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Thoughts on Omarchy
- bigyabai 1y agoEven putting the "ethics" of it aside, I think Omarchy is destined to go the way of LARBS. Many Linux distros are r/unixporn on the outside and a complete trainwreck on the inside. Regolith, Archlabs, Manjaro, dozens of distros have tried the "i3 but it's not like having teeth pulled" gimmick and it never works. Much like LARBS, if I ever see you using Omarchy I just have to assume you don't know what you're doing. You can install Arch and rice i3wm in literally 10 minutes if your SSD and WiFi is fast enough.
- rufugee 1y agoFor me, it's not about ricing. I find Omarchy to be an incredibly productive setup, from the launchers for webapps to the focus on TUIs. I'm conflicted about the drama and still learning more about it, so not ready to draw a conclusion yet. But Omarchy is definitely a very, very fun experience for me. Granted, I've heavily customized it and am using hy3 for i3-like capabilities, so whatever path out of this for me is likely to i3wm or sway. And, fwiw, I've been running linux since the late 90s, and most of that as my primary OS (with a decade-ish period of macOS I'd rather forget). I know what I'm doing.
- BoredPositron 1y agoIt's performative to it's core. In the next release they will probably add a matrix screensaver, burning windows and hack a gibson in the release video.
- jasonvorhe 1y agoNerds having fun playing around sounds really terrible. To the guillotine.
- BoredPositron 1y agoYou meant to write geeks? Nerds generally don't like their software packaged like fast food.
- jasonvorhe 1y agoI must've forgot that nerds use only Linux from Scratch.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- bigyabai 1y agoNerds use whatever distro they like, and then bend it to their will. Geeks are the type of people to install Omarchy or LARBS or disable their Mac's SIP for i3wm eye candy. The biggest change a geek makes to their system is changing the wallpaper to Tony Stark.
- jasonvorhe 1y agoSo using a distribution, which bundles different components into a cohesive package is somehow different then an install script which bundles different components into another cohesive package? A distribution provides the base layer that you can customize to your liking. Omarchy is another base layer to customize to your liking. So using a distribution is for nerds but using something like Omarchy is for lower class geeks? What was the difference again? Can you elaborate on that? It feels like rage baiting but that wouldn't be constructive so I assume that you're acting in good faith and that you explain this line of thinking in more detail. So someone who uses someone's zsh config and adapts it to their liking is a geek as well because someone else (a nerd) did the heavy lifting already? Who even says that everyone installing Omarchy doesn't bend it to their will afterwards? Is everyone using the same tools and web apps as DHH? Then why should something like Omarchy even provide writable configs to customize it? I'm confused.
- watty 1y agoyou do realize it already comes with a matrix screensaver, right?
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- keldaris 1y agoSame here, I have multiple decades of experience running Linux on desktops and servers alike, and Omarchy just saves me time and manages to be productive and fun at the same time. Personally, I don't feel any moral obligation to investigate the personal views of people who write the software I use. Using software, especially free software, doesn't constitute an endorsement of the authors' views. Before this thread, I was blissfully unaware of this entire silly controversy, since Omarchy doesn't mention any politics anywhere as far as I can tell. If that ever changes, I'll delete it in a heartbeat (regardless of the kind of politics it happens to be), but so far the only people politicizing the issue seem to be its detractors.
- rufugee 1y agoThe elapsed time from burning the ISO to productive development environment is impressive. Also, folks worry so much about customizing it, but you don't have to. And hyprland and Omarchy almost entire driven by text files, so Claude Code and its ilk are super effective at customizations.
- bigyabai 1y agoI guess I should defend my point! I actually really like Hyprland (despite it's controversy) and really have no interest in re-hashing DHH's ragebait. My larger point is that we've seen this happen before, hundreds of times, and these distros always end up breaking and making people blame Linux instead of their maintainer. I don't think DHH is addressing this concern, and he's basically teeing-up a catastrophic system update with zero rollbacks by choosing Arch as the base systen. If you search the web for "Manjaro broken update" or "LARBS error" you're just flooded with myriad tech issues that don't exist on normal systems. It's a genuine handicap to rely on someone else's opinionated dotfiles when you don't understand why they made each decision. I think people using Omarchy long-term will end up fighting the distro more than they fight Linux.
- rufugee 1y agoOmarchy uses limine plus snapper to give you (by default, but configurable) five system rollbacks. Each time an update happens, or a package is installed, a bootable btrfs snapshot is created. I've leveraged this myself to after an update caused an issue with nvidia drivers. I don't mean this to come across as snarky, but before you spread misinformation, you might want to inform yourself.
- CuriouslyC 1y agoSaying people who use Omarchy don't know what they're doing feels elitist. If you agree with DHH's opinions it's just fine, some people don't want to fuck with shit, they just want to get to work.
- bigyabai 1y agoA lot of people don't agree with DHH's opinionated setup, though - most of them don't even know what they're installing, and that's the problem. Like I said, we've seen hundreds of OSes that completely break on system updates because the user doesn't understand that the AUR package conflicts with the opinionated defaults. They really don't know what they're doing, which isn't going to help you get things done on Linux. I empathize completely with people who want a one-and-done gorgeous r/unixporn desktop, but they should also know that those distros are a deal with the devil.
- skydhash 1y agoIt’s almost the same with neovim and shell/terminal setup. A lot of people wants blings and are touting the most complicated setup. They balk at reading docs, and when their brittle config fails, blame the software (gnome subreddit).
- phendrenad2 1y ago[flagged]
- Refreeze5224 1y ago[flagged]
- aiisthefiture 1y agoHave you got some examples? Because it seems like people can on cherry pick things that when reading his blog turn out to be not true.
- saagarjha 1y agohttps://world.hey.com/dhh/as-i-remember-london-e7d38e64 https://world.hey.com/dhh/as-i-remember-london-e7d38e64
- ok123456 1y agoThis is a slightly more lucid version of what most pensioners say. Should everyone over 70 get cancelled?
- saagarjha 1y agoIf they are running Rails, sure.
- aiisthefiture 1y agoWhat specifically?
- saagarjha 1y agoI'm not going to read the post for you.
- dayyan 1y agoThere is no ethics complication. That is an imaginary problem imagined by those who wish to force their politics on others. Open source should have no politics left or right.
- throawayonthe 1y agothis makes no sense and even on a basic level, do you not think open source/free software is about the ethics?
- zahlman 1y ago> do you not think open source/free software is about the ethics? It's not about trying to interfere with projects because you don't like the author's beliefs. > 5. No Discrimination Against Persons or Groups > The license must not discriminate against any person or group of persons. > 6. No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor > The license must not restrict anyone from making use of the program in a specific field of endeavor. For example, it may not restrict the program from being used in a business, or from being used for genetic research. This includes persons and fields that the author considers harmful or distasteful. And forking and redistributing are core rights granted by the license. Same thing with XLibre. There are, apparently, people out there who think that their decision to use something that was provided et gratis et libre should depend on the beliefs of the thing's creator, as if doing so should somehow endorse those beliefs or cause them to rub off on the user. I can't understand this line of thought, however. Quite frankly I don't think that even applies to paid proprietary software. My moral intuition doesn't allow for that kind of transfer of guilt, which seems to be what people mean nowadays when they talk about "complicity".
- crote 1y agoShouldn't the "no discrimination" part also apply to the community? How would you feel about a project with an official policy that pull requests from people with a certain skin color will not be accepted - is that still in the spirit of F/LOSS? If a specific maintainer in an otherwise friendly community refuses to merge pull requests from developers with a certain skin color, how should the community handle that? If the other maintainers fork the project and continue without that one toxic maintainer, are they following the spirit of F/LOSS, or are they suddenly "needlessly introducing politics" and "distracting from development"? If the latter, why would the actions of that one toxic maintainer not fall under the same? If you notice that your community is rapidly losing core members because they keep getting insulted by that one toxic maintainer, what do you propose one should do? Do you take action, or do you let the project die?
- orangea 1y ago> Well, dhh considers torrents outdated (I’m not kidding, check the tweet), so it’s only officially being offered as a single download from a Cloudflare server. Which sounds cool until you’re on a weak-ass connection in constant danger of dropping halfway through the download. That has nothing to do with bittorrent vs http; use a download manager instead of a browser.
- mixmastamyk 1y agoHuh, I used to use those every day about twenty years ago. But stopped for some reason. Faster connection? Maybe. In the meantime, wget -C works to resume a download without a fancy program or browser extension.
- throwaway89201 1y agoNit: it's `wget -c` or `curl -C -`
- watty 1y ago> But Omarchy is a reminder that we live in a world where software isn’t just software, but the people who make it. I get people are totally within their rights to ban movies/software/sports, etc. for creators whose beliefs they disagree with. However, software is the people who make it? I rarely, if ever, know the authors who create software or what they believe in.
- adriand 1y agoI’m curious if anyone has heard an explanation for why Omarchy is pronounced “omar chee” instead of “omar key”. To me the word looks like monarchy, hierarchy, anarchy, etc. I’m not sure if words ending in -archy are always pronounced with a hard c but it seems like it.
- moojacob 1y agoMy guess is it's based on Arch Linux. Om-arch-y.
- slillibri 1y agoI believe the answer is that English is a stupid language. Also, starchy (containing a relatively high amount of starch) doesn’t have a hard c.
- dragonwriter 1y ago> I’m not sure if words ending in -archy are always pronounced with a hard c but it seems like it. When it is etymologically derived from the greek arkhein (“to rule”) like all of your examples (but unlike, say, “starchy”, which also ends with -archy but has an unrelated etymology), yes, the “ch” sounds like “k”. But the “-archy” in “omarchy” doesn't come from arkhein, in comes from Arch Linux, so...
- httpsoverdns 1y agoSo as someone that doesn't want to support DHH after what I've learned in this thread, but was interested in checking out omarchy based on some neat videos I've seen... What should I check out instead?
- gedy 1y agoOmarchy is really just some packages and defaults, you can assemble yourself. (It was not a beginner friendly distro to begin with)
- gausswho 1y agoOmarchy is basically an opinionated set of libraries, largely centered around Hyprland tiling window manager, with minor celebrity marketing. I don't see why it's a distro, it may as well be a set of dotfiles. Try out Hyprland yourself, it's fun and simpler to customize than its i3 ancestor.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- _bent 1y agoCachyOS is also an Arch based distro with a GUI installer including multiple desktop options, such as Gnome, KDE Plasma, but also preconfigured Hyprland or Niri with a Waybar, Alacritty and a spotlight-esque application launcher. I'm currently dual booting Windows & CachyOS with Niri and installation was incredibly smooth, including setting up secure boot or playing Windows games. https://cachyos.org/ https://cachyos.org/
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- blitz_skull 1y ago[flagged]
- aaplok 1y ago> I love when people label politics they disagree with as “ethical” problems. This is a disingenious portrayal of what people you disagree with are saying. It is not like someone is calling pro-capitalist or socialist views unethical. "Politics they disagree with" means racism, homophobia and ableism. There certainly is an argument that each of those is ethically problematic, because each denies some human beings' basic rights to be considered human. You may well argue that dhh doesn't hold those views, or argue that the community should accept that some members have toxic views and move on. It is best to avoid claiming that racism is just another respectable political opinion.
- SpecialistK 1y agoPolitics is, by its very nature, about power and coercion. It is a delicate miracle of only a few centuries through which many of us are able to actually voice our opinions peacefully and live in liberal democracies where disagreements impact policy rather than collapse into violence and war. That includes disagreements about incredibly serious, controversial things with devastating impacts. Does the ontological status of the fetus affect the ethics (never mind legality) of terminating a pregnancy? Should people be able to seek medical help in ending their own lives to end suffering? When is a minor allowed to consent to their own medical treatments? These are questions with enormous impact on those affected. Yet people disagree. They have different values, assumptions, experiences, predictions, and priorities which will often be at odds. Even if you disagree on what a good life is or how to achieve it. You may feel a particular policy or party advocating for policies you strongly disagree with is deeply harmful to you or those you care about. You may resent their ideology so much that you get angry, sad, tense, violent thoughts, frustrated, etc. You may have absolutely no idea how someone can promote a particular policy. Your only explanation is that they are bad actors out to cause more harm than good. But they feel the same about you. Your ideas are just as harmful and incomprehensible to others as theirs are to you. People are different. Acknowledging this is called empathy, and its departure from political discourse has been strongly felt. Part of a mature and healthy society is recognizing that although your peers may have different views they are still good faith actors who want to live in a better world. No one person or one subgroup gets to unilaterally decide the Overton Window, or which topics are "settled" and which are off-limits. This is a decision made by the masses, and within the EU approx. between 25 and 50% of representatives hold (some) views in line with what dhh writes in his blog. It is mainstream, governments of major world economies kind of stuff. Are we actually going to propose a world where people are deemed persona non grata for supporting the CPC in Canada? Hell, let's expand that to the LPC because bill C-5 and the Major Projects Office says its going to undermine the human rights of indigenous peoples under UNDRIP as well. 85% of Canadians are racist, we'll welcome them back when they learn respectable political opinions. I mean... it's all completely unworkable. How do you walk down the street knowing that other people are so evil, and who want to do you such harm? Anyone who believes in $religion1 genuinely believes that members of $religion2 are doomed or preventing salvation, yet we can smile and say "good morning" and hold the door open for each other. Where did we lose that?
- hitekker 1y agoFor an article so certain about ethics, it ironically undercuts its own ethos: https://tedium.co/what-is-tedium/ https://tedium.co/what-is-tedium/ > If you like strange and unusual descriptions of common things, explained in extreme depth, the Tedium newsletter is a great place to look for those, because it’s what we specialize in. Rather than focusing on viral things, we instead write about things that would never go viral on their own, that need context and storytelling around them to highlight their importance. Sometimes, the best stories haven’t been properly contexualized. There’s room for someone to do that, and that’s where we come in. I don't think their mission statement covers ongoing internet dramas & cancel campaigns. Rather, this article feels like mission creep, lacking novel insight. For me, the only new info I caught is the author's intimation that the founder of Framework laptops should be canceled.
- time0ut 1y agoCould someone please point me to a concise summary of controversy around DHH? I have seen a few references recently, but I am out of the loop.
- orangea 1y agoWhy not read the source and decide for yourself? Here's a blog post linked in the article, as a start: https://world.hey.com/dhh/as-i-remember-london-e7d38e64 https://world.hey.com/dhh/as-i-remember-london-e7d38e64
- time0ut 1y agoAh thank you. I had read the article, or so I thought, but stopped too soon.
- fragmede 1y agoDHH wrote a blog post complaining about how there are fewer "native Brits" in London, and then linked to Wikipedia's article about the number of white people in London. He also brought up a march by Tommy Robinson, but framed it as just a couple of exceeding normal guys out for a walk, and not a bunch of nationalists. It came off as xenophobic and racist, so sponsors pulled funding while others (some quite high profile) refuse to work with DHH. There's a non-zero amount of reading between the lines, so here's the blog post so everyone can decide for themselves: https://world.hey.com/dhh/as-i-remember-london-e7d38e64 https://world.hey.com/dhh/as-i-remember-london-e7d38e64
- elcritch 1y agoHow is BitTorrent considered better for a “guy in a cabin with weak internet”? Bittorrent requires substantially more connections generally.
- subract 1y agoI think the specific feature he alludes to missing is resumable downloads.
- throwaway7356 1y agoBoth HTTP and even ancient protocols like FTP support that. So it must be something else.
- jasonm23 1y agoOr a brainfart.
- roryirvine 1y agoYeah, I use a mobile broadband provider for my home internet connection (albeit through a 5g router rather than tethering - but that shouldn't make a difference). Normal web browsing etc is more or less indistinguishable from fibre or cable. Streaming - including high participant count Zoom meetings for work, as well as 4k Netflix etc - works perfectly well too. But bittorrent? Nah. The sheer number of connections quickly overload the link, the speed drops to a max of only 1 or 2 Mbps, and it kills off anything else I'm trying to do at the same time. Pushing / pulling containers has a similar issue - I have to set image_parallel_copies = 3 in /etc/containers/containers.conf as the default of 6 can cause problems, especially if two or containers are being pulled at the same time. I reckon that the comfortable limit for the number of parallel connections on 5g is probably somewhere around 10. Plus, y'know, range requests have been supported since HTTP/1.1 way back in the mid 90s, so resuming downloads should work just fine with the likes of wget or any normal web browser. Saying that, the author also mentions that he was WiFi - so why doesn't he just use that rather than tethering? Doesn't matter if it's slow, he could always do something else on the tethered connection while he waits...
- pessimizer 1y ago[flagged]
- hnxyz8663 1y agoIt's deeply ironic that you write this whole rant about "they" are trying to speak for everyone. People are allowed to voice their discontent/concern about a dev having notably weird politics. If you're tired of people writing about it don't click links about it.
- hnt2025 1y agoShouldn't they stop using all of the computers altogether because they have parts produced in oppresive comunist country? I get it - DHH pissed off gay/lesb/non-binary community and now they're after him.
- hackeraccount 1y agoI have a PC running Omarchy and it's really nice. The little touches are really pleasant. I'm more a half assed Unix Admin though then a developer and there are some pain points that are making me give it up. * I don't really like Hyprland. I want to use Niri and hacking at Omarchy to make that happen doesn't seem worth it. * getting flatpaks working with it is painful * it's too dependent on the aur which I try to avoid A lot of the nicer features - some of the shell and nvim setup configs are things that I don't really care about. I think this is really good setup for someone smarter then I am. I think at the end of the day I want something simpler then this - though it does say "opinionated" right on the tin and I had a blast playing around with it.
- nchmy 1y agoConsider PopOS - I just moved to that after flailing with omarchy/hyprland for a day. Very happy.