← Back to context

Comment by marginalia_nu

9 months ago

If you feel it's not for you, then it's probably not for you.

I don't think Omarchy is or needs to be for everyone. Its recipe for success is likely that it's catering to a fairly particular archetype that's generally overlooked by most distributions and OS vendors, and not trying to be or do anything else.

3 comments

marginalia_nu

Reply
nickjj  9 months ago

I don't think distributions or OS vendors focus on that because imagine the outrage if you installed Windows and it pre-installed Zoom, Spotify and 80 other apps for you out of the box.

I think it's popular because DHH turned dotfiles into a product and it's being marketed as a distro. Arch + (Hyprland, Waybar, Walker and Mako) are all really popular and standlone tools that make up a reasonable looking desktop environment which Omarchy happens to use too.

I have nothing against it. If it gets more people using Linux, that is a huge win. I just find it fasinating to see it from the outside.

  • marginalia_nu  9 months ago

    I think this is a bit reductive. I came from using basically the same configuration, configured piecemeal, and migrated to Omarchy because I really enjoy the cohesiveness of the experience.

    The bundled software aspect is also kinda exaggerated. It almost entirely consists of app launchers for a few chrome-based PWAs. There's like no software to speak off, it's just a .desktop-file you can remove if you don't want it (there's even a menu for that).

    It's arguably more of a demo of Omarchy's excellent PWA tooling than anything else, where you can create your own PWAs with a simple TUI that blend seamlessly into the rest of the system.

    This is the supposed bloatware looks like

      $ cat ~/.local/user/applications/HEY.desktop
  [Desktop Entry]
  Version=1.0
  Name=HEY
  Comment=HEY
  Exec=omarchy-launch-webapp "https://app.hey.com"
  Terminal=false
  Type=Application
  Icon=/home/user/.local/share/applications/icons/HEY.png
  StartupNotify=true