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Comment by bigyabai | Hacker News Reader

Even putting the "ethics" of it aside, I think Omarchy is destined to go the way of LARBS. Many Linux distros are r/unixporn on the outside and a complete trainwreck on the inside. Regolith, Archlabs, Manjaro, dozens of distros have tried the "i3 but it's not like having teeth pulled" gimmick and it never works.

Much like LARBS, if I ever see you using Omarchy I just have to assume you don't know what you're doing. You can install Arch and rice i3wm in literally 10 minutes if your SSD and WiFi is fast enough.

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For me, it's not about ricing. I find Omarchy to be an incredibly productive setup, from the launchers for webapps to the focus on TUIs.

I'm conflicted about the drama and still learning more about it, so not ready to draw a conclusion yet. But Omarchy is definitely a very, very fun experience for me.

Granted, I've heavily customized it and am using hy3 for i3-like capabilities, so whatever path out of this for me is likely to i3wm or sway.

And, fwiw, I've been running linux since the late 90s, and most of that as my primary OS (with a decade-ish period of macOS I'd rather forget). I know what I'm doing.

It's performative to it's core. In the next release they will probably add a matrix screensaver, burning windows and hack a gibson in the release video.

Nerds having fun playing around sounds really terrible. To the guillotine.

You meant to write geeks? Nerds generally don't like their software packaged like fast food.

I must've forgot that nerds use only Linux from Scratch.

Nerds use whatever distro they like, and then bend it to their will.

Geeks are the type of people to install Omarchy or LARBS or disable their Mac's SIP for i3wm eye candy. The biggest change a geek makes to their system is changing the wallpaper to Tony Stark.

So using a distribution, which bundles different components into a cohesive package is somehow different then an install script which bundles different components into another cohesive package? A distribution provides the base layer that you can customize to your liking. Omarchy is another base layer to customize to your liking.

So using a distribution is for nerds but using something like Omarchy is for lower class geeks? What was the difference again? Can you elaborate on that? It feels like rage baiting but that wouldn't be constructive so I assume that you're acting in good faith and that you explain this line of thinking in more detail.

So someone who uses someone's zsh config and adapts it to their liking is a geek as well because someone else (a nerd) did the heavy lifting already?

Who even says that everyone installing Omarchy doesn't bend it to their will afterwards? Is everyone using the same tools and web apps as DHH? Then why should something like Omarchy even provide writable configs to customize it?

I'm confused.

The main difference is that nerds don't have para social relationships with software or their creators.

None of this is leading anywhere.

You started it with a dumb comment. I am just circle jerking.

hope this helps:

When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."

Don't be curmudgeonly. Thoughtful criticism is fine, but please don't be rigidly or generically negative.

Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.

Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.

Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes.

Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something.

Interesting it looks like you didn't read the rules yourself.

you do realize it already comes with a matrix screensaver, right?

Same here, I have multiple decades of experience running Linux on desktops and servers alike, and Omarchy just saves me time and manages to be productive and fun at the same time.

Personally, I don't feel any moral obligation to investigate the personal views of people who write the software I use. Using software, especially free software, doesn't constitute an endorsement of the authors' views. Before this thread, I was blissfully unaware of this entire silly controversy, since Omarchy doesn't mention any politics anywhere as far as I can tell. If that ever changes, I'll delete it in a heartbeat (regardless of the kind of politics it happens to be), but so far the only people politicizing the issue seem to be its detractors.

The elapsed time from burning the ISO to productive development environment is impressive. Also, folks worry so much about customizing it, but you don't have to. And hyprland and Omarchy almost entire driven by text files, so Claude Code and its ilk are super effective at customizations.

I guess I should defend my point! I actually really like Hyprland (despite it's controversy) and really have no interest in re-hashing DHH's ragebait. My larger point is that we've seen this happen before, hundreds of times, and these distros always end up breaking and making people blame Linux instead of their maintainer. I don't think DHH is addressing this concern, and he's basically teeing-up a catastrophic system update with zero rollbacks by choosing Arch as the base systen.

If you search the web for "Manjaro broken update" or "LARBS error" you're just flooded with myriad tech issues that don't exist on normal systems. It's a genuine handicap to rely on someone else's opinionated dotfiles when you don't understand why they made each decision. I think people using Omarchy long-term will end up fighting the distro more than they fight Linux.

Omarchy uses limine plus snapper to give you (by default, but configurable) five system rollbacks. Each time an update happens, or a package is installed, a bootable btrfs snapshot is created. I've leveraged this myself to after an update caused an issue with nvidia drivers.

I don't mean this to come across as snarky, but before you spread misinformation, you might want to inform yourself.

It’s almost the same with neovim and shell/terminal setup. A lot of people wants blings and are touting the most complicated setup. They balk at reading docs, and when their brittle config fails, blame the software (gnome subreddit).

Saying people who use Omarchy don't know what they're doing feels elitist. If you agree with DHH's opinions it's just fine, some people don't want to fuck with shit, they just want to get to work.

A lot of people don't agree with DHH's opinionated setup, though - most of them don't even know what they're installing, and that's the problem. Like I said, we've seen hundreds of OSes that completely break on system updates because the user doesn't understand that the AUR package conflicts with the opinionated defaults.

They really don't know what they're doing, which isn't going to help you get things done on Linux. I empathize completely with people who want a one-and-done gorgeous r/unixporn desktop, but they should also know that those distros are a deal with the devil.

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