[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.

[kokada]

> If they have a mac laptop or iMac they have a >200 PPI monitor.

Almost no-one is running Linux in a MacBook or iMac though.

Even Omarchy itself only supports Intel Macs: https://learn.omacom.io/2/the-omarchy-manual/97/mac-support. So the point is moot.

[least]

They don't need to. A lot of PC laptops feature high PPI displays. If you're using a moderately modern laptop, it's probably a high PPI display. A 14 inch laptop with a 1080p display is already at close to 160PPI. That's an option on a T480, a laptop from 2018. A P14S has an option for a 14 inch, 2880x1800 display, or 240+ PPI! The Dell Pro 14 has both an option for 1080p (~160PPI) and 2560x1600 (~215PPI). A 16 inch display with the same 2560x1600 resolution is close to 190PPI. Intel Macbooks Pro have had retina displays since 2012.

It's neither a novelty nor a Mac-only feature these days. A huge portion of the pc laptop market has high PPI displays and it's becoming increasingly rare to see anything that'd comfortably display at 1x scaling.

[kokada]

> A 14 inch laptop with a 1080p display is already at close to 160PPI.

I have one of those, this kinda of screen is uncomfortable at 2x scale (everything gets too big), so I generally set up to 1.25x or 1.5x. This is not what is being set by default by Omarchy though.

> A huge portion of the pc laptop market has high PPI displays and it's becoming increasingly rare to see anything that'd comfortably display at 1x scaling.

That is true, but you're moving the goal posts. This thread was talking about the 2x scale set by Omarchy by default, that is really only good if you have 200+ DPI.

This is still the minority of users even nowadays, and definitely not "98% of the user base" of the distro.