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Comment by marginalia_nu | Hacker News Reader

Arch linux is a great linux distro that's kinda difficult to set up (more so historically but it's got that reputation).

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.

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Sounds like Omarchy also ships with a bunch of bloatware. Why would I need the Hey or Basecamp apps – neither are targeted at developers, neither are commonly used, and both are just websites loosely packaged as installable apps anyway. Similarly for Steam (which runs at startup by default I believe), Spotify, Minecraft (which will bring a JVM?). It's bordering on Dell shipping Norton Antivirus to everyone and calling it a value-add.

Because DHH, obviously.

That's more than a bit exaggerated.

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).

Does Omarchy offer anything other than opinionated dotfiles? These have always existed.

Yes, it goes beyond mere dotfiles.

There's a LUKS setup, PAM setup, ufw setup, yay/aur setup.

It basically is opinionated dotfiles and a few scripts, though that's a bit of a reductive take.

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'm surprised so many people who want to use Arch aren't in it for the fiddling.

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.

If you feel it's not for you, then it's probably not for you.

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 don't think distributions or OS vendors focus on that because imagine the outrage if you installed Windows and it pre-installed Zoom, Spotify and 80 other apps for you out of the box.

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.

I think this is a bit reductive. I came from using basically the same configuration, configured piecemeal, and migrated to Omarchy because I really enjoy the cohesiveness of the experience.

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=true

It's more than the PWAs.

There's:

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.

Thousands of people share their dotfiles though, there's just no need for it to be its own Arch-derivative distribution. Could've just been 'here are my dotfiles, works best on Arch'.

I came from doing that that before switching to Omarchy and it really is not the same.

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.

I'm not at all discounting the value of rallying a community around one configuration - I just think dotfiles could have been the distribution mechanism, and it would be as valuable given the same community around it.

absolutely not.

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 like Omarchy as an advanced user. I migrated off vanilla Arch + Hypr to Omarchy because it saves me a bunch of hassle setting all that up myself. I want the outcome, don't particularly enjoy the fiddling. I definitely could, I've even done LFS way back in the day, but I have other things I'd rather do with my time these days.

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.

comparing arch with LFS is wild, but thanks for sharing.

I personally just pacman install the kde metapackage, and I'm done.

I'm not saying arch is anything like LFS, I'm saying I've done LFS and this is not an "arch is too hard" thing.

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