Comment by marginalia_nu
9 months ago
Arch linux is a great linux distro that's kinda difficult to set up (more so historically but it's got that reputation).
Hyprland is a great WM that has garbage default settings and requires wading through tons of documentation, as well as a lot of effort to set up.
Omarchy is a distribution that ships Arch + Hyprland with sane defaults. The whole thing installs in minutes, and is overall very easy to get going with. This has lead to a lot of people who were previously turned off by all the sharp edges of both Arch and Hyprland to give Arch and Hyprland a shot. Since both of these things are pretty great once you get them going, a lot of people are enthusiastic.
Sounds like Omarchy also ships with a bunch of bloatware. Why would I need the Hey or Basecamp apps – neither are targeted at developers, neither are commonly used, and both are just websites loosely packaged as installable apps anyway. Similarly for Steam (which runs at startup by default I believe), Spotify, Minecraft (which will bring a JVM?). It's bordering on Dell shipping Norton Antivirus to everyone and calling it a value-add.
That's more than a bit exaggerated.
Apart from Spotify, it ships with a few app launchers for PWAs for some of 37signals' stuff. These launchers are easily removed, and basically just launch chrome windows.
It does not ship with steam or minecraft, though it has a menu where you can install it (along with various popular software, mainly development tools).
Because DHH, obviously.
Does Omarchy offer anything other than opinionated dotfiles? These have always existed.
It basically is opinionated dotfiles and a few scripts, though that's a bit of a reductive take.
The killer feature of Omarchy is how accessible and streamlined it is. You can set up your own arch+hypr environment in a weekend of tweaking and fiddling assuming basic Linux competency, or you can use Omarchy and get where you want to be in 10 minutes with no tweaking or fiddling.
If you want is the outcome of the fiddling, then Omarchy is a great choice. If you want is fun of the fiddling process, then it's not for you.
I'm surprised so many people who want to use Arch aren't in it for the fiddling.
I've had publicly installable dotfiles with a "1 command and ~5 minutes later" you have your development environment set up for a few years now. It is command line focused since my main box is running WSL 2 with Arch Linux. The script works for Debian, Ubuntu, Arch and macOS since I use a work laptop that's running a MBP.
It was a lot of fun building things up and learning about the process as I went.
When I got a laptop to install native Linux a little while back, Omarchy was just coming out and I figured ok since I will want a solution to trick out a window manager / DE I'll want more than command line tools so I took a look.
I ended up avoiding it for a few reasons but the main one was I don't want to ask for permission or maintain a fork to deviate from the Omarchy defaults that cannot be customized without a fork.
I love Rails and the philosophy behind it but I don't think the same model applies to something as intimate and personal as your OS. Your OS is more like a custom application made for you, especially if you're going down the Arch (or Linux in general) route.
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Thousands of people share their dotfiles though, there's just no need for it to be its own Arch-derivative distribution. Could've just been 'here are my dotfiles, works best on Arch'.
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absolutely not.
every single arch user thought of making a distro with opinionated defaults, but then they realize the just have to edit the wiki to provide the community the same benefit.
some rich dude lack the self awareness for such.
he's both ignoring advanced users would rather have option open and defaults documented, and new users would just use manjaro.
I like Omarchy as an advanced user. I migrated off vanilla Arch + Hypr to Omarchy because it saves me a bunch of hassle setting all that up myself. I want the outcome, don't particularly enjoy the fiddling. I definitely could, I've even done LFS way back in the day, but I have other things I'd rather do with my time these days.
I think it's in many ways a project that caters to professional programmers. It's definitely not for beginners, neither for enthusiasts.
I respect there are people who would rather do all the fiddling themselves, but that's not what I'm looking for, and neither am I looking for a windows- or mac-a-like desktop environment like the ones you get with most distros. What I want in a desktop is exactly what Omarchy is offering.
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Yes, it goes beyond mere dotfiles.
There's a LUKS setup, PAM setup, ufw setup, yay/aur setup.