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.
The author of the blog post makes valid criticisms, I remember when Ubuntu had a shortcut for Amazon in the default desktop installation because they had a sponsorship with Amazon and people rightfully criticized the distro for it. The author is doing the same for DHH promoting things like Grok/Hey/X. Also I am sure if any distro started shipping things like NordVPN in the default installation people would complain.
> 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.
True! I love it when I buy a computer pre-installed with windows and it has a bunch of extra software bundled in like norton antivirus, dropbox, and opera. Plus the OEM makes money and I get a bunch of free apps. It's a win win. I hope the author of omarchy gets sponsor money for including nordvpn, spotify, and 1password. I love seeing linux become more conventionally attractive and steer in the direction of windows and macos because they're popular so linux will be more popular. Everything should be for everyone.
I know you're being facetious but everything you are saying is kind of the point about Omarchy. The "oma" comes from "omakase" or something like that. The point of it's creation was to give devs at 37Signals a streamlined onboarding process. That is why it includes apps thst the comapny uses internally. The OSS nature of it enables people to fork it and remove the bloat, which is exactly what people have already done.
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.
No Linux distribution offers a good out-of-the-box experience with anything outside of XFCE, GNOME, or KDE Plasma. On the other end, these alternative WMs lack all of the shell features that people expect from a desktop experience.
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.
CachyOS (an Arch distro) has done something kid of like this, where it bundles eg a default setup for hyprland and several other desktop environments. It’s not perfect, but I like their model a lot. I mean it’s very Arch to be able to choose whatever you want, but nice to have some opinionated defaults.
It would still require install scripts to get from a fresh Arch install to Omarchy. And then those scripts would also be adding scripts that aren't really necessary for any single person's dotfiles but that’s not really the point.
The difference is there is an implicit contract. Omarchy is maintained as a complete system. You can install it from an ISO, update it like a distribution, and expect someone to care about whether the pieces work together. hyprland is a minimal compositor and you have to figure out how to put together the other pieces of a shell to get a complete experience. If you're doing that piecemeal, you have to maintain and update those on your own. Changes to each piece that break something has to be addressed individually. With Omarchy, that is maintained by someone else and the downstream user just runs an update to omarchy. It compiles a group of disparate packages and makes something cohesive enough to not require jumping into configuration files to use.
That is different from downloading someone’s dotfiles. A dotfiles repo is usually written for one person’s machine and workflow. Omarchy may have started from DHH's dots, but it is structured as something other people are meant to install, update, override, and live in. It separates Omarchy’s defaults from user overrides [1].
I'm not sure what exactly is required for something to be considered a 'distro' but omarchy definitely feels more like one than not, albeit a relatively thin distro based on Arch.
> It would still require install scripts to get from a fresh Arch install to Omarchy.
If it's really just primarily dotfiles, those 'install scripts' are just going to be a few cp and maybe tar commands.
> Omarchy is maintained as a complete system. You can install it from an ISO, update it like a distribution, and expect someone to care about whether the pieces work together.
Not entirely though, because they defer so much control and judgement to the actual distro they are layering over.
I guess it's semantics. I guess if you consider Kubuntu a different distro from Ubuntu then so too would Omarchy be a distinct Distro.
>My question for people is whether their objection has to do with Omarchy itself or with the person or people behind it
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
> 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
"Technical people" covers a vast variety of people. I can and have configured many different non-mainstream WMs and implemented different bars, and found workarounds to different issues that arise from them, both in wayland and X11. A person can be just as technical as I am and still have no interest nor desire to set that all up, but still want to explore or use the paradigm shift that something like a tiling or scrolling WM offer.
The problem is that these paradigms people find appealing aren't decoupled. You can't just drop it in to your current desktop because the window management is so tightly coupled to the compositor. You can try things like PaperWM, of course, but you don't really get to experience Niri unless you install it, and then figure out how to handle everything else you need in a way that you'd want.
If Omarchy used GNOME or Plasma, there's zero chance it'd have taken off in the same way it has. Yes, it is definitely a case of its virality being tied to an influencer, but it isn't ultimately why someone would stick with it. It gets rid of a lot of the gatekeeping that exists. Anyone that can install a linux distro can install Omarchy and get a fully functional system. That is something we need more of, not less.
Would like to know where are you getting this information. I don't know a single person that has a >200PPI monitor, and most of them are Mac users and also programmers.
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.
>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.
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.
Usually these types of articles are written about things that challenge status quos. I remember reading a lot about Ruby on Rails in the same vein "ruby isn't a real language", "rails is just a collection of scripts", and "you can't build real web apps with it."
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!
> If Omarchy is upsetting the Linux establishment as much as this article implies
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.
I don’t even think Omarchy is particularly popular. I see a lot of activity and user preferences around Linux Mint, Bazzite, and CachyOS, in addition to the traditionally popular choices like Ubuntu and Fedora.
I’d be more inclined to ignore it entirely if I was a blog author.
The upset is due to the imbalance between what omarchy really is and the buzz around it. When your “distro” could be a bash script on a vanilla arch install, is it really worth making a distro?
This is just more perpetuation of the distro fragmentation that doesn’t need to exist.
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.
I’ve done both ultimately doing it raw helped me figure out why my setup and the omarchy attempt failed, (my cpu integrated graphics were rendering and passing the result to my 3090 not using the card at all) but I think anything that elevates Linux and solves the endless choices for people who don’t enjoy engaging with that is a good thing.
Did dhh provide a recipe to install hyprland properly without having to install a full "distribution"? (I don't know, it's a real question)
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.
>Did dhh provide a recipe to install hyprland properly without having to install a full "distribution"? (I don't know, it's a real question)
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.
> 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)
He built it for himself first, posting frequently about it on X. Once it reached a point of stability, he announced that Basecamp was starting to transition it's employees from macOS to it.
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.
This is not what I'm saying. I'm not saying that they should "solve my problem", I'm saying that their reputation should be reviewed negatively if they "create a distribution to solve a problem that has no reason to be solve by creating a distribution". Not that it is a very very bad thing, just that it shows that they are not really good at what they do.
'I'm saying that their reputation should be reviewed negatively if they "create a distribution to solve a problem that has no reason to be solve by creating a distribution".'
Why? People can do as they wish and you can use it or not.
I'm just saying that I trust people who know what they are doing, and if there is someone who does a "superficial" job* but present it as if it is the "whole deal", then they don't really understand what it takes to the whole deal and therefore they don't know what they are doing.
*: I don't mean "superficial" pejoratively, just that a "traditional" distribution does wayyyyyy more than what is done in Omarchy.
And, sure, they can do as they wish, and the consequence is that they get the reputation they deserve. You cannot say "sure, I poop in a bucket and pretend it is a good solution because my toilet is blocked, but people can do as they wish and you can visit my house or not", and I fully agree with that AND I will still say "the reputation of this guy should be reviewed negatively, as it is clear they have a low understanding of how to deal with basic plumbing". You cannot just answer me "What! How dare you to say this guy reputation should be reviewed negatively".
Its exactly what you’re saying. You have a different problem and a different opinion. And your conclusion is that „they are not good at what they are doing“
I’m really no DHH fan, but i think he knows what he’s doing and is also good at it.
The situation is simple, I'm just saying to people the following:
Whatever you call what this thing is, it does not look like the people doing it have a strong grip of what is usually considered important in "traditional distribution". If you don't care about these aspects, great for you, go ahead. If you don't even notice that these aspects are a thing or that this distribution is different on this point, then maybe it is worth for me (and others) to bring that out. Maybe for these people it is useful (and maybe it is not useful for other, in which case, I hope they will just act like an adult and don't complain that someone mention something useful for people who are not them).
I was reacting to someone saying that "Omarchy solved my problem with hyprland when no one else was able to, so it is an indication on how good of a distribution it is". I think it is the point: a "linux distribution" is there to solve a totally different problem. If you have difficulty installing hyprland, the logical solution is to provide tools to help installing hyprland, tools that can work in any distribution. If you go into a strange solution instead (such as ending up building a brand new distribution around it and saying "it's open source, you can always extract the specific code if you don't want the distribution"), then it is just natural that people wonder if you are really understanding how it works.
As for DHH, I don't know: being a good developer is quite different from what it takes to build a reliable distribution, and it looks like he is very prone to think that because he is a good developer, he is good at everything. If anything, the fact that he has no grasp at all at what people talk about when they talk about these kind of thing, it makes me think he knows even less what he is doing.
I was just talking about my experience. I don't think DHH's entire goal was only to help people install Hyprland, it's weird that you're getting this idea.
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.
What? Not at all what I'm saying. The whole thread started with "a solution to install hyprland", which is "the microwave". My expectation is that someone who knows how to fix a microwave will also know how to distribute it without the whole house.
If someone provide a half-furnished house, that is fine by me.
If they provide a half-furnished house and also say "hey, it comes with a microwave because I know how to fix a microwave. If you want me to fix a microwave without having to have the whole house, do it yourself, I don't know how to do that", then it raises quite a bunch of red flags about how this person understand how a house works. And in this case, yes, I will call this person an amateur. Not because of the half-furnished house, but because they presented the situation in a way that indicate that they don't really have a grasp on how houses and microwaves work.
> If they provide a half-furnished house and also say "hey, it comes with a microwave because I know how to fix a microwave. If you want me to fix a microwave without having to have the whole house, do it yourself, I don't know how to do that",
You're still misattributing the reason I like Omarchy to DHH's reason of making Omarchy.
I did not say "I want to sell half-furnished houses because I want to fix microwaves", I said "Hey, it comes with a microwave ...".
I'm not saying Omarchy is done by people who don't know what they are doing because they created a distribution to fix hyprland. I'm saying Omarchy is done by people who don't know what they are doing because despite having a fix to hyprland, they don't act with it like an adult would.
Again, I know perfectly that "fixing hyprland" was not the objective. But the way they are behaving is just smelling too much of people who cannot be trusted and don't really know how a traditional distribution works and what makes it special.
You're suggesting that because the system doesn't offer a standalone recipe to setup Hyprland, implying that everything else it does include and does better than anything else is not a standalone package also, it's silly and amateurish and they don't know what they are doing. You can try and convince me all you want, but that is not a point of view I could ever get behind, sorry.
I did not say "despite having a fix to hyprland, they don't offer a standalone recipe", I'm referring to the whole behavior: how it is presented, how it is hyped, how there is its own conference, its own merchandising, ... When it comes to hyprland, there is this childish attitude of "people do what they want, extract it from the source yourself" when people are legitimately surprised on how the thing was handled.
If it was presented as "Hey, we know it's just some scripts, we don't do the same kind of work that traditional distributions do. We still call it a distribution, but don't hesitate to support Arch instead who is doing the hard work for us", it would be different. But it is apparently not what is done (based on what I've read on the subject in the meanwhile).
What I'm saying is obviously not as simplistic as how you summarized it. It looks like you are just upset that someone may see bad signs in the way this distribution (or whatever one wants to call it) is handled. That's fine, I'm not forcing you to not use it, the same way I'm not forcing anyone to not use anything that is overhyped.
> I did not say "despite having a fix to hyprland, they don't offer a standalone recipe",
You said this:
> Did dhh provide a recipe to install hyprland properly without having to install a full "distribution"? (I don't know, it's a real question)
> 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.
And this:
> 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 understand your overall point now that you took the time to explain a bit more, and it is valid criticism. But it is not "obvious" what you were saying. Based on the replies you've got, I see that I'm not alone to think this. You might want to look inward into why that is.
The number of reactions was pretty small for Hacker News, and the silent majority probably did not react because they did not have a biased reading of my comments and there is therefore nothing to react to.
I don't believe it was difficult to understand, and you are probably not a good person to estimate if it was the case or not (of course if something is misunderstood by 0.1% of the people, these persons who misunderstood it will say "well, it was difficult to understand", it would be more convincing if this judgement was coming from someone who did understand it from the start).
I also think that there is a difference in culture. If you have enough experience to notice that Omarchy is overhyped, then you probably also have some experience thinking of what makes a reliable distributions and so on, and where I was getting at probably seemed simple and obvious. Inversely, if it's not the case, what I'm saying are concepts you did not really think or care about, and therefore it may be new or confusing, even if it is correctly explained.
I recommend installing Omarchy and playing with it. Read through the Omarchy repo to see how the things you liked and disliked were set up.
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 agree with the author's general sentiment, but I would give Omarchy credit for some design features that I find either really innovative or well executed.
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.
>if you're new to Linux, skip omarchy and install a real distribution
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.
I really like Linux, but it's incredibly fragmented. The fragmentation can be seen as part of the allure of Linux (make it your own, use whatever you want, may the best software win, etc).
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.
The author's complaint is that omarchy is basically a set of ricing on top of arch. I can grok that
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
Even though I wouldn't really use something like that myself, I actually think it's a good thing when people share their dotfiles with others. Whether you call it a “distribution” or not is basically irrelevant, and I don't understand all the fuss about it.
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.
> 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.
Leaving SSH exposed is bad if password auth is enabled. Otherwise, under what threat model is either of these a problem?
By your reasoning of what is or is not a distribution, Ubuntu is not a distribution. After all, it’s just opinionated Debian. The vast majority of distributions are, by your logic, not distributions. I’m okay with this, but that isn’t how the word is commonly used.
"if you're new to Linux, skip omarchy..."
I've been using linux for 20+ years. I used to spend way too much time ricing my system when I was young. I don't have time for that now. I installed Omarchy, and I like it.
"... 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.
Having tried both Omakub and Omarchy I think Omakub is the more interesting approach, and it certainly matches the OP's description - just a set of scripts and defaults applied to a standard Ubuntu.
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.
It's not so much that things are missing (although that too) it's that some choices are poor, some are duplicated, and there's no consistency and obvious "right way".
Do you use gnome-photos or shotwell, and does the system tell you how to use either? Do you use rythmbox or gnome-music - or for that matter, do you use KDE, xkcd, budgie, cinnamon or MATE?
Does the software installation show you how to install HAM-radio tools in the same UI as where you install Spotify or Chrome? Does changing the theme also change the terminal theme? Browser theme? Are useful tools like localsend included by default?
I haven't used Ubuntu "proper" in years, so all of my questions may be outdated, but Omakub certainly felt like a breath of fresh air when I tried it. It really felt like a big step forward for attention to detail compared to any other linux distro I have tried.
Not perfect by any means, but still, I think the "proper" distros should take some inspiration from it.
I think most of the people who use the term in the context of Linux desktops don't know the term's origin (or at least don't stop to think about it), so the possibility of it being racist never occurs to them.
Doesn't it come from car culture? Where (mostly young) people put giant wings and shiny wheels on a clapped out Honda Civic to make it look like a race car. I always thought that "rice" was an intentional misspelling of "race" (as in "race car", which, hold on a minute, I guess would also make it race... ist?)
A little off topic but my position is that a Linux distribution ought to be a series of build options, package selection and configuration. Ultimately, you should be able to do this in a few files.
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.
I've been using arch + open box since 2011. Now switched to cachyos + labwc (Wayland version of open box).
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.
if we depended on you no one would use linux then. This is the type of garbage mentality that we need OUT this community.
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
Quality in general seems to be going downhill, too.
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.
The publishing process for Safari extensions is painful, but otherwise it's not meaningfully different from Chromium extensions and there's no good reason for it to work worse in Safari.
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?
For those here that are old enough to remember Knoppix I think there are some similar things happening here. There were similar theads about Knoppix not being a distro for those who installed to their hdd using the live cd. But there was also clear demand for what it offered.
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.
Strongly disagree with this post. And I am not a DHH fan.
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.
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.
I don't think the discussion about "is it a distribution or not" is very interesting, but I think the discussion about "should we make clear that this _thing_ is just a bunch of config files rather than the usual work one would expect behind what was traditionally called linux distributions".
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".
As I've said, I think the discussion about the "real definition of a distribution" is not interesting. It's like idiots who think they are smart when they say "tomato are technically a fruit".
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.
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.
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.
This is a little cringe, it's fine you don't like it, dont use it. There have been other distros based on arch which are also mostly just rices. I've never seen people complain about them, but Omarchy is different, probably because DHH is involved.
I tried Omarchy and thought it was decent, I liked a lot of the settings and visuals.
This article gives me the feeling of someone arguing that the Thai restaurant I like isn’t serving real Thai food. They might even be right, but I don’t know because I don’t care. I like the food.
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.
It also opened up trying a tiling WM to a whole crowd of people that never would have bothered. To the uninitiated it's not exactly easy to get hyprland + all the extra utilities for status bar, menu, wallpaper, theming, etc. running. Then figuring out how their individual configs work, then making it look good on top of that. It's a ton of effort.
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.
FYI, most meals that are DISTRibuted through different convenient means are "prepared".
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.
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.
Its rise is not suspicious to me at all, the author has tremendous reach influence in the developer community, that drives adoption easily.
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.
> almost suspicious how quickly it has risen to prominence.
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.
There's nothing suspicious about it, imho. macOS has been degrading in quality, Mac users are losing more and more control of the system while non-Mac laptops are getting better (Framework, Starlabs, System76, etc) and Windows is in total decay (dumping ads into the OS, forced Microsoft account, privacy nightmares, Microsoft security track record), all perfectly explaining the interest in more open alternatives. Omarchy just benefitted from the sponsoring company being already successful, the founders being well connected and experienced in marketing product launches.
I wish people were as critical in more relevant areas.
DHH has an enormous following and is extremely influential. I don’t think it’s surprising that it gained popularity so quickly. He’s really good at shamelessly plugging his work (as well I hope he should be).
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.
I'm not negative to the growth of Linux. However, we should ask ourselves what it means that there has apparently been such a gap in the market of Linux distributions that this project has been able to fill it so swiftly, and why established distributions with steadier technical communities were not able to capture it already.
"It is understandable to be frustrated at a project without technical merit gaining so much traction"
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.
To the extent that sticking to defaults become technical apathy, yes, that can be troublesome for Linux as a whole. If the Linux user base was to grow considerably via Omarchy, there would be a higher support burden for the specific technologies and hacks it'd use. Consider Ubuntu as an analogy. It is popular because it is used widely, not because it is innovative or moves Linux technology forward (compared to e.g. NixOS).
> 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.
Does it allow newbies to install it and have something like the Apple “it just works” experience?
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.
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?
Having literal billionaire best buds backing the project probably helps one gain traction, no? Toss in a dash of weird culture war bullshit, and… well. Distro popularity isn’t exactly a meritocratic system.
I think they should both not use it and talk about why so that we can get a clearer picture of the diversity of Linux users out there.
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.
well, it is in the "thoughts" section of the author's website. maybe it doesn't belong on HN, but the person who posted it is not the author, so take it up with them. anyway, i agree with most/all of the complaints but if a valuable point were to be made it is probably the funding point. why does this need money?
To your point, I don't think the complaining and ranting by the poster makes sense, given what was ignored before the ranting began.
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.
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.
Realistically, polarizing figures like DHH will have complaints pointed at their work for reasons other than the work itself. And when the complaints are grounded they’ll often be of higher amplitude than otherwise.
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.
What trends were making Linux harder to adopt or less culturally relevant?
The author of the blog post makes valid criticisms, I remember when Ubuntu had a shortcut for Amazon in the default desktop installation because they had a sponsorship with Amazon and people rightfully criticized the distro for it. The author is doing the same for DHH promoting things like Grok/Hey/X. Also I am sure if any distro started shipping things like NordVPN in the default installation people would complain.
> 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.
True! I love it when I buy a computer pre-installed with windows and it has a bunch of extra software bundled in like norton antivirus, dropbox, and opera. Plus the OEM makes money and I get a bunch of free apps. It's a win win. I hope the author of omarchy gets sponsor money for including nordvpn, spotify, and 1password. I love seeing linux become more conventionally attractive and steer in the direction of windows and macos because they're popular so linux will be more popular. Everything should be for everyone.
I know you're being facetious but everything you are saying is kind of the point about Omarchy. The "oma" comes from "omakase" or something like that. The point of it's creation was to give devs at 37Signals a streamlined onboarding process. That is why it includes apps thst the comapny uses internally. The OSS nature of it enables people to fork it and remove the bloat, which is exactly what people have already done.
Could you please confirm that this is satire
>I love it when I buy a computer pre-installed with windows and it has a bunch of extra software bundled in like norton antivirus, dropbox, and opera.
This has got to be satire. There's no way.
>then there has to be something sinister afoot.
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.
No Linux distribution offers a good out-of-the-box experience with anything outside of XFCE, GNOME, or KDE Plasma. On the other end, these alternative WMs lack all of the shell features that people expect from a desktop experience.
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.
CachyOS (an Arch distro) has done something kid of like this, where it bundles eg a default setup for hyprland and several other desktop environments. It’s not perfect, but I like their model a lot. I mean it’s very Arch to be able to choose whatever you want, but nice to have some opinionated defaults.
CachyOS is not a distro. It's just an opinionated Arch spin
> I think it does kind of have to be a “distro” because the appeal is that you don’t maintain the scripts yourself.
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.
It would still require install scripts to get from a fresh Arch install to Omarchy. And then those scripts would also be adding scripts that aren't really necessary for any single person's dotfiles but that’s not really the point.
The difference is there is an implicit contract. Omarchy is maintained as a complete system. You can install it from an ISO, update it like a distribution, and expect someone to care about whether the pieces work together. hyprland is a minimal compositor and you have to figure out how to put together the other pieces of a shell to get a complete experience. If you're doing that piecemeal, you have to maintain and update those on your own. Changes to each piece that break something has to be addressed individually. With Omarchy, that is maintained by someone else and the downstream user just runs an update to omarchy. It compiles a group of disparate packages and makes something cohesive enough to not require jumping into configuration files to use.
That is different from downloading someone’s dotfiles. A dotfiles repo is usually written for one person’s machine and workflow. Omarchy may have started from DHH's dots, but it is structured as something other people are meant to install, update, override, and live in. It separates Omarchy’s defaults from user overrides [1].
I'm not sure what exactly is required for something to be considered a 'distro' but omarchy definitely feels more like one than not, albeit a relatively thin distro based on Arch.
[1] https://learn.omacom.io/2/the-omarchy-manual/65/dotfiles
> It would still require install scripts to get from a fresh Arch install to Omarchy.
If it's really just primarily dotfiles, those 'install scripts' are just going to be a few cp and maybe tar commands.
> Omarchy is maintained as a complete system. You can install it from an ISO, update it like a distribution, and expect someone to care about whether the pieces work together.
Not entirely though, because they defer so much control and judgement to the actual distro they are layering over.
I guess it's semantics. I guess if you consider Kubuntu a different distro from Ubuntu then so too would Omarchy be a distinct Distro.
>My question for people is whether their objection has to do with Omarchy itself or with the person or people behind it
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
> 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
"Technical people" covers a vast variety of people. I can and have configured many different non-mainstream WMs and implemented different bars, and found workarounds to different issues that arise from them, both in wayland and X11. A person can be just as technical as I am and still have no interest nor desire to set that all up, but still want to explore or use the paradigm shift that something like a tiling or scrolling WM offer.
The problem is that these paradigms people find appealing aren't decoupled. You can't just drop it in to your current desktop because the window management is so tightly coupled to the compositor. You can try things like PaperWM, of course, but you don't really get to experience Niri unless you install it, and then figure out how to handle everything else you need in a way that you'd want.
If Omarchy used GNOME or Plasma, there's zero chance it'd have taken off in the same way it has. Yes, it is definitely a case of its virality being tied to an influencer, but it isn't ultimately why someone would stick with it. It gets rid of a lot of the gatekeeping that exists. Anyone that can install a linux distro can install Omarchy and get a fully functional system. That is something we need more of, not less.
Monitors with that PPI have a market share of >98% among people this is targeting. The Apple using crowd.
Would like to know where are you getting this information. I don't know a single person that has a >200PPI monitor, and most of them are Mac users and also programmers.
> then there has to be something sinister afoot.
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.
>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.
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.
Usually these types of articles are written about things that challenge status quos. I remember reading a lot about Ruby on Rails in the same vein "ruby isn't a real language", "rails is just a collection of scripts", and "you can't build real web apps with it."
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!
> If Omarchy is upsetting the Linux establishment as much as this article implies
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.
It's also upsetting people who judge work mainly by the political stances of its authors, not by the merrits of the work itself.
We've seen the same thing play out with Harry Potter for example.
I don’t even think Omarchy is particularly popular. I see a lot of activity and user preferences around Linux Mint, Bazzite, and CachyOS, in addition to the traditionally popular choices like Ubuntu and Fedora.
I’d be more inclined to ignore it entirely if I was a blog author.
it's upsetting as money goes to a dotfile config rather than the underlying projects. arch linux is a phenomenal project
The upset is due to the imbalance between what omarchy really is and the buzz around it. When your “distro” could be a bash script on a vanilla arch install, is it really worth making a distro?
This is just more perpetuation of the distro fragmentation that doesn’t need to exist.
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.
I’ve done both ultimately doing it raw helped me figure out why my setup and the omarchy attempt failed, (my cpu integrated graphics were rendering and passing the result to my 3090 not using the card at all) but I think anything that elevates Linux and solves the endless choices for people who don’t enjoy engaging with that is a good thing.
Did dhh provide a recipe to install hyprland properly without having to install a full "distribution"? (I don't know, it's a real question)
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.
>Did dhh provide a recipe to install hyprland properly without having to install a full "distribution"? (I don't know, it's a real question)
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.
> 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)
Dell has been selling machines with official Ubuntu support for ages iirc
If I remember it correctly Omarchy started as an in-house alternative to macOS in one of DHHs companies. And was then released to the public.
So the purpose of Omarchy was to get devices quickly set up with some opinionated defaults.
He built it for himself first, posting frequently about it on X. Once it reached a point of stability, he announced that Basecamp was starting to transition it's employees from macOS to it.
So, is the answer "no"?
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.
The answer is: no, solving your problem was not the goal of the project.
But the source code is public, you can extract the relevant scripts from the repo: https://github.com/basecamp/omarchy
This is not what I'm saying. I'm not saying that they should "solve my problem", I'm saying that their reputation should be reviewed negatively if they "create a distribution to solve a problem that has no reason to be solve by creating a distribution". Not that it is a very very bad thing, just that it shows that they are not really good at what they do.
'I'm saying that their reputation should be reviewed negatively if they "create a distribution to solve a problem that has no reason to be solve by creating a distribution".'
Why? People can do as they wish and you can use it or not.
What? Why are you saying "why"?
I'm just saying that I trust people who know what they are doing, and if there is someone who does a "superficial" job* but present it as if it is the "whole deal", then they don't really understand what it takes to the whole deal and therefore they don't know what they are doing.
*: I don't mean "superficial" pejoratively, just that a "traditional" distribution does wayyyyyy more than what is done in Omarchy.
And, sure, they can do as they wish, and the consequence is that they get the reputation they deserve. You cannot say "sure, I poop in a bucket and pretend it is a good solution because my toilet is blocked, but people can do as they wish and you can visit my house or not", and I fully agree with that AND I will still say "the reputation of this guy should be reviewed negatively, as it is clear they have a low understanding of how to deal with basic plumbing". You cannot just answer me "What! How dare you to say this guy reputation should be reviewed negatively".
Its exactly what you’re saying. You have a different problem and a different opinion. And your conclusion is that „they are not good at what they are doing“
I’m really no DHH fan, but i think he knows what he’s doing and is also good at it.
I don't have any problem (I don't use hyprland).
The situation is simple, I'm just saying to people the following: Whatever you call what this thing is, it does not look like the people doing it have a strong grip of what is usually considered important in "traditional distribution". If you don't care about these aspects, great for you, go ahead. If you don't even notice that these aspects are a thing or that this distribution is different on this point, then maybe it is worth for me (and others) to bring that out. Maybe for these people it is useful (and maybe it is not useful for other, in which case, I hope they will just act like an adult and don't complain that someone mention something useful for people who are not them).
I was reacting to someone saying that "Omarchy solved my problem with hyprland when no one else was able to, so it is an indication on how good of a distribution it is". I think it is the point: a "linux distribution" is there to solve a totally different problem. If you have difficulty installing hyprland, the logical solution is to provide tools to help installing hyprland, tools that can work in any distribution. If you go into a strange solution instead (such as ending up building a brand new distribution around it and saying "it's open source, you can always extract the specific code if you don't want the distribution"), then it is just natural that people wonder if you are really understanding how it works.
As for DHH, I don't know: being a good developer is quite different from what it takes to build a reliable distribution, and it looks like he is very prone to think that because he is a good developer, he is good at everything. If anything, the fact that he has no grasp at all at what people talk about when they talk about these kind of thing, it makes me think he knows even less what he is doing.
I was just talking about my experience. I don't think DHH's entire goal was only to help people install Hyprland, it's weird that you're getting this idea.
It is not what I'm saying, of course.
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.
That is exactly what you are saying.
"Oh there's a half furnished house. Silly amateur house builder, why they don't just sell microwaves?" ?!
What? Not at all what I'm saying. The whole thread started with "a solution to install hyprland", which is "the microwave". My expectation is that someone who knows how to fix a microwave will also know how to distribute it without the whole house.
If someone provide a half-furnished house, that is fine by me. If they provide a half-furnished house and also say "hey, it comes with a microwave because I know how to fix a microwave. If you want me to fix a microwave without having to have the whole house, do it yourself, I don't know how to do that", then it raises quite a bunch of red flags about how this person understand how a house works. And in this case, yes, I will call this person an amateur. Not because of the half-furnished house, but because they presented the situation in a way that indicate that they don't really have a grasp on how houses and microwaves work.
> If they provide a half-furnished house and also say "hey, it comes with a microwave because I know how to fix a microwave. If you want me to fix a microwave without having to have the whole house, do it yourself, I don't know how to do that",
You're still misattributing the reason I like Omarchy to DHH's reason of making Omarchy.
Incorrect.
I did not say "I want to sell half-furnished houses because I want to fix microwaves", I said "Hey, it comes with a microwave ...".
I'm not saying Omarchy is done by people who don't know what they are doing because they created a distribution to fix hyprland. I'm saying Omarchy is done by people who don't know what they are doing because despite having a fix to hyprland, they don't act with it like an adult would.
Again, I know perfectly that "fixing hyprland" was not the objective. But the way they are behaving is just smelling too much of people who cannot be trusted and don't really know how a traditional distribution works and what makes it special.
You're suggesting that because the system doesn't offer a standalone recipe to setup Hyprland, implying that everything else it does include and does better than anything else is not a standalone package also, it's silly and amateurish and they don't know what they are doing. You can try and convince me all you want, but that is not a point of view I could ever get behind, sorry.
I did not say "despite having a fix to hyprland, they don't offer a standalone recipe", I'm referring to the whole behavior: how it is presented, how it is hyped, how there is its own conference, its own merchandising, ... When it comes to hyprland, there is this childish attitude of "people do what they want, extract it from the source yourself" when people are legitimately surprised on how the thing was handled.
If it was presented as "Hey, we know it's just some scripts, we don't do the same kind of work that traditional distributions do. We still call it a distribution, but don't hesitate to support Arch instead who is doing the hard work for us", it would be different. But it is apparently not what is done (based on what I've read on the subject in the meanwhile).
What I'm saying is obviously not as simplistic as how you summarized it. It looks like you are just upset that someone may see bad signs in the way this distribution (or whatever one wants to call it) is handled. That's fine, I'm not forcing you to not use it, the same way I'm not forcing anyone to not use anything that is overhyped.
> I did not say "despite having a fix to hyprland, they don't offer a standalone recipe",
You said this:
> Did dhh provide a recipe to install hyprland properly without having to install a full "distribution"? (I don't know, it's a real question)
> 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.
And this:
> 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 understand your overall point now that you took the time to explain a bit more, and it is valid criticism. But it is not "obvious" what you were saying. Based on the replies you've got, I see that I'm not alone to think this. You might want to look inward into why that is.
Not upset by the way, just responding in kind.
The number of reactions was pretty small for Hacker News, and the silent majority probably did not react because they did not have a biased reading of my comments and there is therefore nothing to react to.
I don't believe it was difficult to understand, and you are probably not a good person to estimate if it was the case or not (of course if something is misunderstood by 0.1% of the people, these persons who misunderstood it will say "well, it was difficult to understand", it would be more convincing if this judgement was coming from someone who did understand it from the start).
I also think that there is a difference in culture. If you have enough experience to notice that Omarchy is overhyped, then you probably also have some experience thinking of what makes a reliable distributions and so on, and where I was getting at probably seemed simple and obvious. Inversely, if it's not the case, what I'm saying are concepts you did not really think or care about, and therefore it may be new or confusing, even if it is correctly explained.
I recommend installing Omarchy and playing with it. Read through the Omarchy repo to see how the things you liked and disliked were set up.
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)
> as a longtime frequenter of r/unixporn, it was immediately apparent to me that omarchy is not a linux distribution in any traditional sense
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
I agree with the author's general sentiment, but I would give Omarchy credit for some design features that I find either really innovative or well executed.
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...
An opinionated person has different opinions than a different opinionated person
>if you're new to Linux, skip omarchy and install a real distribution
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.
I really like Linux, but it's incredibly fragmented. The fragmentation can be seen as part of the allure of Linux (make it your own, use whatever you want, may the best software win, etc).
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.
The author's complaint is that omarchy is basically a set of ricing on top of arch. I can grok that
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
Omarchy is more like Kubuntu. Some config scripts and a few additional packages on top of another distribution.
Ahh yes, it is a “spin.”
Even though I wouldn't really use something like that myself, I actually think it's a good thing when people share their dotfiles with others. Whether you call it a “distribution” or not is basically irrelevant, and I don't understand all the fuss about it.
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.
> 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.
Leaving SSH exposed is bad if password auth is enabled. Otherwise, under what threat model is either of these a problem?
By your reasoning of what is or is not a distribution, Ubuntu is not a distribution. After all, it’s just opinionated Debian. The vast majority of distributions are, by your logic, not distributions. I’m okay with this, but that isn’t how the word is commonly used.
ubuntu has its own packages from Debian and a different release cycle
And surprise so does Omarchy
"if you're new to Linux, skip omarchy..." I've been using linux for 20+ years. I used to spend way too much time ricing my system when I was young. I don't have time for that now. I installed Omarchy, and I like it.
"... 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.
s/distribution/Arch derivative and the entire post is moot.
Having tried both Omakub and Omarchy I think Omakub is the more interesting approach, and it certainly matches the OP's description - just a set of scripts and defaults applied to a standard Ubuntu.
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.
What's missing from standard Ubuntu? I recently did a fresh install and it seems finished to me
It's not so much that things are missing (although that too) it's that some choices are poor, some are duplicated, and there's no consistency and obvious "right way".
Do you use gnome-photos or shotwell, and does the system tell you how to use either? Do you use rythmbox or gnome-music - or for that matter, do you use KDE, xkcd, budgie, cinnamon or MATE?
Does the software installation show you how to install HAM-radio tools in the same UI as where you install Spotify or Chrome? Does changing the theme also change the terminal theme? Browser theme? Are useful tools like localsend included by default?
I haven't used Ubuntu "proper" in years, so all of my questions may be outdated, but Omakub certainly felt like a breath of fresh air when I tried it. It really felt like a big step forward for attention to detail compared to any other linux distro I have tried.
Not perfect by any means, but still, I think the "proper" distros should take some inspiration from it.
I'm old, is "ricing" (along with "ricer", "rice burners", "rice rockets", etc.) no longer racist?
I think most of the people who use the term in the context of Linux desktops don't know the term's origin (or at least don't stop to think about it), so the possibility of it being racist never occurs to them.
Doesn't it come from car culture? Where (mostly young) people put giant wings and shiny wheels on a clapped out Honda Civic to make it look like a race car. I always thought that "rice" was an intentional misspelling of "race" (as in "race car", which, hold on a minute, I guess would also make it race... ist?)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rice_burner
by author's logic, is Ubuntu not a distro since its based on Debian? i don't understand what author is trying to say here.
A little off topic but my position is that a Linux distribution ought to be a series of build options, package selection and configuration. Ultimately, you should be able to do this in a few files.
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.
I've been using arch + open box since 2011. Now switched to cachyos + labwc (Wayland version of open box).
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.
Omarchy is the best Linux desktop experience I’ve ever had
The new quickshell based omarchy shell is pretty excellent foundation already, I’m very excited for it to be released on omarchy 4.0.
Omarchy really has excellent defaults and generally development is always moving in the right direction.
Seems like the three criteria I'm reading could apply to many other "distros"
1. Based off a common base distro
2. Domain-specific, rather than general-use
3. Includes commercial software
I tried, felt same. its just ricing.
if we depended on you no one would use linux then. This is the type of garbage mentality that we need OUT this community.
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
FWIW, 1Password is pretty great.
It was better when it was still a native app and not this Electron nonsense.
Quality in general seems to be going downhill, too.
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.
Wait, it even needs an extension for Safari?
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.
Maybe that’s why I get the 1Password UI _and_ the native password selection UI :-/
Since the extension works flawlessly in all other browsers I've chalked it up to Safari extensions being a pain.
But yes the Safari 1Password extension constantly shits The bed.
The publishing process for Safari extensions is painful, but otherwise it's not meaningfully different from Chromium extensions and there's no good reason for it to work worse in Safari.
Works a lot better on Linux and Windows since they dropped the native app though.
Installing thing like this should be an agent skill, not a distribution.
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?
“Hyper-opinionated” and “good OOB experience” are orthogonal to each other.
Haters gonna hate.
Just skim the rest of the blog posts…
For those here that are old enough to remember Knoppix I think there are some similar things happening here. There were similar theads about Knoppix not being a distro for those who installed to their hdd using the live cd. But there was also clear demand for what it offered.
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.
If CachyOS or Kubuntu are distros why isn't Omarchy? There's tons of "distros" that piggyback on others...
Love Omarchy
Strongly disagree with this post. And I am not a DHH fan.
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.
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.
I don't think the discussion about "is it a distribution or not" is very interesting, but I think the discussion about "should we make clear that this _thing_ is just a bunch of config files rather than the usual work one would expect behind what was traditionally called linux distributions".
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".
It's a way to distribute Linux (the kernel) and userland packages in a way you can install. Therefore it's a Linux distribution.
As I've said, I think the discussion about the "real definition of a distribution" is not interesting. It's like idiots who think they are smart when they say "tomato are technically a fruit".
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.
It's fine that it exists. But a package of customizations is not a distribution. Yes, the definition is fuzzy, but this is clearly not it.
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.
Ubuntu is (was) Not a Distro.
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.
This is a little cringe, it's fine you don't like it, dont use it. There have been other distros based on arch which are also mostly just rices. I've never seen people complain about them, but Omarchy is different, probably because DHH is involved.
I tried Omarchy and thought it was decent, I liked a lot of the settings and visuals.
This article gives me the feeling of someone arguing that the Thai restaurant I like isn’t serving real Thai food. They might even be right, but I don’t know because I don’t care. I like the food.
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?
If this is the price to pay for adoption I’m ok with it.
I mean... Yeah, it's a curated set of dotfiles that one guy spent a while tuning to his liking.
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.
> apple's hardware lead & overall design philosophy is falling apart
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!
https://frame.work/laptop13pro :)
intel panther lake changed the game.
That’s like saying Ubuntu isn’t a distro as it’s “just Debian”. Yes but also: no.
Ubuntu does quite a lot of "traditional distro" stuff like maintaining a huge amount of infrastructure and packaging
As does Omarchy
I love Omarchy
Another blog post ignoring capitalisation making it difficult to read.
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.
It also opened up trying a tiling WM to a whole crowd of people that never would have bothered. To the uninitiated it's not exactly easy to get hyprland + all the extra utilities for status bar, menu, wallpaper, theming, etc. running. Then figuring out how their individual configs work, then making it look good on top of that. It's a ton of effort.
Eh this just feels like gatekeeping to me.
> my eyes roll out of my head
Summarizes my feeling about this article and the author.
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.
The instructions on the back of the prepared meal box is not a cookbook.
This is not a judgement of using a prepared meal box.
FYI, most meals that are DISTRibuted through different convenient means are "prepared".
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.
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.
Its rise is not suspicious to me at all, the author has tremendous reach influence in the developer community, that drives adoption easily.
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.
On cinnamon setting up a shortcut like that is about three mouse clicks
Ah, but which three clocks? That's the rub.
LLMs make customization much easier, but the impetus has not yet been there for me.
> almost suspicious how quickly it has risen to prominence.
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.
There's nothing suspicious about it, imho. macOS has been degrading in quality, Mac users are losing more and more control of the system while non-Mac laptops are getting better (Framework, Starlabs, System76, etc) and Windows is in total decay (dumping ads into the OS, forced Microsoft account, privacy nightmares, Microsoft security track record), all perfectly explaining the interest in more open alternatives. Omarchy just benefitted from the sponsoring company being already successful, the founders being well connected and experienced in marketing product launches.
I wish people were as critical in more relevant areas.
DHH has an enormous following and is extremely influential. I don’t think it’s surprising that it gained popularity so quickly. He’s really good at shamelessly plugging his work (as well I hope he should be).
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.
I'm not negative to the growth of Linux. However, we should ask ourselves what it means that there has apparently been such a gap in the market of Linux distributions that this project has been able to fill it so swiftly, and why established distributions with steadier technical communities were not able to capture it already.
"It is understandable to be frustrated at a project without technical merit gaining so much traction"
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.
To the extent that sticking to defaults become technical apathy, yes, that can be troublesome for Linux as a whole. If the Linux user base was to grow considerably via Omarchy, there would be a higher support burden for the specific technologies and hacks it'd use. Consider Ubuntu as an analogy. It is popular because it is used widely, not because it is innovative or moves Linux technology forward (compared to e.g. NixOS).
> 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.
So to be clear - distros used by experienced Linux users are better than distros preferred by non-experienced?
You can easily change most things you don’t like in Omarchy.
Does it allow newbies to install it and have something like the Apple “it just works” experience?
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.
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!
The author is so close. “decades of debian and it never got any traction. Why?“
Yeah! What a mystery. What could make people install omarchy or pop os over debian, arch or gentoo?
What could possibly be the reason
Having literal billionaire best buds backing the project probably helps one gain traction, no? Toss in a dash of weird culture war bullshit, and… well. Distro popularity isn’t exactly a meritocratic system.
Yeah Linux will be shitty and break all the time if it doesn’t come preinstalled with Brave and a shortcut to open Grok.
What a strange thing to publish.. just don't use it if you don't like it? What is this even attempting to do?
I think they should both not use it and talk about why so that we can get a clearer picture of the diversity of Linux users out there.
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.
What's wrong with voicing opinion on the Internet? It's a personal blog, you don't have to read it if you don't like it.
There are plenty of strange things that gets publish every day, I don't see why you get hung up on this post.
well, it is in the "thoughts" section of the author's website. maybe it doesn't belong on HN, but the person who posted it is not the author, so take it up with them. anyway, i agree with most/all of the complaints but if a valuable point were to be made it is probably the funding point. why does this need money?
> maybe it doesn't belong on HN
Was helpful to me. I now know not waste my time.
Everyone has the urge to criticize what they don't like, and it looks like you are no exception... :)
It's a critique of Omarchy.
To your point, I don't think the complaining and ranting by the poster makes sense, given what was ignored before the ranting began.
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.
> What is this even attempting to do?
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.
Realistically, polarizing figures like DHH will have complaints pointed at their work for reasons other than the work itself. And when the complaints are grounded they’ll often be of higher amplitude than otherwise.
> DHH realized this, and is cashing in on a wave of new, inexperienced users looking for a cool looking Linux distribution
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.
I'm still on X :laugh: