DHH's Omarchy Considering Replacing Arch/AUR with Nix | Hacker News Reader

DHH's Omarchy Considering Replacing Arch/AUR with Nix

github.com

6 pointsdjfergus20 comments

"Welcome to my distro-hopping adventure, you're all invited!"

> Rejected approaches: home-manager for user configs: it would make ~/.config a farm of read-only symlinks into the store, which is the opposite of Omarchy's "your files" philosophy

What in the world of AI sycophancy is this? Omarchy's "philosophy" is what caused this dotfile disaster to reach for a lifeboat in the first place.

Surely it is better to correct course than to avoid fixing the problem just because it would be hard. I do think that specific fix will be a hard sell, but you shouldn’t mock them just for considering it.

And to characterize it as a “disaster” when it is merely a problem that worries them shows your own bias.

My overall point is that anyone who doesn't want the Omarchy Arch experience can just use ordinary NixOS. Nothing that Omarchy provides is important, and many of the "philosophy" choices directly conflict with NixOS' systems. It's much worse than shipping your own custom Arch ISO, or putting your configuration.nix onto Github. NixOS will mislead and confuse the Mac/Arch expats that are this distro's target audience.

Why should Omarchy fans cheer this on? I ask this as a NixOS user myself, I'd be pissed if I installed an Arch-like distro only to spend my time diagnosing broken AI-generated Nix modules, configuring an FHS sandbox and trying to install pkgbuilds. It's not a fix for the target audience and it just reeks of distrohopping to me.

That’s not a very useful point. Of course if people don’t want the Omarchy experience they can just use something else. That includes you. If it would annoy you then just don’t use it.

Many people did. You see, before Omarchy ever existed there was this thing called "Arch Linux" that was famously a tarpit for unemployed midwits and trend-chasing social media addicts.

To nobody's surprise, curb-cutting a notoriously dangerous and poorly-designed distro does not give you a reliable or accessible system. We saw this with LARBS, ArchLabs, Regolith, Manjaro and now Omarchy too - shipping your dotfiles as an out-of-box experience for other people is 100% pure technical debt. It got so bad that GTK devs directly called on distros to stop shipping overidden defaults since it confuses developers and users both: https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2019/05/open-letter-stop-gtk-the...

> Nothing that Omarchy provides is important

Hundreds of thousands on people beg to disagree.

Hundreds of thousands of people used Manjaro, too. I'm 100% confident saying that nothing Manjaro provided was important.

Spell it out for me; why is Omarchy's AI-generated philosophy superior to Nix's battle-tested 20+ year old design?

Nix's old 20+ year design vs. a new design by professional product managers, programmers, designers. It's clear what is superior.

The fact that Nix is barely used by anyone, speaks volumes about Nix's age and uselessness. People have spoken.

What does it say about Nix, when a barely one-year old Omarchy is already more popular than it, and growing really fast? Not getting traction despite having a 20-year head start - wow.

How do you like me answering you in the style and arguments you chose?

I think everything you just said is absolutely correct, and deliberately avoids answering my initial question. It's an outraged response to my tone towards Arch, btw.

Why is Omarchy's AI-generated philosophy superior to NixOS' battle-tested architecture? Popularity is not an answer, that's the Keynesian beauty contest that macOS and Windows already won.

I was absolutely calm, not outraged at all.

Please check the other 2 answers I gave, they answered your questions as well.

I am actually curious. As a current NixOS user, what do I miss out not using Omarchy ?

Linux is great in that it has options. No distro is the best for everyone. Different people can subjectively and honestly like different distros. And this is an amazingly good thing.

If you are happy with NixOS, then good for you. Genuinely.

At the same time, Omarchy has a clear feature set, a clear proposition, a clear potential target audience:

- Linux for people who want to able to work, not waste a lot of time setting their system up. Sensible defaults.

- Want to change the defaults and their system to their specific needs, easily (AI)

- If they want, they can have close AI integration to help with everything, both to help with the OS and with work. If they don't want AI, the silence is behind pressing one button

- people who want computing to be fun and enjoyable, not an unnecessary struggle

- want a polished product, with customizations made by people with eyes and sense of style

- relatively new packages, but safely, without constantly breaking the system

- Fits perfectly developers' needs

- People who want to be efficient users, are not afraid to use keyboard a lot more

- People from Mac and Windows are especially welcome

- OS is polished for new Linux users and AI helps with onboarding and potential problems, lowers the pain of changing the OS. Changing your whole OS is a scary thing, this needs to be acknowledged and taken into account.

This USP (Unique Selling Proposition) happens to appeal to a lot of people. Saying that all those people don't know what they are doing, that they are wrong in liking Omarchy, is incredibly arrogant.

I have been sitting on Mint since 2014 and have been happily doing anything I want on it, including development. So Omarchy is not for me, not as a main distro. But I still understand why it appeals to many people. A lot of the ideas are appealing to me as well and I would like to see them implemented in Mint as well (starting from being able to access TimeShift snapshots from the Grub menu, instead of being forced into a limited terminal). Not seeing why Omarchy is great for many people shows an incredible amount of ego-centrism.

If this USP doesn't appeal to you, then it's fine. But it does appeal to a lot of people and they are as right as you in their opinions and preferences.

But it's an Arch base system. You will waste time fixing app pkgbuilds, rolling back unstable updates, cleaning root directory pollution, fighting unpolished AUR software, undoing unsafe defaults that require migration/mitigation fixes from the user, and learning a desktop that is based on an arbitrary dotfile stack instead of an HID standard like macOS, Windows or GNOME.

I'm trying to be as sympathetic as possible here, but Omarchy has stepped on many of the same r/unixporn landmines that LARBS and ArchLabs did. Unlike LARBS and ArchLabs, the situation has progressed to the point that the developers are using AI to map out a distro-wide transition(!!!) to a radically different base system while also rejecting many of the native, determinate solutions that NixOS has to offer. If people just want idiot-proof rollback on a Linux machine, use an immutable-root distro like Silverblue instead. If you want Nix, then use NixOS.

My question is this; how many more times will Omarchy have to do this? The last major NixOS rework was ~half a decade ago to promote flakes as an experimental feature. It took several years to develop and was carefully drip-fed into various Nix systems before being formalized and shipped as a default. I can understand why Omarchy would be attracted to this level of careful upkeep, but I don't think their philosophy is compatible with what makes Nix great.

Premature optimization is a common sin in software development. One of the reasons is that in the beginning of the process you don't even understand the problem fully. Heck, often you don't understand it even when you actually encounter it.

The solution is to have an iterative process, to work on problem at hand.

DHH's first distro was based on Ubuntu. It was the right decision at the time until it wasn't. Omarchy needed to be based on something more dynamic, more maleable. Arch was the solution. It worked well for some time, but with more time, more experience was gained about pros and cons. Maybe Nix is part of the solution, maybe staying on Arch and fixing problems there, maybe something else. Omarchy team will figure it out in time.

A year ago nobody could have predicted the level of success Omarchy would get. Heck, even a month ago nobody would.

But within a month the situation (popularity, money, support, ambition, plans) changed dramatically. Now with the changed environment, fixing the underlying Arch issues became relevant and timely. Without the resources, Omarchy would still be happily on Arch, not going anywhere. This once again illustrates why one should not do "premature optimization", worry about things that may (or likely won't) become relevant only in the future.

If we admit that iteration is part of quality, then you've basically just described why Omarchy keeps stubbing it's toe on embarrassing issues like default container misconfiguration.

> Maybe Nix is part of the solution, maybe staying on Arch and fixing problems there, maybe something else. Omarchy team will figure it out in time.

This is the right attitude, and much better than entertaining a new base system on NixOS. The features of Nix and nixpkgs are modular and compatible with all the stuff they do on Arch. It's much easier to put Nix on Arch than it is to port your Arch plumbing to NixOS. My original "AI sycophancy" comment was total bewilderment that an LLM would rubberstamp an idea like switching the base system to NixOS while rejecting off-the-shelf solutions like home-manager. Nothing that Omarchy offers is worth keeping over the Nix equivalents if you're fully committed to a total distro migration.

Seems like some Nix users reached out to clarify some stuff, so we'll see if he avoids this particular iceberg. A lot of these misconceptions could have been avoided by skipping the AI-generated outline and talking to Nix users, but I guess hindsight is 20/20.

> What does it say about Nix, when a barely one-year old Omarchy is already more popular than it, and growing really fast?

Nothing really. Popularity does not mean quality. Some of the most popular items on the planet are complete dogshit quality, but because for example the price is low enough or "everybody else uses it" (argumentum ad populum) or the better alternative is so different to what anyone is use to, the lower quality item has become popular.

Popularity is correlated with quality. Not necessarily in the absolute sense, but in the realistic sense of betterness, while taking other important aspects like price into account.

Panther was a more technically advanced and expensive tank, but taking everything into account, it is the relatively cheap T-34 that is The Best Tank of the WW2.

Visuals are also part of the general quality. As are the marketing and sales. It doesn't matter if you have the technically speaking better product, if you can't sell it for shit, if nobody uses it. Meanwhile, the product that is technically worse, but is able to sell itself, and satisfies enough of users' needs to continue use it - is a superior product.

Interesting update:

https://x.com/dhh/status/2097623347802587393?s=20

https://xcancel.com/dhh/status/2097623347802587393?s=20

DHH: "To that effect, I've also removed the plans/nix.md file from the current quattro branch. We're having some amazing discussions with nix experts about what the future can look like. But that's for Cinque (if at all). Right now we're ALL IN on shipping Omarchy Quattro RS 4.5 next!"

I would not be surprised if Omarchy switching to Nix caused a large number of Nix devs to leave (yet again) simply because they can't stand others having opinions they don't like, and using the worst possible interpretations of what people say.

Oh wait, talking again about that fascist ideologist? https://world.hey.com/dhh/as-i-remember-london-e7d38e64

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