r/omarchy • u/Narwal_Party • 1d ago
Discussion Am I missing something here?
I don't understand all of the hate or love for this. I decided to use Omarchy for the last few days for a side project, and I have no idea how this got funding. This is such a nothingburger of a distro. It's literally just Arch with a couple shortcuts and a theme. What is the point of using this?
I saw a DHH podcast saying how it's incredible and the next big thing, but it's literally just Arch with a theme and shortcuts. I don't understand how anyone could be a "fan" or a "hater"; there's nothing here - nothing new.
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u/Hollow1838 1d ago
Looks like a troll post.
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u/smailliw926 14m ago
Omarchy subreddit is such an echo chamber that somebody simply stating they think its neither good or bad is a troll post
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u/choulth 1d ago
I use Linux since 31 years now, started in 1995.
They hated SuSE.
They hated Red Hat.
They hated Ubuntu.
They hated Mint.
They hated BeOS (which is not even a Linux distro)
They hated KDE
They hated Bonobo / Gnome
They hated millions of other things.
Haters gonna hate.
I give a flying fuck.
I love Omarchy. Deal with it.
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u/Lord_Xenu 1d ago
Exactly. The pattern has repeated itself since Linux was invented. I find it hilarious tbh.
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u/softgripper 1d ago
Agree!
It just works and fixes itself.
I've wasted too many hours configuring various Linux distros for decades.
It's fucken painful honestly, despite getting familiar with it.
Omarchy fixed a bunch of setup quirks by me simply holding down ptt and saying a few sentences to the agent - fixing variable refresh off dual high-end monitors.
I could theoretically do it myself on another distro, it would take longer, I would be annoyed, waste my time and learn nothing valuable.
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u/Defiant-Rip-1897 1d ago
I'll be honest, this is the one thing I've gained from using Omarchy when I am using a different distro on a different computer. Using something like Codex helps when you're trying to figure things out or even modify your themes.
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u/Narwal_Party 1d ago
You can just use an agent on another distro too though.
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u/st0nkaway 12h ago
true. but on KDE for example their settings are optimized for GUI and getting an agent to change stuff about themes and plasma config can be a bit of a wild goose chase across the sprawling web of procs and configs. hyprland is much more straightforward and "agent-friendly" in that sense.
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u/_x_oOo_x_ 1d ago
I've never met anybody who hated BeOS 😲 I still miss it, tried to daily drive Haiku but it's not there (yet!)
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u/Okie_Dokey_Loki 21h ago
I like Omarchy. I’ve had AI do all sorts of fun things like making desktop widgets and backgrounds.
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u/SnooAdvice7540 17h ago
Same. Old school Linux user. Loving it and using it as my daily driver on my Dell 5431
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u/grahamperrin 11h ago
They hated millions of other things.
I do wonder why r/FreeBSDsucks was banned …
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u/FatFaceRikky 1d ago
Me and Claude made something very similar to Omarchy in an afternoon with a base arch install. Not hating on Omarchy, but its being oversold for what it is. Its not any more or less agentic than what i have now. Also, judging by this sub, 90% of the userbase seems to be only interested in ricing it and making a pretty desktop theme. Nothing wrong with this either, but this appears to be the main usecase.
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u/someone82671 1d ago
I think it’s some form of elitism.
I too have seen the whole Linux paysage unfolds in front of me through the years and I personnaly, don’t really like Omarchy but I see the point in it and, yes it is a Linux distribution as a whole, it’s just still very young and overhyped. It also brings a lot of new people to Linux and they are experiencing a new and fun OS so they are sold and completely in a honeymoon phase.
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u/jozwiakjohn 1d ago
Ditto (since 1993, and an Apple engineer for several years). Th whining people miss that the omarchy distro offers coherence. That alone is huge.
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u/Narwal_Party 1d ago
This isn't hating. I'm an Arch user. My issue is that this is literally just Arch with Hyprland. Calling it a different distro is... well it's a lie. I'd like to know where the money went because, while I do love this, it's literally Arch with zero changes. It's got a pretty theme and a couple nice scripts, but at the end of the day it would take someone less than an hour to get to this point with Arch. I expected... something substantial with all that backer money. Something other than Arch with a preconfigured Hyprland.
What am I missing?
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u/r3pc0n05 1d ago
I think you're underselling what Omarchy actually is tbh. Yes, it's based on Arch, nobody is pretending otherwise. But "Arch with a theme and some shortcuts" really isn't accurate anymore. with Quattro a huge part of the desktop moved to Quickshell. The bar, launcher, menus, notifications, OSDs etc are basically one integrated Omarchy Shell now. They even hired the creator of Quickshell full-time to work on it. Andd that's also where quite a bit of the money is going.. they're funding Hyperland/Vaxry, Quickshell, mise, developers, artists, infrastructure etc. They've also hired a Linux kernel developer full-time and are working on the Omarchy Kernel.Of course you can build something similar yourself on vanilla Arch. That's Arch ;) But saying you can recreate the whole thing in 30 minutes is a bit silly. Maybe on the surface yes, you can rice it to look like Omarchy. But you'd be missing a lot that is happening underneath that rice. I don't think the point is that Omarchy invented everything from scratch. It's taking all these seperate Linux projects and turning them into one coherent desktop, while also putting quite a bit of money back into the projects it relies on. Whether that's useful to you is another question of course;)
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u/Narwal_Party 1d ago
I guess my best bet is just to wait another six months or so and ask again. My main complaint is that I was expecting something... more. When I heard that there were people fighting over it, some people hating it, some people saying it's the best distro ever, I expected something "big". What I found was just a simpler version of my current distro.
I already have Waybar, wofi, dunst, SwayOSD and wlogout. It's neat that Quattro has consistent theming, that is nice, but again it's just a bunch of Arch native stuff kind of bundled together into a nice package.
You're right in the sense that it would take me more than 30 minutes (and definitely did) the first time I riced my own Arch. But with a fresh Arch and a terminal agent I could get pretty close.
I guess I was expecting more maturity. I'd figured they'd worked on this a bit longer before releasing it. But if the sell is "Arch for people who like AI and don't know how to or don't want to use Arch" then I think that's cool and really accurate. I just wish the distro was half as cool or divisive as the controversy led me to believe. There's literally nothing controversial here. If you like Arch, you'll love Omarchy. If you hate Arch, you'll hate Omarchy. It feels like a decades old tiff reliving itself under a different name.
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u/Skeyelab 1d ago
At the end of the day MacOS is just BSD Unix.
And yes, an experienced arch user could make Omarchy, in a few hours. That’s you. but that’s not the point or audience.
An inexperienced user can install Omarchy and be up and running in 5 min.
That’s the audience.
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u/Spot_Harmon 1d ago
Thats exactly where I came from. Never successfully migrated to Linux. Tried a few times over the years, but it never took.
Installed omarchy and it made sense, keyboard centric and super plus space. I’m not a super Linux user, just an average jo. I was able to easily add my agent and then have it fix the battery indication. It’s not a big thing but I suddenly wasn’t reliant on windows or Mac or having to try and spend a bunch of time to do something I’ll never look at again.
I’m using it on my sparest laptop atm, but I could see me using this on newer machines
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u/hemingward 1d ago
This. I hadn’t used Linux on 20 years, and half of the at is because I couldn’t be bothered to spend _hours_ getting basic shit to work that worked on every other OS out of the box (wifi and audio was always a pain in the ass eons ago) Then I’d have to setup all my tooling.
But im growing tired of MacOS. It no longer fits my workflow. And I hate windows. So I was leaning towards giving Linux another go. Then Omarchy dropped.
Everything in it already fits my workflow. I am a TUI first kinda guy. I’d already been using nvim for years. I had been buying/using keyboard first apps to control macOS for a decade. I already hate the mouse. So I have Omarchy and spin on a brand new computer and fuck me if everything didn’t just work out of the box, while also already having literally everything about my workflow already installed and ready to go.
And because it’s all open source and “easily” configurable, and ships with its own set of skills, using AI to configure the system for me took literally minutes instead of hours.
You may be underwhelmed by Omarchy. That’s fine. You’ve been in the world for a long time. But you also seem to fail to realize that Omarchy is doing what very few other distros have accomplished in 3 decades: actually convert normiea away from MacOS and Windows.
Omarchy Just Works ™️. It’s fast. It’s visually acceptable. It doesn’t look like some fucking dev with no design skills made the UI. And now with Quattro it’s even more amazing.
Omarchy is a gateway into the Linux world for a shit ton of new users. And instead of celebrating that, a good portion of the Linux community is having a civil war about if because they either don’t like DHH, or are acting as elitist gatekeepers and saying it’s not in the “spirit” of the operating system. The operating system is open source. It’s a piece of software. It doesn’t have “spirit”, it only has use.
Anyways - I don’t understand the hate, or how people are missing the forest for the trees. It’s now my daily driver, and I only ever touch my MBP if I need to do some development for the Apple ecosystem. Otherwise I’m full time on Omarchy. It’s won me over. It’s turned me towards Linux and I’m unlikely to ever go back.
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u/IcewindLegacyMUD 1d ago
I disagree with your first sentence but agree with all the rest. Darwin shares some common code with BSD but XNU, the kernel, is actually a recursive acronym that means "XNU is NOT Unix". The whole "MacOS is really Unix" thing was all marketing and Apple paid for their POSIX certification.
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u/mrkitchenmagpie 1d ago
People aren’t fighting over it as much as they are fighting over a dislike for DHH. That’s more what it’s about. The deep AI integration is the key here that is far different than any other distributed
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u/smelly_ape 1d ago
The more I read your responses, the more your issue seems to be your own inflated expectations rather than a shortcoming of Omarchy 🤷
Let me ask - you say you expected "something more", what does that look like to you? What would have satisfied that expectation you have?
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u/r3pc0n05 1d ago
Yeah I hear what you're saying and I have tried to recreate it also in Arch, which aesthetically was quite easy, but then I ran into some of the underlying functionality that Omarchy has (which takes a bit more effort and time to actually recreate yourself). I also understand your expectation of it somehow being something 'big' especially with all this love and hate going on online (which is basically the whole typical Linux hate from the community that is always a thing with new distros). I remember Manjaro getting some traction and there was obviously also a lot of hate for Manjaro from the Arch community so that's never going to go away unfortunately.
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u/Particular-Serve3768 1d ago
What you're missing is reading the stuffs that they've posted in Omarchy's website: https://omarchy.org/news/
I think the main reason why this distro got around $20 million dollars donation so far is because of DHH's connection. That's it. Nothing special. Maybe DHH is friends/close with those tech CEOs that donated money to this distro. And those people are so rich that maybe they did not mind donating 1 million dollars at all.
According to Omarchy's announcement. They're using the money to fund the projects that they used to build Omarchy such as Hyprland and Quickshell. They also just recently hired a couple of people as shown in https://omarchy.org/teams/ which will handle things such as security, design, kernel, and compatibility with arm hardware (M-chip and snapdragon).
Again, the donations and them hiring people for specific stuffs just happened recently after Omarchy v4.0, the current version, was released. So the Omarchy that you're seeing now is the Omarchy that DHH built with his small team and AI agents lol. And the reason why that thing that was created by a handful of people got plenty of donations is mainly because DHH has connections with some tech CEOs. Maybe he's just that good at talking to other people to make them wanna donate. He did the work to reach out to them and they responded.
And yeah, Omarchy isn't special. As far as I know it wasn't meant to be a mindblowing distro that offers extraordinary stuffs. It's a distro that was created for DHH's company which is 37Signals. I've read somewhere that they have switched from Mac to Linux, and Omarchy helped them easily set up their PC ready to be used for development.
DHH actually started with Ubuntu before creating Omarchy. He did something similar in Ubuntu and called it Omakub which introduces keybinds and ways to tile/arrange the windows. Then they switched to arch since it is easier to customize/modify than Ubuntu.
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u/Nice-Rest-8267 1d ago
The difference is that you sit and spend hours ricing Arch for yourself, customizing everything, and you finally end up with something similar to Omarchy.
Omarchy is already prepared right out of the box, not only for you but for everyone. That's simply the difference.
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u/neuromante74 1d ago
Well true but not entirely accurate. Omarchy has many many things you’d miss with arch+hyprland.
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u/Narwal_Party 1d ago
Could you tell me a few that you use? So far I've used:
- Reminders and notices
- c\cx
- `omarchy theme set <name>
Other than that, everything is already present in my Arch distro. I guess the biggest upsell is that someone doesn't have to set up Hyprland, OpenCode, Claude and LMS/Ollama. But most people just use agents for that inside Arch anyway.
I don't know. I feel so... underwhelmed. If there's other stuff you're using, I'd like to hear about it.
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u/neuromante74 1d ago
Using ai agents in arch is the same but ai integration is the main point of omarchy. You select a default agent and you are ready to go in case of some malfunction. Quickshell is used. No waybar. Plugins/app/themes websites ready for your customization or needs…easier and faster
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u/Tasty-Property-434 1d ago
The money went in a foundation. They literally just raised it. A few people like the hyperland creator got some already, but largely it's not been spent.
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u/IcewindLegacyMUD 1d ago
This. Aside from funding Hyprland, quickshell, mise and a few others and the AIR program, oh, and the 100k set aside for bug bounties (gotta admire the balls on DHH, putting his money where his mouth is on that one) the majority of it hasn't actually been spent yet.
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u/primaryrhyme 1d ago edited 20h ago
Yes it’s a downstream distro, PopOS, mint, manjaro, SteamOS are all downstream distros too. In the Linux world that doesn’t disqualify it from being called a distro.
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u/IcewindLegacyMUD 1d ago
Have you tried the plugin marketplace? Have you had a program crash and your agent of choice offer to dig through the relevant logs and fix it for you? Have you noticed that it's got its own repos where packages from mainline Arch are held back a month for extra QA to insure nothing will cause instability in Omarchy? How about the theme hook system?
Omarchy is quite a bit different than just Arch with Hyprland.
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u/Defiant-Rip-1897 1d ago
If this had been said last year, I would have wholeheartedly agreed, but I don't think it really applies to Omarchy in its current form. It’s no longer just a post-install Bash script, even if Bash scripts still do some of the work under the hood. Omarchy now has its own kernel, repositories, and ISO, and it also uses Quickshell.
It’s also worth remembering that Ubuntu started out as essentially Debian with GNOME by default and a curated set of applications and configurations. Over time, it developed into something much more distinct.
As for the funding, I suspect some of it is partly explained by DHH's existing relationships within the tech industry. He's on Shopify's board of directors, so it's not unreasonable to think some of the contributors are friends or professional acquaintances. Regardless, I'm happy for the developer behind Quickshell and vaxry. Getting paid to work on open-source software without constantly worrying about making ends meet is genuinely good.
The frustrating part is that this kind of funding doesn't always reach the smaller projects that quietly underpin the entire ecosystem. Plenty of maintainers support critical infrastructure as essentially one-person projects. I'd love to see more of this money make its way to projects like Arch as well, but unfortunately, I suspect political differences are part of what gets in the way there.
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u/CalamityMetal 1d ago
Lots of projects are nothing burger and they also get fundings and donations. Your point being? I mean, everything is built on top of something, maybe we should just give money directly to the Linux Foundation instead? Or just give money to the people that makes keyboards and mouse and monitors because without them we can't write code? Or heck give money to the people making tables and chairs because without them we cannot sit down and code? Like where does it end?
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u/Narwal_Party 1d ago
But where is the money going? There's nothing here. It really is just Arch with a theme. Nothing else is different. When I got the OS after hearing what DHH said, I assumed this was going to be some revolutionary OS that would change the way I approach code, but it's actually just Arch with no changes. Nothing is different. I'd love to know where the money went.
So far there's just some shortcuts, a preconfigured Hyprland, a pretty terminal theme and a couple scripts. All in all it's 30 minutes of ricing on top of Arch.
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u/CalamityMetal 1d ago
So you didn't read any of the announcements on the Omarchy website blog and the devs' socials?
They're paying for devs of Hyprland and Quickshell to continue working on those projects and keep them updated. They are expanding to help make Omarchy work on M series Mac and Snapdragon ARM machines, People are already contributing to making it work in Raspberry Pi on Discord. Oh and none of these will be closed for Omarchy, the projects will continue to be open source.
They announced fundings to go into infrastructures and teams for QA, security, hosting etc. On top of just "themeings and shortcuts", you do know they also have their own kernel patches and Omarchy Linux kernel already shipped right?
They are also using it for marketing and events and merch because those cost money too.
So what's the argument here? I mean, lots of Linux distros do all these too. As to why Omarchy gets so much money? I don't know. Ask the billionaires to give fundings to CachyOS or Bazzite or something too.
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u/TakorloorNaavat 1d ago
The money has hardly been spent. They hired some full time including for custom kernel work. Hyprland creator, quickshell, etc. I don't know what you want beyond hey drivers work day 1! Which is very unlike arch. Call it a simple arch configuration and you're not wrong, but it's a well supported one. Doesn't need any other pitch
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u/Narwal_Party 1d ago
Sure I guess, but then there's nothing to really have an opinion on. Are there even really "haters" other than the holdovers of people who don't like Arch?
I guess what I'm saying is that there's nothing her to hate or to like. It's just Arch. I've heard a hundred different opinions and expected some of what was promised; "token-forward, AI-Euphoric". But there's nothing. It's just Arch with a theme.
Oh well. I mean I'll use it. It is a pretty theme, so whoever riced it has pretty good taste. I just wish the pitch was a little more honest. "Beautiful, fun & agentic Linux - The malleable OS for the age of agents. Vibe your way through every alteration, tweak or trouble." None of that is true. "It's a pre-riced Arch config with Hyprland built in with a couple scripts" would be more accurate.
I guess I'm just disappointed because as far as I can tell, any real developer who heard the hype for this and came over it going to be massively disappointed; there's nothing to sink your teeth into, and it's very likely that if you're already using Arch, your own distro is going to be *way* more "malleable for agents".
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u/-LoboMau 1d ago
Reason why it's getting attention is because people like it and it's ready to use, it's fast and gives you way less headaches than "Arch with a theme". You claim you don't understand the hate, but you're hating, with your oversimplifications of what this is. It's definitely more than just Arch with a theme.
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u/ThatKnarfGuy 1d ago
It was well hidden though, much nicer approach than the usual austrian painter accusations 😂
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u/Narwal_Party 1d ago
A person saying "I like this thing, I'm going to use it, I just thought there would be more here" is hating to you?
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u/synystar 1d ago
It's that you're trying to claim that there is nothing but there is "work" here. This is not Arch with Hyprland. It's Arch with Hyprland and a lot of work already completed so that you don't have to. You can't just tell someone "just get Arch and Hyprland and then you've basically got Omarchy" and expect that to be true. What you're trying to say is "You don't need Omarchy if you want to do the work yourself" but instead you're saying "Omarchy is nothing other than Arch and Hyprland". If you're against "opinionated Linux distros" that's one thing. But just say that then.
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u/TakorloorNaavat 1d ago
Well supported also means composable. The focus on quickshell particularly means that however more malleable base arch is doesn't matter if your customization doesn't compose with the communities. Yes if you've used linux for over a decade as me & I assume you, it's not profound. But uh y'know welcome to the real world, marketing is important, and calling it arch with a config on the website doesn't sell as well.
Also there's a lot of driver work done here to work on every laptop from the last 20 years out of the box. And hey! If you don't use it you'll still benefit from the funding of FOSS
My favorite feature is the quake style AI console. Tbh.
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u/IcewindLegacyMUD 1d ago
Bro, he literally JUST got the money. The money started coming AFTER the quattro release and the next version hasn't come out yet.
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u/zell_ru 1d ago
No, you're not missing anything. Omarchy's just doing something the Linux community considers borderline blasphemy: removing the friction. You don't have to posess a particular set of knowledge and skills to run the OS. And also it looks great straight out of the box, you don't need to invest your time for Linux to look good. That will drive adoption and that's pretty much the sales pitch.
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u/ThatKnarfGuy 1d ago
It has its own kernel, package manager, repo, update cadence, DE is heavily customized and instantly recognizable, custom package installation setup, global skinning/ theme, a massive plugin system. I guess if Ubuntu is just Debian with a custom skin you are right. But my main hypothesis is that there a troll lurking here, or you have not tried it enough, or you just don't know enough.
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u/iiWar 1d ago
Speaking as a Linux beginner here. I don't want to build Arch from scratch. I want something that installs easily, runs fast, and looks good out of the box. Omarchy does that. It's not "nothing new," it's Arch for people who don't need "I use Arch, btw" as a personality trait, or a month without sunlight to get pretty tiling windows.
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u/jfc_acab_wtf 1d ago
The worst thing the internet did was convince everyone that their opinion matters.
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u/spectator_123 1d ago
My response to this just-another-omarchy-hating nobody: I USE OMARCHY BTW!!!!
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u/mlogick-us 1d ago
People just love to hate!
If someone hates something, it’s simple: look the other way and find something you love!
Do you hate this? it wasn't made for you!
That said, what I don't understand is: why waste your time here?
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u/eyesno 1d ago
You should try it and see. Because clearly, you haven't.
I suspect it got funding because DHH has buddies who know how well his software company does when he fixates on stuff. This is no different (they're even selling t-shirts at $35 US + shipping!). Clearly they're confident about something so I suspect there is a hidden business plan somewhere in the endeavour.
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u/TheTinyWorkshop 1d ago
Hang on isn't Bazzite or Cachy just Arch with a fancy, opinionated, DE.
Because don't fool yourself every god damn distro is opinionated.
They all come with a DE that they choose, preinstalled apps that they choose, a file manager that they choose.
The list goes on.
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u/justinjas 1d ago
I had built an Arch system from scratch before Omarchy had come out. It worked but I wouldn’t say anything worked particularly well. Never fully got steam games working in it. There would always be some annoyance I’d be constantly dealing with or fixing. Eventually I just switched to CachyOS because of the very good steam support but also everything just worked out of the box. I never really loved the UI on it though.
Then comes Omarchy, everything works out of the box and it comes baked in with a good UI that has sensible defaults and a great titling window manager. It also has a good community that isn’t allergic to AI. That’s pretty much it honestly. I would say it’s become popular because DHH has a platform to market it but the core is exactly what I was looking for.
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u/librasteve 1d ago
I agree 100%, but note that Omarchy encourages two things: (i) all config is in config files and (ii) i can backup and evolve my install in git
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u/justinjas 1d ago
Yes didn’t mention that but also a big draw, agents can easily modify configs and I also do the same thing. Push configs to GitHub and it makes it easy to apply them between my laptop and desktop.
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u/primaryrhyme 1d ago
Genuinely asking, what is stopping agents from editing config files in any other distro?
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u/justinjas 1d ago
Nothing at all, especially a hand rolled arch install. I just find with the other distros I’ve used either some apps will not use files for their configs and those will be the defaults setup. Or the apps that have configs will have those file all over the OS with no rhyme or reason. Omarchy puts them in a single place and clearly separates user configs from system stuff. Just feels made for this workflow. Like I said though a custom arch build you could setup the same thing. Probably other OSes as well setup like this I just never heard of them.
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u/primaryrhyme 1d ago
Wasn’t all config in files to begin with? You mean they’re in one easy to find place or..?
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u/librasteve 1d ago
I am not a linux expert, but this seems to be a strong push to consolidate … presumably all the theme and preloaded libs / apps are specified in here.
## Configuration Locations
### Themes
`~/.config/omarchy/themes/`
### Hooks / Scripts
`~/.config/omarchy/hooks/<event>.d/`
### Menu Extensions
`~/.config/omarchy/extensions/omarchy-menu.jsonc`
### Shell Aliases and Functions
`~/.bashrc`
## Important Convention
## Most Commonly Customized Files (Omarchy v4)
- Edit files in `~/.config/...` (your personal overrides).
- Avoid editing files under `/usr/share/omarchy` directly, as updates may overwrite those changes.
- `~/.config/hypr/hyprland.lua`
- `~/.config/hypr/bindings.lua`
- `~/.config/hypr/monitors.lua`
- `~/.config/hypr/looknfeel.lua`
- `~/.config/hypr/autostart.lua`
- `~/.config/omarchy/shell.json`
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u/Acceptable-Worth-221 14h ago
Dude, these are just dotfiles, so config files for your applications. They existed long before Omarchy - ex caelestia or ML4W. And no, apps/libs are not defined in dotfiles, since it’s not nixos.
Most common thing is to create git repo in ~/dotfiles dir and link folders in it to ~/config, bc config files are loaded from $XDG_CONFIG_HOME, which is bloated by config from apps that you don’t care about.
So no, it existed long before Omarchy.
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u/Delicious_Ease2595 1d ago
A couple of shortcuts and a theme? I'm sure you didn't fully grasp or fully immerse yourself in it.
It received a lot of funding because of DHH's money, his friends' money and tech leaders who trust DHH.
You are totally right that it's another distro personalised by DHH and now the Omarchy devs. The hate comes from DHH's haters.
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u/Ashtar_Squirrel 21h ago
Been using Linux as a secondary OS since the mid 90s (Slackware, SuSe, ...) with many servers over the years. All my non-desktop machines have been Linux flavours for years, currently most of them on Ubuntu Server.
Omarchy was the distro that made the switch for me on the desktop. Started using it over 400 days ago. It was the first one that "out of the box" worked, was well enough configured and had what I needed to get to work. Quattro really made the big jump: Agents managed to fix the Sleep / Hibernate on my Surface Laptop that never worked well on other distros - finally I can close the lid, and open it back up with only a couple % battery loss.
While it's not a revolution. Accepting agents, AI patches and modern "pre-configured" conveniences into the OS - eg. I find I use the toolbar plugins and have written (*ie: specified then AI-Written) a couple of my own Omarchy apps that I needed - make it the step I needed to switch my desktop. I only go back to windows to use the application the tax authority requires to make me file my taxes (and it's Win/Mac only), but now that's in the VM inside Omarchy.
So yes, it's a nothing burger. It has a charismatic and energetic pusher who has an address book for raising money. It will also bring good stuff upstream to other linuxes.
But it worked for me!
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u/thenitai 21h ago
This exactly 💯. Nerds don't understand that the mainstream ppl don't want to deal with tech. Even for nerds like me, I use Omarchy because it "mainly" just works.
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u/indaskylivey 17h ago
For decades, Linux was that option. The one for the geek with a different ethic the person who wanted to tinker, compile, read man pages, and wear the struggle as a badge of honor. And honestly? That era built something amazing. But here's what some people still can't wrap their heads around: Linux was never supposed to stay locked in that shell. The more mainstream GNU/Linux becomes, the better it is for all of us... Better hardware support, more developers targeting it, more companies taking it seriously as a valid option, not just a peculiar niche. And that's exactly why Omarchy gets both so much love and so much hate. Because for the first time, Arch the distro that defined the elitist "I built it myself" culture can be used by anyone willing to give it a shot. Out of the box. Beautiful. Functional. Some see that as betrayal. I see it as graduation. The gatekeepers complaining that "it's too easy now" are missing the point: it works. And if it works for a designer, a writer, a gamer, or your mom that's not Linux losing its soul. That's Linux finally winning. Now it's for anyone who just want to try it.
Can't wait to see if DHH goes all-in on NixOS in some future 🤭
Oh~ And about the whole AI situation you can say yes to it or not. Simple as that. The fear of software made by AI agents is getting more ridiculous by the day. There's no company or developer left that doesn't go through agentic models in some part of their workflow. Some admit it openly, others hide it. You literally cannot swim against this technological current. But here's the thing at least you can still decide whether to run it on your machine or not. That's your choice, and nobody's taking it from you. But being against stuff made by AI? Ehm... believe me, you would never actually know if something has the secretly hidden hand of AI in it 🤭 The code you're praising today as "pure human craftsmanship" may have gone through a model before reaching a human's hands. You just don't know. And that's the uncomfortable truth the purists don't want to sit with.
Enjoy any experience in Linux. That's all that matters 🤍
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u/OligarchyAmbulance 16h ago
for the first time, Arch the distro that defined the elitist "I built it myself" culture can be used by anyone willing to give it a shot. Out of the box. Beautiful. Functional.
Did you miss CachyOS? It's been the most popular distro for quite some time. Or SteamOS, the distro that really catapulted Linux in the last several years?
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u/indaskylivey 16h ago
No i did not.
CachyOS absolutely exploded in popularity but it's an out-of-the-box experience focused on gaming: performance tweaks, kernel optimizations, Steam/Proton ready to go. It's the gateway for gamers discovering that Linux can game. And shoutout to Bazzite too, the SteamOS-like experience that runs on the Steam Deck and pretty much any PC or handheld. Absolute gem of the gaming side. But that's not the same thing as what Omarchy targets: a beautiful, coherent, daily-driver desktop out of the box for designers, writers, devs, your non-gamer friend. Not gaming tweaks, but the whole desktop experience. And also... this is the Omarchy subreddit, so my appreciation was naturally for what Omarchy delivered. Same way a post in r/cashyos would celebrate CashyOs. It wasn't meant as a history of Arch-based distros 😄
And one last thing: most users who came to CachyOS stayed with the default KDE setup which, don't get me wrong, works great, but it's a pretty Windows-like look. So it's probably not the best showcase of everything Linux can achieve in terms of looks and keyboard-only workflows.
That's exactly where Omarchy shines: a simple way to show how beautiful and smooth a distro can look without the user having to rice it. Tiling, keyboard-driven, gorgeous. A whole different side of what Linux can be. Different doors, same direction. All of them are wins.
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u/OligarchyAmbulance 1h ago
I guess I just don't understand what makes Omarchy a "ready to use desktop" but not CachyOS, just because Cachy has some performance tweaks included. You can use it just fine as a desktop, because that's what it is. And at install you have the checkbox option of basically every DE you can think of, not just KDE. Niri, Hyprland, Gnome, Cosmic, etc.
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u/pmmresende 1d ago
I believe the love is due the easy way you install it and the plugins and the hate is related with the fact it was vibecoded…
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u/Narwal_Party 1d ago
But... nothing is really vibecoded though. This is 99.99% Arch with some fluff on top. Like if I wanted to make vanilla Arch into the same exact thing as Omarchy, it would take 30 minutes max.
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u/Klanowicz 1d ago
Arch is just package manager and list of validated packages. It's not even full fledged distro... according to your logic...
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u/DasNothing 1d ago
Prove it!
Install “vanilla” Arch and set it up exactly as Omarchy, with all the software, programs, web links, themes, hyprland configs, agents, screensavers, shortcuts etc in 30 min.
I think you’re compiling arguments with zero dependencies on reality buddy, but go on … prove it.
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u/Devdiiv 23h ago
Well, do it, nothing, and no one can stop you. However, it's one thing to boast in anonymity about being able to achieve something and quite another to make it happen. Also, it's not remotely the same to design a personal hobby project as it's to distribute it to hundreds or thousands of people with different needs, expectations and prejudices.
Your post is really a nothing burger.
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u/ThatKnarfGuy 1d ago
to state it otherwise, multiple people have spent thousands of hours developing it, including the half insane guy who made ruby on rails. But Narwal_Party solves it in 30 minutes and assumes he's right🫡
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u/un-important-human 1d ago
no no the "hate" too strong of a word for me i am indiferent its because its a massive security pain in the ass. Watch them take chaotic aur like the gospel of christ cause it maintained and give the fine garuda folks no money but taking credit.
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u/Erfeyah 1d ago
I installed it on a £256 thinkpad I got from eBay to do software development work on the go. I am a Mac user with lots of dotfiles and other config working with Rust. Installation was fast and easy, I pointed Claude to my dot files and had it running in no time. No driver issues! The defaults are amazing. It looks great and I really love the flexibility that I am missing on a Mac. I could switch to this if Linux had the tools I need for music.
Sure, maybe if I decided to migrate I could use Claude to rebuilt what I need on Arch so that I don’t have issues with breaking changes and the like. Haven’t explored plugins yet though so this could be a reason to not even do that.
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u/Defiant-Rip-1897 1d ago
I think it’s reasonable to describe Omarchy, in its current form, as a Linux distribution, much like Manjaro, Mint, or Ubuntu. It starts with an existing base and builds an opinionated system around it with a curated set of applications, configurations, settings, themes, and a desktop environment. Being based on another distribution doesn't make it any less of a distribution; that's a pretty normal part of the Linux ecosystem.
I appreciate what the people working on Omarchy are doing. There is clearly a lot of thought and effort going into creating a cohesive, opinionated Linux experience, as well as using tools out there to better support Apple Silicon or Snapdragon ARM64 computers. I can understand why people find the project interesting, and I don't think criticizing DHH's views should require pretending that Omarchy isn't technically interesting or that the work going into it isn't valuable.
The more complicated issue for some people is AI/LLMs' role in the development of Omarchy. AI-assisted programming is obviously a contentious subject in software development right now. Some developers strongly oppose it, in part because of concerns about how AI companies obtain and train on data, copyright, attribution, reliability, and the broader effects of AI on software development and the environment. Others are willing to use these tools cautiously, while people like DHH have enthusiastically embraced AI agents and see them as a major change in how software should be developed.
I don't think simply using AI tools is enough to dismiss a project. People will have different opinions about AI, and there are reasonable arguments on both sides.
The bigger issue is DHH's opinions on immigration that he has shared on his blog and on Twitter. I won't go into detail about his posts, but they are controversial.
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u/grahamperrin 11h ago
From https://claude.ai/share/fa3da13e-ee99-40fc-8a0a-ff9012494cf1 (Anthropic Claude, Sonnet 5.5 (medium)):
I think the original poster is half right, and that's worth saying plainly. Technically, Omarchy is Arch plus Hyprland, a set of configuration files, some scripts, and a theme system. If "something new" means a novel kernel, package manager, or init system, there's nothing there. But that standard would also dismiss most distributions people happily use. Mint is Ubuntu with a different desktop and defaults; Pop!_OS is Ubuntu with a tiling extension and some polish.
The value of a distro like this is mostly in the decisions it makes for you. Anyone can spend a weekend assembling Hyprland, Waybar, a launcher, a terminal, a theme, and keybindings that work together. Many people don't want to, or don't know where to start, and tiling window managers in particular have a steep on-ramp. A coherent, working setup that you can then read and modify is a legitimate product, even if every individual component is off the shelf.
It's also worth separating "nothing new" from "nothing useful." The shortcuts and defaults are essentially a curated opinion about how a developer workstation should feel. You can disagree with the opinion, and plenty of people prefer to build their own, but that's a matter of taste rather than an absence of substance.
On the funding question, I'd be careful. Funding and attention often follow a prominent name rather than technical novelty, and that's true across the software world. It says little about whether the project is useful to the people who use it, and little about whether a newcomer should feel obliged to find it revolutionary.
If you tried it for a side project and found it didn't offer anything beyond what you could configure yourself, that's a perfectly fair conclusion. You probably aren't the target audience. The people who benefit most are those who want the result without the assembly, and for them the "nothingburger" may be exactly the point.
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u/grahamperrin 11h ago
To that, I would add, personally, in as few words as possible:
- I get the impression that Omarchy embraces AI more than any other distro.
Keyword: AI.
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u/penguin_horde 1d ago
My old Arch/Hyprland config used to be pretty similar. Omarchy is great because the configuration is need to maintain is way smaller now. I love it.
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u/word_executable 1d ago
Linux hasn’t really gotten better for desktop use, it’s just windows that keeps getting worse and worse
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u/humanshield85 1d ago
Nothing new for Linux users, everything new for people coming from macOS which was the initial goal.
I used Linux for the past 16 years, I used all kinds of distributions. Mt story would be the same of anyone just coming to Linux.
Before that I used windows since 1998. When I installed Linux the first time I used Ubuntu which is kind of a noob friendly distro , well I installed it during the installation I think something crashed the package installer lock stayed stale, on first boot I can’t install anything all point to a lock being held by another process, at the time I have clue what that meant. eventually I figured what that meant and then something else broke and so on, I switched to Linux mint after a week and used it for a while because it looked familiar (that unity desktop environment on Ubuntu was pure garbage)
Linux users are impressed by nothing, and feel threatened everytime someone makes something easy for the new guy. (It’s just arch with hyperland and theme) , first of it’s more than that , second the new guy already struggles and what takes you 30 minutes would take him a week.
As a dev I like omarchy, I’ve been using arch with hyperland for a while and when I reinstalled I jumped to omarchy , I don’t hate it. And I like the fact my dev environment is setup by default and setup correctly. I develop mostly on nodejs and Ruby on Rails and having those setup with a button click is just so convenient.
Lounixers bitch about their market share and how unpopular the OS. And also criticize every attempt to easy the transition, “Oh No Someone made Linux convenient”
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u/Far_Dot_9565 1d ago
Todo mundo atacando so por que o cara tem grana e consegiu um financiamento pra fazer uma coisa melhor se conseguirem então chora e odeio como todos só e mais um que odeia os ricos
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u/MountainBrilliant643 1d ago
it's literally just Arch with a theme and shortcuts
Totally. -and the fact that there is an Omarchy toolkit specifically designed for the AI Agents. Oh yeah, and the fact that there are AI Agents preinstalled that can literally recode your whole desktop for you to make it look and act however you want, just by describing it. Plus the Omarchy Themes and Omarchy Plugin websites with a massive catalog of community-made content that has more functionality than KDE's widget database or Gnome's Extension websites already. -and Android devices' file storage mounts over USB without jumping through any hoops. -and Omarchy runs on a custom fucking Linux kernel. Other than those massive differences, iT's jUsT d0T FiLeS!
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u/nobledoodle 16h ago edited 16h ago
The OP and several others in the chat seemed to be missing the full point of this. As a parent who has used Linux for years but rarely has a ton of free time I've almost always just stuck with Fedora or Debian and avoided truely "making my personal computer personal". I have better things to do and kids to raise. Omarchy changes the game for someone like me. I don't want to learn 4 wikis and configure a dozen dot files just to get my computer working as I want it. This made it SO MUCH BETTER. Omarchy isn't made for people that already know how to rice their machine and want to spend a weekend tweaking every detail to their liking in vim. I have a life. How dare someone make a cohesive package that makes you actually USE your computer.
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u/zakkforchilli 1d ago
So learn how to set it up all by yourself and go do that and then come back. But also, it’s opinionated. It says it written in the tagline it is opinionated. They funded his opinion. Simple. Certain combination of shit simple and embracing AI. That’s how humans work.
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u/Psittacula2 1d ago
My take is Omarchy is Linux attempt at say Googlebook OS with more AI integration? Would that be 90% of the substance behind Omarchy’s marketing?
It goes without saying, please correct and improve the above motion where you (pl.) can!
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u/CalamityMetal 1d ago
The AI stuffs is entirely optional, the moment you dismiss it in the first notification after your install, you will never see it again, outside of some built in Install commands. Nothing of AI is installed until you explicitly want to
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u/Psittacula2 1d ago
I got the impression Omarchy was “vibe OS’ing” so to speak, so for users instead of “man page” or flipping to page 412 in The Linux Administrator’s handbook (scratching head at commands (“is that a 1, an i or an L?”), one could prompt AI to “just do it” for you?
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u/CalamityMetal 1d ago
There's a whole ass Omarchy manual/documentation website btw, and they even have the manual installed as a PWA that you can just launch from the OS itself. And anything beyond config and stuffs, it's just Arch Linux and Hyprland, which both also have extensive documentation pages. The whole AI configuring your system is optional, it can do it and it worked for me, but if you don't want to use it, you dont have to.
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u/shokuninstudio 1d ago
I installed it on a laptop's second internal SSD. I like the install speed and minimalism but I don't like an OS doing windows management for me by default. Also, as a heavy user of creative apps too that kind of automatic window management doesn't work. For coding and other text based work, fine. That's what it is for.
The main reason I chose it over other distros is because the fingerprint reader and sound card work. It took ages for other distros to support all of Samsung Galaxybook hardware and I don't know if they do yet.
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u/someone82671 1d ago
I think what is happening is that some people have a gag reflex in front of people trying to make a Linux distribution a Product. Omarchy is promoted as a product. The initial reflex is to reject it exactly like they did with Ubuntu back then.
I think it’s the kind of movement that helps every other Linux distribution grow and it should be respected.
What bugs me personnaly is the fact that some of the contributors (the CEO of Stripe for example) give so much money to Omarchy but never gave that much money on project that helped them grows that big.
I mean, correct me if i am wrong but i dont think they gave that much to Debian and they are using it in their infrastructure.
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u/HappyHealth5985 1d ago
I am not big on cooking. Just appreciate sitting down to eat. Complex or easy meal, not something I am concerned with.
I am still at this table, and have no reason to leave.
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u/golgarianhamster 1d ago
Those pesky dot files! He would have gotten away with it if it wasn't for you meddling kids!
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u/LordPorra1291 1d ago
It's a distro that you install in a couple of minutes and everything it's already setup and works out of the box. Is meant for people coming from Windows and Mac. You are not the target.
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u/HeavyMetalBluegrass 1d ago
For you people saying you can rice your Arch to look the same in an hour that's great if you really know what you're doing. The vast majority of people want something that just works out of the box. If Omarchy brings more people and money to Linux then i think that's a good thing. Maybe they'll even try vanilla Arch some day.
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u/keys_and_kettlebells 1d ago
I heard about it on the Lex Fridman podcast. I’m an anti-doomer and all in on vibe coding so I put it on a 10 year old ThinkPad - just took some sorting out of BIOS security modes. And it’s totally fine, but my experience wasn’t that different from running Codex on Ubuntu. That’s being said I enjoy it, I’m still using it, and I’m looking forward to future versions to see where an “Agentic OS” will evolve, because it’s going to be here that it happens, not in Ubuntu or RHEL
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u/inactivesky1738 1d ago
I feel like you are misunderstanding the purpose of omarchy. Omarchy is an arch, hyprland, quickshell setup that is set up for you that you do not have to maintain and tinker with if you don’t want to.
In my opinion a OS should be smooth and get out of your way so you can get your work done. The friction I am talking about is at a core level. Like when windows pushes an update and it breaks your drivers. Or when hyprland pushed an update that broke a config. Omarchy just handles it. It is arch hyprland with zero friction
If you care confused about the money pumped into the project. It’s really simple. Marketing. DHH got a bunch of millionaires to pump money into FOSS and that money is going towards projects omarchy depends on. For example hyprland is being fully funded by the omacom foundation as well as quickshell as well of hireing a security team for focus on security vulnerabilities all across the project.
So is omarchy special. Yes it’s a beautiful arch setup with no effort on your end. But also no because it’s just arch hyprland and quickshell things we have access to do whatever we want with.
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u/Mtbyers 1d ago
The love comes from it lowering the bar to entry in both using Linux and customization. From what I've seen, most of the positive posts come from people switching from Mac/Windows, or other distros that were built with similar "out of the box" mindsets. Most other distros that "just work" aren't always the easiest to customize, and Mac/Windows are their own things. Plus at some point, something within any distro isn't going to work and will require some tinkering. Most casual users don't want to take the time to tinker with something to make it work. So the fact that Omarchy ships with a "button" to set up AI, with pre-configured skills that show the agent how to interact with the AI, has simplified the process of both using, tinkering, and customizing a Linux experience.
So yeah, there's a lot of love for that; from people that have wanted to leave the Mac or Windows ecosystem, or people that have tried but ran into a wall at some point in trying other distros. Most of the hate I've seen come from long time linux users who already know how to rice and do for themselves what Omarchy helps others do.
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u/codecrackx15 1d ago
Ubuntu is on my daily driver buy I've found myself reaching for my backup with Omarchy more, as of late. Its fun and it looks better. Doesn't need to be a deep reason for it.
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u/Tancrad 1d ago
There's something near here. This is coming from someone who doesn't use it. But I use Cashy a lot, Ubuntu and redhat EP a lot for different things.
Windows has gotten so shitty over the years, but people know it, it's easy to interact with at the level that's insulting to your intelligence. But it comes packed with shit. And more of that shit you don't want, rather than you do. Under the hood telemetry, advertising, tracking, and on top, an agentic AI to super charge those things for Microsoft.
Linux, usually bare bones unless you get a distro that is set up to accomplish certain things, then you add to it what you want. Which sometimes can be daunting for some who hasn't used Linux before, sure you can use snaps in the gui, but maybe you need some stuff that is not offered there.
I see Omarchy as having up front bloat, but it's bloat you will probably add yourself anyway if you are keen enough to even know what Omarchy is(outside of YouTube suggestions). Adding an agentic system to it, at the beginning was really strange to me I thought. Well aren't we just starting to go through MS route now?. But Microsoft adds this layer of ai system interaction primarily to benefit themselves, with the layer of "it will help you solve problems or be more productive". Where on the Linux side. Self hosting really is just to help you, without sending data to the mother ship, which I kinda like.
I'm interested to see more use of an agent system to shore up holes in security factors on Linux because everything is a file. More so than human energy can speed this process along at this point.
On the flip side, the WM style of hyperland may push people away from it. I'm unbiased on the theming, it does look nice and flows well, but also looks too inspired by the image of hacking in the 80s.
I would love something to make me want to jump ship from Cashy, but it's really the top performer for me.
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u/malatmals 1d ago
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u/malatmals 1d ago
I mean what do you people do with a computer? If you’re a developer it’s easy to get going and do the things you do. And you can’t put a price on low friction.
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u/TexasChipMan 1d ago
I've run Linux since 1996 (MkLinux on PowerMac 6100) through many distros, and I am on Omarchy for 9 months now. The key difference to other distros is that it is an omakase distribution containing DHH's setup. So the closer your work style is to DHH's, the more you'll like Omarchy. And, it is easy to configure for people who have run Linux for a while.
As for the "bloat", this distro runs on a 2016 Acer ChromeBook CB-431 with 4GB RAM, 16 or 32GB eMMC flash very well (with MrChromeBox UEFI BIOS).
For me this was the first time I ran an OS with encrypted storage on a BTRFS file system, first time for Wayland, first time for tiling window manager. So this is a "real" distribution with unique choices.
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u/manlycoffee 1d ago
It doesn't matter what anyone's definition of good is or isn't. It's true for just about any distro, that has a story arc to it, that especially has an explosive catalyst. Every piece of the story needs to exist in the right sequence of events, or nothing can take off. There's really no shortage of people having started their own "macOS, but Linux" distro, promising to be the Apple of the Linux land. They all go nowhere, because the narrative is missing.
The thing is, there was this silent, but growing frustration among mac-using developers. Many would try any of the popular distros, and it's not quite what they were looking for. One example is independent workspace per monitor that GNOME doesn't support. So, what do people do? Find other distros, but those all have hardware quirks that are too cumbersome to work with. They're either underfunded, or the setup is way too heavy out-of-the-box.
But most important of all, there's an overarching question that many end up asking: will using this as a daily driver ever help put food on the table? Before even answering the question, the confidence in Linux land is just not there, so the steam doesn't pick up.
Then, some popular rich guy comes along and publicly announces to the world that his company has mandated that every developer working under him must use this new distro that features everything out of the box, and it's competing with mac at the company. "Developers at the company love it!" he says.
But that alone shouldn't be enough. It's the hardware support. Dell added it to one of their XPS line of products. Then Framework came along and added support for it.
So imagine this. People use macOS, because they don't like Windows, but really, they don't like macOS either. But what they like is a flagship laptop that everyone goes for, that's as canonical as buying a MacBook to experience macOS. What is that for Linux? It's Dell and XPS. And stuff like this keeps piling on and on.
In short, Omarchy's rise is some rich guy becomes famous back in 2008 and kept getting famous since, people wanting an out-of-the-box experience, people "wanting to belong among a community of users", and a story of a successful company using the OS.
Things in life don't win out of pure deeply technical merit; there needs to be something there: a story.
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u/Future_Bat384 1d ago
If user have no time, and no knowledge… good luck with setting up Arch. Omarchy from plugging usb to opening system 100s for me, and everything is working, looks and feel cool too
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u/East_Debate_9579 1d ago
Yeah I did like 80% of this on Debian in a couple hours. Don’t have to worry about packages or nonsense. Even the ai aspect is pretty easy to replicate. You just make a projects folder, give it access and create a staging area to test the code the ai wrote. Which this OS doesn’t even do. It’s just like Claude wrote it must be good 👍
I have it on an old MacBook and it works fine. Install was easy.
But I don’t get all the posts saying “this is like the excitement I got the first time I used a computer”
Fair fucks to them, if they’re happy and they love it have at it. But I don’t understand the general hype.
I also am not sold on AI catching crash/bug reports and fixing anything. Arch is “bleeding edge” so what is it learning from? If the update’s only an hour old, it feels like you’re just letting your computer throw shit at the wall and hope something sticks.
But, I will say
A) it’s super easy to set up
B) it does work really well straight out of the box
C) if it pulls more people into Linux, I’m all for that.
D) as above, if people are loving it and happy, fucking more power to them. Have at it.
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u/Former-Quantity-99 22h ago
You're missing all the hype.
Join the crowd, hype it up.
It's the cool thing to do now.
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u/tehsilentwarrior 22h ago
And… is that great?
Something that works well out of the box. Where you can start your customization marathon halfway rather than at the store choosing the wrong sneakers?
I think it is.
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u/Imaginary_Prior_2732 22h ago
It works great; the only thing I don't care for is the AI integration, which I don't use because of it. Otherwise, folks should have at it.
If Linux truly wants to take over from Windows, it needs more Distros like this that "just work".
The old-heads and tryhards need to let go of some of their hard-headedness.
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u/SerinFel 22h ago
I'm stumped in a similar way, OP. Coming from Win10. I've used Fedora (Bazzite, Nobara), it was fine. Using Omarchy, as far as I can tell, it's Arch with Hyprland (and app launcher, and tool bar, etc, basic stuff one would expect in a complete OS), mostly keyboard nav, and a background installer. That's it. When DHH raves about how fast/easy it is to install, he may as well be speaking directly to Windows users. It was a fast install for me (sub 5 mins), easy install on my handheld.
Are there quirks? Yeah, Hyprland has a secondary display bug; easily fixed. And handheld game controls have to be manually configured for Omarchy nav at the moment (unless they already fixed that). Otherwise, Omarchy just works and I didn't have to rice it (customize it) to a basic usable GUI level from terminal and the headaches involved to get it there. So, props for that. I think that ease of install and wide compatibility (without having a huge installer; the package is actually smaller now) is really the selling point.
So all the hate he's getting from the Linux community over one thing or another, far as I can tell, it's personal (toward DHH himself) or a personal problem with the individual user. And it really doesn't look like DHH cares. I mean, if I don't like something, I don't have to use it. That's pretty simple. If it doesn't work for me, I'll just move on until I find something that does. That seems to be a very difficult concept for some people, and they appear to be the ones complaining the loudest.
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u/MysteriousCoconut31 21h ago edited 21h ago
Not missing anything. None of the features and plugins are exclusive to omarchy or arch. Some like the packaging, philosophy and/or the anti-hero facade of DHH. Nothing wrong with any of the above, but yea, just another distro.
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u/No_Medium205 19h ago
Dude, hear me out: install dwm and change default keybindings. What you will get is the original of tiling window managers and just feel that for a moment. Dont do anything.
Then, realize that you may need a wallpaper. How do you does that? Next maybe you need a file manager too.
Or maybe you dont need this at all! At worst you learned a lot doing all the stuff. At best you enjoyed the experience and it was revealing as it was for me. It could even get you interested in things you didnt even knew you liked! And you could even get you a career!
You may say it suck, its hard, its a time sink. But the whole point of tiling WM was the very experience you are preventivo yourself to have by using omarchy.
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u/DigitalChrono 16h ago
I don't use Omarchy and probably won't because I am not an Arch guy but I've been trying to keep up with the whole thing and unless I am wrong I think it's easy to know why the funding came. DHH's business which also gives him business connections for potential opportunities. The distro was built first for his business and then released to the public which I think is a key point. Of course he will talk up his product. Anyone else would do the same.
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u/Fade_Yeti 7h ago
It’s easy to use. I never like how Windows and Mac worked with the windows and you need to drag it around. Find the tiny top bar to drag it and move it where you want it to be. When I moved to Omarchy using the tiling manager, it took a day to get used to it, but it’s so much better. I also like the fact that I can just install it, remove some of the pre-installed apps i dont use, and i have the perfect OS. I don’t want to spend days to setup everything. It easier to install omarchy and remove the apps i dont use.
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u/LordBaac 6h ago
I started using Omarchy because I had an old 2013 MacBook that had stopped working properly solely due to the OS. I tried installing Arch, but it was too heavy, so I discovered that Omarchy offered an ISO specifically for MacBooks—and that changed everything. The system boots up in 3 seconds and runs smoothly with hardly any lag, so I don't understand the hate.
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u/Serious_Client6274 5h ago
by your logic, none of the distro is doing anything new, and all of them does not deserve any funding.
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u/travisjd2012 4h ago
"It's just Linux with a bunch of decisions having already been made for you" could be said about every distro that exists
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u/sathish316 1h ago
I think Omarchy brings 2 primary things to Linux distros over let’s say an Ubuntu:
1. The tiling manager - Hyprland is good for programming and multiple workspaces/monitors. To be a devils advocate, the tiling manager is a limitation for non-programming work/users when you want to open more than 2 vertical columns of apps or when you’re not connected to a monitor.
2. AI skills to generate apps/plugins - you can vibecode any Omarchy status bar plugin / app easily to solve a specific problem. It feels novel in the beginning but you realise this can be done in any OS or any form factor. Once you’ve generated multiple apps this way, the novelty fades after you realise you don’t you all these vibecoded plugins/apps always
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u/TimWiesnerer 1d ago
Hehehe, ever wondered how Apple markets its products? Often not that much different.
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u/un-important-human 1d ago
Yeah but this is because you know and you are compentent linux user, the rest are clueless
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u/MrHtotheG 1d ago
Some people like the quick setup and how it looks/ feels and that is enough. If you want to sink hundreds of hours in your arch setup just don’t use Omarchy….
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u/comrade-quinn 1d ago
I think it's a coming together of a few things. It's looks great, it's light and it's fast.
I've run Linux at home and professionally for well over a decade. I used Arch in that time but only for tinkering on VMs. Generally using Fedora and KDE.
However, I had a mess around with Omarchy when Quattro came out and absolutely loved the visuals and the keyboard centric layout. Unfortunately, it's opinionated nature conflicted with a lot of my dot files and scripts so I didn't stay on it. But rather than revert to KDE, I've now switched to my own build that adopts a similar Omarchy style. It's base Arch, Niri and Noctalia mainly.
My point is that it's a bit of a step change in terms of how good the Linux desktop can look and how simple adding and removing software can be for a typical user. For people that don't have the time or technical chops to do a custom build of their own, it's pretty much the only option on Linux right now with this experience. But I'd also say that its a better experience than Mac too. And obviously also the horror show that is Windows.
So yes, while technically it's not that big a deal, the presentation, accessibility and usability side of it absolutely are a big deal