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Show HN: Omarchy on CachyOS

66 points by theYipster 1y ago

An install script to create a strong and stable blend of Omarchy on top of CachyOS. You must install CachyOS first (please read the README file.) Feedback and contributions welcome!

OsrsNeedsf2P 1y ago
So this is about setting up a UI.. with no screenshots of the UI. Nice
- OsrsNeedsf2P 1y ago
  Video showcasing UI: https://omarchy.org/ https://omarchy.org/
  - BoredPositron 1y ago
    I skipped through the 38 minutes and landed on like 8 instances were he was switching themes/wallpaper and 4 showing of bash scripts that opens a webpage. It looks like all the fluxbox/openbox themed minimal desktops in the 2000s - function follows form. Feels really performative.
    - RUnconcerned 1y ago
      DHH switched from Mac to Linux and is in the process of experimenting with his setup, but since he's famous within tech, it's getting a lot of attention. There's really nothing special about it.
      - dartharva 1y ago
        I mean.. that vscode-like command palette for system actions incl updating, installing and removing packages looks rather nifty
        diggan 1y ago
        Haven't "launchers" existed for decades at this point though? I remember Crunchbang (RIP) having something similar for example, and that must have been almost two decades ago at this point.
        nickjj 1y ago
        There are a lot of them yeah. In this case, Walker is the launcher being used in Omarchy, https://github.com/abenz1267/walker https://github.com/abenz1267/walker. It's not specific to Omarchy. One of Walker's features is being able to create your own custom menus quite easily with shell scripts.
    - sroerick 1y ago
      Its basically LARBS or an autoricing script. But its happening in kind of a cultural moment where Linux gaming is good enough and Windows is bad enough for people to see ricing and say "I want that!" I think it is function follows form, but it turns out a lot of people actually want that. Not to mention - if you're coming from Windows or MacOS and you've never had real tiling before, you could install a bunch of goofy electron launchers or whatever and still get form improvements. I'm not a Rails guy, so I've always kind of thought their scaffolding system was a little silly. It's going to autogenerate a config and then I also have to edit it? But I'm coming to terms with the idea that there is actually tremendous value to lowering the barrier to entry as much as possible, and providing scaffolding for people to learn along the way
    - horsawlarway 1y ago
      I had the same thought. They made a "micro fork" of chrome to support having it auto update to the system theme. That's... Dedication. I guess. But it's dedication at the wrong spot for my tastes. And having to hear him recall those forced keyboard commands just makes me itchy. Here you hit space to select, over there it's "d" for default. Here it's enter, this menu is actually vim, so it's !wq here... Want to configure those monitors? Just come edit this file! Bleh. Hope you know the name of the things you want to touch! Some of the dev tool suggestions are fine, but those are all standalone tools (mise, yay, lazy docker, etc). Basically: I'm glad there's space for people to do this. It's not my cup of tea. To much attention to things I don't care about. Too much magic in the things I do. Too much crap that's entirely specific to this guy (who the fuck wants a default top level hot key for opening Twitter. It's not me, that's for sure).
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
ikurei 1y ago
The main thing keeping me from trying out Omarchy is the pain of setting up multiple displays. I haven't tried Hyprland, but whenever I've tried a non-mainstream desktop/wm in Linux that was the worst, especially if your setup changes often (as in, you have a laptop and move around and plug it in different places). May be that just means I'm not enough of a tinkerer for these setups. Is it a hard problem to remember more than one configuration and link them to the displays connected to your computer? Or is it just that Omarchy users really don't mind editing monitor.conf[1] often? [1]: https://learn.omacom.io/books/2/pages/86 https://learn.omacom.io/books/2/pages/86
- lpcvoid 1y ago
  I use swaywm and kanshi [0]. It's write once, forget forever. I have one config for each of the display compositions I have (office, home, gaming, eDP...), and "it just works". [0] https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/emersion/kanshi https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/emersion/kanshi
- michielr 1y ago
  The community has written a TUI for this: https://github.com/erans/hyprmon https://github.com/erans/hyprmon I don't really need it, but maybe my setup is too simple. I set my laptop monitor to auto-right, external display to auto-left and that's it. Set it and forget it for me.
  - nickjj 1y ago
    If your external display isn't connected, what happens? Does Hyprland ignore that line from the config without an error and everything works normally?
    - michielr 1y ago
      It's ignored. This setup wouldn't suffice if my external displays used different scaling though, currently they all work fine at scale 1 for me. # external display monitor = DP-3, preferred, auto-left, 1 # internal display monitor = eDP-1, preferred, auto-right, 1.333333
atoav 1y ago
Normally I'd say I would be exactly the type of person that would use such a thing. But what scares me away and makes me stay with vanilla KDE Plasma is that perceived upfront cost of having to relearn everything and having to customize for hours to then have something that feels 100% better in some and 100% worse in other situations. Maybe that just means I am currently at a point in my life where I haven't got the time or energy to play around with these things. I'd rather have KDE Plasma with a hint of tiling window manager than a tiling window manager with a hint of Plasma, if you get what I mean.
temp0826 1y ago
> Omarchy skips installation of a login display manager. Instead, Hyprland autostarts and password protection is provided upon boot by the LUKS full disk encryption service. Pretty unconventional...Is this a bad idea?
- UK-AL 1y ago
  Can't be multiuser
  - vidarh 1y ago
    And that's a reasonable tradeoff - In 30 years of using Linux, I've only used machines that were actually treated as multi-user on the server side. There's space for both - some people do need password protected separate users, but not all of us do.
  - alias_neo 1y ago
    Also not ideal for security if you like to sleep/hibernate on a laptop. Who am I kidding, how many laptops actually sleep or hibernate properly when running Linux anyway...
    - prmoustache 1y ago
      My desktop box is running bazzite and is only used for gaming. I treat it has a console really, it isn't even connected to the internet and doesn't even receive updates unless I want to download a new game. It doesn't have any private data, the only secret I might have is that steam is already logged on but I don't have any payment account/card setup on my steam account. Appart from the internet connection that might be useful for those gaming online I would expect most gamer machines would be like that.
      - alias_neo 1y ago
        I ran Bazzite for a little while on my desktop to see how it was for gaming, and it was great, but I do a lot besides gaming, gaming is a small percentage of my time spent on the PC, and I as a full-time Linux user, work and home, I needed something more traditional, I've switched over to CachyOS now which meets my needs well.
sunshine-o 1y ago
Omarchy and CachyOS are very interesting but they do not look serious about security [0] [1]. I mean in this day and age we all agree you need disk encryption (for a least 20 years) but what about SELinux, application sandboxing for example? Especially for a desktop OS like Omarchy shipped with a bunch of apps and "plugins". This has been a Linux Desktop weakness for more than a decade (compared to macOS, Windows and Android). App sandboxing is a bit sketchy and hard to get right. The fact they do not explicitly state their strategy regarding those things make me believe this is a bit amateurish. - [0] https://wiki.cachyos.org/cachyos_basic/faq/#security--best-practices https://wiki.cachyos.org/cachyos_basic/faq/#security--best-p... - [1] https://learn.omacom.io/2/the-omarchy-manual/93/security https://learn.omacom.io/2/the-omarchy-manual/93/security
- Galanwe 1y ago
  > Especially for a desktop OS like Omarchy shipped with a bunch of apps and "plugins". Omarchy is _just_ a set of scripts to have a nice looking Arch Linux and some helper scripts for day to day tasks. It's not a distribution per se, it doesn't have repositories or packages of its own. Therefore, your criticism of app sandboxing is more for Arch than Omarchy IMHO.
  - sunshine-o 1y ago
    > Therefore, your criticism of app sandboxing is more for Arch than Omarchy IMHO. I've never been an Arch user but deeply respect the project since their wiki as always been my favorite documentation. From what I understand Arch is very much DIY, non opinionated and you you need to decide and build the security level / strategy that fit your needs. It seems you can go Flatpak, SELinux but only if you want. I was kind of lurking for an equivalent of SecureBlue in the Arch world, meaning an Arch derived distro with a strong security posture. Allowing me to get started without worrying too much about it.
    - Galanwe 1y ago
      At the end of the day, you do you, but my experience with SElinux is that using it on the desktop is vastly overkill. At a high level, the essence of SElinux is to limit the possibilities of exploitation and escalation by carefully specifying which process can access which resources in which context. Now that makes sense for a server opened to the www, or a host shared with untrusted users. But Omarchy is a _sole developer_ focused flavor of Arch Linux, think your typical dev laptop. There's no service exposed there, you most likely can't even listen on the internet behind your typical home router. The realistic threats that you face is your laptop being stolen (which is why LUKS is a default) or your laptop sitting unlocked (which is why hypridle & hyprlock are a default). Of course there's always the tails of a compromised software, but it's much more unlikely.
unixhero 1y ago
But why is this necessary? Isn't Omarchy the opinionated setup... and that is all you need? The README on this github link does not explain to me why this is necessary, or why someone is doing it.
- alias_neo 1y ago
  It should probably start with WTF is Omarchy. I recently moved my gaming desktop to CachyOS from Manjaro, but I have no idea what Omarchy is or whether or not I want it, and there's not a single link in the README. Guess I'll go look it up.
  - theshrike79 1y ago
    Omarchy is an “opinionated” Arch distro by dhh of Ruby on Rails and Basecamp/Hey fame
    - isr 1y ago
      Its not really a distro, nor does it pretend to be. What it really is, is an Arch Linux install, with a preconfigured set of apps & workflow, and a set of tools to easily allow the user to customise to their preferences - within the confines of the original config/workflow. Basically, it's a "curated Arch linux"
      - unixhero 1y ago
        So it could just be some files and a bash script or maybe better, an Ansible recipe??? Sorry for being reductionist but its late and I'm out of beer.
        isr 1y ago
        That's essentially what it is. They don't really pretend otherwise. The iso is a convenience for 1 stop installs.
        theshrike79 1y ago
ZhijieChen 1y ago
[dead]
zokier 1y ago
Personally I feel this diverges just enough from omarchy that it deserves its own name to avoid confusion.
ossusermivami 1y ago
This Omarchy remind me of Linux-Mandrake from back in the day, a collection of badly written shell script but that "works"
theYipster 1y ago
OP here: The README.md assumes the reader knows what CachyOS and Omarchy are. A quick primer for those who are coming to this fresh... - CachyOS is an Arch-based Linux distribution with built-in performance optimizations tuned to high end computing and gaming. See more at https://cachyos.org https://cachyos.org - Omarchy is a Hyprland-based "desktop" crafted by DHH that is slowly turning into its own distribution, also based on Arch. See more at https://omarchy.org https://omarchy.org Why would you want to use this instead of vanilla CachyOS? You want to use Hyprland and want a very strong starting configuration. CachyOS includes its own configuration of Hyprland, but I find it's pretty anemic. There are other pre-packaged Hyprland "spins" to try as well, including MyLinux4Work ands JaKoolit. I've found Omarchy to be the most refined. If you have no interest in Hyprland, neither this script nor Omarchy are for you. Why would you want to use this instead of vanilla Omarchy? You prefer CachyOS's defaults and/or enhancements to vanilla Arch, or you do not like all of the out-of-the-box decisions Omarchy makes via its auto-install of Vanilla arch (such as LUKS disk encryption or the enforcement of a single user login.)
sureglymop 1y ago
Honestly I may be getting old but I neither understand CachyOS nor Omarchy. Just use archinstall and set up your arch how you want with it. I would usually install Gnome and some other DEs and then just start whichever one I currently feel like using from GDM. My dotfiles already handle all the Hyprland config and are way lighter than Omarchy. I mean... I get wanting sane defaults but I feel like plain arch already provides that.

66 points by theYipster 1y ago

An install script to create a strong and stable blend of Omarchy on top of CachyOS. You must install CachyOS first (please read the README file.) Feedback and contributions welcome!

OsrsNeedsf2P 1y ago

So this is about setting up a UI.. with no screenshots of the UI. Nice

OsrsNeedsf2P 1y ago
Video showcasing UI: https://omarchy.org/ https://omarchy.org/
- BoredPositron 1y ago
  I skipped through the 38 minutes and landed on like 8 instances were he was switching themes/wallpaper and 4 showing of bash scripts that opens a webpage. It looks like all the fluxbox/openbox themed minimal desktops in the 2000s - function follows form. Feels really performative.
  - RUnconcerned 1y ago
    DHH switched from Mac to Linux and is in the process of experimenting with his setup, but since he's famous within tech, it's getting a lot of attention. There's really nothing special about it.
    - dartharva 1y ago
      I mean.. that vscode-like command palette for system actions incl updating, installing and removing packages looks rather nifty
      - diggan 1y ago
        Haven't "launchers" existed for decades at this point though? I remember Crunchbang (RIP) having something similar for example, and that must have been almost two decades ago at this point.
        nickjj 1y ago
        There are a lot of them yeah. In this case, Walker is the launcher being used in Omarchy, https://github.com/abenz1267/walker https://github.com/abenz1267/walker. It's not specific to Omarchy. One of Walker's features is being able to create your own custom menus quite easily with shell scripts.
  - sroerick 1y ago
    Its basically LARBS or an autoricing script. But its happening in kind of a cultural moment where Linux gaming is good enough and Windows is bad enough for people to see ricing and say "I want that!" I think it is function follows form, but it turns out a lot of people actually want that. Not to mention - if you're coming from Windows or MacOS and you've never had real tiling before, you could install a bunch of goofy electron launchers or whatever and still get form improvements. I'm not a Rails guy, so I've always kind of thought their scaffolding system was a little silly. It's going to autogenerate a config and then I also have to edit it? But I'm coming to terms with the idea that there is actually tremendous value to lowering the barrier to entry as much as possible, and providing scaffolding for people to learn along the way
  - horsawlarway 1y ago
    I had the same thought. They made a "micro fork" of chrome to support having it auto update to the system theme. That's... Dedication. I guess. But it's dedication at the wrong spot for my tastes. And having to hear him recall those forced keyboard commands just makes me itchy. Here you hit space to select, over there it's "d" for default. Here it's enter, this menu is actually vim, so it's !wq here... Want to configure those monitors? Just come edit this file! Bleh. Hope you know the name of the things you want to touch! Some of the dev tool suggestions are fine, but those are all standalone tools (mise, yay, lazy docker, etc). Basically: I'm glad there's space for people to do this. It's not my cup of tea. To much attention to things I don't care about. Too much magic in the things I do. Too much crap that's entirely specific to this guy (who the fuck wants a default top level hot key for opening Twitter. It's not me, that's for sure).

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

ikurei 1y ago

The main thing keeping me from trying out Omarchy is the pain of setting up multiple displays. I haven't tried Hyprland, but whenever I've tried a non-mainstream desktop/wm in Linux that was the worst, especially if your setup changes often (as in, you have a laptop and move around and plug it in different places). May be that just means I'm not enough of a tinkerer for these setups. Is it a hard problem to remember more than one configuration and link them to the displays connected to your computer? Or is it just that Omarchy users really don't mind editing monitor.conf[1] often? [1]: https://learn.omacom.io/books/2/pages/86 https://learn.omacom.io/books/2/pages/86

lpcvoid 1y ago
I use swaywm and kanshi [0]. It's write once, forget forever. I have one config for each of the display compositions I have (office, home, gaming, eDP...), and "it just works". [0] https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/emersion/kanshi https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/emersion/kanshi
michielr 1y ago
The community has written a TUI for this: https://github.com/erans/hyprmon https://github.com/erans/hyprmon I don't really need it, but maybe my setup is too simple. I set my laptop monitor to auto-right, external display to auto-left and that's it. Set it and forget it for me.
- nickjj 1y ago
  If your external display isn't connected, what happens? Does Hyprland ignore that line from the config without an error and everything works normally?
  - michielr 1y ago
    It's ignored. This setup wouldn't suffice if my external displays used different scaling though, currently they all work fine at scale 1 for me. # external display monitor = DP-3, preferred, auto-left, 1 # internal display monitor = eDP-1, preferred, auto-right, 1.333333

atoav 1y ago

Normally I'd say I would be exactly the type of person that would use such a thing. But what scares me away and makes me stay with vanilla KDE Plasma is that perceived upfront cost of having to relearn everything and having to customize for hours to then have something that feels 100% better in some and 100% worse in other situations. Maybe that just means I am currently at a point in my life where I haven't got the time or energy to play around with these things. I'd rather have KDE Plasma with a hint of tiling window manager than a tiling window manager with a hint of Plasma, if you get what I mean.

temp0826 1y ago

> Omarchy skips installation of a login display manager. Instead, Hyprland autostarts and password protection is provided upon boot by the LUKS full disk encryption service. Pretty unconventional...Is this a bad idea?

UK-AL 1y ago
Can't be multiuser
- vidarh 1y ago
  And that's a reasonable tradeoff - In 30 years of using Linux, I've only used machines that were actually treated as multi-user on the server side. There's space for both - some people do need password protected separate users, but not all of us do.
- alias_neo 1y ago
  Also not ideal for security if you like to sleep/hibernate on a laptop. Who am I kidding, how many laptops actually sleep or hibernate properly when running Linux anyway...
  - prmoustache 1y ago
    My desktop box is running bazzite and is only used for gaming. I treat it has a console really, it isn't even connected to the internet and doesn't even receive updates unless I want to download a new game. It doesn't have any private data, the only secret I might have is that steam is already logged on but I don't have any payment account/card setup on my steam account. Appart from the internet connection that might be useful for those gaming online I would expect most gamer machines would be like that.
    - alias_neo 1y ago
      I ran Bazzite for a little while on my desktop to see how it was for gaming, and it was great, but I do a lot besides gaming, gaming is a small percentage of my time spent on the PC, and I as a full-time Linux user, work and home, I needed something more traditional, I've switched over to CachyOS now which meets my needs well.

sunshine-o 1y ago

Omarchy and CachyOS are very interesting but they do not look serious about security [0] [1]. I mean in this day and age we all agree you need disk encryption (for a least 20 years) but what about SELinux, application sandboxing for example? Especially for a desktop OS like Omarchy shipped with a bunch of apps and "plugins". This has been a Linux Desktop weakness for more than a decade (compared to macOS, Windows and Android). App sandboxing is a bit sketchy and hard to get right. The fact they do not explicitly state their strategy regarding those things make me believe this is a bit amateurish. - [0] https://wiki.cachyos.org/cachyos_basic/faq/#security--best-practices https://wiki.cachyos.org/cachyos_basic/faq/#security--best-p... - [1] https://learn.omacom.io/2/the-omarchy-manual/93/security https://learn.omacom.io/2/the-omarchy-manual/93/security

Galanwe 1y ago
> Especially for a desktop OS like Omarchy shipped with a bunch of apps and "plugins". Omarchy is _just_ a set of scripts to have a nice looking Arch Linux and some helper scripts for day to day tasks. It's not a distribution per se, it doesn't have repositories or packages of its own. Therefore, your criticism of app sandboxing is more for Arch than Omarchy IMHO.
- sunshine-o 1y ago
  > Therefore, your criticism of app sandboxing is more for Arch than Omarchy IMHO. I've never been an Arch user but deeply respect the project since their wiki as always been my favorite documentation. From what I understand Arch is very much DIY, non opinionated and you you need to decide and build the security level / strategy that fit your needs. It seems you can go Flatpak, SELinux but only if you want. I was kind of lurking for an equivalent of SecureBlue in the Arch world, meaning an Arch derived distro with a strong security posture. Allowing me to get started without worrying too much about it.
  - Galanwe 1y ago
    At the end of the day, you do you, but my experience with SElinux is that using it on the desktop is vastly overkill. At a high level, the essence of SElinux is to limit the possibilities of exploitation and escalation by carefully specifying which process can access which resources in which context. Now that makes sense for a server opened to the www, or a host shared with untrusted users. But Omarchy is a _sole developer_ focused flavor of Arch Linux, think your typical dev laptop. There's no service exposed there, you most likely can't even listen on the internet behind your typical home router. The realistic threats that you face is your laptop being stolen (which is why LUKS is a default) or your laptop sitting unlocked (which is why hypridle & hyprlock are a default). Of course there's always the tails of a compromised software, but it's much more unlikely.

unixhero 1y ago

But why is this necessary? Isn't Omarchy the opinionated setup... and that is all you need? The README on this github link does not explain to me why this is necessary, or why someone is doing it.

alias_neo 1y ago
It should probably start with WTF is Omarchy. I recently moved my gaming desktop to CachyOS from Manjaro, but I have no idea what Omarchy is or whether or not I want it, and there's not a single link in the README. Guess I'll go look it up.
- theshrike79 1y ago
  Omarchy is an “opinionated” Arch distro by dhh of Ruby on Rails and Basecamp/Hey fame
  - isr 1y ago
    Its not really a distro, nor does it pretend to be. What it really is, is an Arch Linux install, with a preconfigured set of apps & workflow, and a set of tools to easily allow the user to customise to their preferences - within the confines of the original config/workflow. Basically, it's a "curated Arch linux"
    - unixhero 1y ago
      So it could just be some files and a bash script or maybe better, an Ansible recipe??? Sorry for being reductionist but its late and I'm out of beer.
      - isr 1y ago
        That's essentially what it is. They don't really pretend otherwise. The iso is a convenience for 1 stop installs.
      - theshrike79 1y ago

ZhijieChen 1y ago

[dead]

zokier 1y ago

Personally I feel this diverges just enough from omarchy that it deserves its own name to avoid confusion.

ossusermivami 1y ago

This Omarchy remind me of Linux-Mandrake from back in the day, a collection of badly written shell script but that "works"

theYipster 1y ago

OP here: The README.md assumes the reader knows what CachyOS and Omarchy are. A quick primer for those who are coming to this fresh... - CachyOS is an Arch-based Linux distribution with built-in performance optimizations tuned to high end computing and gaming. See more at https://cachyos.org https://cachyos.org - Omarchy is a Hyprland-based "desktop" crafted by DHH that is slowly turning into its own distribution, also based on Arch. See more at https://omarchy.org https://omarchy.org Why would you want to use this instead of vanilla CachyOS? You want to use Hyprland and want a very strong starting configuration. CachyOS includes its own configuration of Hyprland, but I find it's pretty anemic. There are other pre-packaged Hyprland "spins" to try as well, including MyLinux4Work ands JaKoolit. I've found Omarchy to be the most refined. If you have no interest in Hyprland, neither this script nor Omarchy are for you. Why would you want to use this instead of vanilla Omarchy? You prefer CachyOS's defaults and/or enhancements to vanilla Arch, or you do not like all of the out-of-the-box decisions Omarchy makes via its auto-install of Vanilla arch (such as LUKS disk encryption or the enforcement of a single user login.)

sureglymop 1y ago

Honestly I may be getting old but I neither understand CachyOS nor Omarchy. Just use archinstall and set up your arch how you want with it. I would usually install Gnome and some other DEs and then just start whichever one I currently feel like using from GDM. My dotfiles already handle all the Hyprland config and are way lighter than Omarchy. I mean... I get wanting sane defaults but I feel like plain arch already provides that.