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Comment by robinhood | Hacker News Reader

The great strength of Omarchy is the fact that they've repackaged every good things from many different projects (arch, hyperland, and many packages) so I can install a fully functional distro with nice defaults, and every hardware working (bluetooth etc...), in less than 3 minutes without any interaction whatsoever. And it just works. Not because of Omarchy per se, but because they scripted the hell out of it so it just works™.

It's not magic, but damn it's nice.

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Isn't that just Ubuntu?

Yes, but ubuntu made stupid choices most developers don't agree with

Like what?

The big one for me is moving packages to snap. You can work around it, but that defeats the whole “works out of the box” aspect

Right now, snap (2016-present). Before that, Unity instead of GNOME (2011-2017), Mir instead of Wayland (2006-2015), Upstart instead of systemd (2013-2017).

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.

Way, way better than Ubuntu. And it adheres to *NIX philosophy by making all the config editable via text files.

having run ubuntu-server for awhile for my home server.. what config files do i need to edit without a text editor?

That sounds worse.

What exactly in the UNIX philosophy says configs should be editable via text files? It specifically talks about CLI tools using plaintext for their I/O to allow piping commands - not about configuration.

It's called the "Rule of Textuality", a component of which is: "Store data in flat text files." This principle recognizes that text files are human-readable, easily editable with any text editor, version-controllable, and can be processed by standard UNIX tools.

The "nice defaults" of Ubuntu and Omarchy cater to completely different audiences

Isn't that just tasksel and defaults? Iirc the various Ubuntu flavors each have a package for their default settings...

How well does it work if I want to move outside the scripted defaults?

It's not hard, but it's advisable to eventually set up a parallel blank Arch install where you configure everything from scratch based on things you liked from Omarchy.

I think the beauty of this is to get to understand all components in your system, which is quite simple actually.

You're not supposed to with these macOS-like distributions, that's their whole idea, "take it or leave it".

Don't. Just use arch if you plan on changing. It's not for you

Right. Bluetooth notoriously isn't enabled and working out of box on literally every main distro I can think of. /s (and yes, yes it is.)

it's one package install tho. did you try to search for Bluetooth on the arch wiki?

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