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Comment by cosmic_cheese | Hacker News Reader

It’s not just Omarchy, there’s really not much out there in the desktop Linux sphere for those who are mostly happy with how macOS works out of the box. Everything is either in a similar vein to the Omarchy setup (hyper-minimal tiling WM), Windows-like (KDE, Cinnamon, most other DEs), or a chimera with a grab bag of design bits from every desktop and mobile platform (GNOME, Pantheon, COSMIC).

It’s a bit depressing because it means that if I ever feel forced to switch my daily driver, it won’t come without a dump truck load of friction, frustration, and lost productivity, which I’ve validated by using the various Linux desktops on secondary machines.

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KDE Plasma is as good as it gets if you'd like to transition from MacOS:

https://pointieststick.com/2025/10/04/a-mac-like-experience-...

I run KDE on a secondary machine and it's the best it's ever been, but for me it's best for single-purpose machines where desktop differences basically don't matter. It's about on par with one of the better Windows releases (XP or 7 maybe) in terms of how frustrating I'd find it to do work under.

There were 1000 plugins created for Omarchy 4 in 2 days. That's why I don't feel it being hyper minimal anymore.

It's still not well integrated of course as those plugins are from different people, but I at least don't feel powerless as I know I can make any change easily.

It is just regular resistance to change. Loss of productivity is exagerated, it indeed exists in which ever direction but it is only temporary.

Perhaps, but one of desktop Linux's defining philosophies is the machine working for and adapting to the user rather than the reverse, so it's a letdown that this only really applies if you're coming from Windows or have been a Linux user all along.

Choices are always opinionated by the dev but you can always fork and change to obtain what you need. MacOS doesn't let you do that and isn't easier to switch to.

With the caveat that one has the time and energy to fork and modify in the first place, and then additionally has time and energy to maintain the changes that upstream won’t take…

Nothing new under the sun.

You can't expect any system, even the most configurable ones, to be ready out of the box to everyone's particular nitpicking without a minimum of effort.

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