A Word on Omarchy
173 points by yuvadm
173 points by yuvadm
Why would I want an opinionated installation of a distro from someone whose opinions have gotten him largely canceled?
The inclusion of Basecamp and Hey is not substantially different from the OEM bloatware you used to remove from a new Windows PC.
The article would be stronger with less nitpicking and sass. Not all of its points are on the same level.
The inclusion of Basecamp and Hey is not substantially different from the OEM bloatware you used to remove from a new Windows PC.
I would go a step further and explicitly identify it as bloatware.
The only reason why this is being discussed at all is because a famous (now, infamous?) developer is building and promoting it. Not a single person would install this "distro" beyond what they could impose on their employees -- which DHH did.
Just to offer a different take, I've had a pretty good experience with Omarchy and I don't really think about DHH at all. It's legitimately solved a bunch of workflow problems I had with macOS. I'll be bummed if the DHH hate train kills something that I've found to be really useful.
Hey, you know what, I might have been too harsh. I'm glad it's working for you and arch is a fantastic base distro so it's not as bad as I implied.
So, what good does it add that others don't?
I started as a dev with Ubuntu, and then was on mac OS for the last 12 years, so that's my only real basis for comparison. Compared to those, there is far less friction with window + app management. There are other points of friction (i.e. the web versions of some of the apps aren't great), but it's been a good tradeoff for me.
Compared to Ubuntu or stock arch, it feels like the difference between using LazyVim compared to stock vim or one with your own personalized setup. It just feels like a well curated collection of plugins and configurations, made by someone with challenges similar to my own.
Fair enough, nice when you find something that fits. I've used EndeavourOS (https://endeavouros.com/) a fair bit, so that's my Arch-based choice when running something other than NixOS.
I've been quite happy with CachyOS (https://cachyos.org). Gives me the dev tools I always install in the base image, uses KDE Plasma, and provides optimized environment for programming and gaming. It feels really snappy. Also fits to the Arch with installer and pre-selected packages model.
Because people can have good opinions in one area and bad opinions in other area.
Probably not the case for Omarchy if it bundles so much proprietary bloat, tho.
it is even more saddening that recording a 30 minute video of someone clicking around on a UI seemingly counts as a legitimate “review” these days.
Good observation from the author. You are not reviewing an OS when you just look at it and describe what's on screen or what's installed, you're just demoing it. Most "reviews" on YouTube for OSes and such are this kind of demo. A review is an exploration of the product with an assessment of how the product works for some purposes, and I haven't seen an Omarchy review up until this article that actually explored the system. It's just shit, and it's getting so much attention that's effectively stolen valor - the hard work of Arch devs over years is being seen as DHH's, people congratulating him constantly on his new OS... and it's a bunch of crap I got over in my teens prioritising tiling windows with gaps over actually getting anything done. It's offensive. It's disrespectful. Software "personalities" and "rockstars" are wasting the time of people new to Linux and setting them up for failure. It's embarrassing that Linux in 2025 boils down to larping as Mouse from The Matrix.
it's getting so much attention that's effectively stolen valor - the hard work of Arch devs over years is being seen as DHH's
Please. Let them.
Reading this and everything going on with DHH in recent times, I'm reminded of a pattern that seems increasingly common amongst famous (and especially scientific) people. It goes something like this:
In the case of people in Silicon Valley, it also seems that the longer they spend time in that area the more unhinged (read: extremely problematic) they become.
I think what we're seeing here with DHH is just that: he made something objectively excellent hugely influential (= Ruby on Rails), got famous as a result of that, but then just sort of kept bungling things, but without ever reflecting on this and looking inwards, instead pointing fingers at others. "It's London that's becoming less English, not me becoming more racist!" especially comes to mind.
I think what's more problematic though is companies such as Cloudflare and Framework looking at that and saying to themselves "Yup, this needs our money". Not FreeBSD, Fedora, or literally any other project that has proven it's worth. No, a project that seemingly exists only because its deranged author wills it and apparently couldn't be bothered contributing back to (in this case) Arch Linux (i.e. by creating a proper user-friendly graphical installer).
On the bright side, maybe in a few years we'll have an entire suite of Oma-something projects because DHH keeps going all in on something else every few years :)
No, a project that seemingly exists only because its deranged author wills it and apparently couldn't be bothered contributing back to (in this case) Arch Linux (i.e. by creating a proper user-friendly graphical installer).
Arch has a proper installer, archinstall. It is graphical and supports a TUI with a declarative JSON format to specify the installation. Omarchy even uses this!
It's not really a new thing for Nobel laurates it have had a named "disease" since 2001 though there are probably plenty of examples outside of Nobel laurates.
perhaps weren't so good at A to begin with
Rails' diverse community and ongoing success very much seem to be despite DHH and not thanks to him.
I used to subscribe to DHH blog, as I do agree with some of hist technical views and choices (after all, some of those views generated Rails), but I had to un-subscribe after certain articles he started writing, which are straigh-up racist.
Such a shame, really.
I think what we're seeing here with DHH is just that: he made something objectively excellent hugely influential (= Ruby on Rails),
I never understood the attraction of Ruby on Rails. Everything that people were telling me about it that was amazing was something that WebObjects (arguably the first ever web app framework, possibly the second or third depending on how you count) was doing in 1996. And an open-source reimplementation existed before Rails shipped in 2004 (though it lacked some of the GUI things for EOF that made WO so nice back in the '90s). It was much worse for rapid application development than Seaside in Smalltalk, which shipped in 2002. Rails just seemed to be a slow reimplementation of a bunch of old ideas, with very good marketing.
with very good marketing.
Yes, and very good DX which helped. I worked with Rails from the early beginnings and looking back I think about 80% of its usefulness was generating scaffolding and setting some pre-defined ways of doing things (directories, templating, routing, etc). To me it seems the actual MVC part isn't actually that important to its success or even revolutionary; on the contrary, it's where Rails starts to smell.
However there's a lot of value in defining boxes that solutions can just fit into, even if at times awkwardly. The type of code scaffolding and fast-paced prototyping that Rails brought certainly wasn't present in many other frameworks at the time. Smalltalk unfortunately never got into people's heads and Ruby is the next best thing for that style of OO.
More and more I believe DX is the reason for success of most things in software: technical prowess is way below on the totem pole.
I guess RoR got more attention partly because of Ruby.
Ruby is essentially a more Unix-friendly Smalltalk with a Perl-like syntax.
And in a more "normal" language. I mean, that was the whole raison d'etre of Ruby in the first place, bringing some shell scripting/Perl dirt onto too pristine SmallTalk ;)
Also the environment. DHH's first demo didn't just boost his own Ruby, but also the Textmate editor, maybe even OS X. It was all so normal and pleasantly boring. Nothing continuation-based, no Objective-C. And quite a few people liked Ruby's syntax better than contemporaries like Tcl or Perl. But basically the same boring stuff the mainstream was doing, but without all the XML/EJB Java cruft of its time.
Sure, the packaging/marketing didn't hurt, either.
And for DHH's "myth", it was quite large, so he seemed more important than e.g. the developer of Sinatra, something copied even more so than RoR.
The Sinatra point is interesting. Definitely after Rails a lot of other web frameworks were developed, but did any other ones do "convention over configuration"? The implicit connection between files based on file names feels very Rails specific, whereas lots of things are a Sinatra/Flask/Express-alike.
Next.js is a convention over configuration framework with file-based routing and things like that. There are others like it in the JS world like Nuxt and SvelteKit.
Considering how popular Rails and Next.js are there's probably an underlying desire by developers to work with that kind of abstraction. Sinatra/Flask/Express philosophy is more popular for framework creators but leaves too much to be decided for users.
It has file based routing but that’s pretty different from file based models and views. The scope of Next is also pretty different from Rails so it’s not totally comparable, but I don’t see it as the same as singulars and plurals automatically connecting.
Maybe I am doing it a little disservice but my last brush with Django was a bit like this "my way or the highway". Mostly the ORM though and it's been like 10y.
Django is Rails-like in that it tries to encompass everything from the ORM to the template language, but it's different in that all the imports and whatnot are explicit. There's not a part where you write models/user.py and then it automagically hooks up with views/users.py and routes.py. It has to be wired together by hand. There is magic in the ORM where it does look ups by attributes though.
It was something with their lack of support for composite keys and I quote (from memory) "no one should use that so we don't support it". But as I said, it's been a while. Maybe the comparison is not great.
I’ve never even heard of WebObjects which is pretty unusual for me and web frameworks of that time, so you piqued my curiosity. I couldn’t find much info online. Is this code comparison from ChatGPT accurate?:
WebObjects:
EOQualifier qualifier = EOQualifier.qualifierWithQualifierFormat("age > %@", new NSArray<>(30));
NSArray<EOSortOrdering> sortOrderings = new NSArray<>(
new EOSortOrdering("lastName", EOSortOrdering.CompareAscending)
);
EOFetchSpecification fetchSpec = new EOFetchSpecification("Person", qualifier, sortOrderings);
NSArray<Person> results = (NSArray<Person>) ec.objectsWithFetchSpecification(fetchSpec);
Ruby on Rails:
results = Person.where("age > ?", 30).order(:last_name)
If that’s a reasonable comparison I think you have your answer: the attraction (whether or not you think it’s better) is how much simpler it is than Java. A pillar of the pitch of RoR at the time.
WebObjects is a […] Java […]
Release Date: May 21 2001
I did not start writing code professionally until 2010, but even then, there was this huge stink in the air about ‘90s Java. The second coming of web development was in full swing. Ruby and Rails hit three marks at exactly the right time:
Maybe it’s not your preference, or you don’t think it’s logical, but it didn’t take off out of the blue. I wouldn’t at all die on a hill for Rails, but it helped me build a career in the early days, so I’m thankful for it.
I’m not even saying you’re wrong, because even in my childishly short tenure compared to yours, I’ve seen the wheel reinvented. It’s dumb, and you can’t help but feel “all this effort could have been spent making the current thing better!” Yet, this seems to happen. Over and over. It’s in our DNA to pursue what’s new, what’s next. Sometimes it even unlocks great new things that stick (Rust?)
The 1996 release was Objective-C. There was a later release in Java.
Was it May 2001? I don’t want it to be wrong if I put it in a quote block
https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2001/05/21Apple-Ships-Java-Based-WebObjects-5/
I believe NeXT shipped an Objective-C + Java version, but it's a very long time since I looked at WebObjects.
I remember evaluating WebObjects in the late 90s and to my memory the ORM-esque functionality was limited to their dev tools which cost many thousands of dollars. By the Rails release open source had already taken over web development. Thus WebObjects lacked cultural cohesion with the industry. Without that the technical merits are difficult to consider.
I've been thinking about this a lot lately, especially with how many people feel the desire/need to be "influencers" these days.
You can actually just run shellcheck on the project and tell quite fast that the general quality is poor?
λ omarchy master Ɇ » shellcheck -f checkstyle bin/* **/*.sh | grep error | wc -l
451
λ omarchy master Ɇ » cloc .
662 text files.
473 unique files.
253 files ignored.
github.com/AlDanial/cloc v 2.06 T=0.07 s (6645.0 files/s, 133055.1 lines/s)
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Language files blank comment code
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Bourne Again Shell 125 704 319 3344
Bourne Shell 237 499 229 1952
CSS 41 122 22 653
TOML 19 113 9 612
XML 3 6 12 437
Lua 12 0 0 151
INI 14 20 0 78
JSON 13 0 0 67
YAML 4 4 0 50
Text 2 0 0 36
JavaScript 1 1 0 20
Markdown 1 5 0 5
SVG 1 0 0 1
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
SUM: 473 1474 591 7406
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
451 warnings/errors on 5300 lines of bash? Not great yo.
Wild. I think not doing something as simple, basic and exceptionally effective as running and integrating the feedback from a linter against the code you're writing speaks volumes about the capability of a developer.
It's a pattern. I remember testing kamal when it was first launched and immediately ran into an env var expansion issue, something a test case would've caught. Most of his (their?) stuff seems to be a "works for me" kind of thing, then it gets hype and other competent people come in and fix the issues. I'd be more OK with that if their attitude wasn't so holier than thou.
I mean, a lot of FOSS stuff is "I bashed together something that works even though I'm not a developer". If the idea and original approach take off, then it tends to attract people who are better at development but maybe didn't have the original spark of an idea or motivation to start from scratch. And that's OK. I've interviewed a lot of project founders who were like that. "I had no idea what I was doing, so I didn't know I shouldn't have tried this, but I did... and then competent people showed up." But they were usually cool people who knew when to step aside and/or be humble about their abilities + had good community building skills.
Yep, I appreciate the "I made this, maybe you'll like" spirit. Like I said I'm OK with that attitude.
My problem is when the project owner acts like their stuff don't stink and is the best or "only sane" way of doing things.
they were usually cool people who knew when to step aside and/or be humble about their abilities + had good community building skills.
Indeed, and DHH has decided that community-building is beneath him; it's his way or the highway. The entire focus on "omakase" follows from this. So he invites this close scrutiny.
I might be tooting my own horn here, but my experience tells me that anyone who has had the sense to independently run shellcheck on a project is in the top 0.1% of developers.
DHH sounds like the kind of guy who might brag about being in the top 99%.
The video on Omarchy's site is actually really funny.
Omarchy is a modern Linux distribution [...] for anyone interested in a pro system, that takes a little time to learn and to setup, but that will pay dividents in terms of speed of use [...]
He also says something about how it will "make you 10x yourself".
So anyways, he first demos some of the most important shortcuts:
He then shows the application launcher and says how you can "just type what you want to get there". A few minutes after that, he opens up Neovim - and to get to some particular file, he just keeps pressing j to get down to it in the file list, instead of searching for its name. He did that every time he opened the editor up for something, seemingly without questioning it.
He does flex a separate menu that lets you directly open up to some dotfiles, though! e.g. you can search for XCompose there, and that'll get opened up in your editor. It's a shame this is a feature hardcoded only for the dotfiles, and outside of the editor.
In all this time trying to optimize such pointless tasks, it doesn't seem like he ever questioned how he uses his editor.
But hey, even if opening files in my editor is surprisingly inefficient for a pro 10x distro, I'm at least always one keypress away from getting on X!
A few minutes after that, he opens up Neovim - and to get to some particular file, he just keeps pressing j to get down to it in the file list, instead of searching for its name. He did that every time he opened the editor up for something, seemingly without questioning it.
In fairness to this, any vim user watching any other vim user use vim (or its variants) will experience a similar frustrated "why don't you just do..." moment. It's a complicated system and 80% of vim users only know 20% of the functionality!
I mean sure, in the limit, but if vim user B claims to know vim user A can "10x themselves" and then uses key-repeat J and L to move around the screen, they're going to lose a bit of credibility.
the one tiny defense of not just searching is that searching can be hard to follow for someone watching you do it. I... I guess.
as a vi, vim, neovim user of 25 years, knowing 20% of the functionality would boost my productivity, it's why I'm planning on learning ed properly when I retire ;~)
80% of vim users only know 20% of the functionality!
I'd actually argue that showing and focusing the file tree by default encourages this behavior. This is not a default vim feature, he had to explicitly add and configure that plugin.
Also, come on, if the goal of Omarchy is actual efficiency - I think this is one of the first things you'd notice if you tried looking at it critically, instead of just configuring random bindings and hoping that magically makes for good usability.
I enjoyed reading this writeup. The javascript title gimmick was very annoying.
It seems it was posted on Hacker News as well and promptly flagged, for… reasons?
I have a sneaking suspicion that stuff gets manually tanked on HN if it's critical of DHH in any way. Saw an article of mine with some commentary about DHH go from #3 to the second page of results in the matter of an hour while other things hang on the front page for days. (I was not the submitter, I generally do not submit my own articles on HN or here -- I figure if people find them useful, they'll submit them on their own. If nobody is moved to submit them, then I guess I didn't do as well as I hoped...)
considering that the summary says DHH's attempt at a distro is kinda hamfisted i don't think that it was flagged for political reasons.
Omarchy feels like a project created by a Linux newcomer, utterly captivated by all the cool things that Linux can do, but lacking the architectural knowledge to get the basics right, and the experience to give each tool a thoughtful review. Instead of carefully selecting software and ensuring that everything works as promised, the approach seems to be more about throwing everything that somehow looks cool into a pile. There’s no attention to sensible defaults, no real quality control, and certainly no verification that the setup won’t end up causing harm or, at the very least, frustration for the user. The primary focus seems to be on creating a visually appealing but otherwise hollow product.
and yeah it does look like a hollow distro focused on aesthetics. i watched his overview of the distro and it seemed that over half of it was talking about how cool it looks.
It seems it was posted on Hacker News as well and promptly flagged, for… reasons?
The javascript title gimmick? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Switch to a different tab after you opened the article, then look at the URL tab bar
This was actually hard to reproduce on my system. For anyone else who didn't see it, here's a screenshot of the overlay that appears when you return to the article after putting it into the background on a browser with javascript enabled.
Edit to add: Sorry for imgur. Does anyone know of a less junky choice for hosting screenshots when posting to web forums? I plan to stand up my own at some point, but that's got some large items in front of it on the todo list.
https://0x0.st/ is a common option for somewhere to host a small file
Thanks. That looks useful, and very close to what I was looking for when I gave up and used imgur.
The issue is that the title and favico are changed when you switch tabs. It cycles but at some point it makes it look like you were on Google searching "bill gates nudes". I actually had never even thought this was possible, it's like finding a new phishing vector all over.
It seems to cycle things, some of which are quite funny. Would be annoying if I wanted to find the tab again though.
Thanks for the screenshot even if from imgur, this was breaking my ability to read on a mobile browser. Looks like this gimmick does not translate well. At least I am no longer confused.
Also on mobile, I could just click on the text and it disappeared, although this wasn't obvious at first. But it came back every time I locked my screen.
I think they're saying the reason for being flagged on Hacker News that the parent commenter seems confused about is probably the very JS title gimmick that they mentioned.
I didn’t notice it since I had JS off, but it is very arrogant and annoying for no really good reason… It recommends I only turn JS on on sites I trust—but that’s exactly what I did with this page, and I still got reprimanded for it.
I don’t know what makes my browser show a little notification dot on pages; I assume it’s when they change title, but I’m grateful that so far I haven’t seen that abused much. It’s a similar thing with the "Are you sure you want to close this page?" box, where I’m very glad that there hasn’t been a huge amount of pages abusing it for retention purposes, as then the browser makers would have to restrict it. So I dislike that this page abuses it heavily. It hurts the web.
Reading the source code for that, it’s written in a very weird style. All this makes me wary of taking the author’s opinions seriously. Obviously the points made mostly still stand. But, for instance, they seem to think that not having mailutils installed by default is a major omission. As far as I can tell, hardly anyone actually uses the UNIX mail spool for real email anymore. The estimate that "99%" of users will need to have an inbox that interacts with SMTP/IMAP is also just not true, even with a more tech-literate target audience.
About as annoying as your friend who bumped key'ed his way into your flat in 5 seconds waiting for you in the living room. Or the protest blocking the highway making you late for work.
Many people don't realize that JavaScript means running arbitrary untrusted code on your machine. Sure, it's sandboxed, but spectre and rowhammer are a thing. There's a reason JavaScript is disabled on the TOR browser (NOTE: Apparantly this is no longer the default, and only enabled for SAFEST).
Maybe the hacker ethos has changed, but I for one miss the days of small pranks and nudges to illustrate security flaws, instead of ransomware and exploits for cash. A gentle reminder that we can all do better, and the world isn't always all that friendly.
no, this is just obnoxious. it would be better served if the page itself had some sort of "prank" rather than messing with the browser.
If you'd read the overlay the website did state that you should Disable JS.... which I agree with. Tho, yes - its quite annoying if reading on ie: a work device lol
tl;dr: David discovered ricing, cobbled together a bunch of shell, named it, & marketed it as a "distro", and it will serve the very small slice of people who are not yet capable of configuring a distribution on their own, but aspire to do so.
anyone who has been running Linux for any length of time understands the problem with Omarchy immediately: such specific tooling & configuration choices cannot possibly serve a broad population. From the hyprland hotkeys to the vim plugin choices, to the vim plugin manager itself - Omarchy amounts to David's dotfiles, not a bespoke distro.
It's hard enough to manage your own configs across machines - I can't imagine what kind of mess you could end up with here, just blindly running scripts.
This script runs five commands in sequence within an if condition: first pacman, followed by two systemctl invocations, then pacman again, and finally setsid. While this might work as expected “on a sunny day”, the first pacman command could fail for various reasons. If it does, the subsequent commands may encounter issues that the script doesn’t account for, and the outcome of this migration will be differently from what the author anticipated.
This is a good example of the failings of complex shell scripts in the wild that @fanf started off in another thread. Provisioning anything through shell scripts is just a nightmare.
I was thinking of doing this on a Void Linux system with ZFS snapshots - just snapshotting before a "migration" and rolling back if anything fails. Of course, Linux systems always work as expected across any hardware configurations, so this is unnecessary complexity.
90% of the things Omarchy sets up seem like the ideal use-case for NixOS, but obviously it's quite a different paradigm so I understand why it wouldn't be attractive to everyone.
Other than that though, it's just so much bad practice after bad practice as evidenced by this article. E.g. regarding editing files with sed, all of the services that it's editing support having drop-in files (e.g. in /etc/ssh/sshd_config.d/ vs /etc/ssh/sshd_config), which are specifically meant for the use-case of being able to have a package manager-like thing put files in there without breaking other configurations! Not to mention things like splitting configs between /usr/, /var/ and /etc/, so keep the upstream ones in /usr/, add the custom ones in /var/ and leave /etc/ for the end-user. You could even use systemd-sysext to put everything in an immutable overlay!
I've probably linked this before in other threads, but Fitting Everything Together is just a great reference for the kind of end-user system that modern Linux lets us build, and Omarchy is using none of that.
So even if DHH's... problems (and hyprland's) aren't enough reason to not consider Omarchy, I guess this should be. It's just so underwhelming considering what something like it could be.
Just listened to a interview form DHH on this configuration set atop Arch. A lot of the idea was to encourage non-Linux users to start making the switch & starting at this configuration set (proprietary software included). It is pretty hard to wrap your head around how a NixOS configuration would output to a Linux config without prior Linux experience as well as with a target audience that will be often web searching very basic terms NixOS would add a layer of abstraction to (for long-term good!). Learning Nix does pay off, but it is an even higher learning cliff (language + package set + OS)—& as popularity has grown a lot of bad ideas & anti-patterns have been propagated with better SEO which I think might lead that target & DHH himself astray.
I would never be the target audience for this, but have a curated set in the open means there is a reference implementation of sorts for certain aspects. Anyone should be able to easily port these bit to NixOS if that is what they want to use/learn.
I agree, and that's why I didn't focus on NixOS afterwards. It's a very unique way of doing things that doesn't necessarily transfer to other distros.
My main point is that if what you want to do is make an easily installable configuration (a very good goal! Though I'd argue Omarchy fails at providing a good config, as evidenced by the OP), there are just so much better ways to do that that don't break if you ever touch /etc, and would even allow you to install these upon an already configured system.
Additionally, since it's being explicitly aimed at newcomers, if you use bad practices in your beginner configs, what you're going to do is perpetuate those bad practices even more, since a beginner will just copy what they're already seeing!
A lot of the idea was to encourage non-Linux users to start making the switch
I really wish that the first contact people have with Linux doesn't involve only webapps and TUI apps. I don't understand the vendetta against proper native GUIs :/
I imagine it's great after you first install it, but I'm sort of worried what will happen in 6 months time when a considerable number of installations end up breaking. The combiantion of rolling release distro + hacky migration scripts does seem like a bit of a ticking time bomb for installations, but time will tell.
I'm glad Linux is getting wider attention/adoption but can't help but thinking most of the same people amazed by Omarchy would have been better off with just using Gnome/KDE.
To all evidence, the creator of Omarchy has no such concern. They were all-in on Windows last year, then a couple months later it was Omakub. About a year later, it was this thing. It seems there's a good chance they'll be on to the next new shiny thing before they have to worry much about maintaining this one.
I imagine it's great after you first install it, but I'm sort of worried what will happen in 6 months time when a considerable number of installations end up breaking
As someone who inevitably ends up being the person who gets/keeps software stacks running locally on developer machines across multiple teams, I'm pretty confident that this is going to be a nightmare over the long term.
Reading about all the weird bash choices like the overuse of awk/sed or using a scrip ton a systemd timer for power management makes me wonder if the majority of the scripts were written by AI. Those sound a lot like the common terrible scripts I've seen LLMs write.
And from my – albeit limited – experience, LLM's will write this stuff the modern way, with drop ins, idempotent execution, etc. if you tell it so.
Beyond dissing Hansson, which is admittedly why I clicked, this turned out to be a neat laundry list of what not to do when writing orchestration scripts. Worth reading from that perspective alone.
This is a fair critique, even with its pedantry. Say, even if the firewall bug was eventually (twice) fixed, it shows the attention to detail that goes into the project.
And to call that a distro is disrespectful to people who actually build and maintain distros. As mentioned before, I wouldn’t call it a gateway into Linux. A gateway drug only works if people keep coming back, not if you get burned and never want to touch it again.
Lastly, I didn’t like the title trick, but I can overlook it.
Bazzite is a much more polished first time Linux ime. I've been happy to see friends and family switch to Linux without my help at all! I've been tinkering with a nixos flake that somewhat replicates bazzite. Mostly because I already know nix, but I really admire their work!
As a Bazzite hater, I agree. It would be great if all the people who allegedly got into Linux due to Omarchy got started on Bazzite instead.
I'm curious, I haven't used Bazzite much myself. I've just heard good things about it from people who picked it up on their own. What issues do you have with it? or does it have more to do with Fedora Atomic?
If I had to guess, it's because of some of the programs that Bazzite and its sibling images include.
For example, Bluefin includes Homebrew/Linuxbrew so you can install tools without needing a container, but this is a bid of an odd choice considering the generally poor availability of Linux-only software in Linuxbrew.
In the case of Bazzite it may be that most gaming flavored Linux distributions tend to make questionable tweaks (i.e. cargo culting kernel parameters because some blog post said it was a good idea), and usually don't survive for more than a few years.
At least this is why I'm personally staying away from the Universal Blue suite: it's a nice idea and I really like how they're pushing bootc, but some of the choices don't sit well with me and I strongly doubt it will still be around 5 years from now.
Asking for myself: what would you recommend, then?
In my particular case, I used to be a harcore Linux user ~10 years ago (I used to use Arch, btw). Recently I tried to come back to it, but I feel I really don't have the time or the energy anymore to build a system from scratch like that. I really liked that Bazzite allows me to easily rollback botched installs, Flatpak is miles above what it used to be 10 years ago, and distrobox feels like a nice way to have separate dev environments.
My current setup is Fedora Silverblue, and an Arch container for development. Silverblue as a base system is rock solid, but it being immutable means you need a container, Nix or something else.
Fedora as a development environment is also fine, but I ran into a few issues with packages either not being available or being really out of date. The bigger underlying issue here is Fedora's dumb packaging requirements (= every dependency must be a package, even if that doesn't make sense), resulting in (at least I suspect) many people just not bothering packaging their project for Fedora.
An Arch container means you can work around this by, well, using Arch. Since it's not your base system the usual issues with Arch (e.g. it not always being stable) don't matter much, because in the worst case you rebuild your container (something I've automated down to a simple make arch). And Arch being Arch means pretty much every package is available, either as an official package or an AUR package.
My main gripe with Silverblue is that running development environments inside a container is a bit wonky, and the tooling surrounding it is a hit and miss. For example, Toolbox is generally more stable/of better quality compared to Distrobox, but lacks features that seem pretty important (e.g. generating .desktop files).
I've used Aurora Linux for the past year and I kind of agree. Arch in a distrobox is... fine, but there definitely is software that just don't work very well. Yes, you can install them from Flathub, which in general is great... but not always.
I've been toying with CachyOS in my laptop a few months now. It gives me what I want: out of the box Arch with sane defaults that work great. Automatic snapshots you can roll back if something breaks, and everything seems to just work.
Ask me again in a few years and I'll give you a different answer.
They are obsessed with OCI and container-based tools, which they use excessively instead of admitting that the FHS way of storing applications is a failure.
Fhs?
The filesystem hierarchy standard. The thing I'm focused on here is its insistence on global search paths.
To make sure I follow, your prefefence would be that executables hard-code their rpath's at installation time, like guix, or something else?
Yes, and similar mechanisms for non-library search paths as well. For shared libraries specifically, ideally it would be something more efficient than just a bunch of rpath entries, like https://github.com/fzakaria/shrinkwrap.
File system hierarchy standard. Now mostly obsolete but there’s a revival attempt ongoing. systemd proposes an alternative, look for their hier manpage
systemd's file-hierarchy is hardly an improvement, it makes some parts of it more sensible but it does not fix the core issue.
Do you mean this one?
Yep, that one. FHS is referenced as Note 1 on the bottom. EDIT: Also check https://uapi-group.org/specifications/specs/linux_file_system_hierarchy/ and https://lobste.rs/s/yu0vd7/debian_technical_committee_overrides
A lot has been said about DHH but I don’t see how any of this is different from the blustering disingenuous technology marketing he’s done during his entire career.
Lots of people were happy enough to tolerate him as long as it fueled the Rails hype train, but even then there were steam engine sized holes in the entire operation.
Agreed with a lot in the article, however, I disagree on the cron point:
Speaking of which: Cron jobs? Not a thing on Omarchy. Want to automate backing up some files to remote storage? Get ready to dive into the wonderful world of systemd timers, where you’ll spend hours figuring out where to create the necessary files, what they need to contain, and how to activate them.
I just use an LLM to help me generate systemd unit/timer files, it'll even load them for you. I find systemd-timers to be superior to cron because: a) I can activate the task at-will, b) better logging system, c) you already have systemd to monitor anyway, why not have it all in one supervisor system?
I'd go even further and say systemd should also supervise containers via quadlet, which provides simplicity through a single supervisor for the entire system.
It's surprising to me that a post like this even has to exist. Omarchy is so clearly and so obviously complete garbage that anyone should be able to dismiss it as not worth using within the first minute of hearing about it. There isn't even anything new about it, these rices are a dime a dozen. Your average first-time Arch + tiling WM user has probably built himself a similar setup, complete with the severe lack of knowledge of what facilities FreeDesktop provides and how a modern Linux system, much less a modern Linux desktop, is put together, resulting in the same hodgepodge of misconfigurations and badly written shell scripts that we see here.
Your average first-time Arch + tiling WM user has probably built himself a similar setup, complete with the severe lack of knowledge of what facilities FreeDesktop provides and how a modern Linux system, much less a modern Linux desktop, is put together,
That's a little harsh. Most people don't script it up and call it a distribution until their third or fourth attempt, as far as I've observed. [/s?]
That said... this is basically one guy's dotfiles, automated. And it takes some experience to understand that if you just apply someone else's dotfiles to your system, you're gonna have a bad time. Automating it just makes it so you're gonna have a bad time faster.
IMO the biggest sin here is the way they're treating AUR. If they want a curated, "omakase" set of things, they should publish a repository of curated binary packages that they test and release as they get updated. Automating the YOLO-ing of AUR upgrades with -y is a recipe for pain. In addition to all the lesser sins the OP points out.
the thing is, rails was a genuinely good piece of software, so people have a somewhat natural tendency to treat it as proof that dhh is good at crafting user experiences
Good is a strong word. It was definitely influential, but it was also the framework that thought it'd be a good/worthwhile/realistic goal to try to implement english inflections exhaustively (until they eventually gave up).
it was influential because it hit upon a design that let people build a web app in less time, with less friction and greater developer happiness. even if not every decision it made was the greatest in hindsight the overall framework really was good for its time.
The post contains useful recommendations that are unfortunately interspersed with layers of pedantry.
I understand that it's fashioned as a hit piece against DHH, but it comes across as gatekeeping instead. If Omarchy brings a wave of new people to the Linux Desktop, that's ultimately a plus. If they run up against the mentioned issues, maybe they enjoyed their stay enough to switch to something else, contribute back, or learn how to fix the gaps. Having more eyes on the Linux Desktop ecosystem is a positive.
I still like how thorough it is. I'll probably refer back to it when getting back to Arch after several years away. :)
If Omarchy brings a wave of new people to the Linux Desktop, that's ultimately a plus.
It's a plus if they come away with a good experience. If they've formatted their drives and can't play their Steam library because their drivers were bodge-migrated and the migration script choked, they're calling Linux shit in YouTube comments for the next ten years.
Well said.
I'm also of the opinion that Omarchy is bringing users to Linux, but I think the post above is right that it's so surface level as to be teetering the edge of damaging.
An opinionated set of dotfiles is not inherently bad, but it is being hyped to all holy-hell. In reality a system like Manjaro is a much better set of opinionated dotfiles in a significantly larger array of circumstances.
With this attitude no one can ever make a Linux distro/etc. that's anything short of perfect in case someone might criticize it. It's not exactly a novel experience for Linux drivers to sometimes not work, should we just give up and go back to Windows?
That's taking my comment to absurdity. I don't think your distro has to be perfect, but there's a huge grey area separating a noob installing Fedora and a noob installing Omarchy.
Isn't something like Bazzite bringing people to the Linux desktop in a far more principled and robust way?
Possibly, but I have never ever heard of Bazzite.
You're not alone -- Bazzite took a different marketing strategy than most other Linux distros, targeting folks who wanted a better experience than Windows on handheld gaming devices. (It also works well on desktop, and in fact my workstation Linux installation is downstream of Bazzite.)
The average new linux user that wants a pre packed distro is often someone that has no deep understanding. It's the responsibility of those who do understand to make it safe and performant for those that don't. Today there are already distros that do this, ubuntu, fedora.
The elephant in the room here is really that Omarchy isn't as compelling of a product and that doesn't provide this basis while capturing funding from other open source projects that omarchy relies on.
Really well said. I saw one of the Omarchy demos on the day I upgraded to Tahoe, and I was so extremely frustrated with Tahoe that I ordered a Thinkpad that day and set it up with Omarchy. Overall it's delivered on everything that I was hoping it would. Some of the web apps don't work quite as well as I had hoped (i.e. Figma, Zoom), but those small frustrations have been worth the payoff.
So overall I think it's a worthwhile project that mostly delivers on its goals, even with the rough edges.
Which makes these "hit pieces" so frustrating. If the goal was to improve Omarchy (or even to advance alternatives), there are way more constructive ways to go about it. All this talk about "stolen valor", etc feels absurd. It's only because DHH is involved.
You are absolutely correct: if someone who wasn't very rich and a racecar-driver and a public racist had come up with this, very few people would be talking about it.
And if it had been somebody rich who drives racecars but wasn't a racist, very few people would be talking about it so negatively.
It makes me think that people don't want to be associated with racists.
Serious question, are the racism accusations based solely on his London post from 2014? Or is there an established pattern? I've had friends that worked at 37signals back in the day and I never heard anything about him being racist.
Serious question, are the racism accusations based solely on his London post from 2014?
The post is from 2025.
Or is there an established pattern?
https://xcancel.com/dhh/search?f=tweets&q=immigrants&since=&until=&near=
I mean.
Yikes. He should really stop tweeting about this stuff
The issues described around migrations in particular are really likely to bite you down the road. The issue isn't at all the collection of settings, rather that Omarchy doesn't use the available tools to correctly and safely distribute these settings OR recover from badly applied changes. Lack of recovery options is par for the course in Arch of course, but making a pacman repo and packages is not very difficult. I would expect a distro to be able to that much at a minimum.
If Omarchy wants to be a friendly on-ramp for pro linux users then it should be done well. Currently all I'm seeing is a redistributable r/unixporn config, which isn't a bad thing per-se, but it doesn't come close to clearing the quality bar of something like Manjaro which is also an Arch distro.
The Omarchy manual: The ultimate repository of Omarchy wisdom, all packed into 33 pages, clocking in at little over 10,000 words. For context, this post on Omarchy alone is almost 10,000 words long.
What an exemplary, quintessential critique this is. To pay due respect, let's reuse an old word in the title: s/A Word/Myriad Words/
To treat with this much respect and deal with this subject so civilly, why do I feel surprised.. What trying times are ahead of us and how shall we proceed and get through.. sigh
My issues with Omarchy are on two fronts:
Wow. IDK if the "omgarchi" on the main image of the post (which is also the image used on content embeds if you share the post URL) is the Spanish pun i think it is. The author has a Japanese domain name, but they have been places too, and some of those are Spanish-speaking. So it could be that pun. But it's also a very Argentinian-specific pun, so IDK. I'm puzzled.
Does someone know what the "misspelled" "omgarchi" on that image could mean?
I'm guessing the OMG part is just a reference to the overblown hype for D-HH's dotfiles. I'm usually the one making that kind of puns so I would have noticed.
I think I must have missed a nuance with this javascript title (?) pop-over or whatever. I'm left confused. Perhaps it didn't work properly in my setup. I think I know what point they are trying to make, but whatever shock tactic they tried to use didn't happen.
yeah it triggers at the wrong time due to browser shenanigans. Its suppose to only trigger when the tab is changed upon which its suppose to change the window title and icon to something more dramatic which would grab your attention.
It's taken me some time to realize that the point of an operating system is to get things done, rather than look cool, but I'm glad I've finally gotten here. I genuinely wanted to install Hyprland for a while, but by the time I was skilled enough to install arch without a hand holding tool, I had outgrown the need.
A pet theory of mine is that the reason that software engineers are so obsessed about tools is that the vast majority of software work is on things that don't really matter to humanity in general. A lot of work is boring and soul crushing so you might as well have cool windows about it.
I have some concerns towards sponsorship from Cloudflare titled "Supporting the future of the open web" where they added it next to Ladybird without further explanation of how Omarchy is related to "the future of open web" at all.
I think it's great what DHH has accomplished. I wish we had more celebrities advocating for switching to Linux like him. He has opened the eyes on many Mac and Windows users, and made them buy Linux hardware and install Linux on their computers.
Recently PewDiePie also switched to Linux and made it public. I think we Linux users need all help we can get to make Linux on the desktop more popular.
Personally I have been using Linux for almost 20 years. The last 10 years of those have been with Fedora as my main distro. I remember having CDs with Ubuntu 6.06 etc when I started, getting inspired by the philosophy, etc. I think it's great that finally people are catching on and starting to try out Linux.
I'm glad Cosmic Desktop is in a state that is a perfectly fine and easy Hyprland/sway replacement. Without needing thousands of lines of poorly written bash and non-interactive installations from AUR.
I'm also glad that DHH is using his weight to advertise Linux. Plenty of more people could and should be using Linux. I just hope his version of it isn't so bad that it will tarnish the name at the same time.
I am not familiar with Omarchy, but when I first heard what it was all about, it looked to me like a bunch hyprland dotfiles on top of Arch. And can't you do it with any linux distro which supports hyprland? You can even have different desktop environments installed and try them out. If you look at what PopOs did with Cosmic, it looks much more impressive to me
i was with you until
Why bother shipping tools like btop and bat but fail to provide aliases for top, cat, etc to make use of these tools by default?
say what again??
I used arch forever as a server but not desktop. I set hyprland up on a little pc. I got some stuff working, but then got busy doing other things. There are ten options for every little piece like which status bar, or app launcher or wall paper manager. It's kind of fatiguing. I don't want to use omarchy. I'm not. But also I don't want to spend an hour trying to evaluate which clipboard manager is actively maintained.
It seems to me that what you want is to just switch to something like plasma which does all of that for you... (It's just sudo pacman -S plasma, or it was the last time I switched).
I watched the video where the creator gives a tour of Omarchy and I remember him saying the chrome/chromium used in it is a custom patched version to allow theming. When you select the global colour scheme (a feature of omarchy) it changes the same for chromium as well. Not sure if it is true still.
As the the thread you link to points out, Framework has been gushing about Omarchy on social media in a way that they have not been with Fedora/Arch/..., so it seems untrue that the support has been "similar".
And as the fine article points out, Omarchy is not a distro like Fedora/Arch/etc but a thin wrapper on top of Arch, so the comparison is inapt anyways.
Maybe the Framework guy(s) wants access to DHH’s inner circle? Like the YouTube influencers. DHH gets advertisements eyeballs while more people will be willing to come on their channel since DHH has.
So it might be a purely business decision for Framework not based on any technical merit.
You're not wrong that that seems likely, but is it supposed to be a justification?
If the Framework guys think its an acceptable decision to promote a bad (apparently both technically and ethically) operating system to their users in exchange for advertising dollars... that's a pretty strong signal that I/people I advise shouldn't be purchasing their computers.
Keep in mind that Framework is in the business of charging a premium based on the supposedly high quality (beyond the spec sheet) product they deliver and the ethical nature of it...
More likely the framework people are interested in broadening the reach of their computers and this 'distribution' runs on their computers well and is popularly appealing.
If you associate something with something popular, then your thing might get popular too. It's a sound decision.
Your quote is preceded by
What’s even more baffling is that seemingly no one at Framework (Computer Inc.) or Cloudflare appears to have properly vetted the project they’re directing attention (and sometimes financial support) to
I.e. it is primarily about publicity, the financial/material support is an afterthought.