Comment by Barrin92
1 hour ago
>then there has to be something sinister afoot.
because most of the time there is. We live in a world that is dominated by obnoxious social media influencers and 'taste makers' who push people to the <newest thing> every day. This is the linux version of Mr. Beast lunchables.
Having a conference and corporate sponsorships for what is 500 lines of bash scripting is beyond silly. And like the other half dozen arch based 'desktop reskin disguised as distro' things, when it eventually breaks or stops being supported you'll have a lot of confused people who don't know how to fix it.
No Linux distribution offers a good out-of-the-box experience with anything outside of XFCE, GNOME, or KDE Plasma. On the other end, these alternative WMs lack all of the shell features that people expect from a desktop experience.
I run regular Arch with Niri and Noctalia Shell, which is based on Quick Shell. It is a pretty solid experience. But even with Quick Shell, which has taken a lot of the pain out of closing the gap between traditional DEs and these tiling WMs, it’s still a decent chunk of configuration.
Without it, I’d be doing a ton more configuration with a bar and scripts to display some information. And then those would be hardly functional, since really they’re just showing some stdout from the terminal. If I wanted to actually, say, connect to a new Bluetooth device, I’d still be heading to the terminal to connect.
That gap is what makes Omarchy interesting to me, and presumably to the people who seem to really like it.
Omarchy lets someone install it just like another “real” distribution and get a working OS without having to do hours of configuration and ensuring they have all the additional utilities they’d expect to have.
I think it does kind of have to be a “distro” because the appeal is that you don’t maintain the scripts yourself. You can just install it and get sensible defaults from a fresh install.
There’s nothing stopping Ubuntu, Fedora, or another major distribution from creating something like this. They already have Plasma and GNOME variants that include bundled software and sensible defaults customized from the delivered version of those DEs.
My question for people is whether their objection has to do with Omarchy itself or with the person or people behind it. I get that even without a controversial figure behind it, people might still object to some of the technical decisions behind it. But I find it hard to argue against the idea. It is filling a niche by making alternative WMs like Hyprland more accessible.
CachyOS (an Arch distro) has done something kid of like this, where it bundles eg a default setup for hyprland and several other desktop environments. It’s not perfect, but I like their model a lot. I mean it’s very Arch to be able to choose whatever you want, but nice to have some opinionated defaults.
>My question for people is whether their objection has to do with Omarchy itself or with the person or people behind it
both because as I said there's no distinction with a project like this, and I'll give you a technical example for this. The manual which I briefly read through says this on the monitor configuration:
"Omarchy assumes you're running on a 2x-capable retina-class display by default[...] It's what you'd want to run on a 27" 5K Apple Studio Display [...] But if you're not running a display with a PPI of 218 or above, you'll want to change the monitor settings ..."
then it proceeds to tell you what config files to edit by hand. Monitors with that PPI have a market share of <2%. This isn't a system for people who want things out of the box, it's his personal dotfiles that people use because they know his name. It's like buying Jordan sneakers and thinking they'll make you great at basketball, it's an influencer product. How many people, given that the appeal is to not read anything, have consulted that part of the manual? If this was a nobody's repo it'd have 10 stars and people would ask why the fonts look like crap.
If you want stuff working out of the box for non-technical people give them an Ubuntu LTS release, not window managers on release version 0.x. maintained by people in a discord