8 ms·

Omarchy Is Out

215 points by kristianp 1y ago

coreyh14444 1y ago
Hyprland was a bit too far from what I'm used to, and required too many changes in my workflow, but all of this DHH pushing convinced me to try out Linux on a day to day basis and I'm switching to Fedora/Gnome so that's still a win for the cause I'd say.
- pmdr 1y ago
  I've been using Linux on and off since 2005. I've mostly stuck with Ubuntu after briefly using Slackware, but found myself using Windows like 95% of the time in the last few years. Then DHH launched Omakub and, for me, it's been a game changer. It's not like he invented anything revolutionary, but he did something I hadn't had the time to do: customize it in a sensible way that, for me, is now superior to using Windows 10/11. Also caught the Lazyvim/neovim bug thanks to him, which led to other improvements such as Vimium in browsers. I haven't tried Omarchy yet, but I will as soon as I find the time to tinker with it.
lbrito 1y ago
There's over a dozen posts about this, most recent one from 19 days ago, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44811905 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44811905
- ezekg 1y ago
  It's making the rounds again because it just hit 2.0.
yewenjie 1y ago
[flagged]
- umbra07 1y ago
  Nix is not competition. Nix is not attracting thousands and thousands of new, young Linux users and potential future contributors like Arch+Hyprland are.
  - sroerick 1y ago
    Nix seems really cool, and I'd like to explore it. I'm spending more time with OpenBSD right now as that approach just seems simpler. I use Artix and hyprland at home though. It's a better desktop experience, I think. The only reason I'd use OpenBSD or NixOS in the desktop would be to try and learn it more so I was more comfortable in deployment.
  - femiagbabiaka 1y ago
    I don’t know if either are attracting thousands, but both are attracting a lot, to be sure.
- uberduper 1y ago
  It's not an article about competition. Forcing nixos in to any linux relevant discussion is a bit awkward, yea?
- femiagbabiaka 1y ago
  No hate, but I don't really feel like Arch + opinionated dotfiles is really in the same space as NixOS. If someone found setting up Hyprland or just installing Arch and some packages to be overly difficult, I can't imagine what they'd think of Nix.
- tonoto 1y ago
  (2025 Version): I use NixOS, btw
- lbhdc 1y ago
  I don't get the sense that NixOS has much traction in desktop linux.
- wpm 1y ago
  I don't give a shit about NixOS.
- maherbeg 1y ago
  There's a sweet omarchy-nix config that I really like https://github.com/henrysipp/omarchy-nix https://github.com/henrysipp/omarchy-nix
runjake 1y ago
This article is from June 26th. The real news is that Omarchy 2.0 has just been released, as well as an Omarchy distribution ISO based on Arch. Installation is fairly quick (~5 minutes on a fresh machine), given you have bandwidth. https://github.com/basecamp/omarchy/releases/tag/v2.0.0 https://github.com/basecamp/omarchy/releases/tag/v2.0.0 Here is the updated Omarchy Manual to get a good feel for things: https://learn.omacom.io/2/the-omarchy-manual https://learn.omacom.io/2/the-omarchy-manual
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- ewf 1y ago
  I've been seeing a lot of people setting it up on old macbook pros.. and think I'll do the same
siliconc0w 1y ago
I might be in the minority but I actually like overlapping windows - often the entire window is not necessary to get the data I am interested in. Right now I'm running tests in another window and I have a sliver of that window visible while the majority of the screen real-estate gets used for the browser in primary window.
- mrinterweb 1y ago
  (CMD|CTRL)+TAB is all I usually all I need. I know this may sound wasteful considering that I have two eyes, but I have only ever been able to focus my eyes on a single thing at a time. I usually make the window take up the full window, and I just switch between windows. It is fast to do this. I tried multi-monitors, but it wasn't for me.
  - jm4 1y ago
    I tried Omarchy for a bit. It's a nice setup and DHH made some good choices, but I'm right there with you. Most often, I use maximized windows for the things I'm actively working on and floating windows for something like popping over to a file manager for a quick operation. In Hyprland, this often meant using separate workspaces for the main apps I always have open and workspace switching is more effort than alt+tab. I'm also a heavy user of hotkeys for my most frequent apps. They are set up to focus or launch the app. I ended up gaining little to nothing from the Hyprland setup that I didn't already have or could easily implement in Plasma so I went back after several days. I was also having weird problems launching some games in Steam. In particular, Balatro wouldn't launch under Hyprland even though it works fine under Plasma/Wayland. I spent some time troubleshooting to no avail before deciding it just wasn't worth it. I did get some new ideas from Omarchy though. I never thought to set up xcompose before. I also like what DHH did with PWAs. In any case, I like what DHH is doing because it's making people try Linux when they otherwise may not have. What's especially cool is he's proving that you don't need to dumb things down, which is exactly what everyone else has tried to do all these years. Omarchy is 100% a power user setup and does an awesome job of showing what Linux is capable of while still being very accessible to newcomers.
anaisbetts 1y ago
I want to love Omarchy but replacing the boot splash screen with its logo is rough, I wish there was a clear way to disable that
- martini333 1y ago
  That's a deal breaker for you?
  - anaisbetts 1y ago
    Yeah, it's like, embarrassing. I don't want other people seeing that screen pop up
- jm4 1y ago
  You can. You can either change the logo or disable the splash screen altogether by removing a kernel parameter. https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Plymouth https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Plymouth
  - anaisbetts 1y ago
    Thanks for the tip, "Plymouth" was the keyword I was missing here
- ramblerman 1y ago
  The whole point of omarchy is to give you great defaults, and then it being linux everything is completely customizable. Which with ChatGpt/Grok is trivial these days for even a non linux native.
  - wpm 1y ago
    Calling many of Omarchys defaults great is a stretch.
    - teekert 1y ago
      It's not about Omarchy, it's about an influencer falling in love with Linux. You can also fall in love, and shape the OS to your own liking.
hd4 1y ago
The real story with Omarchy is Hyprland. Feels like the first time the desktop Linux is not only fun but that there's a far better case being made for switching to desktop Linux over Windows, not only because of less resource usage, but also a new (old) paradigm in tiling windows, repackaged in a way that doesn't make people want to smash their computer. Hyprland itself comes with such nice defaults that it isn't surprising at all that it's getting as much attention as it is, for better or worse.
- aidenn0 1y ago
  I hear Hyprland second only to Gnome in the NixOS world (where it's arguably easier to try different desktop environments compared to e.g. Ubuntu). Now it could just be that Hyprland users are more vocal than XFCE or plasma users, so it's not definitive, but it definitely has "buzz"
  - Imustaskforhelp 1y ago
    yes as an hyprland user, the community is definitely more vocal. I myself convinced one of my friends to use hyprland fedora as his first linux experience which is wild (I also use nixos too but I use nix plasma and arch hyprland, i mean I barely use nix, arch is my goto but you get my point) I agree it has buzz but its just cool open source software man, I like it. it isn't as plug n play even still as plasma or gnome for example but that's the point. Makes for a really good minimalist system but for me somethings don't usually work that "just" work on other desktop environments but I learnt a lot and now its a really enjoyable experience. One example I can give of where I really had a big issue with hyprland was consistent schema around every application. I think its still broken on my system for qt apps which I had fixed but then broke again I think, but I now don't have the time to fix it and its a minor inconvenience at best. nothing wrong to hyprland, that's just fundamentally how it works if you try hyprland like me. Omarchy seems to be promising the premise of hyprland with "it just works" Maybe if my arch system bricks, I will give omarchy a try. Untill then, I am happy with my theme and hyprland. Its cool. Dhh is also cool for making omarchy tbh.
    - 1y ago
indigodaddy 1y ago
I'm surprised the DHH cult hasn't latched on to projects like Bluefin instead of this. They are way better workflows for development imo. https://docs.projectbluefin.io/bluefin-dx/ https://docs.projectbluefin.io/bluefin-dx/
- PKop 1y ago
  If you think it's a cult centered around him, why in the world would that surprise you?
  - indigodaddy 1y ago
    Good point actually
- jm4 1y ago
  They serve completely different purposes and are not mutually exclusive. The main takeaways from the ublue stuff is how they build immutable OS images and focus on container-based development workflows. Omarchy is all about ergonomic desktop configuration. They are both cool projects. You could easily replicate the container-based development workflows on Omarchy with distrobox even if you won't be using an immutable OS image. With more effort, you could replicate the Omarchy desktop configuration on a ublue image. Someone already ported Omarchy to nixos. I think we will continue to see a lot going on with immutable, reproducible operating systems and Omarchy will kickstart some cool stuff with desktop configuration.
- sroerick 1y ago
  Bluefin looks super interesting! But I'm personally on a "less cloud everywhere" kick. I'm running OpenBSD as a hobby machine because I want to get better at real UNIX administration, which seems like a lost art. So my gut feeling looking at bluefin is that separating the OS layer and the dev layer gets me farther away from bare metal, not closer, which is not what I want right now. But I'm totally open to the idea that it could offer a better experience, it's just that getting farther away from the core OS is not what I'm looking for right now. That's why I really appreciate what DHH is doing both for desktop Linux and with Linux server deployment. I think there's a pretty comprehensive worldview in advocating for both of those technologies. Not sure if that makes me a cult member or what
harel 1y ago
I've been using Ubuntu exclusively since around 2005 when they sent you CD-ROMs (remember those?). I've been trying to switch to Arch for about 5 years now. Not because Ubuntu was broken, but because I wanted something new. I sometimes install it on an old laptop, marvel at the perceived speed increase of that old(er) machine, tell myself I'll switch tomorrow when I can find a spare day for it, and 5 years later it still didn't happen. My older laptop now runs Omarchy. And it's great and all, but I still don't think it will happen. My next laptop, for sure, will switch to Arch. Possibly. Maybe.
lucideer 1y ago
<offtopic> Minor website feedback: Setting the `download` property on all of your screenshot image anchors is a very odd choice: not only does it make it very difficult to view the images quickly & easily in-browser, it also clogs up my Downloads directory with things I don't intend to keep. Not only that, but it goes beyond client-side measure: someone has gone to the extra trouble of also setting `content-disposition: attachment` on each of the image HTTP response headers to make absolutely sure they can't be viewed easily in browser, even with workarounds.
- quesera 1y ago
  I suspect it's a Hey-wide thing. But if you trim off the `?disposition=attachment` from the URL, it loads in the browser. At least for me in Firefox.
  - lucideer 1y ago
    Ah... that makes sense. I hadn't heard of Hey before but it appears Hey World is a pretty newly added feature to a platform primarily built for & around email - attachments do make some deal of sense in that context, though I'd imagine I might still like to browse image attachments in my email client from time to time rather than stash them in downloads. Might just be teething issues for a new product though.
jeswin 1y ago
The world needs people like DHH. When he saw issues with the Apple ecosystem, decides to make useful, well thought-out tooling for helping developers adopt Linux. When he saw how expensive the cloud can be, goes on to build open source tooling for deploying on bare-metal servers. Both have been successful. Not just blog posts. Blog posts followed by hard work to fix the problem.
- mxuribe 1y ago
  I don't know DHH personally, but seeing what he did by introducing ruby on rails, plus listening to his thoughts via the rework podcast, also reading about his company's move away from the hyperscaler cloud providers, and now both the omakube and omarchy offerings...yeah, we need more folks (with his kind of fame of sorts) to help others as well.
  - sroerick 1y ago
    I just watched the Rails 8 presentation, and was tremendously impressed. It made me wish I was a Rails dev. The philosophy of a framework designed for a lone developer to deploy extremely quickly is very cool.
- bdcravens 1y ago
  It's worth noting that some of it may be inspired by some of the spats he's had with Apple over the years that aren't really related to their desktop operating system. A couple that come to mind is the fact that his wife wasn't approved for an Apple credit card, and the difficulty he had in getting the Hey app approved in the App Store. (Of course, it could be that once Apple lost its "shine" for him he became more critical of other products in a way that tribe-members won't)
- UK-AL 1y ago
  I like DHH because I like his taste. However there are lots of people like him. However he seems to have the ability to build movements, and I don't know why.
  - 1y ago
ximm 1y ago
Last time I checked hyprland was pretty much despised in the wider linux developer community. See for example https://drewdevault.com/2023/09/17/Hyprland-toxicity.html https://drewdevault.com/2023/09/17/Hyprland-toxicity.html. Has anything about that changed?
- indy 1y ago
  The linux developer community has quite a diverse set of opinions so it would be unfair to say that they despise hyprland. At most it's just a small number of developers who hold such an extreme position.
- coconut08 1y ago
  the linux developer community is not a monolith and drew devault is an extremist activist gatekeeper.
- umbra07 1y ago
  Yes. Hyprland has burnt bridges with many of the classic/pre-existing Linux dev communities. Amongst other things, the main developer was banned from freedesktop. But they have a very, very large user base, which means lots of contributors - especially young, first-time-FOSS/Linux contributors. In a way, Hyprland has partially done what Linus was hoping to do by adding Rust to the kernel (attract the next-generation of young developers). And they have an active BDFL - no "led by committee" issues.
- whimsicalism 1y ago
  i don’t care, hyprland is great software and much better than whatever the ‘non-toxic as labeled by drew devault’ communities have come up with for WMs
- wpm 1y ago
  Nah it's just the people who don't like them are really loud.
- dismalaf 1y ago
  Drew Devault is a left wing nutjob. He's done nothing but cause drama and attack people for years now. Vaxry is an immature ~20 year old Polish dude. That means a bit of angst, Eastern European humour, more conservative opinions than most US tech workers. Yeah, Vaxry is considered abrasive to some of the ultra-privileged leftwing US tech sphere. Most people don't care, just as people don't care about DD's views when using Sway, Miguel de Icaza's views when using Gnome, etc...
juancn 1y ago
TIL that the "Super" key is the "Windows" key.
- strawhatguy 1y ago
  Sadly, no "Hyper" key from yesteryear yet. https://www.globalnerdy.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2009/02/lisp-machine-keyboard-2.jpg https://www.globalnerdy.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/200...
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
marstall 1y ago
For mac users interested in tiling (ish) managers, but not willing to make the leap DHH made, I highly recommend the Magnet app, which gets me most of the goodness he is demoing in the first part here ... (and maybe a little more?)
- durandal1 1y ago
  The only tiling window experience that stuck for me is Aerospace.
- filereaper 1y ago
  I would also like to recommend Aerospace which is closer to i3 on Linux: https://github.com/nikitabobko/AeroSpace https://github.com/nikitabobko/AeroSpace
  - basitmustafa 1y ago
    Aerospace is great, but macos is not, and unfortunately, there are enough immutable things (given the discussions in the GH issues around them in the Aerospace repo) about macos' walled garden/closed approach that annoyed me/got in my way enough after a few weeks of using it that I have concluded (for myself/my purposes at least) that macos is not tiling/custom WM workable now or in the forseeable future. How Aerospace (and others) degrade under heavier system load, etc (again, not b/c they are poorly written, but b/c macos inherently does not want these kinds of packages to even exist and makes things very hard to say the least, if not impossible, requiring some very awkward gymnastics) made this incredibly frustrating at the worst possible times.
- pss314 1y ago
  Free version of Rectangle is very good https://rectangleapp.com/ https://rectangleapp.com/
alphatozeta 1y ago
tried omargchy, went back to vanilla hyprland
pavel_lishin 1y ago
> I don't know when we'll literally get "The Year of Linux on the Desktop" Not for as long as we keep telling people that the best software is like this: > Because I do think that Hyprland deserves its reputation of being difficult! Not because the core tiling window manager is hard, but because it comes incredibly bare-boned in the box. You have to figure out everything yourself. Even how to get a lock screen or idle timing or a menu bar or bluetooth setting or... you get the idea. My mom just bought a replacement Windows laptop, and even that needs some gentle prodding before it can be used by a regular human person - and that's only gentle because we told her that she should buy the Professional version of Windows, and not the adware-riddled Home one. I guess as long as we assume that the Year of Linux on the Desktop has arrived when a slightly higher percentage of nerds who are happy to endlessly tinker with settings adopts it as their daily driver, then sure. It's any day now.
- sroerick 1y ago
  There's also Omikub or any of the other "user friendly" distros. Hyprland is definitely a power user environment. And I think that's okay. There have been great "user friendly" distros for decades, and in the last 5-10 years they've gotten very good, but I think everybody is a little surprised to find that the thing that is actually drawing thousands of new linux desktop users is hyprland, an awesome tiling window experience, and ricing. Steam goes a long way too
- wing-_-nuts 1y ago
  >she should buy the Professional version of Windows, and not the adware-riddled Home one Interesting and disappointing. When I googled the difference between the two versions I only came up with the fact that one supported disk encryption (which I didn't really feel was necessary for a desktop) I would have loved a stripped down install of windows without all the bloat, but the only option I knew of was the LTSC version which is supposedly janky for gaming
- debo_ 1y ago
  My 76-year old mother finds it much easier to use Zorin out the box than her Windows 11 machine.
joshcsimmons 1y ago
I genuinely don't understand this. It seems obtuse for the take of being obtuse with no real payoff. NixOS solves this problem comprehensively.
- teekert 1y ago
  It's just a dude that fell in love with an OS, let him enjoy it. Many people went through this phase, except he is very influential and high energy, so we hear a lot about his particular honeymoon. I for one am really enjoying his journey. Reminds me of myself when I first discovered Linux. I don't evangelize anymore, I helped to many people onto Linux only to have to watch them completely hate it, it's too painful ;) Sure, a nice configuration.nix to try Ohmanix would be great, and much more convenient, easier to maintain and evolve than DHH's scripts. But that is not the point. Maybe he will try NixOS in a year, maybe he will land on some bootc distro. I don't care, I love his enthusiasm. Btw, on the Linux Unplugged podcast the hosts are following DHH closely and indeed experimenting with more modern ways of creating similar experiences. Partly fueled just by DHH's enthusiasm.
- UK-AL 1y ago
  Nix is hard to get into. The lang is weird, and I'm a functional programmer. It's not very well documented. Flakes just don't seem to be documented at all? But are used everywhere?
  - joshcsimmons 1y ago
    This was true a couple of years ago. Now LLMs are well trained on it. Flakes are extensively documented.
teekert 1y ago
Somehow, DHH has tapped into an enthusiasm for Linux I haven't felt in a long time. It's so great to see and to experience it with him! When I first discovered Linux it started a journey, from wonder to pragmatism (Mandrake [2004] -> Slackware -> Ubuntu -> Arch -> NixOS [current]). I also spend many nights tweaking and re-tweaking, compiling kernels to get the maximum out of my desktops on rotating cubes with reflections and fish inside, the early Beryl/Xgl days. I miss those days, but Linux is a tool now, sometimes even just a runtime! Still have it on any computer though, and it just works, it feels like home! From that late 2.4 kernel, manually mounting the first USB drives to what we have now. Super slick and smooth desktops, COW files systems, the ability to run almost any software. I love Linux.
- yndoendo 1y ago
  (RedHat[Office Max] -> Yellow Dog -> Gentoo -> Arch). Moved from Gentoo to Arch because I was tired of compiling system updates. Was fun compiling when tweaking the kernel and compiler settings trying to maximize Doom 3 on Linux. Enemy Territory didn't need any tweaking. I don't mind new or more distros. Helps learn new ways of doing things to make Linux more presentable to others. Tools still needs to be presentable to the masses.
  - teekert 1y ago
    Hehe, I forgot to put Gentoo in there haha, for me Arch also felt like binary (and thus much faster to install!) Gentoo! I love new distro's, especially paradigm shifting ones. Ubuntu at the time ("It just works"), Gentoo ("squeeze max performance out of my hardware and know it thoroughly") Arch ("So fresh, unmatched package availability through AUR"), NixOS ("My OS lives in Git, and that is where it is supposed to be") and the new Fedora silverblue/bootc stuff ("Get some of those cloud paradigms on my personal devices"). Although I haven't played with the latter, mostly because the advantages are NixOS like, and NixOS does it well, and I'm not done learning by a long shot, but it deserves some checking out, it's certainly a new paradigm.
mattbettinson 1y ago
Anyone know how to change the mouse acceleration to something that feels like Mac? It feels really bad.
- gainda 1y ago
  This might help: https://learn.omacom.io/2/the-omarchy-manual/78/keyboard-mouse-trackpad https://learn.omacom.io/2/the-omarchy-manual/78/keyboard-mou...
theYipster 1y ago
Hyprland is delightful, and the exposure DHH is giving both to it, Arch, and Linux is great. Since Hyprland is composable and customizable by design, building out a functional workspace from scratch is an undertaking. On the other hand, there are number of other pre-configured dot-file "spins" worth trying that produce a nice Hyprland setup. I like Omarchy, but ultimately settled on a Cachyos + Hyprland setup using Ml4W dotfiles. Like Omarchy, ML4W builds a very nice setup that isn't too garish and with sensible defaults. However, I benefit from Cachyos kernel optimizations and I'll admit I've become a convert to Fish. (Omarchy is the only Hyprland spin I've seen that keeps to Bash as the default interactive shell for Kitty/Alacritty.) As I do like keeping up with Omarchy's evolution, it would be great if DHH could separate the Hyprland stuff from the rest of what he packages into his quasi-distro and make it available to folks who already have an Arch or Arch-derived setup they like. Personally, I'd like to revisit Omarchy from time to time without having to install another OS (Hyprland doesn't work well with VMs.)
- TiredOfLife 1y ago
  The thing with ML4W is that by screenshots it looks like any other desktop environment with overlapping mess of differently sized windows. While Omarchy pushes the tiling manager aspect.
  - theYipster 1y ago
    It's not. It's 100% tiling by default and functions the same way as Omarchy's spin. However, the developer did make a couple of setting app GUIs that are pop-up focused. I think the screenshots emphasize those, which makes it look less tiling than it is.
puppycodes 1y ago
wow looks nice, will try ;)
gigatexal 1y ago
[flagged]
- christophilus 1y ago
  I mean, your comment doesn’t exactly sound non-whiney.
  - gigatexal 1y ago
    Hah true. Maybe he and I could be friends we both are very whiney and petty.
d6c79580a9 1y ago
First page explaining Omacom: It's the idea that most people don't actually know what they want, at least not at first. Several pages after: Making a choice # I built Omakub when I first switched to Linux. I ran it as my daily driver for over a year. It's an excellent choice for anyone making the switch from Windows or Mac for the first time. But today I run Omarchy. It's not as familiar, it's more of an acquired taste, but boy, when you acquire the taste for tiling window managers, it's hard to go back to using the mouse to drag windows around. The whole system just flows through your fingertips! Why? You just killed the whole omakase concept
rendaw 1y ago
I feel like I'm missing some context here. Who is DHH and why is his desktop so desirable? The main page says it's "opinionated" and has two thumbnails of desktops that are mostly just a background image.
- TiredOfLife 1y ago
  DHH is the creator of Ruby On Rails. He is also a rich opinionated high energy asshole (so your average Apple fanboi). Those thumbnails are videos that explain and show the workflow of his desktop.
  - pythonaut_16 1y ago
    Seems a bit reductive when the post is literally him pushing Arch Linux and he's also been hyping Framework and talking about his Apple departure for quite a while now. But also for GP, there's literally an "About DHH" section at the bottom of the pretty short post you're commenting on.

215 points by kristianp 1y ago

Hyprland was a bit too far from what I'm used to, and required too many changes in my workflow, but all of this DHH pushing convinced me to try out Linux on a day to day basis and I'm switching to Fedora/Gnome so that's still a win for the cause I'd say.

pmdr 1y ago
I've been using Linux on and off since 2005. I've mostly stuck with Ubuntu after briefly using Slackware, but found myself using Windows like 95% of the time in the last few years. Then DHH launched Omakub and, for me, it's been a game changer. It's not like he invented anything revolutionary, but he did something I hadn't had the time to do: customize it in a sensible way that, for me, is now superior to using Windows 10/11. Also caught the Lazyvim/neovim bug thanks to him, which led to other improvements such as Vimium in browsers. I haven't tried Omarchy yet, but I will as soon as I find the time to tinker with it.

lbrito 1y ago

There's over a dozen posts about this, most recent one from 19 days ago, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44811905 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44811905

ezekg 1y ago
It's making the rounds again because it just hit 2.0.

yewenjie 1y ago

[flagged]

umbra07 1y ago
Nix is not competition. Nix is not attracting thousands and thousands of new, young Linux users and potential future contributors like Arch+Hyprland are.
- sroerick 1y ago
  Nix seems really cool, and I'd like to explore it. I'm spending more time with OpenBSD right now as that approach just seems simpler. I use Artix and hyprland at home though. It's a better desktop experience, I think. The only reason I'd use OpenBSD or NixOS in the desktop would be to try and learn it more so I was more comfortable in deployment.
- femiagbabiaka 1y ago
  I don’t know if either are attracting thousands, but both are attracting a lot, to be sure.
uberduper 1y ago
It's not an article about competition. Forcing nixos in to any linux relevant discussion is a bit awkward, yea?
femiagbabiaka 1y ago
No hate, but I don't really feel like Arch + opinionated dotfiles is really in the same space as NixOS. If someone found setting up Hyprland or just installing Arch and some packages to be overly difficult, I can't imagine what they'd think of Nix.
tonoto 1y ago
(2025 Version): I use NixOS, btw
lbhdc 1y ago
I don't get the sense that NixOS has much traction in desktop linux.
wpm 1y ago
I don't give a shit about NixOS.
maherbeg 1y ago
There's a sweet omarchy-nix config that I really like https://github.com/henrysipp/omarchy-nix https://github.com/henrysipp/omarchy-nix

runjake 1y ago

This article is from June 26th. The real news is that Omarchy 2.0 has just been released, as well as an Omarchy distribution ISO based on Arch. Installation is fairly quick (~5 minutes on a fresh machine), given you have bandwidth. https://github.com/basecamp/omarchy/releases/tag/v2.0.0 https://github.com/basecamp/omarchy/releases/tag/v2.0.0 Here is the updated Omarchy Manual to get a good feel for things: https://learn.omacom.io/2/the-omarchy-manual https://learn.omacom.io/2/the-omarchy-manual

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
ewf 1y ago
I've been seeing a lot of people setting it up on old macbook pros.. and think I'll do the same

siliconc0w 1y ago

I might be in the minority but I actually like overlapping windows - often the entire window is not necessary to get the data I am interested in. Right now I'm running tests in another window and I have a sliver of that window visible while the majority of the screen real-estate gets used for the browser in primary window.

mrinterweb 1y ago
(CMD|CTRL)+TAB is all I usually all I need. I know this may sound wasteful considering that I have two eyes, but I have only ever been able to focus my eyes on a single thing at a time. I usually make the window take up the full window, and I just switch between windows. It is fast to do this. I tried multi-monitors, but it wasn't for me.
- jm4 1y ago
  I tried Omarchy for a bit. It's a nice setup and DHH made some good choices, but I'm right there with you. Most often, I use maximized windows for the things I'm actively working on and floating windows for something like popping over to a file manager for a quick operation. In Hyprland, this often meant using separate workspaces for the main apps I always have open and workspace switching is more effort than alt+tab. I'm also a heavy user of hotkeys for my most frequent apps. They are set up to focus or launch the app. I ended up gaining little to nothing from the Hyprland setup that I didn't already have or could easily implement in Plasma so I went back after several days. I was also having weird problems launching some games in Steam. In particular, Balatro wouldn't launch under Hyprland even though it works fine under Plasma/Wayland. I spent some time troubleshooting to no avail before deciding it just wasn't worth it. I did get some new ideas from Omarchy though. I never thought to set up xcompose before. I also like what DHH did with PWAs. In any case, I like what DHH is doing because it's making people try Linux when they otherwise may not have. What's especially cool is he's proving that you don't need to dumb things down, which is exactly what everyone else has tried to do all these years. Omarchy is 100% a power user setup and does an awesome job of showing what Linux is capable of while still being very accessible to newcomers.

anaisbetts 1y ago

I want to love Omarchy but replacing the boot splash screen with its logo is rough, I wish there was a clear way to disable that

martini333 1y ago
That's a deal breaker for you?
- anaisbetts 1y ago
  Yeah, it's like, embarrassing. I don't want other people seeing that screen pop up
jm4 1y ago
You can. You can either change the logo or disable the splash screen altogether by removing a kernel parameter. https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Plymouth https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Plymouth
- anaisbetts 1y ago
  Thanks for the tip, "Plymouth" was the keyword I was missing here
ramblerman 1y ago
The whole point of omarchy is to give you great defaults, and then it being linux everything is completely customizable. Which with ChatGpt/Grok is trivial these days for even a non linux native.
- wpm 1y ago
  Calling many of Omarchys defaults great is a stretch.
  - teekert 1y ago
    It's not about Omarchy, it's about an influencer falling in love with Linux. You can also fall in love, and shape the OS to your own liking.

hd4 1y ago

The real story with Omarchy is Hyprland. Feels like the first time the desktop Linux is not only fun but that there's a far better case being made for switching to desktop Linux over Windows, not only because of less resource usage, but also a new (old) paradigm in tiling windows, repackaged in a way that doesn't make people want to smash their computer. Hyprland itself comes with such nice defaults that it isn't surprising at all that it's getting as much attention as it is, for better or worse.

aidenn0 1y ago
I hear Hyprland second only to Gnome in the NixOS world (where it's arguably easier to try different desktop environments compared to e.g. Ubuntu). Now it could just be that Hyprland users are more vocal than XFCE or plasma users, so it's not definitive, but it definitely has "buzz"
- Imustaskforhelp 1y ago
  yes as an hyprland user, the community is definitely more vocal. I myself convinced one of my friends to use hyprland fedora as his first linux experience which is wild (I also use nixos too but I use nix plasma and arch hyprland, i mean I barely use nix, arch is my goto but you get my point) I agree it has buzz but its just cool open source software man, I like it. it isn't as plug n play even still as plasma or gnome for example but that's the point. Makes for a really good minimalist system but for me somethings don't usually work that "just" work on other desktop environments but I learnt a lot and now its a really enjoyable experience. One example I can give of where I really had a big issue with hyprland was consistent schema around every application. I think its still broken on my system for qt apps which I had fixed but then broke again I think, but I now don't have the time to fix it and its a minor inconvenience at best. nothing wrong to hyprland, that's just fundamentally how it works if you try hyprland like me. Omarchy seems to be promising the premise of hyprland with "it just works" Maybe if my arch system bricks, I will give omarchy a try. Untill then, I am happy with my theme and hyprland. Its cool. Dhh is also cool for making omarchy tbh.
  - 1y ago

indigodaddy 1y ago

I'm surprised the DHH cult hasn't latched on to projects like Bluefin instead of this. They are way better workflows for development imo. https://docs.projectbluefin.io/bluefin-dx/ https://docs.projectbluefin.io/bluefin-dx/

PKop 1y ago
If you think it's a cult centered around him, why in the world would that surprise you?
- indigodaddy 1y ago
  Good point actually
jm4 1y ago
They serve completely different purposes and are not mutually exclusive. The main takeaways from the ublue stuff is how they build immutable OS images and focus on container-based development workflows. Omarchy is all about ergonomic desktop configuration. They are both cool projects. You could easily replicate the container-based development workflows on Omarchy with distrobox even if you won't be using an immutable OS image. With more effort, you could replicate the Omarchy desktop configuration on a ublue image. Someone already ported Omarchy to nixos. I think we will continue to see a lot going on with immutable, reproducible operating systems and Omarchy will kickstart some cool stuff with desktop configuration.
sroerick 1y ago
Bluefin looks super interesting! But I'm personally on a "less cloud everywhere" kick. I'm running OpenBSD as a hobby machine because I want to get better at real UNIX administration, which seems like a lost art. So my gut feeling looking at bluefin is that separating the OS layer and the dev layer gets me farther away from bare metal, not closer, which is not what I want right now. But I'm totally open to the idea that it could offer a better experience, it's just that getting farther away from the core OS is not what I'm looking for right now. That's why I really appreciate what DHH is doing both for desktop Linux and with Linux server deployment. I think there's a pretty comprehensive worldview in advocating for both of those technologies. Not sure if that makes me a cult member or what

harel 1y ago

I've been using Ubuntu exclusively since around 2005 when they sent you CD-ROMs (remember those?). I've been trying to switch to Arch for about 5 years now. Not because Ubuntu was broken, but because I wanted something new. I sometimes install it on an old laptop, marvel at the perceived speed increase of that old(er) machine, tell myself I'll switch tomorrow when I can find a spare day for it, and 5 years later it still didn't happen. My older laptop now runs Omarchy. And it's great and all, but I still don't think it will happen. My next laptop, for sure, will switch to Arch. Possibly. Maybe.

lucideer 1y ago

<offtopic> Minor website feedback: Setting the `download` property on all of your screenshot image anchors is a very odd choice: not only does it make it very difficult to view the images quickly & easily in-browser, it also clogs up my Downloads directory with things I don't intend to keep. Not only that, but it goes beyond client-side measure: someone has gone to the extra trouble of also setting `content-disposition: attachment` on each of the image HTTP response headers to make absolutely sure they can't be viewed easily in browser, even with workarounds.

quesera 1y ago
I suspect it's a Hey-wide thing. But if you trim off the `?disposition=attachment` from the URL, it loads in the browser. At least for me in Firefox.
- lucideer 1y ago
  Ah... that makes sense. I hadn't heard of Hey before but it appears Hey World is a pretty newly added feature to a platform primarily built for & around email - attachments do make some deal of sense in that context, though I'd imagine I might still like to browse image attachments in my email client from time to time rather than stash them in downloads. Might just be teething issues for a new product though.

jeswin 1y ago

The world needs people like DHH. When he saw issues with the Apple ecosystem, decides to make useful, well thought-out tooling for helping developers adopt Linux. When he saw how expensive the cloud can be, goes on to build open source tooling for deploying on bare-metal servers. Both have been successful. Not just blog posts. Blog posts followed by hard work to fix the problem.

mxuribe 1y ago
I don't know DHH personally, but seeing what he did by introducing ruby on rails, plus listening to his thoughts via the rework podcast, also reading about his company's move away from the hyperscaler cloud providers, and now both the omakube and omarchy offerings...yeah, we need more folks (with his kind of fame of sorts) to help others as well.
- sroerick 1y ago
  I just watched the Rails 8 presentation, and was tremendously impressed. It made me wish I was a Rails dev. The philosophy of a framework designed for a lone developer to deploy extremely quickly is very cool.
bdcravens 1y ago
It's worth noting that some of it may be inspired by some of the spats he's had with Apple over the years that aren't really related to their desktop operating system. A couple that come to mind is the fact that his wife wasn't approved for an Apple credit card, and the difficulty he had in getting the Hey app approved in the App Store. (Of course, it could be that once Apple lost its "shine" for him he became more critical of other products in a way that tribe-members won't)
UK-AL 1y ago
I like DHH because I like his taste. However there are lots of people like him. However he seems to have the ability to build movements, and I don't know why.
- 1y ago

ximm 1y ago

Last time I checked hyprland was pretty much despised in the wider linux developer community. See for example https://drewdevault.com/2023/09/17/Hyprland-toxicity.html https://drewdevault.com/2023/09/17/Hyprland-toxicity.html. Has anything about that changed?

indy 1y ago
The linux developer community has quite a diverse set of opinions so it would be unfair to say that they despise hyprland. At most it's just a small number of developers who hold such an extreme position.
coconut08 1y ago
the linux developer community is not a monolith and drew devault is an extremist activist gatekeeper.
umbra07 1y ago
Yes. Hyprland has burnt bridges with many of the classic/pre-existing Linux dev communities. Amongst other things, the main developer was banned from freedesktop. But they have a very, very large user base, which means lots of contributors - especially young, first-time-FOSS/Linux contributors. In a way, Hyprland has partially done what Linus was hoping to do by adding Rust to the kernel (attract the next-generation of young developers). And they have an active BDFL - no "led by committee" issues.
whimsicalism 1y ago
i don’t care, hyprland is great software and much better than whatever the ‘non-toxic as labeled by drew devault’ communities have come up with for WMs
wpm 1y ago
Nah it's just the people who don't like them are really loud.
dismalaf 1y ago
Drew Devault is a left wing nutjob. He's done nothing but cause drama and attack people for years now. Vaxry is an immature ~20 year old Polish dude. That means a bit of angst, Eastern European humour, more conservative opinions than most US tech workers. Yeah, Vaxry is considered abrasive to some of the ultra-privileged leftwing US tech sphere. Most people don't care, just as people don't care about DD's views when using Sway, Miguel de Icaza's views when using Gnome, etc...

juancn 1y ago

TIL that the "Super" key is the "Windows" key.

strawhatguy 1y ago
Sadly, no "Hyper" key from yesteryear yet. https://www.globalnerdy.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2009/02/lisp-machine-keyboard-2.jpg https://www.globalnerdy.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/200...
deleted 1y ago
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marstall 1y ago

For mac users interested in tiling (ish) managers, but not willing to make the leap DHH made, I highly recommend the Magnet app, which gets me most of the goodness he is demoing in the first part here ... (and maybe a little more?)

durandal1 1y ago
The only tiling window experience that stuck for me is Aerospace.
filereaper 1y ago
I would also like to recommend Aerospace which is closer to i3 on Linux: https://github.com/nikitabobko/AeroSpace https://github.com/nikitabobko/AeroSpace
- basitmustafa 1y ago
  Aerospace is great, but macos is not, and unfortunately, there are enough immutable things (given the discussions in the GH issues around them in the Aerospace repo) about macos' walled garden/closed approach that annoyed me/got in my way enough after a few weeks of using it that I have concluded (for myself/my purposes at least) that macos is not tiling/custom WM workable now or in the forseeable future. How Aerospace (and others) degrade under heavier system load, etc (again, not b/c they are poorly written, but b/c macos inherently does not want these kinds of packages to even exist and makes things very hard to say the least, if not impossible, requiring some very awkward gymnastics) made this incredibly frustrating at the worst possible times.
pss314 1y ago
Free version of Rectangle is very good https://rectangleapp.com/ https://rectangleapp.com/

alphatozeta 1y ago

tried omargchy, went back to vanilla hyprland

pavel_lishin 1y ago

> I don't know when we'll literally get "The Year of Linux on the Desktop" Not for as long as we keep telling people that the best software is like this: > Because I do think that Hyprland deserves its reputation of being difficult! Not because the core tiling window manager is hard, but because it comes incredibly bare-boned in the box. You have to figure out everything yourself. Even how to get a lock screen or idle timing or a menu bar or bluetooth setting or... you get the idea. My mom just bought a replacement Windows laptop, and even that needs some gentle prodding before it can be used by a regular human person - and that's only gentle because we told her that she should buy the Professional version of Windows, and not the adware-riddled Home one. I guess as long as we assume that the Year of Linux on the Desktop has arrived when a slightly higher percentage of nerds who are happy to endlessly tinker with settings adopts it as their daily driver, then sure. It's any day now.

sroerick 1y ago
There's also Omikub or any of the other "user friendly" distros. Hyprland is definitely a power user environment. And I think that's okay. There have been great "user friendly" distros for decades, and in the last 5-10 years they've gotten very good, but I think everybody is a little surprised to find that the thing that is actually drawing thousands of new linux desktop users is hyprland, an awesome tiling window experience, and ricing. Steam goes a long way too
wing-_-nuts 1y ago
>she should buy the Professional version of Windows, and not the adware-riddled Home one Interesting and disappointing. When I googled the difference between the two versions I only came up with the fact that one supported disk encryption (which I didn't really feel was necessary for a desktop) I would have loved a stripped down install of windows without all the bloat, but the only option I knew of was the LTSC version which is supposedly janky for gaming
debo_ 1y ago
My 76-year old mother finds it much easier to use Zorin out the box than her Windows 11 machine.

joshcsimmons 1y ago

I genuinely don't understand this. It seems obtuse for the take of being obtuse with no real payoff. NixOS solves this problem comprehensively.

teekert 1y ago
It's just a dude that fell in love with an OS, let him enjoy it. Many people went through this phase, except he is very influential and high energy, so we hear a lot about his particular honeymoon. I for one am really enjoying his journey. Reminds me of myself when I first discovered Linux. I don't evangelize anymore, I helped to many people onto Linux only to have to watch them completely hate it, it's too painful ;) Sure, a nice configuration.nix to try Ohmanix would be great, and much more convenient, easier to maintain and evolve than DHH's scripts. But that is not the point. Maybe he will try NixOS in a year, maybe he will land on some bootc distro. I don't care, I love his enthusiasm. Btw, on the Linux Unplugged podcast the hosts are following DHH closely and indeed experimenting with more modern ways of creating similar experiences. Partly fueled just by DHH's enthusiasm.
UK-AL 1y ago
Nix is hard to get into. The lang is weird, and I'm a functional programmer. It's not very well documented. Flakes just don't seem to be documented at all? But are used everywhere?
- joshcsimmons 1y ago
  This was true a couple of years ago. Now LLMs are well trained on it. Flakes are extensively documented.

teekert 1y ago

Somehow, DHH has tapped into an enthusiasm for Linux I haven't felt in a long time. It's so great to see and to experience it with him! When I first discovered Linux it started a journey, from wonder to pragmatism (Mandrake [2004] -> Slackware -> Ubuntu -> Arch -> NixOS [current]). I also spend many nights tweaking and re-tweaking, compiling kernels to get the maximum out of my desktops on rotating cubes with reflections and fish inside, the early Beryl/Xgl days. I miss those days, but Linux is a tool now, sometimes even just a runtime! Still have it on any computer though, and it just works, it feels like home! From that late 2.4 kernel, manually mounting the first USB drives to what we have now. Super slick and smooth desktops, COW files systems, the ability to run almost any software. I love Linux.

yndoendo 1y ago
(RedHat[Office Max] -> Yellow Dog -> Gentoo -> Arch). Moved from Gentoo to Arch because I was tired of compiling system updates. Was fun compiling when tweaking the kernel and compiler settings trying to maximize Doom 3 on Linux. Enemy Territory didn't need any tweaking. I don't mind new or more distros. Helps learn new ways of doing things to make Linux more presentable to others. Tools still needs to be presentable to the masses.
- teekert 1y ago
  Hehe, I forgot to put Gentoo in there haha, for me Arch also felt like binary (and thus much faster to install!) Gentoo! I love new distro's, especially paradigm shifting ones. Ubuntu at the time ("It just works"), Gentoo ("squeeze max performance out of my hardware and know it thoroughly") Arch ("So fresh, unmatched package availability through AUR"), NixOS ("My OS lives in Git, and that is where it is supposed to be") and the new Fedora silverblue/bootc stuff ("Get some of those cloud paradigms on my personal devices"). Although I haven't played with the latter, mostly because the advantages are NixOS like, and NixOS does it well, and I'm not done learning by a long shot, but it deserves some checking out, it's certainly a new paradigm.

mattbettinson 1y ago

Anyone know how to change the mouse acceleration to something that feels like Mac? It feels really bad.

gainda 1y ago
This might help: https://learn.omacom.io/2/the-omarchy-manual/78/keyboard-mouse-trackpad https://learn.omacom.io/2/the-omarchy-manual/78/keyboard-mou...

theYipster 1y ago

Hyprland is delightful, and the exposure DHH is giving both to it, Arch, and Linux is great. Since Hyprland is composable and customizable by design, building out a functional workspace from scratch is an undertaking. On the other hand, there are number of other pre-configured dot-file "spins" worth trying that produce a nice Hyprland setup. I like Omarchy, but ultimately settled on a Cachyos + Hyprland setup using Ml4W dotfiles. Like Omarchy, ML4W builds a very nice setup that isn't too garish and with sensible defaults. However, I benefit from Cachyos kernel optimizations and I'll admit I've become a convert to Fish. (Omarchy is the only Hyprland spin I've seen that keeps to Bash as the default interactive shell for Kitty/Alacritty.) As I do like keeping up with Omarchy's evolution, it would be great if DHH could separate the Hyprland stuff from the rest of what he packages into his quasi-distro and make it available to folks who already have an Arch or Arch-derived setup they like. Personally, I'd like to revisit Omarchy from time to time without having to install another OS (Hyprland doesn't work well with VMs.)

TiredOfLife 1y ago
The thing with ML4W is that by screenshots it looks like any other desktop environment with overlapping mess of differently sized windows. While Omarchy pushes the tiling manager aspect.
- theYipster 1y ago
  It's not. It's 100% tiling by default and functions the same way as Omarchy's spin. However, the developer did make a couple of setting app GUIs that are pop-up focused. I think the screenshots emphasize those, which makes it look less tiling than it is.

puppycodes 1y ago

wow looks nice, will try ;)

gigatexal 1y ago

[flagged]

christophilus 1y ago
I mean, your comment doesn’t exactly sound non-whiney.
- gigatexal 1y ago
  Hah true. Maybe he and I could be friends we both are very whiney and petty.

d6c79580a9 1y ago

First page explaining Omacom: It's the idea that most people don't actually know what they want, at least not at first. Several pages after: Making a choice # I built Omakub when I first switched to Linux. I ran it as my daily driver for over a year. It's an excellent choice for anyone making the switch from Windows or Mac for the first time. But today I run Omarchy. It's not as familiar, it's more of an acquired taste, but boy, when you acquire the taste for tiling window managers, it's hard to go back to using the mouse to drag windows around. The whole system just flows through your fingertips! Why? You just killed the whole omakase concept

rendaw 1y ago

I feel like I'm missing some context here. Who is DHH and why is his desktop so desirable? The main page says it's "opinionated" and has two thumbnails of desktops that are mostly just a background image.

TiredOfLife 1y ago
DHH is the creator of Ruby On Rails. He is also a rich opinionated high energy asshole (so your average Apple fanboi). Those thumbnails are videos that explain and show the workflow of his desktop.
- pythonaut_16 1y ago
  Seems a bit reductive when the post is literally him pushing Arch Linux and he's also been hyping Framework and talking about his Apple departure for quite a while now. But also for GP, there's literally an "About DHH" section at the bottom of the pretty short post you're commenting on.