I cannot for the life of me understand the Omarchy hype. The Linux community has been theming their distribution installs for decades. What distinguishes this from that?
Hyprland is a great WM that has garbage default settings and requires wading through tons of documentation, as well as a lot of effort to set up.
Omarchy is a distribution that ships Arch + Hyprland with sane defaults. The whole thing installs in minutes, and is overall very easy to get going with. This has lead to a lot of people who were previously turned off by all the sharp edges of both Arch and Hyprland to give Arch and Hyprland a shot. Since both of these things are pretty great once you get them going, a lot of people are enthusiastic.
There's a LUKS setup, PAM setup, ufw setup, yay/aur setup.
The killer feature of Omarchy is how accessible and streamlined it is. You can set up your own arch+hypr environment in a weekend of tweaking and fiddling assuming basic Linux competency, or you can use Omarchy and get where you want to be in 10 minutes with no tweaking or fiddling.
If you want is the outcome of the fiddling, then Omarchy is a great choice. If you want is fun of the fiddling process, then it's not for you.
I've had publicly installable dotfiles with a "1 command and ~5 minutes later" you have your development environment set up for a few years now. It is command line focused since my main box is running WSL 2 with Arch Linux. The script works for Debian, Ubuntu, Arch and macOS since I use a work laptop that's running a MBP.
It was a lot of fun building things up and learning about the process as I went.
When I got a laptop to install native Linux a little while back, Omarchy was just coming out and I figured ok since I will want a solution to trick out a window manager / DE I'll want more than command line tools so I took a look.
I ended up avoiding it for a few reasons but the main one was I don't want to ask for permission or maintain a fork to deviate from the Omarchy defaults that cannot be customized without a fork.
I love Rails and the philosophy behind it but I don't think the same model applies to something as intimate and personal as your OS. Your OS is more like a custom application made for you, especially if you're going down the Arch (or Linux in general) route.
I don't think Omarchy is or needs to be for everyone. Its recipe for success is likely that it's catering to a fairly particular archetype that's generally overlooked by most distributions and OS vendors, and not trying to be or do anything else.
I think it's popular because DHH turned dotfiles into a product and it's being marketed as a distro. Arch + (Hyprland, Waybar, Walker and Mako) are all really popular and standlone tools that make up a reasonable looking desktop environment which Omarchy happens to use too.
I have nothing against it. If it gets more people using Linux, that is a huge win. I just find it fasinating to see it from the outside.
The bundled software aspect is also kinda exaggerated. It almost entirely consists of app launchers for a few chrome-based PWAs. There's like no software to speak off, it's just a .desktop-file you can remove if you don't want it (there's even a menu for that).
It's arguably more of a demo of Omarchy's excellent PWA tooling than anything else, where you can create your own PWAs with a simple TUI that blend seamlessly into the rest of the system.
This is the supposed bloatware looks like
$ cat ~/.local/user/applications/HEY.desktop
[Desktop Entry]
Version=1.0
Name=HEY
Comment=HEY
Exec=omarchy-launch-webapp "https://app.hey.com"
Terminal=false
Type=Application
Icon=/home/user/.local/share/applications/icons/HEY.png
StartupNotify=trueThere's:
https://github.com/basecamp/omarchy/blob/master/install/omar...
https://github.com/basecamp/omarchy/blob/master/install/omar...
There's around 180 packages being installed, most of which are considered base packages.
1password and tons upon tons of other apps and tools.
A lot of "other people's dotfiles" have issues, and often just a few too many anime waifus bundled. That's fine I guess, but it's not what I'm looking for in a WM.
The fact that DHH's managed to rally a community to participate and maintain Omarchy is also a big part of it. If you have an issue, other people will have that issue, and quickly work together to find a fix. There's also a discord full of people running your exact setup you can exchange experiences with.
every single arch user thought of making a distro with opinionated defaults, but then they realize the just have to edit the wiki to provide the community the same benefit.
some rich dude lack the self awareness for such.
he's both ignoring advanced users would rather have option open and defaults documented, and new users would just use manjaro.
I think it's in many ways a project that caters to professional programmers. It's definitely not for beginners, neither for enthusiasts.
I respect there are people who would rather do all the fiddling themselves, but that's not what I'm looking for, and neither am I looking for a windows- or mac-a-like desktop environment like the ones you get with most distros. What I want in a desktop is exactly what Omarchy is offering.
I personally just pacman install the kde metapackage, and I'm done.
Apart from Spotify, it ships with a few app launchers for PWAs for some of 37signals' stuff. These launchers are easily removed, and basically just launch chrome windows.
It does not ship with steam or minecraft, though it has a menu where you can install it (along with various popular software, mainly development tools).
It's not magic, but damn it's nice.
They always do something custom-made and not adopted by anyone else, only to completely backpedal and go with what everyone else has already been doing. So, even if you like their custom-made solution you'll eventually end up being disappointed. After that, it becomes like a relic that only some frustrated sysadmins like me will have to deal with whenever we interact with some legacy systems, which definitely doesn't help with Ubuntu's overall reputation.
I think the beauty of this is to get to understand all components in your system, which is quite simple actually.
What reasons? I've been using tilling window managers for years now, and I feel like it's 1995 whenever I need to deal with dragging and maximizing windows.
The main pain points for me were
1) I often end up with two windows each taking a side of the screen leaving basically nothing of interest in the centre. So I end up jumping through some tetris-like hoops to make a window be centered.
2) If I close any window all the others move, often causing a repeat of problem 1
3) apps not supporting it properly causing weird graphical glitches
4) some apps should never be small windows, others never large.
Basically I ended up spending more time managing windows with a tiling vm than I ever did before, which eventually outweighed the benefits.
Hyprland is like half the point of Omarchy (the other half being Arch)
Or Kali Linux
Sure, there's no innovation in it. But not everything has to be innovative. Useful things can be important too.
I've been a desktop linux user since the 90's and entirely since 2003 (excluding gaming) so I'm not the target user.
Cute in the video on the omarchy page that they use Edward Hopper's - Nighthawks painting (~11m) - that was my default wallpaper for about 15 years on Linux.
Think of it as "Ubuntu, but explicitly marketed for devs" Plus hype because DHH is a well-known figure.
Linux fandom really doesn't understand the power of defaults and the power of user experience. I mean, in the first versions of Omarchy installer you had to type in some CLI commands just to select and connect to wifi. This comes from Arch, a " a lightweight and flexible Linux® distribution that tries to Keep It Simple" [1] What's more simple than connecting to one of the most ubiquitous connection types via iwctl [2] during OS installation.
So DHH decided to make an opinionated config that mostly just works and provide you with a few conveniences out of the box.
[1] Yes, those capital letters are on their website https://archlinux.org
Sounds a lot like Rails when you put it that way, which is no coincidence given the figure behind it.
[1]: I don't agree with all of them, e.g. the chatbot shortcuts. But they're trivial to disable and/or redirect and, indeed, the project does a good job of trying not to mess with your changes.
1/ (biggest group by far) People who are new to Linux on the desktop and, to a lesser extent, want to get out of the macOS ecosystem
2/ Power users who run Arch btw, and have probably installed, configured, partitioned, and encrypted Arch without the installer script at least a few times and now want a sane default Arch + Hyprland install with sane defaults and a production-grade environment in just a few minutes
This is not like DHH selling dogshit to you. It's a high quality package / product or whatever you want to call it..
Now everyone is thinking why nobody did this un-innovative thing before DHH did.
I use every possible opportunity to say "Fuck Ubuntu Snaps"
archinstall. You can even select a DE in it
Also, it has sane, sensible and appealing defaults. It's installable in a few minutes, so it saves time. I'm a happy Omakub user, even if I first used Linux back in 2005.
And it's getting a lot of attention because of DHH. Doesn't look half bad either which helps.
Maybe I'm boring but I'm sticking to Debian/Gnome...
I'd argue there's a fairly big niche of people who want a tiling WM but also don't want to have to start from scratch, figure out what accompanying utilities and programs they want to satisfy things like runner/menu, status bar, etc.
Other dots aren't as opinionated, or don't come with such a detailed user guide that Omarchy does, nor a set up script.
I'd even argue that Omarchy isn't really for other Linux users looking to distro hop, but like Omakub, it's for mac users curious about Linux, wanting an equally opinionated set up.
More eyes on it, DHH has a big following.