[poly2it]

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]

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.

[kuschku]

Search for "global shortcuts" in your start menu. KDE Plasma has a global shortcuts settings page where you can create shortcuts to run any program, command, open any page you like etc.

https://userbase.kde.org/Tutorials/hotkeys

[queenkjuul]

On cinnamon setting up a shortcut like that is about three mouse clicks

[epistasis]

Ah, but which three clocks? That's the rub.

LLMs make customization much easier, but the impetus has not yet been there for me.

[thewebguyd]

> almost suspicious how quickly it has risen to prominence.

I don't think its suspicious at all. I think it filled a long standing need for some subset of current and on-the-fence Linux users of needing and wanting a really opinionated, well put together set of defaults that you don't really get with a vanilla OOTB experience on most distros.

The popularity of the various dotfiles repos proves that enough, Omarchy just turns that into an automated set up script on top of arch while regular dotfiles repos assume you already know how to, or care enough, to figure out how to install hyprland and all the associated utilities (waybar, launcher menu, wallpaper handling, etc).

Plus, generally, most people grew up using either Windows or macOS which are also very opinionated and I'd argue most users don't actually want to form their own workflows, they'd rather have something already put together to adapt into.

Myself included. Albeit I'm a macOS user, but I genuinely don't really have opinions unless something is seriously annoying, I'll change it, but otherwise I'd much prefer a set of good defaults and I'll just learn how to use them. Most of my work isn't using the operating system itself anyway, it's done within software running on it and that's where I'd rather focus my time.

[jasonvorhe]

There's nothing suspicious about it, imho. macOS has been degrading in quality, Mac users are losing more and more control of the system while non-Mac laptops are getting better (Framework, Starlabs, System76, etc) and Windows is in total decay (dumping ads into the OS, forced Microsoft account, privacy nightmares, Microsoft security track record), all perfectly explaining the interest in more open alternatives. Omarchy just benefitted from the sponsoring company being already successful, the founders being well connected and experienced in marketing product launches.

I wish people were as critical in more relevant areas.

[hokumguru]

DHH has an enormous following and is extremely influential. I don’t think it’s surprising that it gained popularity so quickly. He’s really good at shamelessly plugging his work (as well I hope he should be).

But yeah, I think the vast majority of people using it are first timers to Linux in general. It attracts these people because it doesn’t ask too much of them. I don’t know why anybody would complain about growing the ecosystem. More people using Linux is always a good thing for the community.

[poly2it]

I'm not negative to the growth of Linux. However, we should ask ourselves what it means that there has apparently been such a gap in the market of Linux distributions that this project has been able to fill it so swiftly, and why established distributions with steadier technical communities were not able to capture it already.

[api]

Does it allow newbies to install it and have something like the Apple “it just works” experience?

If so then that’s your answer. Why isn’t this obvious?

Giving someone a box of parts vs an assembled product is a huge difference. Yes there are some who prefer the box of parts, but they’re an extreme minority.

[Vaslo]

So to be clear - distros used by experienced Linux users are better than distros preferred by non-experienced?

You can easily change most things you don’t like in Omarchy.

[soupbowl]

"It is understandable to be frustrated at a project without technical merit gaining so much traction"

Not really, seems kinda weird to be frustrated by an opensource project that people have decided to build a community around.

When POPos was just an Ubuntu fork with a few gnome extensions and a better nvidia installer, I guess you were upset it got traction also? Or is their enhanced nvidia bash script enough of technical merit to appease your righteous stance.

I wonder how you feel about a sponsored Kubuntu conference, you must look at the idea with disgust.

[poly2it]

To the extent that sticking to defaults become technical apathy, yes, that can be troublesome for Linux as a whole. If the Linux user base was to grow considerably via Omarchy, there would be a higher support burden for the specific technologies and hacks it'd use. Consider Ubuntu as an analogy. It is popular because it is used widely, not because it is innovative or moves Linux technology forward (compared to e.g. NixOS).

> I wonder how you feel about a sponsored Kubuntu conference

Oddly specific? If you were honestly interested in a technical discussion then yes, in short, I wouldn't consider Kubuntu the pinnacle of the Linux-human interface. A sponsored conference? I have no idea why that is relevant or why you brought it up in such a stingy manner.

Again, what I find interesting in these low-barrier distributions, be it Omarchy or otherwise, is the implicit burden on the rest of the Linux ecosystem. The original author of the article could have expanded on Omarchy in this relation rather than just its technical shortcomings.