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Omarchy, a Linux Distribution by DHH
- islanderfun 1y agoReminds me of crunchbang, in that it's a small opinionated distro-ish. Seems like a fun try.
- neillyons 1y agoCrunchbang was such a good distro! I ran linux for about seven years. Ubuntu and then Crunchbang. Had my 2012 MacBook Pro dual boot into Crunchbang. Battery life was awful. It had no automatic fan control, so the laptop got so hot I could barely touch it. I ended up writing a bash script to manually control the fans using function keys https://gist.github.com/nwjlyons/b29ee6f7e26595f55a2a https://gist.github.com/nwjlyons/b29ee6f7e26595f55a2a As cool as it was, I can't be bothered with any of that these days. Just give me a Macbook Pro, as I know it will work and have amazing battery life!
- emptysongglass 1y agoIt's still around in its spiritual successor! https://crunchbangplusplus.org/ https://crunchbangplusplus.org/
- indigodaddy 1y agoIs distribution the right word here?
- samgranieri 1y agoI'd probably call this an Arch Linux setup instead. A curated set of configs. Kind of like how i'm using LazyVim instead of rolling my own NeoVim configuration these days
- JSR_FDED 1y agoI really appreciate that he included a video with great narration. So much better than the animated gifs that provide too little context and go too fast.
- Shank 1y agoI find it moderately amusing that it seems like this ships with Chromium instead of Firefox, and doesn't note this anywhere in the manual. The manual just says "Browser" but like, really. I also find that this is definitely throwing someone off the deep end (Hyprland + neovim are not that difficult to learn, but not exactly intuitive), but I guess that's what Omakub is for (to not throw people off the deep end but still be on Linux instead of macOS).
- sam_lowry_ 1y agoIt is opinionated just like Rails.
- pyrale 1y agoIt's no surprise given the distro name, and DHH's previous use of the word Omakase [1, or, perhaps, 2] [1]: https://dhh.dk/2012/rails-is-omakase.html https://dhh.dk/2012/rails-is-omakase.html [2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E99FnoYqoII https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E99FnoYqoII
- fouc 1y agoOh that's surprising, Omakub had Firefox. I thought DHH mainly used Firefox too.
- throwaway74354 1y agoChromium choice is easy to explain due to PWA-shortcuts integration. That's less clunky than shipping Firefox with an extension or adding an external GUI PWA-manager.
- ezekg 1y agoI've been following his journey here since Omakub. I plan on refurbishing a 2015 MBP that had its HDD die to run Omarchy this weekend. I've heard it runs well on old hardware. Will be nice to have a mobile dev machine again.
- efekurnaz 1y agodid you go for it? I have a base 13" 2015 mbp that's pretty much unusable, planning the same.
- wiseowise 1y agoIronic how DHH ditched everything Apple after the whole lawsuit shenanigans, but keeps using Google stuff.
- bachmeier 1y agoIf you don't care about the privacy angle, and he apparently doesn't, Google's offerings are hard to beat.
- miah_ 1y agoSimilarly that people are interested in running anything made by him after he's repeatedly shown his true colors.
- darthrupert 1y ago[flagged]
- dfee 1y agoWhat are his true colors?
- baggy_trough 1y agoHe deviated from progressive orthodoxy.
- porridgeraisin 1y ago> wayland Ctrl_W
- bachmeier 1y agoI'm going to try this out. I used i3 as my main desktop for a long spell. I don't remember the specifics but I eventually moved back to Mate due to some inconveniences. I've never heard of Hyprland TBH.
- tristan957 1y agoIf you're used to i3, maybe you would be interested in Sway. It's a port of i3 to Wayland.
- samgranieri 1y agoI've been using this on a mini pc I bought and I'm really digging it. I could see myself using it as my daily driver instead of macOS one day. I also am floored by how low the resource consumption is on it
- richardlblair 1y agoI used the one he put together for Ubuntu. My setup had become old and clunky. My dotfiles had become a mass. It was nice to go from 0 to something useful without effort. Now I just make changes as I see fit.
- andrewmutz 1y agoIf you're looking for a fantastic dev-focused linux distro, I can't say enough good things about Bluefin Linux https://projectbluefin.io/ https://projectbluefin.io/
- fcarraldo 1y agoI've also been very happy with Silverblue (an alternate flavor of Universal Blue, the same guts as Bluefin). It took a bit of an adjustment period to get used to using an immutable distro, but given that I run this as the sole OS on my daily driver, reliability is paramount. It gives the same feeling of running a highly stable OS like MacOS, but with the power, ergonomics and customizability of Linux - and anything I need that isn't easy to fit into the immutable model is just a simple Distrobox invocation away. It's "Container-driven development" done right - containerized applications and shells _feel_ native via Distrobox (which gives them access to the host FS, network, hardware, etc by default) but without the risks of native development causing dependency conflicts. And if I screw something up, I can just spin up a new container.
- abhinavk 1y agoSilverblue is a Fedora project. The Universal Blue and its flavors (Bluefin, Bazzite, Aurora) are based on its image. They are basically community maintained versions of silverblue because Fedora is very cautious (and stubborn) in including QoL things. [1]: https://fedoraproject.org/atomic-desktops/silverblue/ https://fedoraproject.org/atomic-desktops/silverblue/
- fcarraldo 1y agoThat’s a more accurate way of putting it, thanks!
- fouc 1y agoCool idea, but supporting homebrew is a big yikes! I hope no serious developers on linux ever use homebrew, it's the worst package manager by far. Most package managers support versioning and keeping old versions of installs around, but not homebrew. That's why I'm boycotting it at this point, got burnt by it too many times. I'd rather use pacman or apt-get or pkgsrc or nix or any other package manager than homebrew.
- k310 1y ago> wget -qO- https://omarchy.org/install https://omarchy.org/install | bash Right!
- darthrupert 1y agoWell it's not worse than picking up a random usb stick on the street and running the exe from it
- tasuki 1y agoIt appears there's no versioning, nor even an upgrade path? I'm a fan of DHH but I think actual distro maintainers do a better job of this.
- apazzolini 1y agoThis isn't true at all, it uses a Rails-inspired migration system: https://github.com/basecamp/omarchy/tree/master/migrations https://github.com/basecamp/omarchy/tree/master/migrations
- fouc 1y agoI used to run Linux on my home computer between 1998-2007 (Slackware, Gentoo, Arch Linux) but it often felt like there was a lot of extra work with configuring and fixing drivers and so on. After that I switched to MacOS and never looked back until now. The appeal of Omakub & Omarchy to me is that it minimizes the amount of time wasted on getting everything setup. I setup Omakub on a 2015 MBP at the beginning of this year. I'll definitely be switching to Omarchy soon. My only thought is that it would be nice if Omarchy/Omakub used something more declarative than a bunch of bash scripts, like nix or something else.
- acegopher 1y agoOut of the box Linux Mint, Debian or Fedora Gnome or KDE is similarly "just works". A lot has changed since 2007 Linux.
- dismalaf 1y agoDunno, in 2007 Ubuntu and Suse "just worked". Others were more flaky but there were solid distros even back then...
- tasuki 1y ago> I setup Omakub on a 2015 MBP at the beginning of this year. I'll definitely be switching to Omarchy soon. Why? And... why? If you like omakub than why switch? What does omarchy do better? Wrt the bash scripts, parts look extremely brittle: this stuff is sure to stop setting up new machines in the future...
- fouc 1y agomostly because I like Arch Linux better than Ubuntu. I like pacman so much better than apt-get. Also Omarchy has the hyperland setup, I don't think he's bringing that to Omakub?
- lvl155 1y agoA lot of people post their dot files. It’s an interesting idea but I would not run Omarchy as my main dev machine.
- chao- 1y agoObserving the progression of DHH's Linux journey has been entertaining, and I don't mean that in a condescending way! A mix of lighthearted enjoyment, and anticipation of which part of the tech tree is next for him. Will the next rabbit hole he stumbles into be immutable distros? If so, will he take the Silverblue path or the NixOS path? And so on.
- SvenL 1y agoYes, agree. It reminded me of my toddlers, when they learned walking (also in a non condescending way). I hope he discovers FreeBSD next.
- joshcsimmons 1y agoI floated the idea of using Nix for Omakub but he rather emphatically shot the idea down. Choosing whimsical tools instead of the most useful tools is kind of DHHs thing though, like still using Rails in 2025.
- mrweasel 1y agoI mean, if you think DHHs workflow might work for you, I don't see the harm in trying it out. It just feels like one of those things where people think that they'll become just like the author, if they adopt their tooling.
- darthrupert 1y agoHere's a port to NixOS which I haven't had the time to try out yet but will try to soon: https://github.com/henrysipp/omarchy-nix https://github.com/henrysipp/omarchy-nix
- ChocolateGod 1y agoHyprland seems to be the compositor/environment getting all the attention at the moment, I've been meaning to try it out.
- hmans 1y ago[dead]
- aus10d 1y agoThis is an awesome project
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- dismalaf 1y agoSuper cool and I want to try it out. My only issue is that sometimes my wife uses my laptop occasionally. She can navigate Gnome + Dock easily, but a tiling WM might be a step too far...
- Kon5ole 1y agoI thought I had missed a new development here but it's still not a distro, it's a set of scripts to /configure/ a distro, just like Omakub. Which I actually prefer. Having it be "just scripts" leaves all of the energy and time to be spent on the itch that DHH wants to scratch instead of all the plumbing that others have solved several times already. It also removes a plethora of thresholds someone has to overcome before they get to start developing their app in Linux. I think Omakub and Omarchy are great examples of something that should be in the base repo of most distros. A package-manager installable tool that lets you completely transform the default desktop, preferences, plugins and installed apps to a specific purpose and aesthetic. Kind of a theme manager that also includes functionality.
- grigio 1y agoDistribution is too much.. it's archlinux with Hyprland configured
- JeremyNT 1y agoYeah and "distribution" isn't even mentioned on the page. I flagged this post for the misleading title. Although this is kind of interesting it's nowhere near as interesting as a new distribution.
- amanzi 1y agoIn an interview, DHH referred to it as a remix. It's more than just Hyprland configured, but it's definitely not a distribution.
- theanonymousone 1y agoIs it a read-only distribution?
- 77ko 1y agoThe config is really well setup - i am using Omarchy on a second pc (main one being a mac). Some thoughts: DHH has good taste - leaving besides application choices (some of which I changed, e.g <insert_browser> instead of Chromium, no 1password), the configuration defaults all make sense (coming from a mac) - especially the key bindings. Arch Linux by itself is a bit scary and requires config to make it "nice" so basically Omarchy takes away all the choices and config learning / pain - this tweet is a good summary: > I've poured in endless hours configuring Hyprland + Arch, GTK/QT theming/scaling, auxiliary apps, and more to give you a superb base that can either be taken as-is or used to keep tweaking.[1] Tiling window managers are great - I have young kids using computers for their hw and they prefered this over mac - windows. Which suprised me as personally it is a much bigger change for me after decades of regular windows/mac window management. Linux / Hyperland Pros: - I had a old pc from 2014 - which I put a minimal fresh new install of windows 10 - and it has been dog slow enough that it was waiting to be replaced. After installing Omarchy (Arch + Hyperland) it's perfectly fast and usable. Cons: 1. Its designed to be a single user setup - the idea being u use HD encryption and login straight to the one true user. So for a shared pc its not ideal - the way its currently configured I think you need to run the omarchy bash install script for each user and also update individually for each one - not ideal for a pc shared with kids. Really interested to see where Omarchy ends up. Its also given my usability ideas for my mac. [1]: https://x.com/dhh/status/1932130355663761794 https://x.com/dhh/status/1932130355663761794
- onfir3 1y agoI partially applied the omarchy scripts on my Manjaro for trying it out. Feels cool to use it but not on the state were I'm more productive (not done yet though). Be careful if you try this, because part of the script overwrite your login manager I have to mention that the 'web2app' function is super cool. It transforms and website to a desktop file launching it in an own chromium. That is super neat, especially in a tiling window manager A version of the script which installs omarchy next to a running desktop would be nice
- darthrupert 1y agoOk, so I checked it out slightly more and noticed that the omarchy installation script enables the chaotix.cx repo, which contains packages automatically built from AUR. I.e. packages contributed by practically anyone. So you'll be trusting not just one unknown set of people (AUR) but a completely second one too (chaotic.cx). Omarchy enables all this silently with pacman -U --noconfirm. This is probably fine for a hobbyist, and this is what people in the Linux world generally do, but also constitutes a pretty bad supply side attack vector. Then again, not significantly worse than what things like npm/node do. On a positive note, using the concept of migrations in a tool like this is neat.