Omarchy, a Linux Distribution by DHH
omarchy.org
omarchy.org
I hope no serious developers on linux ever use homebrew, it's the worst package manager by far.
Most package managers support versioning and keeping old versions of installs around, but not homebrew. That's why I'm boycotting it at this point, got burnt by it too many times.
I'd rather use pacman or apt-get or pkgsrc or nix or any other package manager than homebrew.
If you change where Homebrew installs, then you are on your own because they don't support changing the install path.
While homebrew isn't perfect, it's still a lot better than manually compiling every new version of a tool until the distros repo gets the update, or following custom install instructions for every tool (and then manually managing updates).
But I'm new to having Linux as a daily dev driver (only servers before), so if I'm missing an obvious fix to get 99% of tools in their up-to-date version installed and managed on Fedora (or ideally, anywhere), please let me know.
You can't use pacman, apt or pkgsrc on image based distros. And nix is a big headache.
Of course anything that can easily run in a container is better, but I use brew for the stuff that doesn't and have few problems.
It's "Container-driven development" done right - containerized applications and shells _feel_ native via Distrobox (which gives them access to the host FS, network, hardware, etc by default) but without the risks of native development causing dependency conflicts. And if I screw something up, I can just spin up a new container.
Nearly 20 years later and it's surprising that more people don't do this.
Omarchy enables all this silently with pacman -U --noconfirm.
This is probably fine for a hobbyist, and this is what people in the Linux world generally do, but also constitutes a pretty bad supply side attack vector. Then again, not significantly worse than what things like npm/node do.
On a positive note, using the concept of migrations in a tool like this is neat.
I flagged this post for the misleading title. Although this is kind of interesting it's nowhere near as interesting as a new distribution.
As cool as it was, I can't be bothered with any of that these days. Just give me a Macbook Pro, as I know it will work and have amazing battery life!
DHH has good taste - leaving besides application choices (some of which I changed, e.g <insert_browser> instead of Chromium, no 1password), the configuration defaults all make sense (coming from a mac) - especially the key bindings.
Arch Linux by itself is a bit scary and requires config to make it "nice" so basically Omarchy takes away all the choices and config learning / pain - this tweet is a good summary:
> I've poured in endless hours configuring Hyprland + Arch, GTK/QT theming/scaling, auxiliary apps, and more to give you a superb base that can either be taken as-is or used to keep tweaking.[1]
Tiling window managers are great - I have young kids using computers for their hw and they prefered this over mac - windows. Which suprised me as personally it is a much bigger change for me after decades of regular windows/mac window management.
Linux / Hyperland Pros:
- I had a old pc from 2014 - which I put a minimal fresh new install of windows 10 - and it has been dog slow enough that it was waiting to be replaced. After installing Omarchy (Arch + Hyperland) it's perfectly fast and usable.
Cons: 1. Its designed to be a single user setup - the idea being u use HD encryption and login straight to the one true user. So for a shared pc its not ideal - the way its currently configured I think you need to run the omarchy bash install script for each user and also update individually for each one - not ideal for a pc shared with kids.
Really interested to see where Omarchy ends up. Its also given my usability ideas for my mac.
I have to mention that the 'web2app' function is super cool. It transforms and website to a desktop file launching it in an own chromium. That is super neat, especially in a tiling window manager
A version of the script which installs omarchy next to a running desktop would be nice
And so on.
Choosing whimsical tools instead of the most useful tools is kind of DHHs thing though, like still using Rails in 2025.
[1]: https://dhh.dk/2012/rails-is-omakase.html [2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E99FnoYqoII
Having it be "just scripts" leaves all of the energy and time to be spent on the itch that DHH wants to scratch instead of all the plumbing that others have solved several times already. It also removes a plethora of thresholds someone has to overcome before they get to start developing their app in Linux.
I think Omakub and Omarchy are great examples of something that should be in the base repo of most distros. A package-manager installable tool that lets you completely transform the default desktop, preferences, plugins and installed apps to a specific purpose and aesthetic.
Kind of a theme manager that also includes functionality.
The appeal of Omakub & Omarchy to me is that it minimizes the amount of time wasted on getting everything setup.
I setup Omakub on a 2015 MBP at the beginning of this year. I'll definitely be switching to Omarchy soon.
My only thought is that it would be nice if Omarchy/Omakub used something more declarative than a bunch of bash scripts, like nix or something else.
Why? And... why? If you like omakub than why switch? What does omarchy do better?
Wrt the bash scripts, parts look extremely brittle: this stuff is sure to stop setting up new machines in the future...
Also Omarchy has the hyperland setup, I don't think he's bringing that to Omakub?
Right!
Also Google makes it easy to skirt around the 30% through sideloading and web signups.
But DHH has, and continues, to do a lot to share his obvious passion and endless curiosity for tech. I’m not going to stop following him and enjoying his work just because he is not as woke as I am. Politics is not everything.
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