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.
This has got to be satire. There's no way.
> and _why_ does it have a conference, sponsors, and merchandise? especially when longstanding distros like Debian have struggled with funding and sponsorship for decades?
I agree with the author that this is the thing that mostly gets me about Omarchy: yes, it is fine for you to use Omarchy, but in the end this is just a collection of dotfiles from DHH. We should be investing this money in some other distro that is actually doing some actual work (like packaging programs, maintaining infrastructure, etc.), instead of a hobby project from a millionaire.
because most of the time there is. We live in a world that is dominated by obnoxious social media influencers and 'taste makers' who push people to the <newest thing> every day. This is the linux version of Mr. Beast lunchables.
Having a conference and corporate sponsorships for what is 500 lines of bash scripting is beyond silly. And like the other half dozen arch based 'desktop reskin disguised as distro' things, when it eventually breaks or stops being supported you'll have a lot of confused people who don't know how to fix it.
I run regular Arch with Niri and Noctalia Shell, which is based on Quick Shell. It is a pretty solid experience. But even with Quick Shell, which has taken a lot of the pain out of closing the gap between traditional DEs and these tiling WMs, it’s still a decent chunk of configuration.
Without it, I’d be doing a ton more configuration with a bar and scripts to display some information. And then those would be hardly functional, since really they’re just showing some stdout from the terminal. If I wanted to actually, say, connect to a new Bluetooth device, I’d still be heading to the terminal to connect.
That gap is what makes Omarchy interesting to me, and presumably to the people who seem to really like it.
Omarchy lets someone install it just like another “real” distribution and get a working OS without having to do hours of configuration and ensuring they have all the additional utilities they’d expect to have.
I think it does kind of have to be a “distro” because the appeal is that you don’t maintain the scripts yourself. You can just install it and get sensible defaults from a fresh install.
There’s nothing stopping Ubuntu, Fedora, or another major distribution from creating something like this. They already have Plasma and GNOME variants that include bundled software and sensible defaults customized from the delivered version of those DEs.
My question for people is whether their objection has to do with Omarchy itself or with the person or people behind it. I get that even without a controversial figure behind it, people might still object to some of the technical decisions behind it. But I find it hard to argue against the idea. It is filling a niche by making alternative WMs like Hyprland more accessible.
It's not a distro because you could overwrite everything by downloading someone else's dotfiles in a few minutes. It's purely just a set of configs.
both because as I said there's no distinction with a project like this, and I'll give you a technical example for this. The manual which I briefly read through says this on the monitor configuration:
"Omarchy assumes you're running on a 2x-capable retina-class display by default[...] It's what you'd want to run on a 27" 5K Apple Studio Display [...] But if you're not running a display with a PPI of 218 or above, you'll want to change the monitor settings ..."
then it proceeds to tell you what config files to edit by hand. Monitors with that PPI have a market share of <2%. This isn't a system for people who want things out of the box, it's his personal dotfiles that people use because they know his name. It's like buying Jordan sneakers and thinking they'll make you great at basketball, it's an influencer product. How many people, given that the appeal is to not read anything, have consulted that part of the manual? If this was a nobody's repo it'd have 10 stars and people would ask why the fonts look like crap.
If you want stuff working out of the box for non-technical people give them an Ubuntu LTS release, not window managers on release version 0.x. maintained by people in a discord
Not sinister, but just a simple strategy of a business to increase sales of his products (such as hey.com) as well as pushing his personal preferences (grok) to younger audience masquerading as being done for public good.
It is just repulsive for people who see through this. But I think it is an OK business strategy which may be somewhat successful.
Values of DHH and his businesses on one side and Linux community on the other are not very well aligned, so it will inevitably cause these kind of tensions.
But if the goal is to target younger people who are not part of Linux community yet, then it may work, and that's the play here.
He has said multiple times Omarchy is his distro he designed for himself with his personal defaults. He's not masquerading anything, and what he's doing is being done for the public good, he's sharing his creation open and freely. He even documents how you can change those defaults to better fit you.
>Values of DHH and his businesses on one side and Linux community on the other are not very well aligned, so it will inevitably cause these kind of tensions.
You speak for yourself and possibly a small group of loud terminally online people. You do not speak for "the Linux community" as a whole. Omarchy users part of the Linux community. You do not get to define the community's values.
Omarchy isn't any more "just some dotfiles" (henceforth, "default configurations") than any other derivative distribution seeks to be. Distributions always ship some kind of default configuration, be it embedded in the programs themselves, installed in /etc or otherwise patched in. Of course, some distributions, especially base distributions, focus on just shipping the packages, but more involved ones, for example Ubuntu, tweak the default configurations of many programs to provide a cohesive experience.
I've always found it a shame how difficult it is to reproduce some of the r/unixporn screenshots, to see if they actually function nicely, use for a bit and see what I like and can backport to my own configurations. Even when the author provides some links, it's usually really hard to set up, and you're never quite sure what the author might've glossed over or configured out-of-band. I always wished there were more of these highly opinionated linux respins with heavily tweaked dotfiles, so at some point I also made my own to add to the pile: https://github.com/mid-kid/RocketISO/blob/master/docs/RELEAS...
If Omarchy is upsetting the Linux establishment as much as this article implies (unclear if this is just a one-off) then it's probably worth a look!
It’s not upsetting anyone other than people who like to argue about inconsequential things on social media.
I actually don’t think it would be as popular without all of the manufactured drama and controversy around. Some people (like the parent comment) are drawn to the controversy and feeling of rebellion.
I bet 99% of people do not care if you use it or not. The other 1% just like arguing about other people’s personal preferences for some reason.
We've seen the same thing play out with Harry Potter for example.
I’d be more inclined to ignore it entirely if I was a blog author.
This is just more perpetuation of the distro fragmentation that doesn’t need to exist.
It feels very strange (and wrong) to me: if there is difficulties in installing something, try to help people instead of packaging the solution with other things that are not related. It feels a bit like if uv was mainly providing their "uvOS" to solve the difficulties of dealing with python packages.
I would guess in typical DHH fashion he would say it is Open Source. And I don't understand where this just Arch + Hyprland installation is coming from?
They have also customised the OS / distro so it install in less than 2 min on a super fast USB. Getting Laptops, both Framework and Dell are now on board, tested on Omarchy so they work out of the box. And so many other tiny things that just make the experience better. I say better but to most consumer, those are expected in the first place.
And this "expectation" people have been waiting for more than a decade.
As a fan of boring Dell laptops/desktops and owner of many, I can tell you they have been well supported in every distro I have tried (Debian, Fedora, Arch, SUSE)
So the purpose of Omarchy was to get devices quickly set up with some opinionated defaults.
I don't think it changes anything about what I was saying. If indeed dhh helped find a way to install hyprland more easily but failed to also provide a standalone recipe, that does not sound like a good practice to me.
I'm saying that if they ended up shipping the house because the house contains their new useful microwave but forget to ship the microwave independently, it is something that should decrease their reputation, it looks silly and amateurish.
Of course, I'm not saying that they should solve my problem for me. Simply, they are doing things in a complicated way either uselessly or either non-fully-honnestly.
I'm not sure why "I browse reddit" is any sort of a valid qualifier upon which to base this decision
but yes otherwise the article is correct, dotfiles != distro
Then install arch or Cachy or some other Arch based distro and just use the parts you liked.
I am completely disinterested in the author's concerns because Omarchy was useful to me in demonstrating how to compose pieces into a useful whole in a relatively minimalist distribution like Arch. It is much easier to learn with good examples than just only reading DIY reference docs. (And they are good examples even if you dislike the targets of the apps installed - I agree on those points, but they're just not that important)
I find the launch menu the most interesting I've seen out of any desktop environment / OS. It puts easy access to your apps front and center and above esthetics, and yet it still looks great. It's not a sane request, but I'd love to be able to swap the launcher/start menu in another DE for a fully customizable version of that.
Omarchy also has a very smooth way to 'install' web apps. There exist packages that do that for you, but I've tested several and wouldn't recommend any of them. They're bloated (this should really only be a couple lines of bash, like Omarchy's [0]), some use web views (I really want an actual browser under the hood so I can have my extensions), and all that I've tested leave litter on your machine after removing apps or the software. I find web apps as .desktop files so useful that I'm actually using a hacky DIY script now (which I'm considering releasing under GPL if I ever find time to clean it up).
Also, whether you're a beginner or a pro, having a sane starting config for Hyprland is just convenient. Which tells you something about it imho. My conclusion would be similar to the OP's, if you're Omarchy-curious, try Cosmic on your distro of choice. Or at least a cleaned up version with the most egregious personal preferences (like a global keybind for opening Twitter/X) removed, if anybody cares to maintain that.
[0] https://github.com/basecamp/omarchy/blob/dev/bin/omarchy-web...
I am so glad I have LLMs now to help me with Linux problems, gone are the years of putting up with curmudgeonly Linux gate keepers like this on IRC just so I could make progress when I was stuck.
As I've gained experience (and maybe some wisdom), I've come to find the fragmentation a huge turn off. I've grown more and more fond of the BSD world. You install an operating system. You can learn the system and it doesn't change (much). It feels like you can accrue knowledge that doesn't become irrelevant every six months.
However I would still generally advise against using Omarchy because the maintainer does not seem to place any importance on security. For example the default firewall configuration leaves the SSH port open and the number of failed login and sudo attempts before a timeout has been unnecessarily increased. Furthermore Omarchy installs some of the offered programs via a .sh script that is downloaded via curl rather than using a package manager like the one Arch already has. In addition Hannsen still refuses to sign his commits, which means it's only a matter of time before a supply chain attack occurs.
"... install a real distribution - not some guy's personal dotfiles." "the entire 'omarchy distribution' amounts to little more than Arch linux" Your own statements contradict each other.
I'd love to see a bunch of similar projects based on slackware, debian, suse or whatever.
I think most current distros/DE's dump "everything and the kitchen sink" at the user leaving him or her to finish the setup themselves. They stop short of actually presenting a good, unified experience. That's how it has been for ages of course, and Omakub is basically a "distro skin" that IMO has been lacking from distros all this time.
Picking a set of sensible default apps and making them 100% integrated and well documented is just nice. Ubuntu with Omakub just feels more like a finished OS than Ubuntu itself does.
Omarchy on the other hand is as much a distribution as most other popular distributions. Sure, based on arch, but if that disqualifies it then most distros are "not distros" all of a sudden. So I call Omarchy a distro.
I get why it exists and I use it for convenience since I like Arch anyway - but I would actually have preferred a few more variants on omakub, personally.
Problem is, some people are really impressed by ricing and that is what has been catching users for that ""distro""
I'm pretty sure the fans of minimalism/t distros or just plain bare setups aren't really hyping that much. The author is right in that it's just an opinionated layer on top of Arch
The fact that it takes so much more to put together a Linux distribution is I think something that the Linux ecosystem ought to aspire to change.
Every once in a while I try something else realise what an absolute bloated mess it is and come back. A long time ago maybe 18 years back I used wmii which did tiling and it was reasonable (you could still resize with a mouse)
Why do you need tiling for anything that isn't s terminal? Just use tmux or ghostty?
If I want in labwc I can drag the window to the side and it snaps to half screen just like windows.
I stick with this set up even with 32GB ram it literally never fails and never has in over a decade.
My guess is hyperland takes forever to figure out and uses way more ram. No thanks
Openbox/labwc looks great out the box without this flailing about.
We need Linux to win period. I don't care if it's called Distro, gist of envfiles, or a tank for gods sake. I want the market share for linux rather than macOs and Windows.
"omarchy install will include a bunch of proprietary software, including... what are we doing?? these are not the kinds of packages that any sane distro would ship to its users" - Ye this is great software. You know what is not good? when you download a distro that only has open source software and your codecs doesn't work, then that person just install windows again (true story many of my friends went through that). So please, don't tell people to skip stuff just because you dislike it
Omarchy really has excellent defaults and generally development is always moving in the right direction.
1. Based off a common base distro
2. Domain-specific, rather than general-use
3. Includes commercial software
Frequently the desktop app and the safari extension won't be in sync and missing a recently added password, or doesn't show up on my other devices hours later. I still have no idea how the extension vs desktop app actually work together, or if they do at all.
Sometimes 1password (safari extension) is "locked" - but the desktop app isn't locked? and No amount of clicking the little 1password icon, that's supposed to unlock it does anything. Just a completely no-op button. Quitting safari _and_ the desktop app seems to be what's required to fix it.
I've been thinking about just moving back to native macOS keychain, but I haven't bothered to check on linux+windows support.
I'm using Strongbox (uses a KeePass-compatible database) which integrates into Apple's AutoFill API and appears automatically in all input fields - just like Keychain. No extension needed.
But yes the Safari 1Password extension constantly shits The bed.
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?
I for one really liked the out-of-box Omarchy experience and wouldn't know the first thing right now about how to customize arch so that it feels the same as Omarchy. Maybe it's trivial? But honestly I don't care I just like Omarchy's default opinion design way better than any other distro I've tried so far.
I tried Omarchy and thought it was decent, I liked a lot of the settings and visuals.
Back to the article, they then list a bunch of things that I think are supposed to be negatives, but includes things like some shortcuts and some software I already use pre-installed.
So let’s grant that the title is true. So what?
The biggest problem with Linux as a desktop gaining more popularity is the learning curve. In our bubble, you might not want any software installed and want your first install to barely have a desktop environment, but the average Joe wants their browser, music player and password manager ready to go. If omarchy is nothing but a gateway drug to making leaving windows much easier then I am all for it, even if we bikeshed about whether or not it’s a distributed (I agree it’s not). Once you have it installed you can customise just as much as you would any other “distribution”, it just makes that first step that bit easier. Linux, if it wants to win the war, needs to make it easier for new folks to onboard. The winning desktop distributions (omarchy, cachyos etc) make onboarding easy.
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.
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.
And I know Omarchy is not the only one out there doing something similar, and that there is a spectrum. It is not a problem. The problem is not the existence of the spectrum, the problem is that at some point, we should just call a cat a cat instead of arguing "well, being a cat is a spectrum, so every year we can call a new thing in the adjacent spectrum a cat and pretend it has all the quality one would expect from a cat".
What I'm interested in, is obtaining a system that allows me to run Linux and userland reliably and trust-worthily. I don't know about you, but I don't compile all my software one by one myself after checking the source code. So, I prefer not relying on people who don't display much understanding on how to distribute a system reliably and trust-worthily. If someone is "just" making their own "flavor" of desktop and distribute it and call it "a distribution" without even noticing that such a package is lacking a lot of things that traditional distributions are doing, these people are just not mature enough to be trusted to do a good job. (and of course, being a "traditional distributions" is not "good enough", it is a necessary but not sufficient condition)
Don't get me wrong, they can distribute their flavor as much as they want, I'm happy with that. But if they act as if their stuff is the same as what is traditionally called "linux distribution" or if they are not smart (or honest) enough to mention that it's different, then 1) they are not mature enough, 2) it is worth informing newcomers or naive people about that.
It's a bit like a company that build cars, and then you have a guy that buy some of these cars, change one or two things on the dashboard and paint the car in a different color, and call themselves a car manufacturer. Nothing wrong with selling customised cars, but it is dangerous to act as if the guy is a proper manufacturer when they don't have either the capacity, the knowledge or the expertise to provide a good reliable car.
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.
I don't use it, but I figure it's just a matter of most people being too lazy to polish up their own equivalent, so they'll use someone else's.
What?? Could someone tell me where I can buy hardware as good as a MBP? Genuinely I’d love this, it would be like Christmas had come early!
intel panther lake changed the game.
Summarizes my feeling about this article and the author.
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.
This is not a judgement of using a prepared meal box.
If I didn't want a distro, I'd just go with something like Buildroot, or even more elementary. Yes, this is one of the projects I also have in mind to understand better and with the cross-supporting goal of reducing boot time of a machine that'll eventually run my game engine, with the reference of running said game engine on a n MCU.
But that's not what I want from desktop Linux of a pedigree that'd have potential of replacing my daily driver requirements, which are actually quite difficult to match, but I do have hope.
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.
Omarchy was my first entry back into desktop Linux since the early 2000s, when I ran enlightenment. The promises of Omarchy are big, and the idea of somebody trying all the tons of available bits of desktop Linux and assembling their favorites is very compelling!
I've since moved to KDE Plasma on that initial Omarchy install, but kept some other parts like the Bash completion system. I would love to get back to having single key sequences to bring up, say, a Claude window, but not enough to set it up in Plasma. If somebody else did it for me though... that's the appeal of Omarchy.
LLMs make customization much easier, but the impetus has not yet been there for me.
I don't think its suspicious at all. I think it filled a long standing need for some subset of current and on-the-fence Linux users of needing and wanting a really opinionated, well put together set of defaults that you don't really get with a vanilla OOTB experience on most distros.
The popularity of the various dotfiles repos proves that enough, Omarchy just turns that into an automated set up script on top of arch while regular dotfiles repos assume you already know how to, or care enough, to figure out how to install hyprland and all the associated utilities (waybar, launcher menu, wallpaper handling, etc).
Plus, generally, most people grew up using either Windows or macOS which are also very opinionated and I'd argue most users don't actually want to form their own workflows, they'd rather have something already put together to adapt into.
Myself included. Albeit I'm a macOS user, but I genuinely don't really have opinions unless something is seriously annoying, I'll change it, but otherwise I'd much prefer a set of good defaults and I'll just learn how to use them. Most of my work isn't using the operating system itself anyway, it's done within software running on it and that's where I'd rather focus my time.
I wish people were as critical in more relevant areas.
But yeah, I think the vast majority of people using it are first timers to Linux in general. It attracts these people because it doesn’t ask too much of them. I don’t know why anybody would complain about growing the ecosystem. More people using Linux is always a good thing for the community.
Not really, seems kinda weird to be frustrated by an opensource project that people have decided to build a community around.
When POPos was just an Ubuntu fork with a few gnome extensions and a better nvidia installer, I guess you were upset it got traction also? Or is their enhanced nvidia bash script enough of technical merit to appease your righteous stance.
I wonder how you feel about a sponsored Kubuntu conference, you must look at the idea with disgust.
> I wonder how you feel about a sponsored Kubuntu conference
Oddly specific? If you were honestly interested in a technical discussion then yes, in short, I wouldn't consider Kubuntu the pinnacle of the Linux-human interface. A sponsored conference? I have no idea why that is relevant or why you brought it up in such a stingy manner.
Again, what I find interesting in these low-barrier distributions, be it Omarchy or otherwise, is the implicit burden on the rest of the Linux ecosystem. The original author of the article could have expanded on Omarchy in this relation rather than just its technical shortcomings.
You can easily change most things you don’t like in Omarchy.
If so then that’s your answer. Why isn’t this obvious?
Giving someone a box of parts vs an assembled product is a huge difference. Yes there are some who prefer the box of parts, but they’re an extreme minority.
The idea of enabling proprietary software in the default install is apparently verboten to some, and getting that viewpoint out there helps people understand why Linux on the desktop is where it is.
There are plenty of strange things that gets publish every day, I don't see why you get hung up on this post.
Was helpful to me. I now know not waste my time.
the poster seems to have skipped over the point that "Omarchy" is just the default configuration of Arch for 37signals internal use, and enthusiasm over it working well caught on, so it's shared as open source.
CachyOS is another set of UI configurations of Arch and is also just handy.
disclaimer: i use both and they work well.
It's a blog post, a medium where people can self-publish their writing for no other purpose than expressing themselves. These things have been around for decades at this point.
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.
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!
Yeah! What a mystery. What could make people install omarchy or pop os over debian, arch or gentoo?
What could possibly be the reason
This is the dumbest thing i’ve read this month.
Stopped reading after that.
The implicit amount of hate for DHH is almost at tinfoil hat levels.
