7 ms·

Omarchy Is Not A Distro

186 points by j3s 4mo ago

chinathrow 4mo ago
Haters gonna hate.
- Vaslo 4mo ago
  Just skim the rest of the blog posts…
deleted 4mo ago
[deleted]
awesan 4mo ago
What a strange thing to publish.. just don't use it if you don't like it? What is this even attempting to do?
- throwaway613746 4mo ago
  [dead]
- clouedoc 4mo ago
  Everyone has the urge to criticize what they don't like, and it looks like you are no exception... :)
- tptacek 4mo ago
  It's a critique of Omarchy.
- peesem 4mo ago
  well, it is in the "thoughts" section of the author's website. maybe it doesn't belong on HN, but the person who posted it is not the author, so take it up with them. anyway, i agree with most/all of the complaints but if a valuable point were to be made it is probably the funding point. why does this need money?
  - sodapopcan 4mo ago
    > maybe it doesn't belong on HN Was helpful to me. I now know not waste my time.
- deleted 4mo ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 4mo ago
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- jjtheblunt 4mo ago
  To your point, I don't think the complaining and ranting by the poster makes sense, given what was ignored before the ranting began. the poster seems to have skipped over the point that "Omarchy" is just the default configuration of Arch for 37signals internal use, and enthusiasm over it working well caught on, so it's shared as open source. CachyOS is another set of UI configurations of Arch and is also just handy. disclaimer: i use both and they work well.
- epistasis 4mo ago
  I think they should both not use it and talk about why so that we can get a clearer picture of the diversity of Linux users out there. The idea of enabling proprietary software in the default install is apparently verboten to some, and getting that viewpoint out there helps people understand why Linux on the desktop is where it is.
- sodapopcan 4mo ago
  > What is this even attempting to do? It's a blog post, a medium where people can self-publish their writing for no other purpose than expressing themselves. These things have been around for decades at this point.
- arjie 4mo ago
  Realistically, polarizing figures like DHH will have complaints pointed at their work for reasons other than the work itself. And when the complaints are grounded they’ll often be of higher amplitude than otherwise.
- p-o 4mo ago
  What's wrong with voicing opinion on the Internet? It's a personal blog, you don't have to read it if you don't like it. There are plenty of strange things that gets publish every day, I don't see why you get hung up on this post.
lmrkk 4mo ago
I tried, felt same. its just ricing.
peteforde 4mo ago
FWIW, 1Password is pretty great.
- mbirth 4mo ago
  It was better when it was still a native app and not this Electron nonsense.
  - andrewjf 4mo ago
    Quality in general seems to be going downhill, too. Frequently the desktop app and the safari extension won't be in sync and missing a recently added password, or doesn't show up on my other devices hours later. I still have no idea how the extension vs desktop app actually work together, or if they do at all. Sometimes 1password (safari extension) is "locked" - but the desktop app isn't locked? and No amount of clicking the little 1password icon, that's supposed to unlock it does anything. Just a completely no-op button. Quitting safari _and_ the desktop app seems to be what's required to fix it. I've been thinking about just moving back to native macOS keychain, but I haven't bothered to check on linux+windows support.
    - c-hendricks 4mo ago
      Since the extension works flawlessly in all other browsers I've chalked it up to Safari extensions being a pain. But yes the Safari 1Password extension constantly shits The bed.
      - plorkyeran 4mo ago
        The publishing process for Safari extensions is painful, but otherwise it's not meaningfully different from Chromium extensions and there's no good reason for it to work worse in Safari.
    - mbirth 4mo ago
      Wait, it even needs an extension for Safari? I'm using Strongbox (uses a KeePass-compatible database) which integrates into Apple's AutoFill API and appears automatically in all input fields - just like Keychain. No extension needed.
poly2it 4mo ago
It is understandable to be frustrated at a project without technical merit gaining so much traction when, as in the author's words, "longstanding distros like Debian have struggled with funding and sponsorship for decades". However, I do feel the author fails to come up with any conclusion as to why there is such a disparity between interest in traditional distributions and this rice. I agree that it is almost suspicious how quickly it has risen to prominence. There has been a surge of hugely popular amorphous open source projects by single or few maintainers, often created very recently. In my experience, most of the users of Omarchy are inexperienced with Linux, and use it because it doesn't require them to form their own opinions and workflows, which can be both positive and negative.
- epistasis 4mo ago
  Its rise is not suspicious to me at all, the author has tremendous reach influence in the developer community, that drives adoption easily. Omarchy was my first entry back into desktop Linux since the early 2000s, when I ran enlightenment. The promises of Omarchy are big, and the idea of somebody trying all the tons of available bits of desktop Linux and assembling their favorites is very compelling! I've since moved to KDE Plasma on that initial Omarchy install, but kept some other parts like the Bash completion system. I would love to get back to having single key sequences to bring up, say, a Claude window, but not enough to set it up in Plasma. If somebody else did it for me though... that's the appeal of Omarchy.
  - queenkjuul 4mo ago
    On cinnamon setting up a shortcut like that is about three mouse clicks
    - epistasis 4mo ago
      Ah, but which three clocks? That's the rub. LLMs make customization much easier, but the impetus has not yet been there for me.
  - kuschku 4mo ago
zwaps 4mo ago
Omarchy!! shipping a window manager with defaults and or a terminal with a config - what an unspeakable sin. Linux should be hard and shitty and it should break all the time! What is this newfound obsession with distros that just works and have some great setups and defaults. Where do we end up if you can just close your laptop lid or copy paste with the same key or or or if even… gasp… the theme is automatically applied across all apps? DHH? More like literal devil. No sir! Let me write a blogpost post haste!
- zwaps 4mo ago
  The author is so close. “decades of debian and it never got any traction. Why?“ Yeah! What a mystery. What could make people install omarchy or pop os over debian, arch or gentoo? What could possibly be the reason
  - the_gastropod 4mo ago
    Having literal billionaire best buds backing the project probably helps one gain traction, no? Toss in a dash of weird culture war bullshit, and… well. Distro popularity isn’t exactly a meritocratic system.
- jeremyjh 4mo ago
  Yeah Linux will be shitty and break all the time if it doesn’t come preinstalled with Brave and a shortcut to open Grok.
hokumguru 4mo ago
I’m sorry, but what is the actual definition of a distro? What makes Omarchy different than, say, Cachy which is also an opinionated DE and set of packages on top of Arch. There aren’t really any rules to what to find this or not. Just because something is more opinionated than other solutions doesn’t mean it’s invalid. In fact, I would say that that’s the primary reason people gravitate towards Omarchy. Many developers coming from the competing operating systems want stuff that just works out of the box, including proprietary software! If you don’t like it, just ignore it and move on. I thought we were past this “I dislike this thing on the internet therefore everyone who likes it is wrong” phase of the internet. It’s also discourse like this that specifically discourages people from trying Linux.
- cwillu 4mo ago
  It's fine that it exists. But a package of customizations is not a distribution. Yes, the definition is fuzzy, but this is clearly not it.
- cauch 4mo ago
  I don't think the discussion about "is it a distribution or not" is very interesting, but I think the discussion about "should we make clear that this _thing_ is just a bunch of config files rather than the usual work one would expect behind what was traditionally called linux distributions". And I know Omarchy is not the only one out there doing something similar, and that there is a spectrum. It is not a problem. The problem is not the existence of the spectrum, the problem is that at some point, we should just call a cat a cat instead of arguing "well, being a cat is a spectrum, so every year we can call a new thing in the adjacent spectrum a cat and pretend it has all the quality one would expect from a cat".
  - ffaccount2 4mo ago
    It's a way to distribute Linux (the kernel) and userland packages in a way you can install. Therefore it's a Linux distribution.
    - 4mo ago
dcmatt 4mo ago
An opinionated person has different opinions than a different opinionated person
ethanlipson 4mo ago
Whether we call it a distribution or not is really a matter of semantics. The more interesting question is, do people actually want a hyper-opinionated Linux install? Based on the reactions to Omarchy that I've seen, the answer is obviously yes. Broadly, people seem ok with just not using some of the suggested software if the defaults get them most of the way there. More generally, I would say that configuring one's own Linux installation is not in itself virtuous. It used to be a way to identify people who were "committed" to using it via gatekeeping. The OP says that Omarchy is just DHH "cashing in" on new inexperienced Linux users, but as long as we don't value customizing one's own installation just for the sake of customization (I certainly don't anymore!), why is this a problem?
- layer8 4mo ago
  “Hyper-opinionated” and “good OOB experience” are orthogonal to each other.
shdh 4mo ago
Omarchy is the best Linux desktop experience I’ve ever had
Kiro 4mo ago
> my eyes roll out of my head Summarizes my feeling about this article and the author.
maxlin 4mo ago
Well, this "not distro" software that takes over your whole computer when you boot the ISO and install it has been the greatest out-of-the box Linux experience for me, and has introduced me to the best new way of using an operating system since I first installed a Linux distro ~20 years ago. And yes I did actually end up going thru archinstaller first as the other route failed, but turned out it was archinstall failing to start with, failing to clear the existing Chrome OS partitions even after selecting the disk (full disk!) properly. I managed to install it on a N23 Chromebook I got for 30€, with just a 32GB SSD on it. Now I am on the edge of making my work laptop dual boot it, so I can run some heavier software on it. Haven't used as much Desktop Linux in the previous 15 years as I have the previous month. It's supposed to be opinionated to start with. It absolutely is better that way. Probably one of the easiest to mod too, changed my battery indicator to show current wattage with an one-line change. As it says - Chef's choice. I want my food to be edible to start with when I'm hungry.
- cwillu 4mo ago
  The instructions on the back of the prepared meal box is not a cookbook. This is not a judgement of using a prepared meal box.
  - maxlin 4mo ago
    FYI, most meals that are DISTRibuted through different convenient means are "prepared". If I didn't want a distro, I'd just go with something like Buildroot, or even more elementary. Yes, this is one of the projects I also have in mind to understand better and with the cross-supporting goal of reducing boot time of a machine that'll eventually run my game engine, with the reference of running said game engine on a n MCU. But that's not what I want from desktop Linux of a pedigree that'd have potential of replacing my daily driver requirements, which are actually quite difficult to match, but I do have hope.
tiffanyh 4mo ago
The post seems to be missing an important point… DHH tends to build things for himself first, then share it with the world (sometimes free, sometimes paid) to see if others find value in it too. Most of those things never become broadly adopted, which is clear from the long list of products 37signals has shut down over the years: Breeze, Writeboard, Backpack, Sortfolio, and others. But every once in a while, there’s a huge success … like Rails, Basecamp, Hey, and apparently now Omarchy. I honestly don’t think it’s much more complicated than that. He enjoys building things he personally wants. And when he sees others getting joy from what he built, he gets excited and doubles down.
goosejuice 4mo ago
Words have meaning, sure I get that. The rest is silly. Omarchy was built for DHH and Basecamp. It's MIT. Noone is forcing anyone to use someone's "shitty dotfiles" unless you work at Basecamp. Things like Omarchy are a boon to Linux because they bring in people that otherwise wouldn't have given it any thought. It's demonstrating what is possible as a little gateway drug. Things like SteamOS are much better at this, but more is better. It's not doing any harm.
yuters 4mo ago
I've tried to setup Arch with Hyprland like 3 times on my own and with the most popular dot files. It was terrible, frustrating and things broke all the time. Omarchy fixed that and I can't recommend it enough.
- cauch 4mo ago
  Did dhh provide a recipe to install hyprland properly without having to install a full "distribution"? (I don't know, it's a real question) It feels very strange (and wrong) to me: if there is difficulties in installing something, try to help people instead of packaging the solution with other things that are not related. It feels a bit like if uv was mainly providing their "uvOS" to solve the difficulties of dealing with python packages.
  - andix 4mo ago
    If I remember it correctly Omarchy started as an in-house alternative to macOS in one of DHHs companies. And was then released to the public. So the purpose of Omarchy was to get devices quickly set up with some opinionated defaults.
    - cauch 4mo ago
      So, is the answer "no"? I don't think it changes anything about what I was saying. If indeed dhh helped find a way to install hyprland more easily but failed to also provide a standalone recipe, that does not sound like a good practice to me.
      - andix 4mo ago
        The answer is: no, solving your problem was not the goal of the project. But the source code is public, you can extract the relevant scripts from the repo: https://github.com/basecamp/omarchy https://github.com/basecamp/omarchy
        cauch 4mo ago
mvdtnz 4mo ago
Eh this just feels like gatekeeping to me.
deleted 4mo ago
[deleted]
andix 4mo ago
Omarchy is more like Kubuntu. Some config scripts and a few additional packages on top of another distribution.
- mixmastamyk 4mo ago
  Ahh yes, it is a “spin.”
wrren 4mo ago
We seem to have arrived at a set of assumptions that states that if a large number of people like something that we don’t, or don’t subscribe to some cultural norms that we doggedly adhere to, then there has to be something sinister afoot. The out of box experience with Omarchy is highly functional, aesthetically pleasing and challenges users to lean more on keyboard shortcuts than they’d typically be used to. That’s clever because once you’re whizzing around with these shortcuts you feel accomplished, productive, and that generates loyalty towards the distro. None of this is a bad thing, anything that makes Linux more accessible and interesting is good. Bucking trends that were making Linux harder to adopt or less culturally relevant is good too.
- Barrin92 4mo ago
  >then there has to be something sinister afoot. because most of the time there is. We live in a world that is dominated by obnoxious social media influencers and 'taste makers' who push people to the <newest thing> every day. This is the linux version of Mr. Beast lunchables. Having a conference and corporate sponsorships for what is 500 lines of bash scripting is beyond silly. And like the other half dozen arch based 'desktop reskin disguised as distro' things, when it eventually breaks or stops being supported you'll have a lot of confused people who don't know how to fix it.
  - least 4mo ago
    No Linux distribution offers a good out-of-the-box experience with anything outside of XFCE, GNOME, or KDE Plasma. On the other end, these alternative WMs lack all of the shell features that people expect from a desktop experience. I run regular Arch with Niri and Noctalia Shell, which is based on Quick Shell. It is a pretty solid experience. But even with Quick Shell, which has taken a lot of the pain out of closing the gap between traditional DEs and these tiling WMs, it’s still a decent chunk of configuration. Without it, I’d be doing a ton more configuration with a bar and scripts to display some information. And then those would be hardly functional, since really they’re just showing some stdout from the terminal. If I wanted to actually, say, connect to a new Bluetooth device, I’d still be heading to the terminal to connect. That gap is what makes Omarchy interesting to me, and presumably to the people who seem to really like it. Omarchy lets someone install it just like another “real” distribution and get a working OS without having to do hours of configuration and ensuring they have all the additional utilities they’d expect to have. I think it does kind of have to be a “distro” because the appeal is that you don’t maintain the scripts yourself. You can just install it and get sensible defaults from a fresh install. There’s nothing stopping Ubuntu, Fedora, or another major distribution from creating something like this. They already have Plasma and GNOME variants that include bundled software and sensible defaults customized from the delivered version of those DEs. My question for people is whether their objection has to do with Omarchy itself or with the person or people behind it. I get that even without a controversial figure behind it, people might still object to some of the technical decisions behind it. But I find it hard to argue against the idea. It is filling a niche by making alternative WMs like Hyprland more accessible.
Vaslo 4mo ago
Pretty clear by the other opinions this author has on his “blog” that he dislikes DHH for more than just the Omarchy distribution. Here’s a fact - Omarchy opened up Arch to a whole crowd of people that would have never tried Arch given its notorious difficulty to the uninitiated.
- ath3nd 4mo ago
  [dead]
- thewebguyd 4mo ago
  It also opened up trying a tiling WM to a whole crowd of people that never would have bothered. To the uninitiated it's not exactly easy to get hyprland + all the extra utilities for status bar, menu, wallpaper, theming, etc. running. Then figuring out how their individual configs work, then making it look good on top of that. It's a ton of effort.
aftbit 4mo ago
I'm still on X :laugh:
very_good_man 4mo ago
I love Omarchy
periodjet 4mo ago
[flagged]
eximius 4mo ago
I recommend installing Omarchy and playing with it. Read through the Omarchy repo to see how the things you liked and disliked were set up. Then install arch or Cachy or some other Arch based distro and just use the parts you liked. I am completely disinterested in the author's concerns because Omarchy was useful to me in demonstrating how to compose pieces into a useful whole in a relatively minimalist distribution like Arch. It is much easier to learn with good examples than just only reading DIY reference docs. (And they are good examples even if you dislike the targets of the apps installed - I agree on those points, but they're just not that important)
MangoCoffee 4mo ago
by author's logic, is Ubuntu not a distro since its based on Debian? i don't understand what author is trying to say here.
- tuananh 4mo ago
  [dead]
terracatta 4mo ago
Usually these types of articles are written about things that challenge status quos. I remember reading a lot about Ruby on Rails in the same vein "ruby isn't a real language", "rails is just a collection of scripts", and "you can't build real web apps with it." If Omarchy is upsetting the Linux establishment as much as this article implies (unclear if this is just a one-off) then it's probably worth a look!
- whalesalad 4mo ago
  The upset is due to the imbalance between what omarchy really is and the buzz around it. When your “distro” could be a bash script on a vanilla arch install, is it really worth making a distro? This is just more perpetuation of the distro fragmentation that doesn’t need to exist.
- Aurornis 4mo ago
  > If Omarchy is upsetting the Linux establishment as much as this article implies It’s not upsetting anyone other than people who like to argue about inconsequential things on social media. I actually don’t think it would be as popular without all of the manufactured drama and controversy around. Some people (like the parent comment) are drawn to the controversy and feeling of rebellion. I bet 99% of people do not care if you use it or not. The other 1% just like arguing about other people’s personal preferences for some reason.
  - dangus 4mo ago
    I don’t even think Omarchy is particularly popular. I see a lot of activity and user preferences around Linux Mint, Bazzite, and CachyOS, in addition to the traditionally popular choices like Ubuntu and Fedora. I’d be more inclined to ignore it entirely if I was a blog author.
  - miki123211 4mo ago
    It's also upsetting people who judge work mainly by the political stances of its authors, not by the merrits of the work itself. We've seen the same thing play out with Harry Potter for example.
pure-orange 4mo ago
Strongly disagree with this post. And I am not a DHH fan. The biggest problem with Linux as a desktop gaining more popularity is the learning curve. In our bubble, you might not want any software installed and want your first install to barely have a desktop environment, but the average Joe wants their browser, music player and password manager ready to go. If omarchy is nothing but a gateway drug to making leaving windows much easier then I am all for it, even if we bikeshed about whether or not it’s a distributed (I agree it’s not). Once you have it installed you can customise just as much as you would any other “distribution”, it just makes that first step that bit easier. Linux, if it wants to win the war, needs to make it easier for new folks to onboard. The winning desktop distributions (omarchy, cachyos etc) make onboarding easy.
branon 4mo ago
> as a longtime frequenter of r/unixporn, it was immediately apparent to me that omarchy is not a linux distribution in any traditional sense I'm not sure why "I browse reddit" is any sort of a valid qualifier upon which to base this decision but yes otherwise the article is correct, dotfiles != distro
fb03 4mo ago
The author's complaint is that omarchy is basically a set of ricing on top of arch. I can grok that Problem is, some people are really impressed by ricing and that is what has been catching users for that ""distro"" I'm pretty sure the fans of minimalism/t distros or just plain bare setups aren't really hyping that much. The author is right in that it's just an opinionated layer on top of Arch
seaal 4mo ago
The new quickshell based omarchy shell is pretty excellent foundation already, I’m very excited for it to be released on omarchy 4.0. Omarchy really has excellent defaults and generally development is always moving in the right direction.
olcarl75 4mo ago
if we depended on you no one would use linux then. This is the type of garbage mentality that we need OUT this community. We need Linux to win period. I don't care if it's called Distro, gist of envfiles, or a tank for gods sake. I want the market share for linux rather than macOs and Windows. "omarchy install will include a bunch of proprietary software, including... what are we doing?? these are not the kinds of packages that any sane distro would ship to its users" - Ye this is great software. You know what is not good? when you download a distro that only has open source software and your codecs doesn't work, then that person just install windows again (true story many of my friends went through that). So please, don't tell people to skip stuff just because you dislike it
BirAdam 4mo ago
By your reasoning of what is or is not a distribution, Ubuntu is not a distribution. After all, it’s just opinionated Debian. The vast majority of distributions are, by your logic, not distributions. I’m okay with this, but that isn’t how the word is commonly used.
- undeveloper 4mo ago
  ubuntu has its own packages from Debian and a different release cycle
  - TiredOfLife 4mo ago
    And surprise so does Omarchy
CharlesW 4mo ago
I'm old, is "ricing" (along with "ricer", "rice burners", "rice rockets", etc.) no longer racist?
- LambdaComplex 4mo ago
  I think most of the people who use the term in the context of Linux desktops don't know the term's origin (or at least don't stop to think about it), so the possibility of it being racist never occurs to them.
  - wkjagt 4mo ago
    Doesn't it come from car culture? Where (mostly young) people put giant wings and shiny wheels on a clapped out Honda Civic to make it look like a race car. I always thought that "rice" was an intentional misspelling of "race" (as in "race car", which, hold on a minute, I guess would also make it race... ist?)
    - eurleif 4mo ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rice_burner https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rice_burner
magiclaw 4mo ago
"if you're new to Linux, skip omarchy..." I've been using linux for 20+ years. I used to spend way too much time ricing my system when I was young. I don't have time for that now. I installed Omarchy, and I like it. "... install a real distribution - not some guy's personal dotfiles." "the entire 'omarchy distribution' amounts to little more than Arch linux" Your own statements contradict each other.
- jasonvorhe 4mo ago
  s/distribution/Arch derivative and the entire post is moot.
slabtickler 4mo ago
[flagged]
- dismalaf 4mo ago
  It's easy. Omarchy provides an ISO image. Cloudflare's "sponsorship" is just providing servers from which you can download said images. The difference from a "set of dot files" is that you can download a full installation image.
- soupbowl 4mo ago
  The DHH haters seem incapable of explaining why they are offended by sponsorship from CloudFlare for a project they do not want to use.
  - queenkjuul 4mo ago
    I think they very clearly did explain: they think that money could be better spent
    - jasonvorhe 4mo ago
      They should apply for a management role at cloudflare then.
jaccola 4mo ago
> apple's hardware lead & overall design philosophy is falling apart What?? Could someone tell me where I can buy hardware as good as a MBP? Genuinely I’d love this, it would be like Christmas had come early!
- j3s 4mo ago
  https://frame.work/laptop13pro https://frame.work/laptop13pro :) intel panther lake changed the game.
nailer 4mo ago
That’s like saying Ubuntu isn’t a distro as it’s “just Debian”. Yes but also: no.
- deleted 4mo ago
  [deleted]
- queenkjuul 4mo ago
  Ubuntu does quite a lot of "traditional distro" stuff like maintaining a huge amount of infrastructure and packaging
  - TiredOfLife 4mo ago
    As does Omarchy
VladVladikoff 4mo ago
>if you're new to Linux, skip omarchy and install a real distribution I am so glad I have LLMs now to help me with Linux problems, gone are the years of putting up with curmudgeonly Linux gate keepers like this on IRC just so I could make progress when I was stuck.
- lpcvoid 4mo ago
  [dead]
bdcravens 4mo ago
Seems like the three criteria I'm reading could apply to many other "distros" 1. Based off a common base distro 2. Domain-specific, rather than general-use 3. Includes commercial software
InfiniteRand 4mo ago
A little off topic but my position is that a Linux distribution ought to be a series of build options, package selection and configuration. Ultimately, you should be able to do this in a few files. The fact that it takes so much more to put together a Linux distribution is I think something that the Linux ecosystem ought to aspire to change.
zoidb 4mo ago
For those here that are old enough to remember Knoppix I think there are some similar things happening here. There were similar theads about Knoppix not being a distro for those who installed to their hdd using the live cd. But there was also clear demand for what it offered. I for one really liked the out-of-box Omarchy experience and wouldn't know the first thing right now about how to customize arch so that it feels the same as Omarchy. Maybe it's trivial? But honestly I don't care I just like Omarchy's default opinion design way better than any other distro I've tried so far.
nkrisc 4mo ago
This article gives me the feeling of someone arguing that the Thai restaurant I like isn’t serving real Thai food. They might even be right, but I don’t know because I don’t care. I like the food. Back to the article, they then list a bunch of things that I think are supposed to be negatives, but includes things like some shortcuts and some software I already use pre-installed. So let’s grant that the title is true. So what?
reanimus 4mo ago
I mean... Yeah, it's a curated set of dotfiles that one guy spent a while tuning to his liking. I don't use it, but I figure it's just a matter of most people being too lazy to polish up their own equivalent, so they'll use someone else's.
Kon5ole 4mo ago
Having tried both Omakub and Omarchy I think Omakub is the more interesting approach, and it certainly matches the OP's description - just a set of scripts and defaults applied to a standard Ubuntu. I'd love to see a bunch of similar projects based on slackware, debian, suse or whatever. I think most current distros/DE's dump "everything and the kitchen sink" at the user leaving him or her to finish the setup themselves. They stop short of actually presenting a good, unified experience. That's how it has been for ages of course, and Omakub is basically a "distro skin" that IMO has been lacking from distros all this time. Picking a set of sensible default apps and making them 100% integrated and well documented is just nice. Ubuntu with Omakub just feels more like a finished OS than Ubuntu itself does. Omarchy on the other hand is as much a distribution as most other popular distributions. Sure, based on arch, but if that disqualifies it then most distros are "not distros" all of a sudden. So I call Omarchy a distro. I get why it exists and I use it for convenience since I like Arch anyway - but I would actually have preferred a few more variants on omakub, personally.
- queenkjuul 4mo ago
  What's missing from standard Ubuntu? I recently did a fresh install and it seems finished to me
  - Kon5ole 4mo ago
    It's not so much that things are missing (although that too) it's that some choices are poor, some are duplicated, and there's no consistency and obvious "right way". Do you use gnome-photos or shotwell, and does the system tell you how to use either? Do you use rythmbox or gnome-music - or for that matter, do you use KDE, xkcd, budgie, cinnamon or MATE? Does the software installation show you how to install HAM-radio tools in the same UI as where you install Spotify or Chrome? Does changing the theme also change the terminal theme? Browser theme? Are useful tools like localsend included by default? I haven't used Ubuntu "proper" in years, so all of my questions may be outdated, but Omakub certainly felt like a breath of fresh air when I tried it. It really felt like a big step forward for attention to detail compared to any other linux distro I have tried. Not perfect by any means, but still, I think the "proper" distros should take some inspiration from it.
kombine 4mo ago
[flagged]
jruz 4mo ago
If this is the price to pay for adoption I’m ok with it.
dismalaf 4mo ago
If CachyOS or Kubuntu are distros why isn't Omarchy? There's tons of "distros" that piggyback on others...
c7b 4mo ago
I agree with the author's general sentiment, but I would give Omarchy credit for some design features that I find either really innovative or well executed. I find the launch menu the most interesting I've seen out of any desktop environment / OS. It puts easy access to your apps front and center and above esthetics, and yet it still looks great. It's not a sane request, but I'd love to be able to swap the launcher/start menu in another DE for a fully customizable version of that. Omarchy also has a very smooth way to 'install' web apps. There exist packages that do that for you, but I've tested several and wouldn't recommend any of them. They're bloated (this should really only be a couple lines of bash, like Omarchy's [0]), some use web views (I really want an actual browser under the hood so I can have my extensions), and all that I've tested leave litter on your machine after removing apps or the software. I find web apps as .desktop files so useful that I'm actually using a hacky DIY script now (which I'm considering releasing under GPL if I ever find time to clean it up). Also, whether you're a beginner or a pro, having a sane starting config for Hyprland is just convenient. Which tells you something about it imho. My conclusion would be similar to the OP's, if you're Omarchy-curious, try Cosmic on your distro of choice. Or at least a cleaned up version with the most egregious personal preferences (like a global keybind for opening Twitter/X) removed, if anybody cares to maintain that. [0] https://github.com/basecamp/omarchy/blob/dev/bin/omarchy-webapp-install https://github.com/basecamp/omarchy/blob/dev/bin/omarchy-web...
soupbowl 4mo ago
This is a little cringe, it's fine you don't like it, dont use it. There have been other distros based on arch which are also mostly just rices. I've never seen people complain about them, but Omarchy is different, probably because DHH is involved. I tried Omarchy and thought it was decent, I liked a lot of the settings and visuals.
RandomGerm4n 4mo ago
Even though I wouldn't really use something like that myself, I actually think it's a good thing when people share their dotfiles with others. Whether you call it a “distribution” or not is basically irrelevant, and I don't understand all the fuss about it. However I would still generally advise against using Omarchy because the maintainer does not seem to place any importance on security. For example the default firewall configuration leaves the SSH port open and the number of failed login and sudo attempts before a timeout has been unnecessarily increased. Furthermore Omarchy installs some of the offered programs via a .sh script that is downloaded via curl rather than using a package manager like the one Arch already has. In addition Hannsen still refuses to sign his commits, which means it's only a matter of time before a supply chain attack occurs.
- yjftsjthsd-h 4mo ago
  > For example the default firewall configuration leaves the SSH port open and the number of failed login and sudo attempts before a timeout has been unnecessarily increased. Leaving SSH exposed is bad if password auth is enabled. Otherwise, under what threat model is either of these a problem?
znpy 4mo ago
> DHH realized this, and is cashing in on a wave of new, inexperienced users looking for a cool looking Linux distribution This is the dumbest thing i’ve read this month. Stopped reading after that. The implicit amount of hate for DHH is almost at tinfoil hat levels.
tim-projects 4mo ago
I've been using arch + open box since 2011. Now switched to cachyos + labwc (Wayland version of open box). Every once in a while I try something else realise what an absolute bloated mess it is and come back. A long time ago maybe 18 years back I used wmii which did tiling and it was reasonable (you could still resize with a mouse) Why do you need tiling for anything that isn't s terminal? Just use tmux or ghostty? If I want in labwc I can drag the window to the side and it snaps to half screen just like windows. I stick with this set up even with 32GB ram it literally never fails and never has in over a decade. My guess is hyperland takes forever to figure out and uses way more ram. No thanks Openbox/labwc looks great out the box without this flailing about.
flumpcakes 4mo ago
Another blog post ignoring capitalisation making it difficult to read.
postepowanieadm 4mo ago
Ubuntu is (was) Not a Distro.
adsharma 4mo ago
Installing thing like this should be an agent skill, not a distribution.
bitbasher 4mo ago
I really like Linux, but it's incredibly fragmented. The fragmentation can be seen as part of the allure of Linux (make it your own, use whatever you want, may the best software win, etc). As I've gained experience (and maybe some wisdom), I've come to find the fragmentation a huge turn off. I've grown more and more fond of the BSD world. You install an operating system. You can learn the system and it doesn't change (much). It feels like you can accrue knowledge that doesn't become irrelevant every six months.
ancorevard 4mo ago
Love Omarchy
mid-kid 4mo ago
It's a shame that this article focusses on Omarchy being "just some dotfiles" when I feel it's the weakest of the points it makes against Omarchy (there's many valid reasons to have issues with it!). Omarchy isn't any more "just some dotfiles" (henceforth, "default configurations") than any other derivative distribution seeks to be. Distributions always ship some kind of default configuration, be it embedded in the programs themselves, installed in /etc or otherwise patched in. Of course, some distributions, especially base distributions, focus on just shipping the packages, but more involved ones, for example Ubuntu, tweak the default configurations of many programs to provide a cohesive experience. I've always found it a shame how difficult it is to reproduce some of the r/unixporn screenshots, to see if they actually function nicely, use for a bit and see what I like and can backport to my own configurations. Even when the author provides some links, it's usually really hard to set up, and you're never quite sure what the author might've glossed over or configured out-of-band. I always wished there were more of these highly opinionated linux respins with heavily tweaked dotfiles, so at some point I also made my own to add to the pile: https://github.com/mid-kid/RocketISO/blob/master/docs/RELEASE-2025.md https://github.com/mid-kid/RocketISO/blob/master/docs/RELEAS...

186 points by j3s 4mo ago

chinathrow 4mo ago

Haters gonna hate.

Vaslo 4mo ago
Just skim the rest of the blog posts…

deleted 4mo ago

[deleted]

awesan 4mo ago

What a strange thing to publish.. just don't use it if you don't like it? What is this even attempting to do?

throwaway613746 4mo ago
[dead]
clouedoc 4mo ago
Everyone has the urge to criticize what they don't like, and it looks like you are no exception... :)
tptacek 4mo ago
It's a critique of Omarchy.
peesem 4mo ago
well, it is in the "thoughts" section of the author's website. maybe it doesn't belong on HN, but the person who posted it is not the author, so take it up with them. anyway, i agree with most/all of the complaints but if a valuable point were to be made it is probably the funding point. why does this need money?
- sodapopcan 4mo ago
  > maybe it doesn't belong on HN Was helpful to me. I now know not waste my time.
deleted 4mo ago
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deleted 4mo ago
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jjtheblunt 4mo ago
To your point, I don't think the complaining and ranting by the poster makes sense, given what was ignored before the ranting began. the poster seems to have skipped over the point that "Omarchy" is just the default configuration of Arch for 37signals internal use, and enthusiasm over it working well caught on, so it's shared as open source. CachyOS is another set of UI configurations of Arch and is also just handy. disclaimer: i use both and they work well.
epistasis 4mo ago
I think they should both not use it and talk about why so that we can get a clearer picture of the diversity of Linux users out there. The idea of enabling proprietary software in the default install is apparently verboten to some, and getting that viewpoint out there helps people understand why Linux on the desktop is where it is.
sodapopcan 4mo ago
> What is this even attempting to do? It's a blog post, a medium where people can self-publish their writing for no other purpose than expressing themselves. These things have been around for decades at this point.
arjie 4mo ago
Realistically, polarizing figures like DHH will have complaints pointed at their work for reasons other than the work itself. And when the complaints are grounded they’ll often be of higher amplitude than otherwise.
p-o 4mo ago
What's wrong with voicing opinion on the Internet? It's a personal blog, you don't have to read it if you don't like it. There are plenty of strange things that gets publish every day, I don't see why you get hung up on this post.

lmrkk 4mo ago

I tried, felt same. its just ricing.

peteforde 4mo ago

FWIW, 1Password is pretty great.

mbirth 4mo ago
It was better when it was still a native app and not this Electron nonsense.
- andrewjf 4mo ago
  Quality in general seems to be going downhill, too. Frequently the desktop app and the safari extension won't be in sync and missing a recently added password, or doesn't show up on my other devices hours later. I still have no idea how the extension vs desktop app actually work together, or if they do at all. Sometimes 1password (safari extension) is "locked" - but the desktop app isn't locked? and No amount of clicking the little 1password icon, that's supposed to unlock it does anything. Just a completely no-op button. Quitting safari _and_ the desktop app seems to be what's required to fix it. I've been thinking about just moving back to native macOS keychain, but I haven't bothered to check on linux+windows support.
  - c-hendricks 4mo ago
    Since the extension works flawlessly in all other browsers I've chalked it up to Safari extensions being a pain. But yes the Safari 1Password extension constantly shits The bed.
    - plorkyeran 4mo ago
      The publishing process for Safari extensions is painful, but otherwise it's not meaningfully different from Chromium extensions and there's no good reason for it to work worse in Safari.
  - mbirth 4mo ago
    Wait, it even needs an extension for Safari? I'm using Strongbox (uses a KeePass-compatible database) which integrates into Apple's AutoFill API and appears automatically in all input fields - just like Keychain. No extension needed.

poly2it 4mo ago

It is understandable to be frustrated at a project without technical merit gaining so much traction when, as in the author's words, "longstanding distros like Debian have struggled with funding and sponsorship for decades". However, I do feel the author fails to come up with any conclusion as to why there is such a disparity between interest in traditional distributions and this rice. I agree that it is almost suspicious how quickly it has risen to prominence. There has been a surge of hugely popular amorphous open source projects by single or few maintainers, often created very recently. In my experience, most of the users of Omarchy are inexperienced with Linux, and use it because it doesn't require them to form their own opinions and workflows, which can be both positive and negative.

epistasis 4mo ago
Its rise is not suspicious to me at all, the author has tremendous reach influence in the developer community, that drives adoption easily. Omarchy was my first entry back into desktop Linux since the early 2000s, when I ran enlightenment. The promises of Omarchy are big, and the idea of somebody trying all the tons of available bits of desktop Linux and assembling their favorites is very compelling! I've since moved to KDE Plasma on that initial Omarchy install, but kept some other parts like the Bash completion system. I would love to get back to having single key sequences to bring up, say, a Claude window, but not enough to set it up in Plasma. If somebody else did it for me though... that's the appeal of Omarchy.
- queenkjuul 4mo ago
  On cinnamon setting up a shortcut like that is about three mouse clicks
  - epistasis 4mo ago
    Ah, but which three clocks? That's the rub. LLMs make customization much easier, but the impetus has not yet been there for me.
- kuschku 4mo ago

zwaps 4mo ago

Omarchy!! shipping a window manager with defaults and or a terminal with a config - what an unspeakable sin. Linux should be hard and shitty and it should break all the time! What is this newfound obsession with distros that just works and have some great setups and defaults. Where do we end up if you can just close your laptop lid or copy paste with the same key or or or if even… gasp… the theme is automatically applied across all apps? DHH? More like literal devil. No sir! Let me write a blogpost post haste!

zwaps 4mo ago
The author is so close. “decades of debian and it never got any traction. Why?“ Yeah! What a mystery. What could make people install omarchy or pop os over debian, arch or gentoo? What could possibly be the reason
- the_gastropod 4mo ago
  Having literal billionaire best buds backing the project probably helps one gain traction, no? Toss in a dash of weird culture war bullshit, and… well. Distro popularity isn’t exactly a meritocratic system.
jeremyjh 4mo ago
Yeah Linux will be shitty and break all the time if it doesn’t come preinstalled with Brave and a shortcut to open Grok.

hokumguru 4mo ago

I’m sorry, but what is the actual definition of a distro? What makes Omarchy different than, say, Cachy which is also an opinionated DE and set of packages on top of Arch. There aren’t really any rules to what to find this or not. Just because something is more opinionated than other solutions doesn’t mean it’s invalid. In fact, I would say that that’s the primary reason people gravitate towards Omarchy. Many developers coming from the competing operating systems want stuff that just works out of the box, including proprietary software! If you don’t like it, just ignore it and move on. I thought we were past this “I dislike this thing on the internet therefore everyone who likes it is wrong” phase of the internet. It’s also discourse like this that specifically discourages people from trying Linux.

cwillu 4mo ago
It's fine that it exists. But a package of customizations is not a distribution. Yes, the definition is fuzzy, but this is clearly not it.
cauch 4mo ago
I don't think the discussion about "is it a distribution or not" is very interesting, but I think the discussion about "should we make clear that this _thing_ is just a bunch of config files rather than the usual work one would expect behind what was traditionally called linux distributions". And I know Omarchy is not the only one out there doing something similar, and that there is a spectrum. It is not a problem. The problem is not the existence of the spectrum, the problem is that at some point, we should just call a cat a cat instead of arguing "well, being a cat is a spectrum, so every year we can call a new thing in the adjacent spectrum a cat and pretend it has all the quality one would expect from a cat".
- ffaccount2 4mo ago
  It's a way to distribute Linux (the kernel) and userland packages in a way you can install. Therefore it's a Linux distribution.
  - 4mo ago

dcmatt 4mo ago

An opinionated person has different opinions than a different opinionated person

ethanlipson 4mo ago

Whether we call it a distribution or not is really a matter of semantics. The more interesting question is, do people actually want a hyper-opinionated Linux install? Based on the reactions to Omarchy that I've seen, the answer is obviously yes. Broadly, people seem ok with just not using some of the suggested software if the defaults get them most of the way there. More generally, I would say that configuring one's own Linux installation is not in itself virtuous. It used to be a way to identify people who were "committed" to using it via gatekeeping. The OP says that Omarchy is just DHH "cashing in" on new inexperienced Linux users, but as long as we don't value customizing one's own installation just for the sake of customization (I certainly don't anymore!), why is this a problem?

layer8 4mo ago
“Hyper-opinionated” and “good OOB experience” are orthogonal to each other.

shdh 4mo ago

Omarchy is the best Linux desktop experience I’ve ever had

Kiro 4mo ago

> my eyes roll out of my head Summarizes my feeling about this article and the author.

maxlin 4mo ago

Well, this "not distro" software that takes over your whole computer when you boot the ISO and install it has been the greatest out-of-the box Linux experience for me, and has introduced me to the best new way of using an operating system since I first installed a Linux distro ~20 years ago. And yes I did actually end up going thru archinstaller first as the other route failed, but turned out it was archinstall failing to start with, failing to clear the existing Chrome OS partitions even after selecting the disk (full disk!) properly. I managed to install it on a N23 Chromebook I got for 30€, with just a 32GB SSD on it. Now I am on the edge of making my work laptop dual boot it, so I can run some heavier software on it. Haven't used as much Desktop Linux in the previous 15 years as I have the previous month. It's supposed to be opinionated to start with. It absolutely is better that way. Probably one of the easiest to mod too, changed my battery indicator to show current wattage with an one-line change. As it says - Chef's choice. I want my food to be edible to start with when I'm hungry.

cwillu 4mo ago
The instructions on the back of the prepared meal box is not a cookbook. This is not a judgement of using a prepared meal box.
- maxlin 4mo ago
  FYI, most meals that are DISTRibuted through different convenient means are "prepared". If I didn't want a distro, I'd just go with something like Buildroot, or even more elementary. Yes, this is one of the projects I also have in mind to understand better and with the cross-supporting goal of reducing boot time of a machine that'll eventually run my game engine, with the reference of running said game engine on a n MCU. But that's not what I want from desktop Linux of a pedigree that'd have potential of replacing my daily driver requirements, which are actually quite difficult to match, but I do have hope.

tiffanyh 4mo ago

The post seems to be missing an important point… DHH tends to build things for himself first, then share it with the world (sometimes free, sometimes paid) to see if others find value in it too. Most of those things never become broadly adopted, which is clear from the long list of products 37signals has shut down over the years: Breeze, Writeboard, Backpack, Sortfolio, and others. But every once in a while, there’s a huge success … like Rails, Basecamp, Hey, and apparently now Omarchy. I honestly don’t think it’s much more complicated than that. He enjoys building things he personally wants. And when he sees others getting joy from what he built, he gets excited and doubles down.

goosejuice 4mo ago

Words have meaning, sure I get that. The rest is silly. Omarchy was built for DHH and Basecamp. It's MIT. Noone is forcing anyone to use someone's "shitty dotfiles" unless you work at Basecamp. Things like Omarchy are a boon to Linux because they bring in people that otherwise wouldn't have given it any thought. It's demonstrating what is possible as a little gateway drug. Things like SteamOS are much better at this, but more is better. It's not doing any harm.

yuters 4mo ago

I've tried to setup Arch with Hyprland like 3 times on my own and with the most popular dot files. It was terrible, frustrating and things broke all the time. Omarchy fixed that and I can't recommend it enough.

cauch 4mo ago
Did dhh provide a recipe to install hyprland properly without having to install a full "distribution"? (I don't know, it's a real question) It feels very strange (and wrong) to me: if there is difficulties in installing something, try to help people instead of packaging the solution with other things that are not related. It feels a bit like if uv was mainly providing their "uvOS" to solve the difficulties of dealing with python packages.
- andix 4mo ago
  If I remember it correctly Omarchy started as an in-house alternative to macOS in one of DHHs companies. And was then released to the public. So the purpose of Omarchy was to get devices quickly set up with some opinionated defaults.
  - cauch 4mo ago
    So, is the answer "no"? I don't think it changes anything about what I was saying. If indeed dhh helped find a way to install hyprland more easily but failed to also provide a standalone recipe, that does not sound like a good practice to me.
    - andix 4mo ago
      The answer is: no, solving your problem was not the goal of the project. But the source code is public, you can extract the relevant scripts from the repo: https://github.com/basecamp/omarchy https://github.com/basecamp/omarchy
      - cauch 4mo ago

mvdtnz 4mo ago

Eh this just feels like gatekeeping to me.

deleted 4mo ago

[deleted]

andix 4mo ago

Omarchy is more like Kubuntu. Some config scripts and a few additional packages on top of another distribution.

mixmastamyk 4mo ago
Ahh yes, it is a “spin.”

wrren 4mo ago

We seem to have arrived at a set of assumptions that states that if a large number of people like something that we don’t, or don’t subscribe to some cultural norms that we doggedly adhere to, then there has to be something sinister afoot. The out of box experience with Omarchy is highly functional, aesthetically pleasing and challenges users to lean more on keyboard shortcuts than they’d typically be used to. That’s clever because once you’re whizzing around with these shortcuts you feel accomplished, productive, and that generates loyalty towards the distro. None of this is a bad thing, anything that makes Linux more accessible and interesting is good. Bucking trends that were making Linux harder to adopt or less culturally relevant is good too.

Barrin92 4mo ago
>then there has to be something sinister afoot. because most of the time there is. We live in a world that is dominated by obnoxious social media influencers and 'taste makers' who push people to the <newest thing> every day. This is the linux version of Mr. Beast lunchables. Having a conference and corporate sponsorships for what is 500 lines of bash scripting is beyond silly. And like the other half dozen arch based 'desktop reskin disguised as distro' things, when it eventually breaks or stops being supported you'll have a lot of confused people who don't know how to fix it.
- least 4mo ago
  No Linux distribution offers a good out-of-the-box experience with anything outside of XFCE, GNOME, or KDE Plasma. On the other end, these alternative WMs lack all of the shell features that people expect from a desktop experience. I run regular Arch with Niri and Noctalia Shell, which is based on Quick Shell. It is a pretty solid experience. But even with Quick Shell, which has taken a lot of the pain out of closing the gap between traditional DEs and these tiling WMs, it’s still a decent chunk of configuration. Without it, I’d be doing a ton more configuration with a bar and scripts to display some information. And then those would be hardly functional, since really they’re just showing some stdout from the terminal. If I wanted to actually, say, connect to a new Bluetooth device, I’d still be heading to the terminal to connect. That gap is what makes Omarchy interesting to me, and presumably to the people who seem to really like it. Omarchy lets someone install it just like another “real” distribution and get a working OS without having to do hours of configuration and ensuring they have all the additional utilities they’d expect to have. I think it does kind of have to be a “distro” because the appeal is that you don’t maintain the scripts yourself. You can just install it and get sensible defaults from a fresh install. There’s nothing stopping Ubuntu, Fedora, or another major distribution from creating something like this. They already have Plasma and GNOME variants that include bundled software and sensible defaults customized from the delivered version of those DEs. My question for people is whether their objection has to do with Omarchy itself or with the person or people behind it. I get that even without a controversial figure behind it, people might still object to some of the technical decisions behind it. But I find it hard to argue against the idea. It is filling a niche by making alternative WMs like Hyprland more accessible.

Vaslo 4mo ago

Pretty clear by the other opinions this author has on his “blog” that he dislikes DHH for more than just the Omarchy distribution. Here’s a fact - Omarchy opened up Arch to a whole crowd of people that would have never tried Arch given its notorious difficulty to the uninitiated.

ath3nd 4mo ago
[dead]
thewebguyd 4mo ago
It also opened up trying a tiling WM to a whole crowd of people that never would have bothered. To the uninitiated it's not exactly easy to get hyprland + all the extra utilities for status bar, menu, wallpaper, theming, etc. running. Then figuring out how their individual configs work, then making it look good on top of that. It's a ton of effort.

aftbit 4mo ago

I'm still on X :laugh:

very_good_man 4mo ago

I love Omarchy

periodjet 4mo ago

[flagged]

eximius 4mo ago

I recommend installing Omarchy and playing with it. Read through the Omarchy repo to see how the things you liked and disliked were set up. Then install arch or Cachy or some other Arch based distro and just use the parts you liked. I am completely disinterested in the author's concerns because Omarchy was useful to me in demonstrating how to compose pieces into a useful whole in a relatively minimalist distribution like Arch. It is much easier to learn with good examples than just only reading DIY reference docs. (And they are good examples even if you dislike the targets of the apps installed - I agree on those points, but they're just not that important)

MangoCoffee 4mo ago

by author's logic, is Ubuntu not a distro since its based on Debian? i don't understand what author is trying to say here.

tuananh 4mo ago
[dead]

terracatta 4mo ago

Usually these types of articles are written about things that challenge status quos. I remember reading a lot about Ruby on Rails in the same vein "ruby isn't a real language", "rails is just a collection of scripts", and "you can't build real web apps with it." If Omarchy is upsetting the Linux establishment as much as this article implies (unclear if this is just a one-off) then it's probably worth a look!

whalesalad 4mo ago
The upset is due to the imbalance between what omarchy really is and the buzz around it. When your “distro” could be a bash script on a vanilla arch install, is it really worth making a distro? This is just more perpetuation of the distro fragmentation that doesn’t need to exist.
Aurornis 4mo ago
> If Omarchy is upsetting the Linux establishment as much as this article implies It’s not upsetting anyone other than people who like to argue about inconsequential things on social media. I actually don’t think it would be as popular without all of the manufactured drama and controversy around. Some people (like the parent comment) are drawn to the controversy and feeling of rebellion. I bet 99% of people do not care if you use it or not. The other 1% just like arguing about other people’s personal preferences for some reason.
- dangus 4mo ago
  I don’t even think Omarchy is particularly popular. I see a lot of activity and user preferences around Linux Mint, Bazzite, and CachyOS, in addition to the traditionally popular choices like Ubuntu and Fedora. I’d be more inclined to ignore it entirely if I was a blog author.
- miki123211 4mo ago
  It's also upsetting people who judge work mainly by the political stances of its authors, not by the merrits of the work itself. We've seen the same thing play out with Harry Potter for example.

pure-orange 4mo ago

Strongly disagree with this post. And I am not a DHH fan. The biggest problem with Linux as a desktop gaining more popularity is the learning curve. In our bubble, you might not want any software installed and want your first install to barely have a desktop environment, but the average Joe wants their browser, music player and password manager ready to go. If omarchy is nothing but a gateway drug to making leaving windows much easier then I am all for it, even if we bikeshed about whether or not it’s a distributed (I agree it’s not). Once you have it installed you can customise just as much as you would any other “distribution”, it just makes that first step that bit easier. Linux, if it wants to win the war, needs to make it easier for new folks to onboard. The winning desktop distributions (omarchy, cachyos etc) make onboarding easy.

branon 4mo ago

> as a longtime frequenter of r/unixporn, it was immediately apparent to me that omarchy is not a linux distribution in any traditional sense I'm not sure why "I browse reddit" is any sort of a valid qualifier upon which to base this decision but yes otherwise the article is correct, dotfiles != distro

fb03 4mo ago

The author's complaint is that omarchy is basically a set of ricing on top of arch. I can grok that Problem is, some people are really impressed by ricing and that is what has been catching users for that ""distro"" I'm pretty sure the fans of minimalism/t distros or just plain bare setups aren't really hyping that much. The author is right in that it's just an opinionated layer on top of Arch

seaal 4mo ago

The new quickshell based omarchy shell is pretty excellent foundation already, I’m very excited for it to be released on omarchy 4.0. Omarchy really has excellent defaults and generally development is always moving in the right direction.

olcarl75 4mo ago

if we depended on you no one would use linux then. This is the type of garbage mentality that we need OUT this community. We need Linux to win period. I don't care if it's called Distro, gist of envfiles, or a tank for gods sake. I want the market share for linux rather than macOs and Windows. "omarchy install will include a bunch of proprietary software, including... what are we doing?? these are not the kinds of packages that any sane distro would ship to its users" - Ye this is great software. You know what is not good? when you download a distro that only has open source software and your codecs doesn't work, then that person just install windows again (true story many of my friends went through that). So please, don't tell people to skip stuff just because you dislike it

BirAdam 4mo ago

By your reasoning of what is or is not a distribution, Ubuntu is not a distribution. After all, it’s just opinionated Debian. The vast majority of distributions are, by your logic, not distributions. I’m okay with this, but that isn’t how the word is commonly used.

undeveloper 4mo ago
ubuntu has its own packages from Debian and a different release cycle
- TiredOfLife 4mo ago
  And surprise so does Omarchy

CharlesW 4mo ago

I'm old, is "ricing" (along with "ricer", "rice burners", "rice rockets", etc.) no longer racist?

LambdaComplex 4mo ago
I think most of the people who use the term in the context of Linux desktops don't know the term's origin (or at least don't stop to think about it), so the possibility of it being racist never occurs to them.
- wkjagt 4mo ago
  Doesn't it come from car culture? Where (mostly young) people put giant wings and shiny wheels on a clapped out Honda Civic to make it look like a race car. I always thought that "rice" was an intentional misspelling of "race" (as in "race car", which, hold on a minute, I guess would also make it race... ist?)
  - eurleif 4mo ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rice_burner https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rice_burner

magiclaw 4mo ago

"if you're new to Linux, skip omarchy..." I've been using linux for 20+ years. I used to spend way too much time ricing my system when I was young. I don't have time for that now. I installed Omarchy, and I like it. "... install a real distribution - not some guy's personal dotfiles." "the entire 'omarchy distribution' amounts to little more than Arch linux" Your own statements contradict each other.

jasonvorhe 4mo ago
s/distribution/Arch derivative and the entire post is moot.

slabtickler 4mo ago

[flagged]

dismalaf 4mo ago
It's easy. Omarchy provides an ISO image. Cloudflare's "sponsorship" is just providing servers from which you can download said images. The difference from a "set of dot files" is that you can download a full installation image.
soupbowl 4mo ago
The DHH haters seem incapable of explaining why they are offended by sponsorship from CloudFlare for a project they do not want to use.
- queenkjuul 4mo ago
  I think they very clearly did explain: they think that money could be better spent
  - jasonvorhe 4mo ago
    They should apply for a management role at cloudflare then.

jaccola 4mo ago

> apple's hardware lead & overall design philosophy is falling apart What?? Could someone tell me where I can buy hardware as good as a MBP? Genuinely I’d love this, it would be like Christmas had come early!

j3s 4mo ago
https://frame.work/laptop13pro https://frame.work/laptop13pro :) intel panther lake changed the game.

nailer 4mo ago

That’s like saying Ubuntu isn’t a distro as it’s “just Debian”. Yes but also: no.

deleted 4mo ago
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queenkjuul 4mo ago
Ubuntu does quite a lot of "traditional distro" stuff like maintaining a huge amount of infrastructure and packaging
- TiredOfLife 4mo ago
  As does Omarchy

VladVladikoff 4mo ago

>if you're new to Linux, skip omarchy and install a real distribution I am so glad I have LLMs now to help me with Linux problems, gone are the years of putting up with curmudgeonly Linux gate keepers like this on IRC just so I could make progress when I was stuck.

lpcvoid 4mo ago
[dead]

bdcravens 4mo ago

Seems like the three criteria I'm reading could apply to many other "distros" 1. Based off a common base distro 2. Domain-specific, rather than general-use 3. Includes commercial software

InfiniteRand 4mo ago

A little off topic but my position is that a Linux distribution ought to be a series of build options, package selection and configuration. Ultimately, you should be able to do this in a few files. The fact that it takes so much more to put together a Linux distribution is I think something that the Linux ecosystem ought to aspire to change.

zoidb 4mo ago

For those here that are old enough to remember Knoppix I think there are some similar things happening here. There were similar theads about Knoppix not being a distro for those who installed to their hdd using the live cd. But there was also clear demand for what it offered. I for one really liked the out-of-box Omarchy experience and wouldn't know the first thing right now about how to customize arch so that it feels the same as Omarchy. Maybe it's trivial? But honestly I don't care I just like Omarchy's default opinion design way better than any other distro I've tried so far.

nkrisc 4mo ago

This article gives me the feeling of someone arguing that the Thai restaurant I like isn’t serving real Thai food. They might even be right, but I don’t know because I don’t care. I like the food. Back to the article, they then list a bunch of things that I think are supposed to be negatives, but includes things like some shortcuts and some software I already use pre-installed. So let’s grant that the title is true. So what?

reanimus 4mo ago

I mean... Yeah, it's a curated set of dotfiles that one guy spent a while tuning to his liking. I don't use it, but I figure it's just a matter of most people being too lazy to polish up their own equivalent, so they'll use someone else's.

Kon5ole 4mo ago

Having tried both Omakub and Omarchy I think Omakub is the more interesting approach, and it certainly matches the OP's description - just a set of scripts and defaults applied to a standard Ubuntu. I'd love to see a bunch of similar projects based on slackware, debian, suse or whatever. I think most current distros/DE's dump "everything and the kitchen sink" at the user leaving him or her to finish the setup themselves. They stop short of actually presenting a good, unified experience. That's how it has been for ages of course, and Omakub is basically a "distro skin" that IMO has been lacking from distros all this time. Picking a set of sensible default apps and making them 100% integrated and well documented is just nice. Ubuntu with Omakub just feels more like a finished OS than Ubuntu itself does. Omarchy on the other hand is as much a distribution as most other popular distributions. Sure, based on arch, but if that disqualifies it then most distros are "not distros" all of a sudden. So I call Omarchy a distro. I get why it exists and I use it for convenience since I like Arch anyway - but I would actually have preferred a few more variants on omakub, personally.

queenkjuul 4mo ago
What's missing from standard Ubuntu? I recently did a fresh install and it seems finished to me
- Kon5ole 4mo ago
  It's not so much that things are missing (although that too) it's that some choices are poor, some are duplicated, and there's no consistency and obvious "right way". Do you use gnome-photos or shotwell, and does the system tell you how to use either? Do you use rythmbox or gnome-music - or for that matter, do you use KDE, xkcd, budgie, cinnamon or MATE? Does the software installation show you how to install HAM-radio tools in the same UI as where you install Spotify or Chrome? Does changing the theme also change the terminal theme? Browser theme? Are useful tools like localsend included by default? I haven't used Ubuntu "proper" in years, so all of my questions may be outdated, but Omakub certainly felt like a breath of fresh air when I tried it. It really felt like a big step forward for attention to detail compared to any other linux distro I have tried. Not perfect by any means, but still, I think the "proper" distros should take some inspiration from it.

kombine 4mo ago

[flagged]

jruz 4mo ago

If this is the price to pay for adoption I’m ok with it.

dismalaf 4mo ago

If CachyOS or Kubuntu are distros why isn't Omarchy? There's tons of "distros" that piggyback on others...

c7b 4mo ago

I agree with the author's general sentiment, but I would give Omarchy credit for some design features that I find either really innovative or well executed. I find the launch menu the most interesting I've seen out of any desktop environment / OS. It puts easy access to your apps front and center and above esthetics, and yet it still looks great. It's not a sane request, but I'd love to be able to swap the launcher/start menu in another DE for a fully customizable version of that. Omarchy also has a very smooth way to 'install' web apps. There exist packages that do that for you, but I've tested several and wouldn't recommend any of them. They're bloated (this should really only be a couple lines of bash, like Omarchy's [0]), some use web views (I really want an actual browser under the hood so I can have my extensions), and all that I've tested leave litter on your machine after removing apps or the software. I find web apps as .desktop files so useful that I'm actually using a hacky DIY script now (which I'm considering releasing under GPL if I ever find time to clean it up). Also, whether you're a beginner or a pro, having a sane starting config for Hyprland is just convenient. Which tells you something about it imho. My conclusion would be similar to the OP's, if you're Omarchy-curious, try Cosmic on your distro of choice. Or at least a cleaned up version with the most egregious personal preferences (like a global keybind for opening Twitter/X) removed, if anybody cares to maintain that. [0] https://github.com/basecamp/omarchy/blob/dev/bin/omarchy-webapp-install https://github.com/basecamp/omarchy/blob/dev/bin/omarchy-web...

soupbowl 4mo ago

This is a little cringe, it's fine you don't like it, dont use it. There have been other distros based on arch which are also mostly just rices. I've never seen people complain about them, but Omarchy is different, probably because DHH is involved. I tried Omarchy and thought it was decent, I liked a lot of the settings and visuals.

RandomGerm4n 4mo ago

Even though I wouldn't really use something like that myself, I actually think it's a good thing when people share their dotfiles with others. Whether you call it a “distribution” or not is basically irrelevant, and I don't understand all the fuss about it. However I would still generally advise against using Omarchy because the maintainer does not seem to place any importance on security. For example the default firewall configuration leaves the SSH port open and the number of failed login and sudo attempts before a timeout has been unnecessarily increased. Furthermore Omarchy installs some of the offered programs via a .sh script that is downloaded via curl rather than using a package manager like the one Arch already has. In addition Hannsen still refuses to sign his commits, which means it's only a matter of time before a supply chain attack occurs.

yjftsjthsd-h 4mo ago
> For example the default firewall configuration leaves the SSH port open and the number of failed login and sudo attempts before a timeout has been unnecessarily increased. Leaving SSH exposed is bad if password auth is enabled. Otherwise, under what threat model is either of these a problem?

znpy 4mo ago

> DHH realized this, and is cashing in on a wave of new, inexperienced users looking for a cool looking Linux distribution This is the dumbest thing i’ve read this month. Stopped reading after that. The implicit amount of hate for DHH is almost at tinfoil hat levels.

tim-projects 4mo ago

I've been using arch + open box since 2011. Now switched to cachyos + labwc (Wayland version of open box). Every once in a while I try something else realise what an absolute bloated mess it is and come back. A long time ago maybe 18 years back I used wmii which did tiling and it was reasonable (you could still resize with a mouse) Why do you need tiling for anything that isn't s terminal? Just use tmux or ghostty? If I want in labwc I can drag the window to the side and it snaps to half screen just like windows. I stick with this set up even with 32GB ram it literally never fails and never has in over a decade. My guess is hyperland takes forever to figure out and uses way more ram. No thanks Openbox/labwc looks great out the box without this flailing about.

flumpcakes 4mo ago

Another blog post ignoring capitalisation making it difficult to read.

postepowanieadm 4mo ago

Ubuntu is (was) Not a Distro.

adsharma 4mo ago

Installing thing like this should be an agent skill, not a distribution.

bitbasher 4mo ago

I really like Linux, but it's incredibly fragmented. The fragmentation can be seen as part of the allure of Linux (make it your own, use whatever you want, may the best software win, etc). As I've gained experience (and maybe some wisdom), I've come to find the fragmentation a huge turn off. I've grown more and more fond of the BSD world. You install an operating system. You can learn the system and it doesn't change (much). It feels like you can accrue knowledge that doesn't become irrelevant every six months.

ancorevard 4mo ago

Love Omarchy

mid-kid 4mo ago

It's a shame that this article focusses on Omarchy being "just some dotfiles" when I feel it's the weakest of the points it makes against Omarchy (there's many valid reasons to have issues with it!). Omarchy isn't any more "just some dotfiles" (henceforth, "default configurations") than any other derivative distribution seeks to be. Distributions always ship some kind of default configuration, be it embedded in the programs themselves, installed in /etc or otherwise patched in. Of course, some distributions, especially base distributions, focus on just shipping the packages, but more involved ones, for example Ubuntu, tweak the default configurations of many programs to provide a cohesive experience. I've always found it a shame how difficult it is to reproduce some of the r/unixporn screenshots, to see if they actually function nicely, use for a bit and see what I like and can backport to my own configurations. Even when the author provides some links, it's usually really hard to set up, and you're never quite sure what the author might've glossed over or configured out-of-band. I always wished there were more of these highly opinionated linux respins with heavily tweaked dotfiles, so at some point I also made my own to add to the pile: https://github.com/mid-kid/RocketISO/blob/master/docs/RELEASE-2025.md https://github.com/mid-kid/RocketISO/blob/master/docs/RELEAS...