Omarchy Is Out
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The real news is that Omarchy 2.0 has just been released, as well as an Omarchy distribution ISO based on Arch. Installation is fairly quick (~5 minutes on a fresh machine), given you have bandwidth.
https://github.com/basecamp/omarchy/releases/tag/v2.0.0
Here is the updated Omarchy Manual to get a good feel for things: https://learn.omacom.io/2/the-omarchy-manual
Setting the `download` property on all of your screenshot image anchors is a very odd choice: not only does it make it very difficult to view the images quickly & easily in-browser, it also clogs up my Downloads directory with things I don't intend to keep.
Not only that, but it goes beyond client-side measure: someone has gone to the extra trouble of also setting `content-disposition: attachment` on each of the image HTTP response headers to make absolutely sure they can't be viewed easily in browser, even with workarounds.
But if you trim off the `?disposition=attachment` from the URL, it loads in the browser. At least for me in Firefox.
Might just be teething issues for a new product though.
Most often, I use maximized windows for the things I'm actively working on and floating windows for something like popping over to a file manager for a quick operation. In Hyprland, this often meant using separate workspaces for the main apps I always have open and workspace switching is more effort than alt+tab. I'm also a heavy user of hotkeys for my most frequent apps. They are set up to focus or launch the app.
I ended up gaining little to nothing from the Hyprland setup that I didn't already have or could easily implement in Plasma so I went back after several days. I was also having weird problems launching some games in Steam. In particular, Balatro wouldn't launch under Hyprland even though it works fine under Plasma/Wayland. I spent some time troubleshooting to no avail before deciding it just wasn't worth it.
I did get some new ideas from Omarchy though. I never thought to set up xcompose before. I also like what DHH did with PWAs.
In any case, I like what DHH is doing because it's making people try Linux when they otherwise may not have. What's especially cool is he's proving that you don't need to dumb things down, which is exactly what everyone else has tried to do all these years. Omarchy is 100% a power user setup and does an awesome job of showing what Linux is capable of while still being very accessible to newcomers.
>Balatro wouldn't launch under Hyprland
Just tried it, worked without issue using Proton-GE https://github.com/GloriousEggroll/proton-ge-custom
On the other hand, the Great Wayland Security Theater probably doesn't admit such riff-raff.
I'm pretty sure it's doable, but it probably does need to be baked into the compositor. But since there are compositors that can do full immersive 3D environments with windows moving around in them, I can't believe that there's any manipulation of the contents of a window that you can't do in Wayland.
Of course, being able to add it as tiny helper program is probably something that's going to be specific to X11, or possibly (best case) require non-portable APIs that are specific to individual compositors in Wayland.
I really tried switching over to sway / wayland a couple years back, but there were just so. many. things. which, despite wayland being 'the future' and 'ready for prime time' among proponents just bugged the heck out of me.
Why is it an act of congress to setup screen sharing / recording. Like sure it works for this one fork of OBS but if I'm trying to set up a telehealth session with my doctor all of a sudden I can't share my screen? Or global hotkeys don't work? I can't easily redshift my monitor at night? Pulse audio is jank for some unknown reason (Idk if this was even related)
It was just death by a thousand cuts. When it really came down to it, wayland added nothing but headaches to my life without any discernible benefit. None of it's 'selling points' meant anything to me.
Then suddenly I remembered I'm no longer the early adopter / OSS enthusiast I was in my youth. I'm now a grumpy grey beard who just wants things to work. I installed pop 22 with gnome on xorg and went on with my life. I think it's pretty telling that cosmic was released in alpha this time last year and it's still there today. While I realize that writing a DE is a big undertaking, they were basically trying for a fresh rewrite of gnome's UI in rust under wayland. No way it would have taken this long if they were targeting x.
https://wiki.hypr.land/Configuring/Binds/#global-keybinds
Bullshit.
No one cares that I can go and register global hotkeys in the compositor config file. The whole point is that apps do it themselves. If you still want a security theater, then add a prompt or what macos has where you go give it permissions.
If you see the global hotkeys section. It still has a lot of caveats. Bonus: see what's needed for push to talk to work...
The benchmark before wayland becomes default is:
Do OBS start recording shortcuts work.
And does discord push to talk work.
Today on KDE and GNOME the answer is no.
Any distro/DE that pushes wayland as a default without the answer to both of these questions being yes is pure cancer.
For anyone interested, there is a dbus API to register shortcuts that I believe KDE supports, gnome does only since the last 6 months, and hyprland/sway don't, and likely won't. Obviously, app developers aren't going to use it with such fragmented support.
Further reading(2024): https://dec05eba.com/2024/03/29/wayland-global-hotkeys-short...
https://github.com/dawsers/scroll?tab=readme-ov-file#content...
I rarely use floating windows, even on windowed-WMs.
It’s worth noting that I don’t spend large amounts of time in terminals and text editors, but instead in graphical apps and chrome-heavy IDEs which are awkward in tiling setups because of how much screen space they demand. If I were more terminal-heavy I’m sure tiling would make more sense.
Tiling is all about efficient use of space (and wasting all gains by adding cool looking gaps to post on UnixPorn). I find floating windows just hard to navigate and wasteful when 99% of time I want the app to be in a full-screen. Hence why macOS splits get me pretty much where I want to be.
In the center are two Chrome browsers representing two separate profiles.. a personal profile for some flows, and a work profile for others. Again, stacked so that I can see most of the tabs.
I've never dared to dream that I could combine this habit with some Hyprland-style "spontaneous windows launched by keybinds". I'd love that. A prime stack of core windows and an omega stack of ephemeral windows.
When I have multiple screens I also tend to stack one above the other, as opposed to left and right.
Corner case all the way.
It's optimized for minimal splits (let's say 2-3 windows) per view but it makes it effortless to flip between apps. Floating windows is also an option and making any of them full screen is available too.
Imagine tiling a bunch of pieces of paper on your floor and now you want to focus on a few of them at a time. That's basically what a scrolling window manager allows, you can either swipe on a touchpad, hit the arrow keys or use your mouse wheel to cycle between stuff. Of course you can customize these, that's just a reasonable default.
It's so much faster than manually dealing with workspaces IMO.
I'm currently taking a look into both Hyprland's scrolling plugins and if that fails then Niri. I wish Hyprland's official scrolling plugin was not in an alpha state. I want to stick with Hyprland because everything else about it is really nice.
All of this stuff works independent of Omarchy too since it's 100% related to your window manager.
Here's a video demo: https://youtu.be/r0JUm77inIA?t=319
[Note: I'm not the author of the video but I jumped to a timestamp where he's showing Niri's scrolling features]
What's your favorite? Right now I'm on xfce and KDE as my daily drivers but I'll shop around next time I wanna shake things up
Yes exactly. Since I was a kid, I always envisioned a future world where all of my walls were a monitor and I could just move across them as needed to focus on things. A scrolling manager isn't quite that but it's in the right direction.
I don't like switching between full screen windows because mentally it's so much easier (IMO) to keep things in context when I see all the important things at once. I want to see my code, the terminal output, search results and the docs in 1 view but when I don't care about the search results and docs I want to quickly throw them off to the side, but still have them available if needed on demand.
Situational splitting with scrolling allows for the above without the cognitive load of hitting a million hotkeys to move things to workspaces and balance your splits.
I've always felt like with traditional tiled window managers you're trading 1 problem for another. Instead of meddling with every floated window's size and position you're meddling with split sizes and workspace management.
> What's your favorite?
It's too soon to say as I've only recently discovered them. I do think Niri and Hyprland with https://github.com/cpiber/hyprscroller or https://github.com/hyprwm/hyprland-plugins are places to start. Niri has scrolling as a first class feature. The first Hyprland link is a fork of a deprecated plugin and the 2nd link is an official new plugin but it's super bare bones and a big WIP.
I quite like it!
Earlier concepts existed but it all exploded with PaperWM on Gnome.
There is niri, scroll(sway), papersway, hyprland's plugins, PaperWM, PaperWM.spoon on Mac, Komorebi on Windows etc
https://github.com/dawsers/scroll https://github.com/dawsers/hyprscroller
I think it's really important to be able to take a region, specific window or full display screenshot with an ability to annotate afterwards and then also have an option to save to disk or copy to clipboard depending on what you want to do for that screenshot.
Flameshot was ideal because it lets you adjust the region size while also having the annotation controls at the same time. All of these other solutions don't let you adjust the region during annotation time since you're piping the image data into a different annotation tool.
I'm not a big fan of "workspaces" but I do love tiling WM with multiple screens.
My desktop at home is Ubuntu + i3 but I keep experimenting on my laptop with different WM. It's currently running Regolith but I'm probably going to try Omarchy 2.0...2.1 maybe? Let it simmer a little.
I saw a scrolling WM video recently and _loved_ what I saw, just too busy to set it up right now. Lots of potential there.
Also some seemed to interact badly with software that brought pop up windows/dialogs.
Several times I have tried to move to scrolling as I like it a lot more than tiling.
Hyprland itself comes with such nice defaults that it isn't surprising at all that it's getting as much attention as it is, for better or worse.
Now it could just be that Hyprland users are more vocal than XFCE or plasma users, so it's not definitive, but it definitely has "buzz"
(I also use nixos too but I use nix plasma and arch hyprland, i mean I barely use nix, arch is my goto but you get my point)
I agree it has buzz but its just cool open source software man, I like it. it isn't as plug n play even still as plasma or gnome for example but that's the point. Makes for a really good minimalist system but for me somethings don't usually work that "just" work on other desktop environments but I learnt a lot and now its a really enjoyable experience.
One example I can give of where I really had a big issue with hyprland was consistent schema around every application. I think its still broken on my system for qt apps which I had fixed but then broke again I think, but I now don't have the time to fix it and its a minor inconvenience at best. nothing wrong to hyprland, that's just fundamentally how it works if you try hyprland like me.
Omarchy seems to be promising the premise of hyprland with "it just works" Maybe if my arch system bricks, I will give omarchy a try. Untill then, I am happy with my theme and hyprland. Its cool. Dhh is also cool for making omarchy tbh.
Although I don't necessarily agree with the hyprland's main dev's responses on many github issues (which sound crude/rude to me) and I think that the community from what I've heard has also become just a little toxic on things like discord but I feel like sometimes we need to seperate the art from the artist and hyprland is picking even more hype so the main's dev's crudeness can be tucked away even more so. To be honest, thinking about it, even linus is crude yet the penguin (tux/linux) is universally loved (for the most part) So yeah. for the most part, I like hyprland.
Anyways, Hyprland is primarily driven by the Arch side of things, considering that:
* there are way more Arch users than Nix users
* Arch is much more trendy amongst non-developer/Linux users.
* Arch is easier to setup and use - less friction
* Arch is more popular in the unixporn reddit/YouTube world, which is where Hyprland gained much of its popularity
* the Hyprland developer uses Arch, and has recently started selling customized dot files, advertised as "supported on Arch- based and Fedora distributions."
Nix users are simply not a driving force in the Linux userland world.
2. I didn't mean to imply that Hyperland is driven by NixOS (NixOS is niche enough I doubt it drives anything); just that it seems to have hype on NixOS. I use NixOS, I'm semi-active in the NixOS community, and I regularly interact with NixOS users. I don't regularly interact with anybody that uses Arch, so why would I comment on the Arch community?
So many of the criticisms of Wayland around the internet end up being things that Mutter doesn't let you control directly.
The only problem I have is that I bought a new beelink Pro9, put Omarchy on it and Hyperland locks up every day, and I don't know if it’s only me or not.
For example, imagine this screencast recording set up:
- You have a 4k monitor
- You only want to record a 1920x1080 section of your screen (OBS can do this in both set ups)
- You only want certain windows to appear in that 1920x1080 zone
- You want other adhoc windows (notepad, etc.) floating around that recording zone
- You want to easily be able to pick and flip between the apps in that 1920x1080 zone
With Hyprland this isn't as easy to pull off. A maintainer mentioned to me that I'd likely have to write a Hyprland plugin which would be C++. I'm not a C++ developer though.
I guess you could probably make a workable but not as good solution by hyprctl dispatching commands in a shell script to position specific windows into the zone and then have a notepad like app dedicated to always floating, but when you record hundreds of videos you want an optimized solution to the highest degree.
In Hyprland's defense I've only been using it for a few days but I saw nothing in their docs or the internet that would indicate there's features built into the tool to make this less painful.
If I could find a solution for this, I'd install it on my main machine.
I don't know of any reason that wouldn't work, but I haven't tried it so I'm not certain it would.
If it were possible to pull off, that would be the perfect combo:
- A dedicated 1920x1080 recording zone, using Hyrpland's config file to automatically resize and position this Hyprland session in whatever spot makes the most sense (top middle of a 4k monitor, etc.)
- The nested session could use 1.5x or 2x scaling so fonts are larger on video[0]
- There's no BS or manual steps because the nested session is a full fledged Hyprland set up, so tiling, floats, workspaces and app launching is fully working
- Free to float whatever you want around the recording zone from the main Hyprland set up
Edit:
The Hyprland docs mentions you should make a separate config and also avoid running any exec/exec-once commands. That could be a problem because I would want my wallpaper, mako, waybar and walker to come up in the videos which means running multiple copies of these.
Maybe it could work tho in the end. I will play with it and see how it goes. Thank you for introducing me to the idea, even if it doesn't work, it's an interesting concept.
It's probably going to get complicated though due to wanting to run waybar, walker, wallpaper, etc. in the nested session but if you do anything that's going to modify its state in that session is also going to affect the outer one since only 1 process runs for those tools.
It's almost like you need a separate copy for everything that runs in exec but with a different process name too.
You'd end up with 2 copies of it running and you typically killall/pkill to reload it because it's expected you'd only run 1 copy but now with this nested solution there's 2 copies running.
The only thing really stopping me from Niri is it doesn't seem to have dynamic configs to let you have 1 main config and then source in a smaller 2nd config to overwrite settings in the main config.
That's really useful for having personalized changes per device or overwriting specific colors to change themes.
Hyprland has a `source` feature for this.
Not for as long as we keep telling people that the best software is like this:
> Because I do think that Hyprland deserves its reputation of being difficult! Not because the core tiling window manager is hard, but because it comes incredibly bare-boned in the box. You have to figure out everything yourself. Even how to get a lock screen or idle timing or a menu bar or bluetooth setting or... you get the idea.
My mom just bought a replacement Windows laptop, and even that needs some gentle prodding before it can be used by a regular human person - and that's only gentle because we told her that she should buy the Professional version of Windows, and not the adware-riddled Home one.
I guess as long as we assume that the Year of Linux on the Desktop has arrived when a slightly higher percentage of nerds who are happy to endlessly tinker with settings adopts it as their daily driver, then sure. It's any day now.
Hyprland is definitely a power user environment. And I think that's okay.
There have been great "user friendly" distros for decades, and in the last 5-10 years they've gotten very good, but I think everybody is a little surprised to find that the thing that is actually drawing thousands of new linux desktop users is hyprland, an awesome tiling window experience, and ricing.
Steam goes a long way too
Interesting and disappointing. When I googled the difference between the two versions I only came up with the fact that one supported disk encryption (which I didn't really feel was necessary for a desktop)
I would have loved a stripped down install of windows without all the bloat, but the only option I knew of was the LTSC version which is supposedly janky for gaming
When he saw issues with the Apple ecosystem, decides to make useful, well thought-out tooling for helping developers adopt Linux. When he saw how expensive the cloud can be, goes on to build open source tooling for deploying on bare-metal servers. Both have been successful.
Not just blog posts. Blog posts followed by hard work to fix the problem.
However he seems to have the ability to build movements, and I don't know why.
Which with ChatGpt/Grok is trivial these days for even a non linux native.
It's the idea that most people don't actually know what they want, at least not at first.
Several pages after:
Making a choice # I built Omakub when I first switched to Linux. I ran it as my daily driver for over a year. It's an excellent choice for anyone making the switch from Windows or Mac for the first time. But today I run Omarchy. It's not as familiar, it's more of an acquired taste, but boy, when you acquire the taste for tiling window managers, it's hard to go back to using the mouse to drag windows around. The whole system just flows through your fingertips!
Why? You just killed the whole omakase concept
I also spend many nights tweaking and re-tweaking, compiling kernels to get the maximum out of my desktops on rotating cubes with reflections and fish inside, the early Beryl/Xgl days. I miss those days, but Linux is a tool now, sometimes even just a runtime! Still have it on any computer though, and it just works, it feels like home!
From that late 2.4 kernel, manually mounting the first USB drives to what we have now. Super slick and smooth desktops, COW files systems, the ability to run almost any software. I love Linux.
Moved from Gentoo to Arch because I was tired of compiling system updates. Was fun compiling when tweaking the kernel and compiler settings trying to maximize Doom 3 on Linux. Enemy Territory didn't need any tweaking.
I don't mind new or more distros. Helps learn new ways of doing things to make Linux more presentable to others. Tools still needs to be presentable to the masses.
I love new distro's, especially paradigm shifting ones. Ubuntu at the time ("It just works"), Gentoo ("squeeze max performance out of my hardware and know it thoroughly") Arch ("So fresh, unmatched package availability through AUR"), NixOS ("My OS lives in Git, and that is where it is supposed to be") and the new Fedora silverblue/bootc stuff ("Get some of those cloud paradigms on my personal devices"). Although I haven't played with the latter, mostly because the advantages are NixOS like, and NixOS does it well, and I'm not done learning by a long shot, but it deserves some checking out, it's certainly a new paradigm.
Then DHH launched Omakub and, for me, it's been a game changer. It's not like he invented anything revolutionary, but he did something I hadn't had the time to do: customize it in a sensible way that, for me, is now superior to using Windows 10/11. Also caught the Lazyvim/neovim bug thanks to him, which led to other improvements such as Vimium in browsers.
I haven't tried Omarchy yet, but I will as soon as I find the time to tinker with it.
Sure, a nice configuration.nix to try Ohmanix would be great, and much more convenient, easier to maintain and evolve than DHH's scripts. But that is not the point. Maybe he will try NixOS in a year, maybe he will land on some bootc distro. I don't care, I love his enthusiasm. Btw, on the Linux Unplugged podcast the hosts are following DHH closely and indeed experimenting with more modern ways of creating similar experiences. Partly fueled just by DHH's enthusiasm.
Since Hyprland is composable and customizable by design, building out a functional workspace from scratch is an undertaking. On the other hand, there are number of other pre-configured dot-file "spins" worth trying that produce a nice Hyprland setup.
I like Omarchy, but ultimately settled on a Cachyos + Hyprland setup using Ml4W dotfiles. Like Omarchy, ML4W builds a very nice setup that isn't too garish and with sensible defaults. However, I benefit from Cachyos kernel optimizations and I'll admit I've become a convert to Fish. (Omarchy is the only Hyprland spin I've seen that keeps to Bash as the default interactive shell for Kitty/Alacritty.)
As I do like keeping up with Omarchy's evolution, it would be great if DHH could separate the Hyprland stuff from the rest of what he packages into his quasi-distro and make it available to folks who already have an Arch or Arch-derived setup they like. Personally, I'd like to revisit Omarchy from time to time without having to install another OS (Hyprland doesn't work well with VMs.)
https://www.globalnerdy.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/200...
How Aerospace (and others) degrade under heavier system load, etc (again, not b/c they are poorly written, but b/c macos inherently does not want these kinds of packages to even exist and makes things very hard to say the least, if not impossible, requiring some very awkward gymnastics) made this incredibly frustrating at the worst possible times.
The main page says it's "opinionated" and has two thumbnails of desktops that are mostly just a background image.
But also for GP, there's literally an "About DHH" section at the bottom of the pretty short post you're commenting on.
But they have a very, very large user base, which means lots of contributors - especially young, first-time-FOSS/Linux contributors. In a way, Hyprland has partially done what Linus was hoping to do by adding Rust to the kernel (attract the next-generation of young developers). And they have an active BDFL - no "led by committee" issues.
Vaxry is an immature ~20 year old Polish dude. That means a bit of angst, Eastern European humour, more conservative opinions than most US tech workers.
Yeah, Vaxry is considered abrasive to some of the ultra-privileged leftwing US tech sphere. Most people don't care, just as people don't care about DD's views when using Sway, Miguel de Icaza's views when using Gnome, etc...
You could easily replicate the container-based development workflows on Omarchy with distrobox even if you won't be using an immutable OS image. With more effort, you could replicate the Omarchy desktop configuration on a ublue image. Someone already ported Omarchy to nixos. I think we will continue to see a lot going on with immutable, reproducible operating systems and Omarchy will kickstart some cool stuff with desktop configuration.
That's why I really appreciate what DHH is doing both for desktop Linux and with Linux server deployment. I think there's a pretty comprehensive worldview in advocating for both of those technologies. Not sure if that makes me a cult member or what