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Show HN: Omarchy on CachyOS

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66 pointstheYipster63 comments

An install script to create a strong and stable blend of Omarchy on top of CachyOS. You must install CachyOS first (please read the README file.)

Feedback and contributions welcome!

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The main thing keeping me from trying out Omarchy is the pain of setting up multiple displays. I haven't tried Hyprland, but whenever I've tried a non-mainstream desktop/wm in Linux that was the worst, especially if your setup changes often (as in, you have a laptop and move around and plug it in different places).

May be that just means I'm not enough of a tinkerer for these setups.

Is it a hard problem to remember more than one configuration and link them to the displays connected to your computer? Or is it just that Omarchy users really don't mind editing monitor.conf[1] often?

[1]: https://learn.omacom.io/books/2/pages/86

I use swaywm and kanshi [0]. It's write once, forget forever. I have one config for each of the display compositions I have (office, home, gaming, eDP...), and "it just works".

[0] https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/emersion/kanshi

The community has written a TUI for this: https://github.com/erans/hyprmon

I don't really need it, but maybe my setup is too simple. I set my laptop monitor to auto-right, external display to auto-left and that's it. Set it and forget it for me.

If your external display isn't connected, what happens? Does Hyprland ignore that line from the config without an error and everything works normally?

It's ignored. This setup wouldn't suffice if my external displays used different scaling though, currently they all work fine at scale 1 for me.

  # external display
  monitor = DP-3, preferred, auto-left, 1
  # internal display
  monitor = eDP-1, preferred, auto-right, 1.333333

I just have a bash script that runs on startup which just greps the output of xrandr to determine if I am connected to home/office/no monitors and then runs the appropriate xrandr commands to config them.

On the occasion when I (dis)connect monitors without restarting the laptop, I just have some command line aliases (home/office/laptop) which run the appropriate config

Correct me if I'm wrong but Hyprland is Wayland so xrandr is no go.

There are some utilities for this though. nwg-displays comes to mind

Yes, but you can have a similar setup to what he is describing, just with different commands.

I'm using niri instead hyperland. I can either use `sed` on it's configuration file (on/off, resolution, position) or for some of its configurations I can use the cli (for output scale).

Since Hyprland still supports wlr-output-management (AFAIK) you can use tools like wlr-randr and nwg-displays. I don't use Hyprland but I used Sway for many years and support for multiple outputs was top notch. You did have to edit your text-based Sway config file, since a major part of the draw for Sway was an i3-like mantra, but you could do declarative configuration for both output and input devices, and it worked well with hot plugging. Combined with handling mixed DPI setups better, the general situation feels a lot better for using multiple monitors with Linux these days.

Editing a text file to configure displays is definitely an acquired taste, though. Maybe Omarchy needs some utilities to provide a UI around those config files.

I simply have an NVIDIA card and I’m afraid of Hyprland because of that

Omarchy auto installs the nvidia drivers and fixes if it detects an nvidia card. https://github.com/basecamp/omarchy/pull/13

OP here. It's seamless whether you go the Omarchy route or CachyOS route. In fact, I have an RTX 4090 and have no issues whatsoever.

I was worried about that too but switching from one monitor to multiple ended up being plug and play for me. I installed hypermon before thinking I would need it, but I didn't as I got lucky that the monitors positioned themselves correctly and there was nothing else that needed to be changed otherwise.

When's the last time you tried this?

I used to have this issue too but was pleasantly surprised I don't have this issue with my new machine using EndeavourOS w/ wayland. I switch displays a couple times per day and it's been fine.

Normally I'd say I would be exactly the type of person that would use such a thing. But what scares me away and makes me stay with vanilla KDE Plasma is that perceived upfront cost of having to relearn everything and having to customize for hours to then have something that feels 100% better in some and 100% worse in other situations.

Maybe that just means I am currently at a point in my life where I haven't got the time or energy to play around with these things. I'd rather have KDE Plasma with a hint of tiling window manager than a tiling window manager with a hint of Plasma, if you get what I mean.

But why is this necessary? Isn't Omarchy the opinionated setup... and that is all you need?

The README on this github link does not explain to me why this is necessary, or why someone is doing it.

It should probably start with WTF is Omarchy.

I recently moved my gaming desktop to CachyOS from Manjaro, but I have no idea what Omarchy is or whether or not I want it, and there's not a single link in the README.

Guess I'll go look it up.

Omarchy is an “opinionated” Arch distro by dhh of Ruby on Rails and Basecamp/Hey fame

Its not really a distro, nor does it pretend to be. What it really is, is an Arch Linux install, with a preconfigured set of apps & workflow, and a set of tools to easily allow the user to customise to their preferences - within the confines of the original config/workflow.

Basically, it's a "curated Arch linux"

So it could just be some files and a bash script or maybe better, an Ansible recipe??? Sorry for being reductionist but its late and I'm out of beer.

That's essentially what it is. They don't really pretend otherwise. The iso is a convenience for 1 stop installs.

Aren't most distros like that when you really dig down into it?

The bash scripts just get fancier over time, but that's it.

Ah, thanks for explaining (and the rest of the thread for clearing up the "not a distro" part).

Kinda reminds me of some of the NixOS configs I created to pre-configure workstations for me when I was tinkering with NixOS, a "desktop configuration in a bottle" sort of thing.

Makes sense for Arch I think since a lot of the time getting it ready for your task is a often more than "just install the package you need" as it is on other distros; the main reason I switched to Arch distros when I lost the energy to configure it myself for each new piece of hardware (laptops with media keys especially).

> Omarchy skips installation of a login display manager. Instead, Hyprland autostarts and password protection is provided upon boot by the LUKS full disk encryption service.

Pretty unconventional...Is this a bad idea?

Can't be multiuser

And that's a reasonable tradeoff - In 30 years of using Linux, I've only used machines that were actually treated as multi-user on the server side.

There's space for both - some people do need password protected separate users, but not all of us do.

Also not ideal for security if you like to sleep/hibernate on a laptop.

Who am I kidding, how many laptops actually sleep or hibernate properly when running Linux anyway...

My desktop box is running bazzite and is only used for gaming. I treat it has a console really, it isn't even connected to the internet and doesn't even receive updates unless I want to download a new game. It doesn't have any private data, the only secret I might have is that steam is already logged on but I don't have any payment account/card setup on my steam account.

Appart from the internet connection that might be useful for those gaming online I would expect most gamer machines would be like that.

I ran Bazzite for a little while on my desktop to see how it was for gaming, and it was great, but I do a lot besides gaming, gaming is a small percentage of my time spent on the PC, and I as a full-time Linux user, work and home, I needed something more traditional, I've switched over to CachyOS now which meets my needs well.

Well I don't mix work, gaming (especially with random proprietary code) and personnal stuff on the same device unless there is a good decent separation of the environments. Since gaming is the only usage that warrant a big heavy desktop with a GPU, that I like the conveniency of a laptop for personnal use and have a dedicated work laptop provided by my employer, it is fairly easy to separate duties.

> Who am I kidding, how many laptops actually sleep or hibernate properly when running Linux anyway...

Or period?

My 2015-ish Macbook Air was unreliable at waking up from sleep, and so is my Windows ASUS ROG Zephyrus from ~2021.

> Also not ideal for security if you like to sleep/hibernate on a laptop.

Why not? I presume you're still running a lockscreen that will trigger on sleep/hibernate via whatever the equivalent of swayidle+swaylock is.

> Who am I kidding, how many laptops actually sleep or hibernate properly when running Linux anyway...

More than you think, though it does depend on hardware. I have no use for hibernation, but I couldn't tell you the last laptop I owned that didn't sleep fine on Linux.

> Why not? I presume you're still running a lockscreen that will trigger...

Maybe I misunderstood; I thought the suggestion was that there was no lock screen/login screen at all and that the LUKS password was the only barrier to entry.

> More than you think, though it does depend on hardware

It was an educated-"joke", I'm quite particular about my laptop hardware, I've had quite a few for work and home over the past couple of decades I've been running Linux, and lately, fewer and fewer that meet my other criteria have had the hardware support for proper sleep/standby/hibernate; by that I mean I want to be able to shut the lid at the end of the work day, or at the end of the evening (for my personal laptop) and have my work laptop not be at 0% in the morning, or for my personal laptop to last a week or so for when I next come to use it, but I'd also like to be able to open the lid and be back at my desktop within no more than the time it takes to enter my password plus 2-3 seconds if I need to.

Typically I just leave them plugged in all of the time when I'm at home and put them back on the charger when I'm done to work around this, but that's not great for their batteries; more of an issue for my personal laptop as I tend to replace it less often than work replaces my work one.

Unix systems are inherently very multi-user (check how many lines are in your /etc/passwd!). Other login users would just need to log into via other means (ssh/etc..).*

i wonder how screen locking works then

I imagine the user account still has a password, it's just getty is configured to auto login on tty1

Right...you still need a regular login user (and probably a good idea to have a password set)...also for things like sudo. But that facet wasn't one that actually concerned me with this setup

what happens if the screen locker crashes?

That problem exists for all desktop environments, Omarchy or not.

Generally the compositor doesn't allow you back in. You can go to a console and do some emergency stuff from there, but you're locked out of your original session.

Fwiw this has been my setup for ~10 years now and I don't really see an issue with it. Screen locker crashing would have been a concern back in the Xorg days but I don't think it's an issue nowadays with the ext-session-lock-v1 Wayland protocol. I value startup speed and simplicity of my setup and have no use for features provided by a DM, so this has always felt like a no-brainer to me.

This Omarchy remind me of Linux-Mandrake from back in the day, a collection of badly written shell script but that "works"

So this is about setting up a UI.. with no screenshots of the UI. Nice

Video showcasing UI: https://omarchy.org/

I skipped through the 38 minutes and landed on like 8 instances were he was switching themes/wallpaper and 4 showing of bash scripts that opens a webpage. It looks like all the fluxbox/openbox themed minimal desktops in the 2000s - function follows form. Feels really performative.

DHH switched from Mac to Linux and is in the process of experimenting with his setup, but since he's famous within tech, it's getting a lot of attention. There's really nothing special about it.

I mean.. that vscode-like command palette for system actions incl updating, installing and removing packages looks rather nifty

Haven't "launchers" existed for decades at this point though? I remember Crunchbang (RIP) having something similar for example, and that must have been almost two decades ago at this point.

There are a lot of them yeah.

In this case, Walker is the launcher being used in Omarchy, https://github.com/abenz1267/walker. It's not specific to Omarchy.

One of Walker's features is being able to create your own custom menus quite easily with shell scripts.

Its basically LARBS or an autoricing script. But its happening in kind of a cultural moment where Linux gaming is good enough and Windows is bad enough for people to see ricing and say "I want that!"

I think it is function follows form, but it turns out a lot of people actually want that.

Not to mention - if you're coming from Windows or MacOS and you've never had real tiling before, you could install a bunch of goofy electron launchers or whatever and still get form improvements.

I'm not a Rails guy, so I've always kind of thought their scaffolding system was a little silly. It's going to autogenerate a config and then I also have to edit it?

But I'm coming to terms with the idea that there is actually tremendous value to lowering the barrier to entry as much as possible, and providing scaffolding for people to learn along the way

I had the same thought.

They made a "micro fork" of chrome to support having it auto update to the system theme.

That's... Dedication. I guess. But it's dedication at the wrong spot for my tastes.

And having to hear him recall those forced keyboard commands just makes me itchy. Here you hit space to select, over there it's "d" for default. Here it's enter, this menu is actually vim, so it's !wq here...

Want to configure those monitors? Just come edit this file! Bleh. Hope you know the name of the things you want to touch!

Some of the dev tool suggestions are fine, but those are all standalone tools (mise, yay, lazy docker, etc).

Basically: I'm glad there's space for people to do this. It's not my cup of tea.

To much attention to things I don't care about. Too much magic in the things I do. Too much crap that's entirely specific to this guy (who the fuck wants a default top level hot key for opening Twitter. It's not me, that's for sure).

Omarchy and CachyOS are very interesting but they do not look serious about security [0] [1].

I mean in this day and age we all agree you need disk encryption (for a least 20 years) but what about SELinux, application sandboxing for example?

Especially for a desktop OS like Omarchy shipped with a bunch of apps and "plugins".

This has been a Linux Desktop weakness for more than a decade (compared to macOS, Windows and Android). App sandboxing is a bit sketchy and hard to get right.

The fact they do not explicitly state their strategy regarding those things make me believe this is a bit amateurish.

- [0] https://wiki.cachyos.org/cachyos_basic/faq/#security--best-p...

- [1] https://learn.omacom.io/2/the-omarchy-manual/93/security

> Especially for a desktop OS like Omarchy shipped with a bunch of apps and "plugins".

Omarchy is _just_ a set of scripts to have a nice looking Arch Linux and some helper scripts for day to day tasks. It's not a distribution per se, it doesn't have repositories or packages of its own.

Therefore, your criticism of app sandboxing is more for Arch than Omarchy IMHO.

> Therefore, your criticism of app sandboxing is more for Arch than Omarchy IMHO.

I've never been an Arch user but deeply respect the project since their wiki as always been my favorite documentation.

From what I understand Arch is very much DIY, non opinionated and you you need to decide and build the security level / strategy that fit your needs. It seems you can go Flatpak, SELinux but only if you want.

I was kind of lurking for an equivalent of SecureBlue in the Arch world, meaning an Arch derived distro with a strong security posture. Allowing me to get started without worrying too much about it.

At the end of the day, you do you, but my experience with SElinux is that using it on the desktop is vastly overkill.

At a high level, the essence of SElinux is to limit the possibilities of exploitation and escalation by carefully specifying which process can access which resources in which context. Now that makes sense for a server opened to the www, or a host shared with untrusted users. But Omarchy is a _sole developer_ focused flavor of Arch Linux, think your typical dev laptop. There's no service exposed there, you most likely can't even listen on the internet behind your typical home router. The realistic threats that you face is your laptop being stolen (which is why LUKS is a default) or your laptop sitting unlocked (which is why hypridle & hyprlock are a default).

Of course there's always the tails of a compromised software, but it's much more unlikely.

>using [SELinux] on the desktop is vastly overkill.

The ChromeOS project disagrees with you: ChromeOS uses SELinux to help sandbox the browser.

And Android uses it to help sandbox apps if the AI assistant I use is not making stuff up.

Not just Arch, all mainstream Linux distros have this problem.

It's totally right to point out that it's amateurish but it seems unfair to single out an individual project when it's an ecosystem level issue.

I mean, I don't have the market shares at hand, but if Ubuntu is still on the top, that's one _mainstream distribution_ that heavily emphasizes snaps.

Hmm yeah I suppose that counts. I actually run Ubuntu, and I use very few Snaps. But I guess that's kinda on me!

The distributed development model makes it tricky, because distributions themselves aren't necessarily the developers of sandboxing solutions, there's multiple approaches, many are incompatible with each other, none are fully mature and support every tool users could realistically want to run.

Same with selinux/apparmor/competitors, they're all mutually exclusive to some degree and have different pros and cons. RHEL shoves selinux down everyone's throat without caring how well that works in practice, and coincidentally 100% of RHEL systems I've interacted with have it disabled.

Until there's solutions that are mature, the best solution for distros is still to let users choose the lesser evil for their specific use case.

Personally I feel this diverges just enough from omarchy that it deserves its own name to avoid confusion.

OP here: The README.md assumes the reader knows what CachyOS and Omarchy are. A quick primer for those who are coming to this fresh...

- CachyOS is an Arch-based Linux distribution with built-in performance optimizations tuned to high end computing and gaming. See more at https://cachyos.org

- Omarchy is a Hyprland-based "desktop" crafted by DHH that is slowly turning into its own distribution, also based on Arch. See more at https://omarchy.org

Why would you want to use this instead of vanilla CachyOS?

You want to use Hyprland and want a very strong starting configuration. CachyOS includes its own configuration of Hyprland, but I find it's pretty anemic. There are other pre-packaged Hyprland "spins" to try as well, including MyLinux4Work ands JaKoolit. I've found Omarchy to be the most refined. If you have no interest in Hyprland, neither this script nor Omarchy are for you.

Why would you want to use this instead of vanilla Omarchy?

You prefer CachyOS's defaults and/or enhancements to vanilla Arch, or you do not like all of the out-of-the-box decisions Omarchy makes via its auto-install of Vanilla arch (such as LUKS disk encryption or the enforcement of a single user login.)

Honestly I may be getting old but I neither understand CachyOS nor Omarchy.

Just use archinstall and set up your arch how you want with it. I would usually install Gnome and some other DEs and then just start whichever one I currently feel like using from GDM. My dotfiles already handle all the Hyprland config and are way lighter than Omarchy.

I mean... I get wanting sane defaults but I feel like plain arch already provides that.

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