I've tried to setup Arch with Hyprland like 3 times on my own and with the most popular dot files. It was terrible, frustrating and things broke all the time. Omarchy fixed that and I can't recommend it enough.
It feels very strange (and wrong) to me: if there is difficulties in installing something, try to help people instead of packaging the solution with other things that are not related. It feels a bit like if uv was mainly providing their "uvOS" to solve the difficulties of dealing with python packages.
So the purpose of Omarchy was to get devices quickly set up with some opinionated defaults.
I don't think it changes anything about what I was saying. If indeed dhh helped find a way to install hyprland more easily but failed to also provide a standalone recipe, that does not sound like a good practice to me.
But the source code is public, you can extract the relevant scripts from the repo: https://github.com/basecamp/omarchy
I’m really no DHH fan, but i think he knows what he’s doing and is also good at it.
The situation is simple, I'm just saying to people the following: Whatever you call what this thing is, it does not look like the people doing it have a strong grip of what is usually considered important in "traditional distribution". If you don't care about these aspects, great for you, go ahead. If you don't even notice that these aspects are a thing or that this distribution is different on this point, then maybe it is worth for me (and others) to bring that out. Maybe for these people it is useful (and maybe it is not useful for other, in which case, I hope they will just act like an adult and don't complain that someone mention something useful for people who are not them).
I was reacting to someone saying that "Omarchy solved my problem with hyprland when no one else was able to, so it is an indication on how good of a distribution it is". I think it is the point: a "linux distribution" is there to solve a totally different problem. If you have difficulty installing hyprland, the logical solution is to provide tools to help installing hyprland, tools that can work in any distribution. If you go into a strange solution instead (such as ending up building a brand new distribution around it and saying "it's open source, you can always extract the specific code if you don't want the distribution"), then it is just natural that people wonder if you are really understanding how it works.
As for DHH, I don't know: being a good developer is quite different from what it takes to build a reliable distribution, and it looks like he is very prone to think that because he is a good developer, he is good at everything. If anything, the fact that he has no grasp at all at what people talk about when they talk about these kind of thing, it makes me think he knows even less what he is doing.
Why? People can do as they wish and you can use it or not.
I'm just saying that I trust people who know what they are doing, and if there is someone who does a "superficial" job* but present it as if it is the "whole deal", then they don't really understand what it takes to the whole deal and therefore they don't know what they are doing.
*: I don't mean "superficial" pejoratively, just that a "traditional" distribution does wayyyyyy more than what is done in Omarchy.
And, sure, they can do as they wish, and the consequence is that they get the reputation they deserve. You cannot say "sure, I poop in a bucket and pretend it is a good solution because my toilet is blocked, but people can do as they wish and you can visit my house or not", and I fully agree with that AND I will still say "the reputation of this guy should be reviewed negatively, as it is clear they have a low understanding of how to deal with basic plumbing". You cannot just answer me "What! How dare you to say this guy reputation should be reviewed negatively".
I'm saying that if they ended up shipping the house because the house contains their new useful microwave but forget to ship the microwave independently, it is something that should decrease their reputation, it looks silly and amateurish.
Of course, I'm not saying that they should solve my problem for me. Simply, they are doing things in a complicated way either uselessly or either non-fully-honnestly.
"Oh there's a half furnished house. Silly amateur house builder, why they don't just sell microwaves?" ?!
If someone provide a half-furnished house, that is fine by me. If they provide a half-furnished house and also say "hey, it comes with a microwave because I know how to fix a microwave. If you want me to fix a microwave without having to have the whole house, do it yourself, I don't know how to do that", then it raises quite a bunch of red flags about how this person understand how a house works. And in this case, yes, I will call this person an amateur. Not because of the half-furnished house, but because they presented the situation in a way that indicate that they don't really have a grasp on how houses and microwaves work.
You're still misattributing the reason I like Omarchy to DHH's reason of making Omarchy.
I did not say "I want to sell half-furnished houses because I want to fix microwaves", I said "Hey, it comes with a microwave ...".
I'm not saying Omarchy is done by people who don't know what they are doing because they created a distribution to fix hyprland. I'm saying Omarchy is done by people who don't know what they are doing because despite having a fix to hyprland, they don't act with it like an adult would.
Again, I know perfectly that "fixing hyprland" was not the objective. But the way they are behaving is just smelling too much of people who cannot be trusted and don't really know how a traditional distribution works and what makes it special.
If it was presented as "Hey, we know it's just some scripts, we don't do the same kind of work that traditional distributions do. We still call it a distribution, but don't hesitate to support Arch instead who is doing the hard work for us", it would be different. But it is apparently not what is done (based on what I've read on the subject in the meanwhile).
What I'm saying is obviously not as simplistic as how you summarized it. It looks like you are just upset that someone may see bad signs in the way this distribution (or whatever one wants to call it) is handled. That's fine, I'm not forcing you to not use it, the same way I'm not forcing anyone to not use anything that is overhyped.
You said this:
> Did dhh provide a recipe to install hyprland properly without having to install a full "distribution"? (I don't know, it's a real question)
> It feels very strange (and wrong) to me: if there is difficulties in installing something, try to help people instead of packaging the solution with other things that are not related.
And this:
> If indeed dhh helped find a way to install hyprland more easily but failed to also provide a standalone recipe, that does not sound like a good practice to me.
I understand your overall point now that you took the time to explain a bit more, and it is valid criticism. But it is not "obvious" what you were saying. Based on the replies you've got, I see that I'm not alone to think this. You might want to look inward into why that is.
Not upset by the way, just responding in kind.
I don't believe it was difficult to understand, and you are probably not a good person to estimate if it was the case or not (of course if something is misunderstood by 0.1% of the people, these persons who misunderstood it will say "well, it was difficult to understand", it would be more convincing if this judgement was coming from someone who did understand it from the start).
I also think that there is a difference in culture. If you have enough experience to notice that Omarchy is overhyped, then you probably also have some experience thinking of what makes a reliable distributions and so on, and where I was getting at probably seemed simple and obvious. Inversely, if it's not the case, what I'm saying are concepts you did not really think or care about, and therefore it may be new or confusing, even if it is correctly explained.
I would guess in typical DHH fashion he would say it is Open Source. And I don't understand where this just Arch + Hyprland installation is coming from?
They have also customised the OS / distro so it install in less than 2 min on a super fast USB. Getting Laptops, both Framework and Dell are now on board, tested on Omarchy so they work out of the box. And so many other tiny things that just make the experience better. I say better but to most consumer, those are expected in the first place.
And this "expectation" people have been waiting for more than a decade.
As a fan of boring Dell laptops/desktops and owner of many, I can tell you they have been well supported in every distro I have tried (Debian, Fedora, Arch, SUSE)