[wrren]

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]

>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]

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.

[Barrin92]

>My question for people is whether their objection has to do with Omarchy itself or with the person or people behind it

both because as I said there's no distinction with a project like this, and I'll give you a technical example for this. The manual which I briefly read through says this on the monitor configuration:

"Omarchy assumes you're running on a 2x-capable retina-class display by default[...] It's what you'd want to run on a 27" 5K Apple Studio Display [...] But if you're not running a display with a PPI of 218 or above, you'll want to change the monitor settings ..."

then it proceeds to tell you what config files to edit by hand. Monitors with that PPI have a market share of <2%. This isn't a system for people who want things out of the box, it's his personal dotfiles that people use because they know his name. It's like buying Jordan sneakers and thinking they'll make you great at basketball, it's an influencer product. How many people, given that the appeal is to not read anything, have consulted that part of the manual? If this was a nobody's repo it'd have 10 stars and people would ask why the fonts look like crap.

If you want stuff working out of the box for non-technical people give them an Ubuntu LTS release, not window managers on release version 0.x. maintained by people in a discord

[least]

> If you want stuff working out of the box for non-technical people give them an Ubuntu LTS release, not window managers on release version 0.x. maintained by people in a discord

"Technical people" covers a vast variety of people. I can and have configured many different non-mainstream WMs and implemented different bars, and found workarounds to different issues that arise from them, both in wayland and X11. A person can be just as technical as I am and still have no interest nor desire to set that all up, but still want to explore or use the paradigm shift that something like a tiling or scrolling WM offer.

The problem is that these paradigms people find appealing aren't decoupled. You can't just drop it in to your current desktop because the window management is so tightly coupled to the compositor. You can try things like PaperWM, of course, but you don't really get to experience Niri unless you install it, and then figure out how to handle everything else you need in a way that you'd want.

If Omarchy used GNOME or Plasma, there's zero chance it'd have taken off in the same way it has. Yes, it is definitely a case of its virality being tied to an influencer, but it isn't ultimately why someone would stick with it. It gets rid of a lot of the gatekeeping that exists. Anyone that can install a linux distro can install Omarchy and get a fully functional system. That is something we need more of, not less.

[TiredOfLife]

Monitors with that PPI have a market share of >98% among people this is targeting. The Apple using crowd.

[kokada]

Would like to know where are you getting this information. I don't know a single person that has a >200PPI monitor, and most of them are Mac users and also programmers.

[least]

If they have a mac laptop or iMac they have a >200 PPI monitor. If you have a higher end PC laptop, a lot of them go well past that.

If you're only talking about desktop displays, then I 100% agree that almost no one has them because until very recently, hardly any have existed because the only people who cared about it are people using MacOS. But given the increased number of 5k monitors with high refresh and gaming features shown off at CES and expected to hit the market this year, on top of a smattering of productivity-oriented displays with high PPI coming out in the past year, this could likely change.

I'd say it's something that benefits Windows and Linux because fractional scaling still isn't perfect on either OS. But Windows, frankly, does scaling for desktop in a much more pragmatic and (for most people) better way than MacOS, so having to set your 4k 27 inch monitor to 150% scaling isn't a big deal. Things still look relatively sharp. On MacOS, not so much.

[anon7000]

CachyOS (an Arch distro) has done something kid of like this, where it bundles eg a default setup for hyprland and several other desktop environments. It’s not perfect, but I like their model a lot. I mean it’s very Arch to be able to choose whatever you want, but nice to have some opinionated defaults.

[TiredOfLife]

CachyOS is not a distro. It's just an opinionated Arch spin

[least]

What makes one a distro and one a spin, flavor, or other made up branding by one of the larger linux vendors?

It's arbitrary. They're all linux distributions delivering distinct OS experiences. The only reason we call one a 'flavor' or 'spin' is because Red Hat and Ubuntu wanted to maintain a core identity with its product line.

[JCattheATM]

> I think it does kind of have to be a “distro” because the appeal is that you don’t maintain the scripts yourself.

It's not a distro because you could overwrite everything by downloading someone else's dotfiles in a few minutes. It's purely just a set of configs.

[least]

It would still require install scripts to get from a fresh Arch install to Omarchy. And then those scripts would also be adding scripts that aren't really necessary for any single person's dotfiles but that’s not really the point.

The difference is there is an implicit contract. Omarchy is maintained as a complete system. You can install it from an ISO, update it like a distribution, and expect someone to care about whether the pieces work together. hyprland is a minimal compositor and you have to figure out how to put together the other pieces of a shell to get a complete experience. If you're doing that piecemeal, you have to maintain and update those on your own. Changes to each piece that break something has to be addressed individually. With Omarchy, that is maintained by someone else and the downstream user just runs an update to omarchy. It compiles a group of disparate packages and makes something cohesive enough to not require jumping into configuration files to use.

That is different from downloading someone’s dotfiles. A dotfiles repo is usually written for one person’s machine and workflow. Omarchy may have started from DHH's dots, but it is structured as something other people are meant to install, update, override, and live in. It separates Omarchy’s defaults from user overrides [1].

I'm not sure what exactly is required for something to be considered a 'distro' but omarchy definitely feels more like one than not, albeit a relatively thin distro based on Arch.

[1] https://learn.omacom.io/2/the-omarchy-manual/65/dotfiles

[JCattheATM]

> It would still require install scripts to get from a fresh Arch install to Omarchy.

If it's really just primarily dotfiles, those 'install scripts' are just going to be a few cp and maybe tar commands.

> Omarchy is maintained as a complete system. You can install it from an ISO, update it like a distribution, and expect someone to care about whether the pieces work together.

Not entirely though, because they defer so much control and judgement to the actual distro they are layering over.

I guess it's semantics. I guess if you consider Kubuntu a different distro from Ubuntu then so too would Omarchy be a distinct Distro.

[voidnap]

True! I love it when I buy a computer pre-installed with windows and it has a bunch of extra software bundled in like norton antivirus, dropbox, and opera. Plus the OEM makes money and I get a bunch of free apps. It's a win win. I hope the author of omarchy gets sponsor money for including nordvpn, spotify, and 1password. I love seeing linux become more conventionally attractive and steer in the direction of windows and macos because they're popular so linux will be more popular. Everything should be for everyone.

[GlitchRider47]

I know you're being facetious but everything you are saying is kind of the point about Omarchy. The "oma" comes from "omakase" or something like that. The point of it's creation was to give devs at 37Signals a streamlined onboarding process. That is why it includes apps thst the comapny uses internally. The OSS nature of it enables people to fork it and remove the bloat, which is exactly what people have already done.

[dtj1123]

Could you please confirm that this is satire

[dolmen]

No, don't.

[pseudalopex]

What trends were making Linux harder to adopt or less culturally relevant?

[kokada]

The author of the blog post makes valid criticisms, I remember when Ubuntu had a shortcut for Amazon in the default desktop installation because they had a sponsorship with Amazon and people rightfully criticized the distro for it. The author is doing the same for DHH promoting things like Grok/Hey/X. Also I am sure if any distro started shipping things like NordVPN in the default installation people would complain.

> and _why_ does it have a conference, sponsors, and merchandise? especially when longstanding distros like Debian have struggled with funding and sponsorship for decades?

I agree with the author that this is the thing that mostly gets me about Omarchy: yes, it is fine for you to use Omarchy, but in the end this is just a collection of dotfiles from DHH. We should be investing this money in some other distro that is actually doing some actual work (like packaging programs, maintaining infrastructure, etc.), instead of a hobby project from a millionaire.

[hkpack]

> then there has to be something sinister afoot.

Not sinister, but just a simple strategy of a business to increase sales of his products (such as hey.com) as well as pushing his personal preferences (grok) to younger audience masquerading as being done for public good.

It is just repulsive for people who see through this. But I think it is an OK business strategy which may be somewhat successful.

Values of DHH and his businesses on one side and Linux community on the other are not very well aligned, so it will inevitably cause these kind of tensions.

But if the goal is to target younger people who are not part of Linux community yet, then it may work, and that's the play here.

[throwawaypath]

>Not sinister, but just a simple strategy of a business to increase sales of his products (such as hey.com) as well as pushing his personal preferences (grok) to younger audience masquerading as being done for public good.

He has said multiple times Omarchy is his distro he designed for himself with his personal defaults. He's not masquerading anything, and what he's doing is being done for the public good, he's sharing his creation open and freely. He even documents how you can change those defaults to better fit you.

>Values of DHH and his businesses on one side and Linux community on the other are not very well aligned, so it will inevitably cause these kind of tensions.

You speak for yourself and possibly a small group of loud terminally online people. You do not speak for "the Linux community" as a whole. Omarchy users part of the Linux community. You do not get to define the community's values.