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Omarchy random crashing

·401 words·2 mins
Side-Quest Omarchy Arch

Omarchy random crashing. #

I have been playing with Omarchy for a little while now and I have found that the menu manager would occassionally crash. This would mean that I couldn’t use super+alt+space or super+space to open the menus. My initial sleuthing resulted in finding this issue: https://github.com/basecamp/omarchy/issues/2089 which pointed me in the direction of the menu manager, called walker (https://github.com/abenz1267/walker). The short term solution advocated in that issue was to kill the process and there’s a daemon that will restart it:

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# kill the walker process (ie. ps aux | grep -i walker)
pkill walker

I think that the root cause of the issue is actually to do with my graphics card. I’m using a Radeon card and I think that the default setup for Omarchy assumes a specific configuration that is at odds with my hardware (+1 for Mac!). I stumbled across this as my preferred coding editor is Zed, which uses GPU acceleration and I was getting random crashes which were really, really annoying. I found this issue logged here: https://github.com/basecamp/omarchy/issues/1441 and after running the following commands, my system seems much more stable.

The crux of the issue is that vulkan-radeon is needed to run Zed and it conflicts with a default setup of Omarchy.

The cause can be found in Zed’s logs (who’d a known!):

I know I could check Zed’s chosen GPU in ~/.local/share/zed/logs/Zed.log under Using GPU:

When I checked mine initially, it looked like this:
2025-09-15T23:10:48+02:00 INFO [zed::zed] Using GPU: GpuSpecs { is_software_emulated: false, device_name: "AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT", driver_name: "AMD open-source driver", driver_info: "2025.Q2.1 (LLPC)" }
and based on the reports in the issue, I really, really wanted it to use the Radeon drivers and look more like this:
2025-09-17T09:08:40+02:00 INFO [zed::zed] Using GPU: GpuSpecs { is_software_emulated: false, device_name: "AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT (RADV GFX1201)", driver_name: "radv", driver_info: "Mesa 25.2.2-arch1.2" }

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lspci | grep -i VGA
# 09:00.0 VGA compatible controller: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] Navi 22 [Radeon RX 6700/6700 XT/6750 XT / 6800M/6850M XT] (rev df)
# Install the `vulkan-radeon` drivers
sudo pacman -Syu vulkan-radeon
# That wasn't enough, now, remove the default drivers (amdvlk)
sudo pacman -Rs amdvlk

🤞So far, this has resolved my issues, both Zed and the menu manager have been much more stable. If I find more information on this, I will post an update to this here.