# When Omarchy Breaks

Sooner or later you will press `Super + Space` and nothing will happen, or an update will finish and the screen will look wrong, or the Wi-Fi will vanish five minutes before a call. On a desktop where everything is a file you can edit, that moment feels worse than it is: you have more power than before, so it seems you also have more ways to have ruined it. You have not. Omarchy takes a safety snapshot before every update, keeps your own files separate from its files, and ships commands made for exactly this.

This guide gives you the order of operations: the smallest fix first, the big hammer last, and a clear idea of what each one touches. Checked against Omarchy 4.0.4.

## Prerequisite

You should be comfortable opening a terminal and running a command. If that is still new, read [The Terminal & Shell, Explained](/guides/the-terminal-and-shell) first. It also helps to know what happens between pressing the power button and seeing your desktop, which [How Your Computer Boots](/guides/how-your-computer-boots) covers. This guide is the last in the Omarchy category and leans on the sibling guides, especially [Making Omarchy Comfortable](/guides/making-omarchy-comfortable) (where your config files live) and [Installing and Updating Software on Omarchy](/guides/installing-and-updating-software-on-omarchy) (how updates work).

## How to read this

- **Something is broken right now?** Open [the cheat card](01-the-cheat-card-and-the-repair-ladder.md) and find your symptom. If an update caused it, go straight to [rolling back](02-snapshots-and-rolling-back.md).
- **Calm and want to be ready?** Read in order, then make a snapshot and a config backup before your next risky change. Ten minutes now is worth an evening later.

## The phases

1. **[The Cheat Card and the Repair Ladder](01-the-cheat-card-and-the-repair-ladder.md)** - symptom to fix at a glance, and the five rungs from "restart one thing" to "reinstall".
2. **[Snapshots and Rolling Back](02-snapshots-and-rolling-back.md)** - how Omarchy 4 snapshots, how to roll back from the boot menu, and what a rollback does not touch.
3. **[Reading Logs and Rescuing a Desktop That Will Not Start](03-reading-logs-and-rescuing-a-dead-desktop.md)** - journalctl, the update log, a text-mode login, and fixing a config you broke.
4. **[Hardware Gremlins, Getting Help, and Reinstalling](04-hardware-gremlins-getting-help-and-reinstalling.md)** - Wi-Fi, sound, sleep, displays, asking for help in a way that gets answers, and reinstalling without losing data.

> Not covered here: installing Omarchy from scratch is in [Installing Omarchy](/guides/installing-omarchy), and plugins start at [Omarchy Plugins and the Marketplace](/guides/omarchy-plugins-and-the-marketplace).