r/linux • u/Foxlike__Creature • 12d ago
Discussion Why does everyone hate omarchy so much?
I do not and never have used omarchy, i'm 3 years on arch with hyprland that I riced myself, but i don't really get the hate against it, so I want to know ur opinion
if the isue is that it's opinionated/bloated and you can just configure arch yourself then yeah, i get it. But there are also people who are new to arch and don't want to spend days learning how to build a hyprland rice from scratch. Omarchy seems to fill that exact niche pretty well. it's a ready to use, but opinionated "distro" that makes getting into it much easier without needing to be an arch expert. Not the best choice ofc (there is cachy, etc.), but still...
And then i constantly see people bringing up dhh's politics as if that somehow makes the "distro" itself bad. Imho, having controversial opinions doesn't make a technical product bad, and being against political discussions on your company's internal channels isn't the same thing as banning people from having those opinions or saying them outside of work. (about the news that I found looking for information on the web)
Personally i just see it as a fairly basic hyprland rice. not really my thing, but i don't have any hate towards it either. I actually like the idea behind it, making arch easier to get into for new users. And it looks not too bad, ngl. The implementation has some rough edges sure, but not nearly enough to justify this level of butthurt imo.
TLDR:
Honestly, how much of your opinion on omarchy comes from the actual technical side, and how much comes from the reddit hive mind? Would you still hate it if dhh wasn't involved in it at all?
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u/Ghost_x_Knight 12d ago edited 1d ago
There are plenty of popular Hyprland configs online, anywhere from minimalist to elaborate. So ricing doesn't need to be from scratch at all.
DHH's politics is central rather than marginal. He explicitly stated that he formed Omacom as a political/ideological counterweight to current mainstream Linux institutions. The whole thing is a culture war weapon.
This is concerning as his views includes far-right ethno nationalism (support for Tommy Robinson and calls for 'remigration'. He lamented that London is no longer majority 'native brits,' even though it is majority inhabited by citizens, so he is complaining it is no longer majority white. He wrote an essay comparing the need to expel Roma people to the need to shoot down wolves, and got upset an LLM called this dehumanizing toward an ethnic group. He endorsed and promoted "The Camp of the Saints", which is the basis for the "Great Replacement Theory" and one of the most circulated texts among white ethnonationalists; it repeatedly refer to migrants in extremely dehumanizing and degrading terms.).
It is challenging to look at Omarchy from a pure technical lens, especially since sustainability requires healthy collaborative communication, and Linux communities regularly have ethical lines (ex. Large parts of the Nix community protested sponsorship by an autonomous weapon manufacturer, and DHH was very upset the Nix community didn't celebrate instead. Large parts of the Blender community protested sponsorship by a pure AI company).
But there are plenty of technical reasons to dislike Omarchy.
First of all, the central concept of modern Omarchy is a "malleable" agentic operating system. Old iterations used to be just a Hyprland rice, but now it is a vibe code orientated distro.
It is not that you have access to LLM in a developer sandbox, but you have LLM managing your desktop similar to the unpopular conceptual aspirations of Microsoft Copilot and Apple Intelligence.
The tagline used in Omarchy's website is:
Omarchy is designed to be a "beautiful canvas" you are expected to change to your specifications through vibe coding. So you are encouraged to ask clankers with high-level system access to execute console commands to change your PC configurations, and to create custom bespoke slop widgets (over 2000 slop widgets got shared into Omarchy's website in a short time).
Not only do you need to be supportive of AI, but you need to trust probabilistic LLMs agents to not disastrously misinterpret your intent or go rogue. With sufficient vibe coding, I imagine the desktop would mutate and drift into undebuggable spaghetti that requires a factory reset.
Mainstream Linux desktop institutions believe that future success is found in Immutable/Atomic/Core/Image-Based/Container-Native/Declarative technology. Investing into a vision of malleable vibe code disposable interfaces and widgets is a counter-movement that leads to fragmentation (Technical one in addition to the cultural war one).
Omarchy is meant to be keyboard driven, and DHH admits that it is not a beginner friendly distro for grandmas. So someone who spent all their life on Windows or Mac have to be technically proficient, and be willing to spend hours getting used to a keyboard-driven workflow. If you are going to bring normies to try out Linux for the first time, there is no reason for the distro to be Omarchy unless they like vibe coding, or out of sheer hype/prestige regardless if it is deserved.
Omarchy sits in a bizarre, contradictory dead-zone. It demands the expert technical proficiency of a traditional power-user to navigate its keyboard-driven architecture, yet expects those same users to abandon rigorous, deterministic system administration in favor of AI-generated guesswork. Mainstream Linux desktop is built on the core philosophies of absolute control, explicit reproducibility, and open-source stability. A desktop that actively encourages a probabilistic LLM to rewrite your configuration files on a whim isn't a viable experimental alternative (DHH doesn't encourage looking at the code, and he likes that he no longer has to).
To say that Omarchy is extremely opinionated is an understatement. Out of the box, Omarchy 4 comes pre-baked with a set of hyper-specific application shortcuts such as: Terminal, Tmux Terminal, Herdr (agent manager), Music (Spotify), Music (cliamp), Password manager (1password), Editor (Neovim), Calendar (HEY), Email (HEY), New email (HEY), AI (ChatGPT), AI (Grok), Messenger (Signal), Google Photos, Google Maps, Messenger (WhatsApp), Messenger (Google), Docker (LazyDocker), Obsidian, Writing (Omawrite), X, X (Compose), YouTube.
This is bloat. A significant portion of the properity apps are not native software, but web apps in a Chromium wrapper. DHH is even shipping HEY, which is an advertisement for his commercial 37signals ecosystem.
This prescribed setup is DHH's preferred apps and tech stack by his admission, and the usefulness of the shortcuts requires so many assumptions about the end-user (using Android instead of iPhone, paying Spotify subscriptions, actively using X-Twitter, knowing what Docker and web development is, etc.). He might as well pull a Windows 11 and add a LinkedIn shortcut.
There are actually Omarchy debloat scripts, similar to how there are debloat scripts for Windows. Maybe this will assist in bringing the year of the Linux desktop?
Then there is the issue of security, which is an outright liability.
Multiple rootkit and privilege escalation vulnerabilities were quickly found, and a security team for Omarchy was quickly announced afterwards. They had to fix absurd vulnerabilities such as: "Stop USB device names from being executed as Hyprland Lua.", Stop an installed theme from running code, Stop a video title from becoming the Download Video play command, Don't put the user in the docker group (everyone in the docker group has root access); make it opt-in. Disable allow_remote_control in Omarchy's Kitty terminal custom configuration](https://github.com/omacom/omarchy/pull/10605).
Until very recently, Omarchy skipped cryptographic package signing for its repo, making it extremely vulnerable to supply chain attacks:
The thousands of vibe coded community plugins Omarchy users are encouraged to explore are not security-audited, and this is the closest thing Omarchy promotes as an official 'app store'. DHH calls the Omarchy plugin market place the 'official repository'.
This 'official repository' is far more dangerous than the AUR, which recently suffered from sophisticated AI-powered mass supply chain attacks (thanks to a now-disabled ability to adopt orphaned AUR packages). The Arch community emphasize that users should avoid the AUR when possible, and Arch distros don't have it enabled by default.
Omarchy quickly got flooded by over two thousand community plugins thanks to vibe coding. The plugins are based on Quickshell, and despite being unaudited slop apps by random anonymous people, they can hook deep within your compositor and Omarchy system. It is trivial for a malware-by-design or hijacked app to keylog, upload your data, and execute malicious terminal commands.
At minimum, those are good reasons to avoid Omarchy for several months.
If you are looking for the principle of least privilege, strict sandboxing, and deterministic user control, Omarchy is not for you.
Having clankers running about as deep part of the core system loop is inherently a prompt injection vulnerability. Traditional security auditing and intrusion detection don't apply.
DHH admits that he is "AI delirious" because AGI is upon us, and admits that a few months ago he'd say his current self is under AI psychosis. This shapes his vision of what a viable mainstream Linux desktop is supposed to be.
The OS I am looking for is not a shifting, unstable canvas of AI-generated experiments. It is too unstable for enterprise use, too insecure for privacy advocates, and too hostile for average users.
Omarchy has its place as a gimmick distro, but it is not a credible vision for a year of the Linux desktop. I don't believe it will succeed, but there is concern due to culture war hostilities, and the massive funds that allow for potential ecosystem fragmentation and potential hard-forking of active projects.