[hokumguru]

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.

[cauch]

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]

It's a way to distribute Linux (the kernel) and userland packages in a way you can install. Therefore it's a Linux distribution.

[cauch]

As I've said, I think the discussion about the "real definition of a distribution" is not interesting. It's like idiots who think they are smart when they say "tomato are technically a fruit".

What I'm interested in, is obtaining a system that allows me to run Linux and userland reliably and trust-worthily. I don't know about you, but I don't compile all my software one by one myself after checking the source code. So, I prefer not relying on people who don't display much understanding on how to distribute a system reliably and trust-worthily. If someone is "just" making their own "flavor" of desktop and distribute it and call it "a distribution" without even noticing that such a package is lacking a lot of things that traditional distributions are doing, these people are just not mature enough to be trusted to do a good job. (and of course, being a "traditional distributions" is not "good enough", it is a necessary but not sufficient condition)

Don't get me wrong, they can distribute their flavor as much as they want, I'm happy with that. But if they act as if their stuff is the same as what is traditionally called "linux distribution" or if they are not smart (or honest) enough to mention that it's different, then 1) they are not mature enough, 2) it is worth informing newcomers or naive people about that.

It's a bit like a company that build cars, and then you have a guy that buy some of these cars, change one or two things on the dashboard and paint the car in a different color, and call themselves a car manufacturer. Nothing wrong with selling customised cars, but it is dangerous to act as if the guy is a proper manufacturer when they don't have either the capacity, the knowledge or the expertise to provide a good reliable car.

[kuschku]

Many distros have meta-packages, which install a specific desktop and some good defaults.

Omarchy could have just been two packages, omarchy-defaults (a package containing the default configs) and omarchy-base (a metapackage depending on all the packages omarchy would want to install by default).

Then you could just use a regular arch setup, and set it to install omarchy-base, and you'd get the same end result, but you could also sidegrade between regular arch and the omarchy configs.

See e.g. https://wiki.debian.org/DebianDesktop/Tasks

[cwillu]

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.