driver. No driver, no Vulkan. No Vulkan, no Proton …

Thankfully it’s easy to fix, just install the missing packages:

sudo pacman -S vulkan-radeon mesa mesa-vdpau lib32-vulkan-radeon lib32-mesa

It should work immediately after the installation. There’s already a GitHub issue with a pull request to solve this, but it’s been open for weeks now and it’s not clear, when the fix will be merged and released.

I don’t know why it’s no problem with my other PC, but I have installed Omarchy the old way on this machine (Arch Install and the Omarchy setup script). My best guess is that the bug was introduced with Omarchy’s ISO setup.

How does it run?

Well, that Ryzen AI MAX+ 390 is an absolute beast. Doom 2016 runs with over 100 fps with max settings on the internal display (2880x1800) and still far beyond 60 fps in 4K on my main monitor. Just don’t use fullscreen mode, it flickers like hell (known problem of Doom 2016 with the Vulkan renderer).

The HP ZBook Ultra is no gaming notebook, but it has a really powerful APU and is still a quite compact and light device on the level of a 14" MacBook Pro. I don’t want a 250 W 4 kg behemoth of a notebook.

The HP ZBook has a quite good trackpad, even compared to MacBooks, but some things seemed off. No right-click with two fingers, instead it would only work in the lower right corner. And I absolutely hate tapping, I want real clicks.

Turns out, it’s not the hardware. It’s all configurable in Hyprland. In Omarchy you can find the settings in .config/hypr/input, sub-category input:touchpad.

Here are some handy options to tweak the settings:

input {
  touchpad {
    # Enable two-finger clicks for right-clicking
    clickfinger_behavior = true

    # Disable tapping
    tap-to-click = false

    # Enable natural scrolling
    natural_scroll = true

    # Disable the trackpad while typing (accidental tapping etc.)
    disable_while_typing = true
  }
}

There is even more like tap button maps, middle button emulation etc. – you can find all options here.

With Arch and its rolling release model the latest versions are almost immediately available. Sounds good? Of course there’s a catch: breaking changes are also immediately available. Updating all dependencies can break many things at once and that can get very annoying pretty fast. From what I’ve heard the situation improved over the years, so if you’re doing nothing too crazy, it should be okay.

A few days ago I discovered Omarchy from DHH (creator of Ruby on Rails). He created an opinionated Arch setup for developers. Just install Arch via archinstall and run Omarchy’s installation script and you’re mostly done. A few days ago Omarchy version 2.0 was released and brings a complete ISO file with its own installer. Just boot the ISO from a USB drive, enter some things like your user name, password, hostname etc. and wait a few minutes. That’s it!

Omarchy ships with Hyprland, a really efficient and fast tiling Wayland compositor that doesn’t look like it’s from the 1980s. There’s all sorts of eyecandy, everything is customizable and there are also many cool plugins.

Setting up Hyprland and plugins on your own can be a daunting task and a very time-consuming one as well. Omarchy to the rescue! It ships with a really good default configuration and is perfectly usable from the get-go, but that’s only the beginning of the journey. DHH considers Omarchy a starting point for your own configuration and therefore made it very easy to customize the configuration for your needs. There is even a special Omarchy configuration tool for switching the global color theme (for Hyprland, Alacritty, Neovim etc.) or setting up fingerprint sensors for biometric authentication (should be working very well with Framework devices).

Omarchy also installs many useful terminal and GUI programs, like Alacritty (terminal emulator), Neovim, Spotify, Lazygit, fd etc. All GUI programs are mapped to intuitive hotkeys, f.e. SUPER + M for Spotify or SUPER + B for the browser (Chromium by default). SUPER + Space displays the application launcher (like a simple version of Spotlight or Raycast). There’s much more for controlling the current window size to move the focus, switch virtual desktops, fullscreen etc.

All hotkeys are easily customizable in .config/hypr/bindings.conf. You don’t like Chromium? Just install your favorite browser with Pacman (Arch’s package manager) and update the variable $browser in the Hyprland config. That’s it. The browser is also used for webapps mapped on hotkeys, ChatGPT f.e. is mapped on SUPER + A.

A little example to change the music hotkey to Apple Music as webapp (there is no native Linux version).

bindd = SUPER, M, Apple Music, exec, $webapp="https://music.apple.com/de/library/recently-added?l=en"

Pressing SUPER + M now opens a browser window in app mode (no address bar etc.) with the Apple Music website. Nice. I also changed SUPER + A from ChatGPT to Theo Browne’s awesome T3.chat.

That’s far from all that Omarchy offers, but would be a bit much to list every feature in this blog post. Omarchy has a pretty good documentation with many useful tips, a troubleshooting section etc. They even have advice on my problems with Bluetooth. The Minis Forum UM760 comes with a MediaTek WiFi card and sadly MediaTek doesn’t offer Linux drivers for this particular model. I switched to an Intel AX210 card for a few bucks and now it works like a charm.

According to DHH they will even ship an ISO file with Arch and a custom installer in the near future. It’s also planned to switch the default terminal from Alacritty to Ghostty, but there are still some issues to solve.

TL;DR

If you’re not afraid of Linux and want a decent base installation of Arch with many developer-focused features, give Omarchy a chance!

Updates

1. 2025-08-05: Omarchy 1.11 brings a new Hyprland config file structure and bindd command. I updated the file path for key bindings and the example for Apple Music accordingly.
2. 2025-08-28: a small update about the release of Omarchy 2.0 with its own ISO and installer.

Having trouble with the audio quality of your Bluetooth headset on Linux? It sounds awful if you’re listening to music and videos? Well, congratulations, I had the same problem and found a solution. At least if you’re only into listening and don’t make any calls. This works on Ubuntu or Ubuntu-based distributions like Pop!_OS or any other distribution that relies on BlueZ and Pipewire/WirePlumber for Bluetooth audio.

What’s wrong?

Bluetooth has different profiles for different things. If you want to make a call, your headset will switch to the Hands-free Profile (HFP). The available bandwidth will be shared for audio input and output and different audio codecs will be used. It’s good for calls, but really shitty if you want to listen to music. The headset needs to switch to A2DP (Advanced Audio Distribution Profile) for good sound quality. This should happen automatically and HFP should only be active, if you’re making a call. I never had trouble on macOS or Windows with this, but I’m trying Pop!_OS now. It worked for a few days, but today the headset would only connect with the HFP and streaming music or watching videos was as pleasant as dental treatment with a power drill.

Many searches later, I found out that WirePlumber (the session manager for the Pipewire multimedia framework) has some bugs that will trigger HFP on BT headsets even if there’s no call. That’s pretty annoying but at least somewhat easy to solve. There’s a solution in the Arch Linux Wiki, but it needs some modifications for Ubuntu-based distributions.

The solution

First you need to create a directory path in your home directory:

mkdir -p ~/.config/wireplumber/bluetooth.lua.d/

This will create a directory that allows you to override the default WirePlumber Bluetooth config without overwriting the original file.

Now copy the original config to the override directory:

cp /usr/share/wireplumber/bluetooth.lua.d/50-bluez-config.lua ~/.config/wireplumber/bluetooth.lua.d/

You can now edit the file in the override directory.

Beware that the original instructions from the Arch Linux Wiki contain a conf file, but at least with Ubuntu (and Pop!_OS) the config file is written in lua, so it’s a completely different syntax.

Look for bluez5.roles – it should be commented out. I would recommend not to replace the comment and just put the following line below. It’s easier to undo if something goes wrong or you need to enable HFP.

["bluez5.roles"] = "[ a2dp_sink a2dp_source ]"

Save the file and restart the Bluetooth service:

sudo systemctl restart bluetooth

Now reconnect your device and A2DP should be working fine.

JFYI

kitty, tmux and nvim are available in Homebrew on macOS and should be also available in your favorite package manager on Linux.

Be aware, that most examples contain some macOS-specific settings marked with corresponding comments, as I am a Mac user.

kitty

iTerm 2 is a pretty good terminal emulator with many features and way better than Apple’s sorry excuse of a terminal. To be fair, the macOS terminal app has gotten better over the years, but it still lacks essential features like true color support. As good as iTerm 2 is, there’s one catch: iTerm 2 is slow. GPU-accelerated alternatives like kitty render much faster. Don’t get me wrong, iTerm 2 is no slouch and works well, but if you’re on the way to a terminal power-user, you will notice it. Switching between tmux windows is much faster in kitty or other terminal emulators like Alacritty. The latter is a really nice app, but unfortunately has some trouble with macOS key bindings within tmux and I found no easy solution to that. Kitty works out of the box.

Taming the kitten

Kitty’s configuration is very well documented, but can be overwhelming. There are hundreds of options to explore. One of the most important is the font. Grab yourself a nerd-font, add it to your OS and specify the font family. I’m using “Hack Nerd Font Mono” for this example. Just open your kitty config in ~/.config/kitty/kitty.conf and add the following:

# Replace with your preferred font
font_family			Hack Nerd Font Mono 
bold_font			auto
italic_font			auto
bold_italic_font	auto
# Replace with your preferred font size in points
font_size			17.0 

Save and reload the config via menu bar. Enjoy!

Now that’s out of the way, how about some comfort features?

# Set how many lines the buffer can scroll back
scrollback_lines 10000 

# Auto-detect URLs
detect_url yes
# Open URLs with ctrl + click
mouse_map ctrl+left press ungrabbed,grabbed mouse_click_url 

# Copy the mouse selection directly to the clipboard
copy_on_select yes 
# Paste on right click
mouse_map right press grabbed,ungrabbed no-op
mouse_map right click grabbed,ungrabbed paste_from_clipboard

# Enable macOS copy & paste via CMD + c/v
map cmd+c copy_to_clipboard
map cmd+v paste_from_clipboard

# Jump to beginning and end of a word with alt and arrow keys (macOS)
map alt+left send_text all \x1b\x62
map alt+right send_text all \x1b\x66

# Jump to beginning and end of a line with cmd and arrow keys (macOS)
map cmd+left send_text all \x01
map cmd+right send_text all \x05

# Nicer titlebar on macOS
macos_titlebar_color background

# Make vim the default editor for the kitty config
editor vim

Want some color? No problem, there are hundreds of themes available just a Google search away. I prefer Catppuccin Macchiato, but choose what ever you want. kitty config files support includes, so it’s easy to add a theme:

include ./theme.conf

And put the file theme.conf in the same directory as the kitty config and paste your theme of choice into the file.

tmux

So, what the hell is tmux? If you need a terminal, tmux will be one of your best friends. Did you ever run something complex on the shell and accidentally closed the terminal window or something similar happened during an SSH session? It sucks.

tmux sessions to the rescue! A session will be open until you close it, so even if your internet connection breaks down during an SSH session, nothing will vanish. Just connect to the server again and re-join the tmux session. Everything will be as you left it.

Just type tmux new or if you want to give the session a name tmux new -s my_new_session . Of course tmux can handle multiple sessions. To list all open sessions use tmux ls and to join a session type tmux a -t session_name .

After opening a new session, tmux will display window 0. Need more windows? No problem. Need a window inside a window? No problem, they are called panes. Windows can be split in horizontal or vertical panes, as many and wild as you like.

Inside a tmux session you can trigger commands via a so-called prefix key following one or more keys to tell tmux what you want to do. The default prefix key is ctrl + b . To split your current window into two horizontal panes press ctrl + b followed by % , for a vertical split use ctrl + b and ".

To close a pane, just exit the shell of the pane with exit. You can switch panes with ctrl + b followed by an arrow key in the corresponding direction.

Our new best friend ctrl + b is not the most intuitive key combination. I recommend using ctrl + a and map the caps lock key to ctrl (pro-tip: macOS can do this for you without tools or customizable keyboard firmware). It’s way faster and easier to press. Of course, you can map whatever key combination you want, just beware of conflicts with other combinations like cmd + space.

To change the command key, go to your tmux config in ~/.tmux.conf and add the following lines:

unbind C-b
set -g prefix C-a
bind-key C-a send-prefix

This unbinds ctrl + b and sets the prefix key to ctrl + a. To reload the tmux config inside a session use tmux source-file ~/.tmux.conf.

More? More!

There is much more you can do. Here are some recommendations.

# Enable mouse support
set -g mouse on

# Set history limit to 100,000 lines
set-option -g history-limit 100000

# Enable true color support
set-option -sa terminal-overrides ",xterm*:Tc"

# Start windows and panes at 1, not 0
set -g base-index 1
set -g pane-base-index 1
set-window-option -g pane-base-index 1
set-option -g renumber-windows on

# Open new panes in the same directory as their parent pane
bind '"' split-window -v -c "#{pane_current_path}"
bind % split-window -h -c "#{pane_current_path}"

# Vim style pane selection
bind h select-pane -L
bind j select-pane -D 
bind k select-pane -U
bind l select-pane -R

# Shift arrow to switch windows
bind -n S-Left  previous-window
bind -n S-Right next-window

# Don't scroll down on copy via mouse
unbind -T copy-mode-vi MouseDragEnd1Pane

With mouse support you can resize panes with drag & drop and even get a context menu with a right click. By default tmux assigns numbers to windows for fast switching via ctrl + b and number key. Unfortunately the developers decided to begin with 0. This is technically correct, but on the keyboard it’s quite unintuitive, so we can tell tmux to begin with 1. The rest is pretty much self-explanatory.

Neovim

Why neo? Good old vim is extensible via vimscript. It works, but it’s like bash: ugly as fuck. Neovim is a fork of vim and replaces vimscript with support for lua-based extensions. So it’s still blazingly fast(tm) and much nicer to write extensions.

You could setup Neovim and the necessary extensions yourself, but I won’t recommend it in the beginning. Pre-built configs like AstroNvim or NvChad will massively speed up the process and have great defaults. It can be very overwhelming to get used to vim/nvim, so I would recommend to wait with your own config until you get more familiar with a keyboard-based editor.

HELP! I can’t quit vim!

Don’t worry, you are not the first and will certainly not be the last. vim is a so-called modal-based editor. It has different modes like command, insert, visual etc. As you may have noticed, typing will not add text to the buffer. You need to press certain keys like i to enter insert mode to edit text. There are other keys to go in insert mode and every one of them has a slightly different, but pretty useful function, like o which creates a new line below the cursor and starts insert mode.

To exit vim you have to leave the insert mode by pressing esc. Now you are in command mode and can quit by typing : to enter the command line mode and hit q for quit, followed by enter to execute the command.

If you want to save a file, enter command line mode and use w for write. It’s possible to chain certain commands. wq will save the file and quit vim.

Congratulations, you now know how to exit vim!

Navigation

To move the cursor you would just use the arrow keys in most other editors. But there is a more efficient key mapping in command mode: h (left), j (down), k (up) and l (right). No need to move your hand to the arrow keys anymore. To be honest, I’m still not comfortable with this way of navigation, but it’s objectively more efficient than moving the right hand to the arrow keys.

Of course vim has way more navigation possibilities. For example, the cursor can jump forward by one word with w and backwards with b. Press $ to jump to the end of the current line or 0 to the beginning. G navigates you to the last line and gg jumps to the first line. And there is so much more to explore. I recommend a decent vim cheat sheet to learn. But do yourself a favor and try not to learn all keys at once. You will only become frustrated and give up more easily, it’s just too much to learn everything in the beginning.

Netflix developer and Twitch Streamer ThePrimeagen designed a Neovim plug-in to learn the navigation commands as a game. It’s pretty good and fun: https://github.com/ThePrimeagen/vim-be-good

AstroNvim has many plug-ins out of the box. Syntax highlighting, linting, auto-formatting etc. are all there, but you need to install the corresponding servers, parsers etc.

To do this, enter command line mode and use LspInstall followed by the language name for installing a language server protocol. A language server for Tree-Sitter can be installed with TSInstall followed by the language name. If there’s nothing available, both commands will recommend plug-ins according to your input, if available.

Be aware, that LSPs and Tree-Sitter will not bring the necessary tools with them. If you install tooling for Rust, rust-analyzer has to be installed on the system. Same goes for ESLint, Prettier, Kotlin, Java etc.

The End

… for now

That was a lot to unpack, but there is so much more to show you. I will be back with more productivity tools and tips in the near future. Stay tuned!

NOTICE OF CAUTION BEGIN

Your Raspberry Pi will be exposed to the internet on port 80 for HTTP and port 443 for HTTPS/TLS. A potential attacker could have access to your network. Please make sure, that you keep yourself up to date on security issues and install updates regularly.

To secure your network, I recommend an isolated VLAN for your Pi and the web servers.

If this makes you uncomfortable, please re-consider running web servers within your network, that can be accessed from outside.

NOTICE OF CAUTION END

Still here? Okay, you have been warned. Let’s go.

Please make sure, to forward port 80 and 443 from your router to the Raspberry Pi.

Install nginx and Certbot

This guide assumes that you’re running the latest version of Raspbian on your Pi. It’s based on Debian Stretch. If you’re using an older version based on Jessie or even Wheezy, please consider a dist upgrade. This is not without risk, so back-up your current installation!

If you’re already running a web server on your Pi, you should disable it. Otherwise nginx will not be able to use port 80 and 443. If you need that other web server, you should configure it to run on other ports and use nginx to forward the connections.

Now, to the installation:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install nginx-full certbot -y

The nginx service will automatically start after APT finished.

Issue a certificate

In order to create a certificate, Certbot will need access to port 80, but that’s no problem. Look at the following command:

sudo certbot certonly --authenticator standalone -d example.com --pre-hook "service nginx stop" --post-hook "service nginx start"

This tells certbot to issue a certificate for example.com by using a standalone web server to validate the domain for the Let’s Encrypt service. In order to run the server, you have to shutdown nginx until certbot is finished. The pre hook and post hook parameters will help you with that.

After the certificate is successfully issued, your new certificate and all other necessary files will be available here: /etc/letsencrypt/live/example.com

Configure nginx

Don’t like vim? Just use whatever editor you prefer instead.

Add a new site config to nginx:

sudo vim /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/example.com

All files in /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/ will be automatically used by nginx.

Here is a config for example.com, that will be forwarded to 10.0.0.2.

Please adjust it to your needs and paste/save it.

server {
  listen 80;
  server_name example.com;

  location / {
    proxy_pass http://10.0.0.2:80;
  }
}

server {
  listen 443 ssl;
  server_name example.com;
  ssl on;

  ssl_certificate /etc/letsencrypt/live/example.com/fullchain.pem; 
  ssl_certificate_key /etc/letsencrypt/live/example.com/privkey.pem;
  ssl_session_timeout 1d;
  ssl_session_cache shared:SSL:50m;
  ssl_session_tickets off;
  ssl_protocols TLSv1.1 TLSv1.2;
  ssl_ciphers 'ECDHE-RSA-AES128-GCM-SHA256:ECDHE-ECDSA-AES128-GCM-SHA256:ECDHE-RSA-AES256-GCM-SHA384:ECDHE-ECDSA-AES256-GCM-SHA384:DHE-RSA-AES128-GCM-SHA256:DHE-DSS-AES128-GCM-SHA256:kEDH+AESGCM:ECDHE-RSA-AES128-SHA256:ECDHE-ECDSA-AES128-SHA256:ECDHE-RSA-AES128-SHA:ECDHE-ECDSA-AES128-SHA:ECDHE-RSA-AES256-SHA384:ECDHE-ECDSA-AES256-SHA384:ECDHE-RSA-AES256-SHA:ECDHE-ECDSA-AES256-SHA:DHE-RSA-AES128-SHA256:DHE-RSA-AES128-SHA:DHE-DSS-AES128-SHA256:DHE-RSA-AES256-SHA256:DHE-DSS-AES256-SHA:DHE-RSA-AES256-SHA:!aNULL:!eNULL:!EXPORT:!DES:!RC4:!3DES:!MD5:!PSK';
  ssl_prefer_server_ciphers on;
  ssl_stapling on;
  ssl_stapling_verify on;
  ssl_trusted_certificate /etc/letsencrypt/live/example.com/chain.pem; 

  location / {
    proxy_pass https://10.0.0.2:443;
  }
}

To test your config, use the following command:

sudo nginx -t

The validator will tell you, if anything is wrong and why it’s not working.

No errors? Great, just restart nginx and your reverse proxy is working.

sudo service nginx restart

Certificate auto-renewal

The certbot certificate renewal will renew all certificates you created with certbot.

Checking the renewal process:

sudo certbot renew --dry-run --pre-hook "service nginx stop" --post-hook "service nginx start"

The parameter --dry-run allows to test the renewal without actually replacing the certificates.

In order to renew the certificates automatically, open crontab for root:

sudo crontab -e

Add the following cron job and save.

0 0 1 * * sudo certbot renew --pre-hook "service nginx stop" --post-hook "service nginx start"

And you’re done. From now on, your certificates will be renewed every month automatically.

More domains? No problem, just issue the certificate and add another site config.