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Comment by Aurornis | Hacker News Reader

> Closest thing to the “it just works” experience that Mac was always known for

I see this repeated a lot, but the people I know who tried Omarchy were always fixing something or dealing with breakage from an update.

The best argument I’ve heard for Omarchy that is actually consistent with what I’ve observed is that it ships with cool looking default configs for everything that make it feel fun to use.

The belief that everything just works seems more like a belief perpetuated by the messaging push behind it. Every time real issues pop up they get explained away as being due to someone’s local config changes or forgiven because it’s a young project. Even in this thread there are dozens of comments downplaying security issues as not a problem because they will get fixed, which is a symptom of a project where the messaging has gotten ahead of the facts.

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The main case for Omarchy to me is the OOTB experience, which is more "good to go" than pretty much any other distro, also the hotkeys and config setup are both power user friendly. You are correct that updates have had brick-risk, though I think they've gotten better. I prefer some elements of plasma to the hyprland setup, but agents are very good at making config changes, it's much faster than navigating menus or finding lines in a config file (human work time, maybe not wall clock time).

Hmm ... but take any mainstream desktop Linux. Let's say Ubuntu or one of its official flavors, or Linux Mint. What about them is less 'good to go'?

More stuff people actually use is installed by default with Omarchy, whereas Ubuntu packages a lot of stuff I don't think people use to try and come to checkbox parity to windows, while missing useful commercial software. Omarchy comes with vscode, 1password, obsidian, chromium, discord, docker, OBS, zoom, signal/whatsapp, etc pre rolled and configured.

So in other words... it preinstalls a bunch of proprietary bloatware like an HP laptop or a Samsung phone?

If you're running Linux and you need vscode you're obviously a developer. Is installing vscode really such a difficult task to figure out?

It's not difficult to figure out, it's just friction, and there's a difference between preinstalling malware, sports tickers, etc and preinstalling stuff I would have installed anyhow, and taking the time to configure it nicely.

1. These are trivial to install on any other mainstream distro. I’m talking one-click through discover or Gnome software.

2. Most of these are not even desirable for most people. Obsidian? 1password? Come on, these have vanishingly small amounts of users. It’s not chromium.

3. Any hand-rolled arch based distro is going to be more maintenance and higher friction than fedora, Debian et al. That’s just the name of the game. It’s what makes arch desirable, too, so no, it won’t change.

4. WMs are much higher friction than full service desktops like KDE and GNOME. Again, name of the game. And it also won’t change, because that’s what makes WMs desirable.

I think people who think Omarchy “just works” have not used enough Linux distros. Which is fine, not everyone is a Linux veteran. But then don’t go around claiming it’s sooo much better than other distros. It’s not. Give Debian, fedora, even Ubuntu a shot if you want something that works OOTB.

And based on just on the list above that'd be at least 11 clicks (a lot more since you'd need to find the app in the software manager first before you can click install"

I guess we can compromise and say two clicks and some key presses.

On KDE: Press meta, type "discover", type "discord", click "install". Or, if you use KRUnner, press alt-space, type "discord", click "Get Discord", click "install"

Bear in mind this is how it works for all software in a proper desktop environment. Steam works the same way, or Zed, or whatever VPN you use.

> always fixing something or dealing with breakage from an update.

literally the experience that Mac was always known for

TBH, MacOS 8 and 9 were not that well regarded.

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