Comment by poly2it
2 hours ago
It is understandable to be frustrated at a project without technical merit gaining so much traction when, as in the author's words, "longstanding distros like Debian have struggled with funding and sponsorship for decades". However, I do feel the author fails to come up with any conclusion as to why there is such a disparity between interest in traditional distributions and this rice.
I agree that it is almost suspicious how quickly it has risen to prominence. There has been a surge of hugely popular amorphous open source projects by single or few maintainers, often created very recently. In my experience, most of the users of Omarchy are inexperienced with Linux, and use it because it doesn't require them to form their own opinions and workflows, which can be both positive and negative.
Its rise is not suspicious to me at all, the author has tremendous reach influence in the developer community, that drives adoption easily.
Omarchy was my first entry back into desktop Linux since the early 2000s, when I ran enlightenment. The promises of Omarchy are big, and the idea of somebody trying all the tons of available bits of desktop Linux and assembling their favorites is very compelling!
I've since moved to KDE Plasma on that initial Omarchy install, but kept some other parts like the Bash completion system. I would love to get back to having single key sequences to bring up, say, a Claude window, but not enough to set it up in Plasma. If somebody else did it for me though... that's the appeal of Omarchy.
> almost suspicious how quickly it has risen to prominence.
I don't think its suspicious at all. I think it filled a long standing need for some subset of current and on-the-fence Linux users of needing and wanting a really opinionated, well put together set of defaults that you don't really get with a vanilla OOTB experience on most distros.
The popularity of the various dotfiles repos proves that enough, Omarchy just turns that into an automated set up script on top of arch while regular dotfiles repos assume you already know how to, or care enough, to figure out how to install hyprland and all the associated utilities (waybar, launcher menu, wallpaper handling, etc).
Plus, generally, most people grew up using either Windows or macOS which are also very opinionated and I'd argue most users don't actually want to form their own workflows, they'd rather have something already put together to adapt into.
Myself included. Albeit I'm a macOS user, but I genuinely don't really have opinions unless something is seriously annoying, I'll change it, but otherwise I'd much prefer a set of good defaults and I'll just learn how to use them. Most of my work isn't using the operating system itself anyway, it's done within software running on it and that's where I'd rather focus my time.
DHH has an enormous following and is extremely influential. I don’t think it’s surprising that it gained popularity so quickly. He’s really good at shamelessly plugging his work (as well I hope he should be).
But yeah, I think the vast majority of people using it are first timers to Linux in general. It attracts these people because it doesn’t ask too much of them. I don’t know why anybody would complain about growing the ecosystem. More people using Linux is always a good thing for the community.
So to be clear - distros used by experienced Linux users are better than distros preferred by non-experienced?
You can easily change most things you don’t like in Omarchy.
Does it allow newbies to install it and have something like the Apple “it just works” experience?
If so then that’s your answer. Why isn’t this obvious?
Giving someone a box of parts vs an assembled product is a huge difference. Yes there are some who prefer the box of parts, but they’re an extreme minority.