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Much of the visuals and features in Omarchy is config yes but going from a blank drive to useful development environment in one minute is not just a set of dotf

Much of the visuals and features in Omarchy is config yes but going from a blank drive to useful development environment in one minute is not just a set of dotfiles. It's clearly a distro now. Don't let politics cloud your thinking. There are a lot of good reasons to like Omarchy, and other distros should pay attention to the substance. Omarchy shows how it's possible to realize a very clear, distinct vision of how desktop computing should be. I'd like to see the same amount of effort put into realizing several other visions! An LLM will happily take an instruction like "my currently super-tweaked Debian install is awesome, create a set of scripts that recreates the exact setup starting from a minimal netinstall". It will create a VM, install the base debian, iterate until it's right. You can have it make a user-friendly UI on top of the scripts, have it install drivers, commercial software that Debian shuns from their distro, and so on. If you have good taste and attention to detail, your setup might have universal appeal. You will have created a Debian flavour that might be better than anything anyone gets when installing official Debian. If you have poor taste and attention to detail, at least you have a one-command way to get your familiar janky setup installed from scratch. :)

microtonal 6d ago
I didn't say anything about usefulness. Even a bunch of dotfiles can be useful, Oh My Zsh and others were very popular after all. The thing I complain about are that these companies that build their fortunes partially on open source benefitted a lot from systematically underfunded developers. But they only make small contributions to those projects (if at all). But if their millionaire buddy shows up, they all stand in line to donate millions. I am not sure what it is. I guess partially they want to associate with the popularity of Omarchy, partially they are doing a favor to another rich techbro, some may agree with DHH's politics to 'drive woke out of open source'. But it still sucks that they don't give that many millions to Debian/OpenSSL/LibreSSL/Rust/pick your other favorite infrastructure project that they highly depend on to make their money.
jorvi 6d ago
I wouldn't exactly call Omarchy "good taste". Not that it's terrible, but pretty much the only reason it caught attention is because of the creator.
- Kon5ole 6d ago
  Surely you are only thinking of the visuals then? I can certainly understand that, but the visuals are not what I mean. Things like: - Sweating that the install should take a minute. - Ensuring that when you change themes, most relevant apps also change themes. - Including popular commercial apps with 0 friction. - Consistent design in menus, features and default apps. - Clear explanations of how everything works, including video demos. All of that is good taste, and would be good taste even if the visuals were "My little pony" or "Lovecraftian horror" instead of 80s retro. ;-)
  - Kon5ole 6d ago
    ...Things like not effing up the formatting of a list... :D
  - jorvi 6d ago
    The only "commercial app" it themes automatically is Chromium. Obsidian you have to manually theme, the rest is just DE stuff that other distros also automatically theme. There's just nothing about Omarchy that makes it special or "good taste", in the sense that something like Regolith[0] is special. Or NixOS or uBlue. I'll say again, Omarchy only got attention because of its creator, and now it is draining away funding from other Linux DE stuff. Bad taste. [0]https://regolith-desktop.com/ https://regolith-desktop.com/
    - Kon5ole 6d ago
      I messed upp the list, didn't mean to imply that it can theme any commercial app. It was a separate point - Omarchy lets you install commercial apps as easily as any other app. Including things like Spotify, Claude Code, Codex, steam and even Windows itself (as a VM). All from the same menu and mechanisms. That's just undeniably useful. Also, Omarchy does theme not only Chromium, but VS Code for example, and several other "blessed" apps. I get the impression that you haven't actually tried it? Regolith is similar to Omarchy in many ways but is an older initiative that hasn't gotten as far despite having had more time. When I look up how to install apps in Regolith it says "use debian package tools" (sad trombone). That's clearly worse than Omarchy. You can decide that Regolith isn't gaining traction because it's not made by a techbro mascot if you wish but I think the explanation is easy - Omarchy is clearly better. I'm not saying it being by DHH hurts of course, but IMO it's less about him being connected than it is about his enthusiasm and energy. If being well connected was all it takes we'd all be living in the metaverse now. :) There has to be substance. It'd be fun to see if there are other initiatives that are as polished as Omarchy - the latest Omarchy demo is here[1], if anyone has links to similar demos of other setups it'd be fun to compare. AFAIK Omarchy is the slickest one around so far but I hope open-minded devs will take inspiration and start competing instead of just dismissing. [1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F7fe9pa8OeE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F7fe9pa8OeE

microtonal 6d ago

I didn't say anything about usefulness. Even a bunch of dotfiles can be useful, Oh My Zsh and others were very popular after all. The thing I complain about are that these companies that build their fortunes partially on open source benefitted a lot from systematically underfunded developers. But they only make small contributions to those projects (if at all). But if their millionaire buddy shows up, they all stand in line to donate millions. I am not sure what it is. I guess partially they want to associate with the popularity of Omarchy, partially they are doing a favor to another rich techbro, some may agree with DHH's politics to 'drive woke out of open source'. But it still sucks that they don't give that many millions to Debian/OpenSSL/LibreSSL/Rust/pick your other favorite infrastructure project that they highly depend on to make their money.

jorvi 6d ago

I wouldn't exactly call Omarchy "good taste". Not that it's terrible, but pretty much the only reason it caught attention is because of the creator.

Kon5ole 6d ago
Surely you are only thinking of the visuals then? I can certainly understand that, but the visuals are not what I mean. Things like: - Sweating that the install should take a minute. - Ensuring that when you change themes, most relevant apps also change themes. - Including popular commercial apps with 0 friction. - Consistent design in menus, features and default apps. - Clear explanations of how everything works, including video demos. All of that is good taste, and would be good taste even if the visuals were "My little pony" or "Lovecraftian horror" instead of 80s retro. ;-)
- Kon5ole 6d ago
  ...Things like not effing up the formatting of a list... :D
- jorvi 6d ago
  The only "commercial app" it themes automatically is Chromium. Obsidian you have to manually theme, the rest is just DE stuff that other distros also automatically theme. There's just nothing about Omarchy that makes it special or "good taste", in the sense that something like Regolith[0] is special. Or NixOS or uBlue. I'll say again, Omarchy only got attention because of its creator, and now it is draining away funding from other Linux DE stuff. Bad taste. [0]https://regolith-desktop.com/ https://regolith-desktop.com/
  - Kon5ole 6d ago
    I messed upp the list, didn't mean to imply that it can theme any commercial app. It was a separate point - Omarchy lets you install commercial apps as easily as any other app. Including things like Spotify, Claude Code, Codex, steam and even Windows itself (as a VM). All from the same menu and mechanisms. That's just undeniably useful. Also, Omarchy does theme not only Chromium, but VS Code for example, and several other "blessed" apps. I get the impression that you haven't actually tried it? Regolith is similar to Omarchy in many ways but is an older initiative that hasn't gotten as far despite having had more time. When I look up how to install apps in Regolith it says "use debian package tools" (sad trombone). That's clearly worse than Omarchy. You can decide that Regolith isn't gaining traction because it's not made by a techbro mascot if you wish but I think the explanation is easy - Omarchy is clearly better. I'm not saying it being by DHH hurts of course, but IMO it's less about him being connected than it is about his enthusiasm and energy. If being well connected was all it takes we'd all be living in the metaverse now. :) There has to be substance. It'd be fun to see if there are other initiatives that are as polished as Omarchy - the latest Omarchy demo is here[1], if anyone has links to similar demos of other setups it'd be fun to compare. AFAIK Omarchy is the slickest one around so far but I hope open-minded devs will take inspiration and start competing instead of just dismissing. [1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F7fe9pa8OeE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F7fe9pa8OeE