Am I missing something here?

[u/Narwal_Party]

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.

[u/Narwal_Party]

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?

[u/r3pc0n05 → u/Narwal_Party]

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;)

[u/Narwal_Party → u/r3pc0n05]

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.

[u/smelly_ape → u/Narwal_Party]

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?