Omacom Foundation launches with $8M
omarchy.org
omarchy.org
I guess for now most people will be trying Omarchy on their old PC laptops. Especially when new one is expensive. It would be great if there are certain test case or certification to make sure given laptops works with Omarchy.
I don't think there has been anything close to Omarchy for Linux Desktop momentum. ChromeOS isn't one because most of it usage is like a consumption devices appliance used for education. And those Download numbers and Internet video views seems to back it up.
There are roughly 30 - 50M professional software developers, I wouldn't be surprised if it is closer to 100M if we include hobbyist and other adjacent roles. Even if it is 10% of this market is a sizeable trunk.
On the other hand it is sad to witness the birth of Omarchy is precisely because of Apple macOS, iOS and its software ecosystem. I hope we have more senior leadership changes in the coming months once John is officially CEO.
I'm not sad at all, this is great news. I'm only bummed that the install path for Omarchy on Mac isn't easier, but money like this may change that. Apple has been stagnant in this department for years and its high time they faced some thought-leadership competition on OS UX. They brought this on themselves and I wholeheartedly welcome efforts like this.
I am proudly a Bazzite user, and honestly I think for the average end user an immutable atomic distro is better, but more money to the Linux desktop is always a win !
Dunno, Ubuntu had a lot of hype back in the day. It just kind of died out when Canonical had to start making money.
But yeah, it's nice to see the Omarchy hype. Especially since it's been marketed from the start as something for developers and not necessarily for your mom or grandparents.
If you're in the market for a new laptop / operating system, I highly recommend you give it a try.
https://github.com/malik-na/omarchy-mac
Dual boot, it's not exactly the same as the main Omarchy, but it works fine out of the box. Software can be limited because not many packages has been compiled for ARM but we are software developers ;)
Ah yes, like NVIDIA having good support and stability on Linux for many many decades at this point because Jensen is a fan of Linux :)
Don't purchase equipment and gear based on potential future support, vote properly with your wallet once things are supported instead, this is the only way these for-profit companies listen, and even that sometimes don't work. But don't go by what the CEO supposedly "supports" based on financial backing, it means little today.
Just because they don't give you all their source on command doesn't mean they weren't supporting Linux for decades. They were the only GPU that even worked halfway on Linux (and BSD) for a long time.
In fact, I was going to buy a $4K M4 MacBook before I saw Omarchy and decided to give it a try with a new $730 ThinkPad. Exceeded all my expectations. Omarchy literally saved me thousands of dollars.
Battery life isn't the best in this beast. I'd love to try a Dell Panther Lake laptop and may end up with one in the near future. DHH reports Apple Silicon-ish battery life.
But I was completely lost with, and even offended by, how the tiling window manager worked. Windows were just moving around all over the place, changing sizes etc... It was by far the worst computing experience that I've had in a very long time. And it was particularly awful on a small laptop screen where you REALLY need to make the most of how your windows are arranged.
After a couple days, I installed Pop!_OS and, despite its new COSMIC desktop having tiling-like features, I've been happy with its normal Windows-like UI, where I can just use windows/super key + arrow keys to move and resize windows to the side or corner of the screen, and they stay there.
Yet, so many people are raving about tiling window managers. Surely it cant be as awful of an experience as I had. What was I doing wrong? Is there some configuration that I wasn't using in order to set preferences for applications or profiles or something?
Nothing. Tiling managers just have a bit of a steep learning curve. That said, I'd argue they're better about using space on small screens (no title bar, everything tiled efficiently, etc).
The Omarchy Manual does a good job of covering it, but again, there's a learning curve. I was a late adopter to tiling, but now I can't do without it. I even use macOS and Windows tiled.
What exactly is the "hellish" parts of that documentation page? It seems to be explaining the main concepts you need to understand, how to access them, doesn't have any fluff, and doesn't have anything out of the ordinary really, but again, I might be reading it with very rose-colored glasses, so curious to hear what sticks out as "hellish" from that page.
It must be nice to enter the blowhard stage of life where you can share your bash profile at a cocktail party in SF and go around the table collecting $1 million checks from all your yuppie friends.
I had a similar experience initially. I disliked many of the defaults. But it's quite easy to use an agent to customize everything to your liking. And I haven't really run into a situation where I couldn't accomplish what I wanted.
I'm still deciding how I feel about hyprland. I use a unique hyperkey shortcut to focus each app and I usually want that app (chrome, ghostty, etc) to take up the entire screen rather than caring about having tiled splits in a workspace, so I'm generally putting each app to its own workspace. I'm sure there's more to learn about hyprland and I can imagine it being superior to what I'm used to (macOS with some hammerspoon binds for window management/layouts).
Definitely disagree. I feel a laptop is the sweet spot for wanting each app to take up exactly half the screen.
Separately from using it on a secondary laptop, I have no idea if I could actually make it a daily driver though. Usually I have literally 50 windows, 200+ chrome tabs open, and use that state to "extend" my forgetful mind. Whole different approaches.
For me, XFCE (On Linux Mint currently) turned out to be the answer. Has configurable keyboard shortcuts for pretty much anything you need, like tiling to top/right/bottom/left, corners, moving or resizing windows etc.
To me, that is the best of both worlds - a normal window manager with keyboard shortcuts for tiling the windows when you want.
Things I like about Omarchy:
- Great job at blending Native Desktop, Web and CLI Apps - they launch & look the same
- Polished themes - applied to most Apps (inc. running)
- Built in installers for most dev tools, lets you get setup with most popular programming langs in a few secs
- Built-in Windows (run in Docker container) great to have when you need it
I'm using AI to power a lot of my desktop tasks now, even ended up buying Davinci Resolve yesterday since the paid version had scripting support which let me use ChatGPT to implement some video effects.
Good to see some innovation. Desktop Linux feels like it has been stalled for years and needs new ideas.
Also, having an AI to pre-flight compatibility issues and help with UEFI and BIOS configs makes life so much more pleasant.
Having agents in the default environment, having everything configurable through text files, and having default agents automatically file bug reports on crashes - these are tangible quality of life improvements that you can't get on other systems.
Maybe Windows and MacOS should write some shell scripts.
Is this only sending bug reports to Omarchy or to the upstream developers? I'm not sure many of them would be fond of AI slop bug reports en masse.
I've been maintaining https://github.com/nickjj/dotfriedrice for around 8 years, it's my dotfiles that have an installer, theming and other things. I'd still absolutely classify this is a shell script / dotfiles project. I've added just enough customization to make it easy to modify most things without needing to fork the repo.
I only added a GUI last year after my hardware was finally compatible with native Linux, otherwise I would have switched almost 10 years ago. Before that, it focused on command line tools and your terminal, that's because I ran it under Windows with WSL 2 but it also worked fine on native Linux even back then, macOS too because I use it on a company issued laptop.
All that to say, I don't see the above as anything special. It's a batteries included dotfiles, nothing more nothing less. With that said, I'm thrilled by the environment it's allowed me to create and niri is so good. I wish I could get $8 million dollars in funding, because I'd give $7 million of that to the author of niri.
I guess I think there's a lot more in Omarchy than a dotfiles repo, I was very impressed with the demo video. Even just creating the menu and updating system is non-trivial. Mirroring the entire distro through Cloudflare seems significant also. I've not seen those in another dotfiles project.
Yep, I also handle updates, some menus and generally everything to 1 shot a full system and keep it healthy. There's a 90 minute demo video. Not a lot of interest in rolling my own ISO though, I think running the arch install script directly or CachyOS if you want to use that instead is a feature. It lets you do basic things like easily create multiple users on your system, choose encryption or not, pick ext4 instead of btrfs, dual booting and other things at your discretion.
Or you could sit back and run through the installer in 5 minutes by following the guide without any background knowledge and get a working result.
See for example Lundukes "Woke Software" list
The $8m would have been better spent on giving it to Arch directly than this grifty pretty face.
I'd appreciated them becoming regular supporters to Arch via donations though. Hope that'll happen.
Either of these routes would teach you more about Linux and give you the ability to build a simple desktop for your needs.
I don't care if people see it as a hyped-up collection of scripts, it's calm and fun.
DHH has the gift that he's both a good technologist, but also a good marketer.
[1]: https://omarchy.org/news/2026/08/omacom-foundation-to-be-exc...
Did you really expect them to decrease the prices of the subscriptions given the massive amount of money they had to pay upfront for all that nvme storage?
Let's go :)
https://omarchy.org/manual/commercial-apps-services/ https://omarchy.org/manual/web-apps/
I've been using Omarchy since almost the beginning and it's been fantastic. I get a usable "power user" setup with very little tweaking. Omarchy is for me.
> when those defaults include a bunch of random paid software and links to websites DHH likes?
I'm not sure what you're talking about with "a bunch of random paid software". I've only seen a handful, they are sensible options, and they are not in your face. If you mean these apps[1] then most of Omarchy's user base uses most of them, and if they don't they're trivial to change. A huge portion of people use ChatGPT, Google apps, X, YouTube, WhatsApp, Discord and so on.
If you look in Omarchy issues, it's pretty clear it's not just DHH dictating decisions, it's been a community effort.
But again, it sounds like Omarchy probably isn't your cup of tea.
I guess people who aren't poor can afford a 5090 or even RTX 6000. Plus the latest Linux desktops look cooler.
I run it on a Framework Laptop 12, an old MBP, and a recently built gaming PC (VR primarily). There are tradeoffs, but I haven't enjoyed working on computers this much since the 2010 era, first learning to build web apps with Ruby on Rails. The distro is merely 6 gigs and takes minutes to install. And the video DHH just released Quattro with is worth a watch to get a feel for it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F7fe9pa8OeE
I’m unsure how many devs and how much gets done with $8m.
the fact that it's largely hype-driven is par for the course for how things work these days
- https://po-ru.com/2026/07/29/it-doesnt-matter-whether-matz-i...
- https://blogs.gnome.org/alatiera/2025/11/06/dhh-and-omarchy-...
Do you think it is time to leave Stripe?
And if you weren't afraid of people coming to their own conclusion about DHH you could just link to his blog[1] rather than some literal marxist's opinions about his blog. Why not be intellectually honest and curious enough to state what someone says and point out what you disagree with directly rather than mimetically echo someone else's outrage?
In this case, I hate to tell you - the owner of the company you work for invested a million into this.
So... you should probably quit your job, unless this is all just performative outrage...
Waste of money
A lot of organizations “promote Linux” by explaining why people should use it, while Omarchy is trying to build something that makes people want to use it.
Hand on heart, Whether you personally like Omarchy or DHH is almost beside the point. Bringing this much energy, attention, money, and ambition to the Linux desktop is objectively a good thing for the ecosystem.
Seems you can just vibe code anything and get funding for slop if you’re rich.
If this is needed for the “year of Linux on the desktop” have at it I guess.
My opinion is that I think that cachyos is a much more suitable option over omarchy.
Personally out of so many of the distros that I have tried including Omarchy, I found Cachyos to be somewhat perfectly balanced (atleast for me).
So I highly recommend Cachyos if you haven't already!
(On a side note: Fedora is something that I wish to try a bit more as well to be honest and for servers, I mostly use debian/ubuntu or alpine)
although I am on a mac now but I love Linux and I love it so much :)
It was fun talking in college to one of my friends about how my PC used to boot from start in 3-5 seconds. (I was using archlinux + systemd boot manager, it was fast to boot!)
I have read some Hackernews comment which went into more details of some issues in Linux of the time that you mention. I must admit that compared to it, its a smooth sail now and I wish to thank everyone within the open source contributing to it. What I and my generation/maybe next might be taking for granted is created from the sweet laborious efforts within open source by many folks like you and people who contributed to OSS in general.
And I am not just talking about Linux, but also all the things around Linux like KDE, Gnome,Hyprland, Niri, waybar open source applications which support Linux and are actually becoming/are some really great tools, the list is just endless.)
Thanks!
I think the whole of Linux, its philosophy and its implementations is one of the things which does give me hope. I might be romanticizing it a bit now but isn't it so hopeful what groups of people from all around the world unite on to actually build a better future. I wonder how vastly things could've been different without Open source. Although OSS is having some issues right now in terms of moderation and AI spam, I hope that this is just a bump on a smooth road. It's just so cool. It just makes me so happy when I really think about it. It also joys me that maybe this comment is read by someone who has helped in all of it. It's not all roses and rainbows but when you see open source from its own completeness, zooming out. It's so nice on where we are and where from we have come and for that I must once again thank everyone involved. In short though, OSS in general is genuinely a gift to humanity.
(Gentle reminder to please donate to relevant organizations which really need the funding/money folks!, Open source would really help from these donations.)
Nobody has given me a reason to move of Fedora Atomics.
That aside, the latest release (Quattro) has also added a bunch of bespoke software (technically quickshell configuration, if you don't want to call it software) which has added a new layer of polish. For my taste it has been a real joy to use and a lot of fun to explore and play around with. Could be worth checking out if you haven't looked in a while!
So when you change the "omarchy" theme to something, every single application installed uses the same theme. They even paid money to get proper theming support added to software so they could do this.
A bit beyond "dotfiles" IMO.
Always been true, extra true for people who are "famous" in their niche(s).
No?
However, if it helps to move Linux into the mainstream desktop choice. I'm all for it. Obviously I won't be using it any time soon - but if some rich dudes want to throw millions into marketing and getting Linux mainstream, seems like a net positive to me.
> bUt UbUnTu iS jUsT DeBiAn aNd sOmE ScRipts