While everyone is impressed by the Omarchy Linux distribution—viewing it as the perfect blend of Arch's modernity and Hyprland's powerful customization—another Linux distribution has emerged, offering the same formula but executed even better, in a beginner-friendly way for those who prefer using a mouse.
Although the distribution is brand new—only a few months old—it is undergoing rapid, exciting developments and improvements. In my opinion, this makes it the best Arch Linux-based distribution available; here is why.
What Mainstream OS actually is?
Mainstream OS is an Arch Linux–based distribution built around Hyprland (a Wayland compositor), with a heavily customized Quickshell on top instead of a traditional desktop environment (Quickshell is a toolkit for building status bars, widgets, lockscreens, and other desktop components using QtQuick. It can be used alongside your Wayland compositor or window manager to build a complete desktop environment).
The project's own pitch is "Let's make Linux mainstream." — a rolling-release system under the hood, with a designed, cohesive interface on the surface that borrows visual language from macOS: rounded corners, a dock, and smooth workspace transitions.
That combination — Arch's package availability and freshness, without Arch's usual setup tax — is the entire reason to care about this distro. Here's how it held up against the three things that actually matter for daily use.
1. Installation: about ten minutes, and it means it
Arch Linux is known for its text-based installation process conducted via a black-screen UI, making it certainly not the recommended choice for any user looking to enter the Linux world for the first time. Mainstream OS skips all of that, as it ships with a custom Calamares installer that asks a short set of questions like language, timezone and where to install the OS, and the system is up in roughly the time the project advertises — on my hardware, closer to ten minutes than the twenty or thirty I budgeted for, although it may take longer, especially if you have a slower internet connection.
The partitioning step runs through the same graphical interface, simple enough that anyone can get through it without outside help.
Mainstream OS doesn't come bloated with apps you didn't ask for, the way some other distributions do. Instead, the installer gives you a section to freely pick only what you need to set your computer up the way you like.
The installer also runs a 19-point self-verification check after setup (according to the distribution's SourceForge page), confirming things like bootloader configuration, network state, and graphics driver load before it hands control back to you. I didn't have to open a terminal once during setup. For a distribution built on Arch, that's not a small thing — it's the entire value proposition in one step.
2. Btrfs snapshots: Arch's actual weak point, solved
This is the feature that changed my mind about running Arch as a daily driver. Every system update takes an automatic Btrfs snapshot first. If an update breaks something — a driver regression, or a broken dependency — all you need to do is reboot your system, pick the previous snapshot that works from the boot menu, and you're back to a known-good state in under a minute. No manual timeshift or snapper setup, no separate backup tool, no chroot-and-pray recovery methods.
This directly answers the reason most people (myself included, historically) avoid Arch-based systems for anything other than a hobby install: the fear that a routine system update turns into an evening of troubleshooting. With snapshot-and-rollback built into the update flow itself, that fear mostly evaporates. I updated the system three times over the week specifically to test this, and never once needed the rollback — which is its own kind of endorsement.
3. Hyprland + Quickshell: it looks designed, not assembled
Most Hyprland setups you find online are personal dotfiles — impressive, but clearly built by one person for themselves, with rough edges everywhere else. Mainstream OS is the first Hyprland-based system I've used that feels like a complete and finished product: consistent spacing, a dock and top bar that behave the same way every time, workspace switching that doesn't require memorizing a keybind cheat sheet on day one.
Day-to-day, this matters more than benchmarks. Tiling window management with Hyprland is genuinely fast once you're used to it — snapping windows into a layout takes a gesture or a keybind, not a mouse-drag negotiation with the edge of the screen. On a six-year-old integrated GPU, animations stayed smooth, which says as much about Hyprland's efficiency as it does about the hardware being older but not weak.
The default appearance is simple and intuitive; the desktop stays clean — whether right after login or after minimizing every window — with a distinctive, elegant clock widget sitting in the top-left corner. You can also add other widgets to the desktop, like weather, calendar, a to-do list and "now playing" music info, for quick access to information at a glance.
Mainstream OS also includes a settings app with a graphical interface for system configuration, avoiding the dotfile-editing that other Hyprland-based distributions usually require. It lets you tune different parts of the OS — the top bar, the dock, window appearance, and more. It also handles things like switching between light and dark mode with a single click, or adding and changing languages and keyboard layouts using only the mouse.
Updating Mainstream OS is also handled through the settings app, in the "Update" section. Under the hood it runs on a command-line tool called mainstream-update-helper, which makes sure that every update pass covers everything at once: system packages (from both the Arch and Mainstream repositories), Flatpak apps, and the Mainstream desktop itself — that last one only updates when a new Mainstream release is published.
When a new Mainstream OS release goes out, a small indicator appears in the top bar with a notification telling you what's new and what changed, so you don't miss anything important.
The one rough edge: AUR for closed-source apps
The only friction I hit all week: VS Code and Brave aren't in Mainstream OS's official repositories — both install through the AUR (Arch User Repository). This isn't a Mainstream OS problem specifically; it's true of Arch itself, since neither app is fully open source and Arch's official repos only carry open-source packages. This actually annoys me, as I don't want to double-check PKGBUILD files every time I want to update my operating system.
In practice, this added one extra step (an AUR helper like paru, even though the Mainstream OS project itself recommends avoiding the AUR whenever possible) rather than any real risk. Worth noting if you'd rather avoid AUR entirely: both apps also ship unofficially as Flatpaks on Flathub, which sidesteps the AUR altogether — though personally, I prefer that my apps come from their official vendors, not from unknown people on the internet.
Should you install it?
If you've wanted to try Arch and Hyprland but didn't want to spend a weekend configuring one, Mainstream OS removes that excuse. The installer does the work, the interface is simple, beautiful, and coherent out of the box, and the Btrfs snapshot system solves the one legitimate risk that's kept me away from rolling-release distros for years.
It's not a replacement for a boring, install-and-forget system if that's genuinely all you want — it's still Arch, still rolling, and you'll occasionally see a package move faster than you'd like. But the safety net changes the calculation. A week in, on six-year-old hardware, nothing broke that a reboot into a snapshot couldn't have fixed in under a minute.
To be clear about where I personally landed: this is a review, not an announcement that I've switched. As I mentioned in my previous article, I'm staying on Linux Mint as my daily driver — Mainstream OS is genuinely impressive, and it's the Arch-based distribution I'd point anyone toward if they wanted to try that world, but it hasn't moved me off Mint.
Tested on an HP EliteDesk 800 G2 SFF (Intel Core i5-6500, Intel HD Graphics 530, 16 GB RAM, SATA SSD) over one week of daily use.
