Omarchy Is Not A Distro

awesan

What a strange thing to publish.. just don't use it if you don't like it? What is this even attempting to do?

lmrkk

I tried, felt same. its just ricing.

peteforde

FWIW, 1Password is pretty great.

poly2it

It is understandable to be frustrated at a project without technical merit gaining so much traction when, as in the author's words, "longstanding distros like Debian have struggled with funding and sponsorship for decades". However, I do feel the author fails to come up with any conclusion as to why there is such a disparity between interest in traditional distributions and this rice. I agree that it is almost suspicious how quickly it has risen to prominence. There has been a surge of hugely popular amorphous open source projects by single or few maintainers, often created very recently. In my experience, most of the users of Omarchy are inexperienced with Linux, and use it because it doesn't require them to form their own opinions and workflows, which can be both positive and negative.

zwaps

Omarchy!! shipping a window manager with defaults and or a terminal with a config - what an unspeakable sin. Linux should be hard and shitty and it should break all the time! What is this newfound obsession with distros that just works and have some great setups and defaults. Where do we end up if you can just close your laptop lid or copy paste with the same key or or or if even… gasp… the theme is automatically applied across all apps? DHH? More like literal devil. No sir! Let me write a blogpost post haste!

hokumguru

I’m sorry, but what is the actual definition of a distro? What makes Omarchy different than, say, Cachy which is also an opinionated DE and set of packages on top of Arch. There aren’t really any rules to what to find this or not. Just because something is more opinionated than other solutions doesn’t mean it’s invalid. In fact, I would say that that’s the primary reason people gravitate towards Omarchy. Many developers coming from the competing operating systems want stuff that just works out of the box, including proprietary software! If you don’t like it, just ignore it and move on. I thought we were past this “I dislike this thing on the internet therefore everyone who likes it is wrong” phase of the internet. It’s also discourse like this that specifically discourages people from trying Linux.

dcmatt

An opinionated person has different opinions than a different opinionated person

ethanlipson

Whether we call it a distribution or not is really a matter of semantics. The more interesting question is, do people actually want a hyper-opinionated Linux install? Based on the reactions to Omarchy that I've seen, the answer is obviously yes. Broadly, people seem ok with just not using some of the suggested software if the defaults get them most of the way there. More generally, I would say that configuring one's own Linux installation is not in itself virtuous. It used to be a way to identify people who were "committed" to using it via gatekeeping. The OP says that Omarchy is just DHH "cashing in" on new inexperienced Linux users, but as long as we don't value customizing one's own installation just for the sake of customization (I certainly don't anymore!), why is this a problem?

shdh

Omarchy is the best Linux desktop experience I’ve ever had

Kiro

> my eyes roll out of my head Summarizes my feeling about this article and the author.

maxlin

Well, this "not distro" software that takes over your whole computer when you boot the ISO and install it has been the greatest out-of-the box Linux experience for me, and has introduced me to the best new way of using an operating system since I first installed a Linux distro ~20 years ago. And yes I did actually end up going thru archinstaller first as the other route failed, but turned out it was archinstall failing to start with, failing to clear the existing Chrome OS partitions even after selecting the disk (full disk!) properly. I managed to install it on a N23 Chromebook I got for 30€, with just a 32GB SSD on it. Now I am on the edge of making my work laptop dual boot it, so I can run some heavier software on it. Haven't used as much Desktop Linux in the previous 15 years as I have the previous month. It's supposed to be opinionated to start with. It absolutely is better that way. Probably one of the easiest to mod too, changed my battery indicator to show current wattage with an one-line change. As it says - Chef's choice. I want my food to be edible to start with when I'm hungry.

tiffanyh

The post seems to be missing an important point… DHH tends to build things for himself first, then share it with the world (sometimes free, sometimes paid) to see if others find value in it too. Most of those things never become broadly adopted, which is clear from the long list of products 37signals has shut down over the years: Breeze, Writeboard, Backpack, Sortfolio, and others. But every once in a while, there’s a huge success … like Rails, Basecamp, Hey, and apparently now Omarchy. I honestly don’t think it’s much more complicated than that. He enjoys building things he personally wants. And when he sees others getting joy from what he built, he gets excited and doubles down.

goosejuice

Words have meaning, sure I get that. The rest is silly. Omarchy was built for DHH and Basecamp. It's MIT. Noone is forcing anyone to use someone's "shitty dotfiles" unless you work at Basecamp. Things like Omarchy are a boon to Linux because they bring in people that otherwise wouldn't have given it any thought. It's demonstrating what is possible as a little gateway drug. Things like SteamOS are much better at this, but more is better. It's not doing any harm.

yuters

I've tried to setup Arch with Hyprland like 3 times on my own and with the most popular dot files. It was terrible, frustrating and things broke all the time. Omarchy fixed that and I can't recommend it enough.

chinathrow

Haters gonna hate.

mvdtnz

Eh this just feels like gatekeeping to me.

andix

Omarchy is more like Kubuntu. Some config scripts and a few additional packages on top of another distribution.

wrren

We seem to have arrived at a set of assumptions that states that if a large number of people like something that we don’t, or don’t subscribe to some cultural norms that we doggedly adhere to, then there has to be something sinister afoot. The out of box experience with Omarchy is highly functional, aesthetically pleasing and challenges users to lean more on keyboard shortcuts than they’d typically be used to. That’s clever because once you’re whizzing around with these shortcuts you feel accomplished, productive, and that generates loyalty towards the distro. None of this is a bad thing, anything that makes Linux more accessible and interesting is good. Bucking trends that were making Linux harder to adopt or less culturally relevant is good too.

Vaslo

Pretty clear by the other opinions this author has on his “blog” that he dislikes DHH for more than just the Omarchy distribution. Here’s a fact - Omarchy opened up Arch to a whole crowd of people that would have never tried Arch given its notorious difficulty to the uninitiated.

aftbit

I'm still on X :laugh: