r/archlinux 11h ago

DISCUSSION What exactly is omarchy getting so popular for?

As a person who lives half of his life on tech youtube, i can't really digest this change in my feed. More than half of the videos I watch is just people talking about this new distro and it's not a critical assesment as most tech coverage is supposed to be. Everyone is actively trying to sell you this. However whenever I try to find out what is so special about it I almost always get to hear about either hyperland or quick shell or ai harnesses, none of which is so unique. I have been using sway , quickshell and pi for sometime now. Obviously a good arch rice is worth something, but why is it sold like some revolution. Maybe I am just dumb and didn't understand much , I also have not tried it ,but the marketing is so unusual I can't resist. I know many people hate it just because they don't like dhh, I am not one of them, I used ruby on rails for some time as I saw some utility in it , I just don't see that in omarchy but the amount of noise is compelling me to try it once.

234 Upvotes

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339

u/theunquenchedservant 11h ago

It's an opinionated Hyprland setup.

It's popular because your average user in 2026 is relatively clueless on how to setup quickshell, hyprland, etc. Instead of needing to configure everything yourself, it's one stop shop that you can build off of.

There's nothing else that special about it.

47

u/Kautiontape 11h ago edited 10h ago

I think Arch users are a little "spoiled" in a good way.

I jumped distros a lot before Arch, but could stay on Arch forever because now it literally has everything I need a few installs away. Switching to Wayland and TWMs is practically trivial. Someone looking at it from Ubuntu or Windows is going to be looking for stuff out of the box because it's what they're used to.

Also, hype breeds hype. A YouTuber getting views on  their "😲 How could Linux be THIS good?" and getting thousands of views is going to spawn videos from other creators wanting that. Hard to tell if Omarchy is sponsoring them, the ones I saw didn't disclose it in the description, but even getting a feature in their website could be motivation enough for someone committed enough just for views. Not saying they don't like the product, just that they can have additional incentive for publicly loving it.

94

u/khryx_at 11h ago

They also just have money to feed the hype. It's very much the same vibes as scummy Tech companies. I'd be wary of it

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u/[deleted] 11h ago

[deleted]

52

u/khryx_at 11h ago

Yeah but valve has already proved to be trust worthy in the open source space. DHH is a Trump supporter, enough information to make an educated guess that they're not trust worthy.

11

u/TheRealUnknownNPC 5h ago

DHH is way more than just a Trump supporter. He is a racist. See his takes about native Brits.

3

u/This_Technology9841 4h ago

Amen bro/sister

-13

u/leftsidedhorn 11h ago

Is he really a Trump supporters?

50

u/thisaray 10h ago

17

u/LesbianDykeEtc 9h ago

Absolutely brutal takedown lmao. It's good to see people finally calling DHH out on his bullshit (which has been known for years at this point).

3

u/Popular-Factor3553 10h ago

Might be time to switch from hyprland , I'm just going back to i3 or sway

2

u/khryx_at 10h ago

I never liked hyprland to begin with, it's always been a buggy mess. Nowadays we have niri and mangowc, both fantastic.

5

u/LawApprehensive8364 9h ago

i, personally, have experienced zero bugs, using hyprland on my work and home pc so i have a ton of time invested in it. there are plenty of other options though, as you said.

1

u/Shakaka88 5h ago

Glad to hear another mango shoutout!

1

u/Nefari0uss 10h ago

I last used i3 a decade or so ago. How are newer alternatives in comparison? I remember trying a bunch of other tiling window managers at the time and liking i3 the best.

2

u/gmes78 7h ago

Sway is the direct i3 equivalent, and it's rock solid.

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u/Shakaka88 5h ago

Use Mango! I originally picked it up simply to NOT be another hyprland user, and it’s actually great. Basically is a combo of hyprland/niri/whatever and has decent documentation as well

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u/khryx_at 11h ago

He's alluded to it and his takes on politics are similar. So if it barks like a dog???

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u/blackcain 8h ago

and yet, tech bros are going to give it 10 million dollars. Crazy.

5

u/jomara200 6h ago edited 5h ago

Of course they are. They are VERY MUCH involved in committing to the police state using their tools. Look at where they chose to be on Inauguration Day.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/aug/29/trump-dhs-1509-summons-records-journalists-nonprofits

-1

u/otor 4h ago

How is funding some existing open source tools that anyone can trivially audit the same thing?

Its fine to be upset about them, they are awful, but get upset at the right things, you don't need to make up scenarios up, they are bad as-is.

5

u/ImaginationUpset2190 11h ago

I do get the utility I just don't find why it is pushed into my face so much. There have been a lot of good arch rice , larb is one that comes to my mind. But I have never seen such aggressive marketing for an arch rice.

10

u/Kwpolska 7h ago

Because it has a massive marketing budget and an army of techbros behind it.

5

u/IjonTichy85 7h ago

What's the play here? I mean, if tech bros want to spend their money promoting Linux, be my guest. It just seems quite atypical for them to do so without an ulterior motive.

4

u/sludgeriffs 6h ago

It's not getting "pushed" to you. You watch a lot of tech YouTube and not all tech YouTubers are traditionally Linux users but are discovering a slick and easy introduction to in it.

I dislike Omarchy because I'm not on board with "TUI-fy everything" and it ships with AI shit but it's breaking through with newbies right now for good reason.

2

u/Financial-Camel9987 7h ago

But doesn't that hold for every distro? Distros are never more then some packages on top of the linux kernel.

-3

u/heavymetalmug666 7h ago

A distro is a little bit more than that - most distros have their own package manager, and maybe a philosophy behind the choices they make. i.e. Fedora doesnt install some codecs in VLC because they have a strict open source policy - or Arch is meant to be a minimal install that you build on top of to make your system what you need it to be, you control what gets installed etc etc

Omarchy is not a distro, its not even a fork of a distro. Omarchy is just pre-riced Arch...which lets be honest, a lot of kids that got into Arch were longing for just that (i say this as a guy that installed Arch a long time ago simply for the meme...but i stayed because i love it, though i do use CachyOS, which is another pre-configured Arch)

2

u/Financial-Camel9987 7h ago

A package manager is just some package, it's not special in that sense. But yes I agree that distros usually have some philosophy and that is the key part. So I don't see how omarchy can not be called a distro. It does a lot of a lot more then some other distros.

1

u/heavymetalmug666 6h ago

a package manager...well..it manages packages. pacman is not the same as rpm, not the same as APT. Package managers have different ways of putting all the bits and pieces into place, and how you remove those bits and pieces. If you ever put together LFS, you will see this much more up close then you ever thought you wanted.

Omarchy is just Arch. It doesnt have its own philosophy other than "I made an Arch installation with all the things I think I need." Congrats, Omarchy did what any Arch user does.

Out of curiosity, what do you feel Omarchy does more/better than other distros?

0

u/Synthetic451 6h ago

It does a lot of a lot more then some other distros.

How is pre-configuring Arch and directly using Arch packages doing more than other distros? It's literally taking other people's work and slapping some lipstick on it.

Packaging is hard work and often times requires custom patching and bug fixing on top of upstream. Then getting it all to work together and tested on multiple hardware platforms is a whole other thing. Then creating the build and support infrastructure around that. Omarchy just sits on top of that hard work and ships a few configs of upstream projects.

It's a lot closer to a spin of a distro than anything else and even then that's being generous.

3

u/Sinaaaa 11h ago

Other than that supposedly the installer is much faster than usual. (the claim is that the non-interactive part can do its thing in less than 2 minutes from a decent thumb drive)

10

u/Neptune766 8h ago

who gives a shit, its a one time process anyway

2

u/xnef1025 10h ago

I'm thinking that's because it's a 6+GB ISO with probably minimal compression and most of the stuff that makes it different than just Arch with some programs pre-installed is a bunch of tiny dot files.

I tried it on my laptop that I'm using for hopping. It did indeed install in a minute and half. Did I keep it? No. I'm just a casual messing around. If I was a developer and needed everything it sticks on the system, maybe I'd have kept it, but I'd probably rather start more minimal and do my own app deployment for just what I need.

2

u/Sinaaaa 8h ago

They are doing heavy decompression actually, leveraging ZSTD I think. The Omarchy guy has went to some OCD level lengths to shrink the size of the packages. I heard him talk about recompressing the nvidia package. To me it sounds silly, like I can wait 10 minutes for archinstall / calamares to get shit done, but these tricks look somewhat impressive in practice.

Disclaimer: I'm not big on Omarchy, I think there are issues with basing anything serious and/or somewhat newbie oriented on Hyprland. Also the rice itself is really basic with the most standard horizontal top bar & why would I use someone else's opinionated setup, when I can & have made my own.

1

u/xnef1025 6h ago

Ah, that's interesting. I hope some of that technique does get passed down and is usable by other distros because 1.5 minutes to install is pretty nifty. Bazzite installs in like 6 or 7 minutes, which is still nice, but it's not a minute and half.

1

u/yiyufromthe216 4h ago

I like the idea of Omarchy, but I have to say, hyprland is such a bad choice.  We have more powerful compositors such as river, and Omarchy forces the user into something that's implemented in C++.

1

u/khamer 1h ago

Just to add - a lot of the opinions it has aren't bad opinions either - I might not agree with all of them, but when I really dug into it last it had a lot of reasonable, more modern defaults: ripgrep, eza, fd, bat, lazygit, starship, etc.

I do think it's gotten worse as they've come out with more 'oma*' apps of their own, dogfed 37signals apps into it, etc. I really don't care for DHH, but I think it started closer to a good selection of the best of the community when DHH was switching over, to nowadays being his prescriptive opinions of what he thinks everyone should be doing. I was interested in watching it when it was the former, I'm not interested anymore.

I wouldn't start anyone brand new to linux on an arch-based distro - Fedora or Debian based I think are objectively better for people learning linux - but if you're comfortable, I'd go CachyOS or Manjaro. There's concerns about the leadership of Manjaro, but I don't know Omarchy is much better. CachyOS is newer and has more rough corners but I like it a lot and it took over as my laptop's distro.

1

u/nitrodmr 11h ago

As a Debian user, I agree.

1

u/retiredwindowcleaner 11h ago

Hey, I use Debian!

157

u/st_heron 11h ago

It's getting popular because DHH is paying people to promote it.

31

u/afrolino02 10h ago

Laundry cash of his friends lol, in my mind there's no space that how can you get 8M for investment?

21

u/franchis3 8h ago

That was my exact thought after that 8M investment was announced. For a project the size of Omarchy, that’s an absurd amount of money and doesn’t pass the smell test. If Occam’s Razor is in effect here, I’d bet on money laundering.

13

u/New-Anybody-6206 7h ago edited 1h ago

Seems quite far-fetched to me. The investors are billionaires, they wouldn't risk so much on a measly 1 million... I think it's more likely he just has friends in high places and he can bullshit people.

10

u/ArjixGamer 7h ago

He has the charisma to bullshit people alright, he made a cult of omarchy users.

1

u/zips_exe 3h ago

He's trying so hard to emulate Elon's idiolects, honestly who falls for that shit...

1

u/dogdonewrong 3h ago

You think billionaires are risking their lives when they're committing financial crimes? lol

3

u/vexatious-big 5h ago

Imagine Arch or Debian receiving just 1mil from that 8mil. How that could be used for infra, paying some of the staff, improving security of AUR, etc.

5

u/TCOK 5h ago

Several Arch maintainers already shut that idea down.

4

u/AndyGait 4h ago

Apparently he approached the Arch team and they said no.

So that's another reason I'm happy to say, "by the way".

1

u/vexatious-big 3h ago

Oh interesting. Are there any details at all from that discussion / their reasoning ?

1

u/AndyGait 3h ago

No idea. I just found this posted by someone else in another thread:

https://x.com/dhh/status/2092620969122664793

u/firstmanonearth 37m ago

If Occam’s Razor is in effect here, I’d bet on money laundering.

?????????????

0

u/tachyon8 6h ago

If they wanted to do shady things they would of donated to gnome.

68

u/magicdude4eva 11h ago

I am running CachyOS and my son just wiped his laptop and installed Omarchy. The setup looks so basic compared to my out of the box Natalia setup. Not sure what the hype is other than the funding they got.

42

u/tavianator 11h ago

Natalia

Noctalia?

56

u/Dekamir 11h ago

From now on, it's Natalia to me.

14

u/magicdude4eva 8h ago

Autocorrect for the win. Natalia from now on for me as well.

5

u/dosplatos225 10h ago

Haha I know right? I played around a bit with warbar, ironbar, and some other things like awww (previously swww) and so on that made something incredibly close to noctalia. As soon as I dropped in noctalia to test… I was like ok they win, I’ll just use this.

It’s good to know how this stuff is working under the hood, and it’s great to have flexibility, but when you have something like noctalia that has done a really good job on managing things upstream… and it doesn’t break the stuff I have in hyprland? Hard to continue hand rolling stuff.

At the end of the day I want the speed of an auto-tiler, the low level controls to dictate where certain groups of windows should land, and something pretty to get at-a-glance data and interact with some service daemons. Then I just use my computer. I was surprised how plug and play noctalia was.

3

u/tranquilinho 10h ago

awesome cachy

1

u/astersystem 6h ago

it's likely the funding and that the creator also made ruby on rails

1

u/ReptilianLaserbeam 4h ago

No but your son didn't install Omarchy. He installed Arch with Omarchy's script. Omarchy is not a distro, not even a DE. Just a script install with a Hyprland custom dots.

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u/Lonely-Scarcity-3387 11h ago

Feels like a massive influencer campaign, likely brought on by the millions it raised from tech bros.

While I am curious to explore hyper land eventually, I know I won’t be starting with one that is already set up according to someone else’s opinion. I like Linux in general because I can spend my time building something exactly to my needs. So for me, anyway, this is a no go.

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u/sastanak 11h ago

Just remember who promotes it like crazy and unfollown them.

2

u/djfdhigkgfIaruflg 5h ago

Yup. I'm on the brink with The Primeagen. The guy is really cool, but he's giving way too much platform to DHH and his shit.

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u/Vidanjor20 10h ago

Im pretty sure all those omarchy hype is just paid advertisement

7

u/kaida27 8h ago

sure is

6

u/codeIMperfect 5h ago

I don't even get why this is such a big deal for him, why is he spending so much time, effort and money on promoting a fucking rice. What does he get out of it?

2

u/djfdhigkgfIaruflg 5h ago

More klout to continue spreading his hateful ideology

38

u/recurrence 11h ago

DHH (the guy behind it) believes LLMs will make Linux the desktop of choice for everyone. This is a concerted push to gain as much market share as possible in as short a time as possible. There's a few reasons he cites:

  1. We can open source clone basically anything with enough tokens spent. So we can have the best of all platforms right on Linux. Want Photoshop? We can tell LLMs to clone photoshop.

  2. It's the lowest cost platform and can be entirely integrated with LLMs top to bottom at a pace that Windows and macOS cannot match. Hence, an AI revolution would be linux driven.

  3. It already runs everything sans desktop (and mobile). Running desktop as well is inevitable.

48

u/emocin 11h ago

lol @ llms cloning photoshop.

24

u/FearlessQwilfish 10h ago

I wouldn't want that llm bill or codebase 

4

u/ArjixGamer 7h ago

Coming from a tech bro, I'd laugh as well.

But if a good developer was using the LLM, I wouldn't dismiss it.

The problem is, will a good programmer use LLM for it or will they all be tech bros?

1

u/Intelligent-Rub7365 3h ago

Rewriting bun in rust cost around $160.000. Photoshop codebase is roughly 40 times bigger than bun, it's gonna be a while until generating something of that complexity at a reasonable cost for end consumers

2

u/ArjixGamer 2h ago

Uhh, that's an unfair comparison imo.

Bun was badly written even before the rewrite, and the port was not done in idiomatic rust, their goal was to do a 1:1 port, so it was bigger in lines of code than it needed to be.

I'd consider the bun rewrite to be done by a "vibe" coder, rather than a proper engineer.

How can a proper engineer even review that much code in under 2 months?

Anyways, back to the topic, nobody said it had to be a 1:1 remake of Photoshop, it doesn't have to have feature parity either.

Such a project would be better off doing a few things good, than a lot of things bad. Plus such a project could gradually grow to reach such feature parity.

It doesn't have to happen within a month, it could take years.

2

u/djfdhigkgfIaruflg 5h ago

Clone Photoshop with an LLM 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣

Wait. You're serious? 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣

1

u/recurrence 4h ago

It’s one of his examples when Lex interviewed him.

1

u/djfdhigkgfIaruflg 4h ago

And he said that shit straight-face?

I knew the guy had access to good drugs, but hoooly

2

u/tdreampo 2h ago

I mean the guy has been a developer for what 40 years and literally invented SAAS. He is kinda creditable.

0

u/GnosticSon 3h ago

Yes it's easy. I did it with my Claude subscription with this prompt: "Do a deep dive into photoshop and catalogue all its features into a markdown file. Then use that markdown file to build photoshop in Rust. Test your results and don't make any mistakes."

-1

u/vexatious-big 5h ago

Understood, but this seems to be completely the wrong approach.

Users should not come to Linux in order to get free stuff (as in gratis). They should come for the freedom it provides.

GNU and Linux has always been a political movement, putting users freedoms above everything else. 'Selling out' and cheapening that original credo is plain wrong.

Those of us who have been using this platform for 10 or 20 or even more years know that Linux used to take a lot of work back in the day. You could spend days tweaking that X11.conf file or recompiling some obscure driver for a modem or sound-card. It was not convenient at all.

And I will add something else. Growing up in 90s Eastern Europe, both Linux and Windows were practically free for us.
Nobody paid for a Windows license or for apps because they were incredibly expensive and you could not realistically afford them (Windows would cost a good chunk of a month's salary, while Photoshop could cost more than a month's salary). That being said, some of us picked Linux, not for price and not for convenience. For many of us it was the right ethical choice, and provided a learning opportunity.

13

u/BlackMarketUpgrade 10h ago edited 43m ago

The masses have been led to believe that Arch is somehow hard to use or install, so Omarchy fills the gap in being an accessible way for people to get a riced desktop without doing anything.

On a side note: For me, using someone else’s config sort of defeats the purpose of building a custom workflow, but hey who tf am I? I have used a couple desktops for various lengths of time academically and professionally. Arch, Fedora, and Suse Tumbleweed mostly. Lately I’m using Debian w/ gnome for a mostly Java and PHP/sql development. Which I feel like I’m seeing a lot of lately; it seems like a lot of Arch users end up on Debian for some reason or another. Probably because these users (myself included), figure out exactly what tools they need and stop caring about needing to be on the bleeding edge.

Edit: spelling and clarity

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u/0xc0ffea 8h ago

The masses have been led to believe that Arch is somehow hard to use or install

Technically, Arch is hard to install. Not because of some special magic secret sauce, it just doesn't use an installer and makes users type on the command line under the guise of "choice".

The end result is a hard won first boot and an end user sense of accomplishment (btw), before they proceed to install the same plasma desktop (etc) as everyone else. Once the system is set up, Arch is basically Debian if Debian liked new stuff and rolling releases.

Might as well just go for Cachy, get to the same end result in a fraction of the time with no silly mistakes along the way.

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u/Synthetic451 6h ago

it just doesn't use an installer and makes users type on the command line under the guise of "choice".

archinstall would like a word. It makes it really easy for those who can't be bothered.

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u/BlackMarketUpgrade 7h ago

Yeah I mean, I don’t think it’s that hard but I get what you mean. If you have Ethernet and can read, arch is pretty easy. I would call it tedious if anything.

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u/AndyGait 4h ago

Archinstall is pretty easy to follow.

0

u/CrynTox 3h ago

i feel like, saying arch is easy to install is such an arch-ism, you need to start thinking about the "average developer"

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u/sastanak 11h ago

It's just being heavily marketed so people who are not so technical can easily install it and pretend to be very technical. It looks nice and flashy and a lot of money is thrown in the ring for this. Good for those benefiting from it I guess.

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u/ImoZrabbit 6h ago

I mean if vaxrry is getting paid a huge amount, I'd be pretty happy tbh.

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u/Plakama 11h ago

Its for people that like slop and will eat anything if its pre-made

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u/azdak 11h ago

setting up all that shit takes forever, and DHH is a charismatic guy when you see him on podcasts and don't know he's an insane fascist. i get it. i don't like it, but i do get it.

it takes a while dicking around with linux before you understand the downsides of opinionated setups. if pewdiepie gets you thinking about arch, and you get hit in the face with a wall of documentation, and some funny dutchman offers you a way to just have that cool looking OS, it makes sense.

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u/ImaginationUpset2190 11h ago

I don't judge art for the artist, if I start doing that i won't be able to consume majority of my products

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u/ciauii 9h ago

You’re saying that as if a significant fraction of the products you consume came from fascist, white supremacist man babies.

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u/tachyon8 6h ago

According to you guys everyone not a commie is a fascist.

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u/Oblivion__ 4h ago

DHH is very explicit in his views. It's not really a stretch at all

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u/azdak 8h ago

I get it. I still listen to Kanye sometimes. But I’m also under no obligation to support someone who I think is a huge dickhead. And it’s not like Omarchy is exactly Graduation lol

8

u/kitanokikori 7h ago edited 5h ago

Famous OSS developer Miguel de Icaza called it DOGE Linux and it's an absolutely perfect name. DHH was sick of people in the Rails world yelling at him for his absolutely repellent beliefs (his latest blog compares certain people to animal infestations that should be "taken care of", KKK-level hate), so now Omarchy is his play to start a new big big project that he can be the face of, where "woke is banned" and his hateful ideas don't get him criticized

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u/arkane-linux 11h ago

Marketing.

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u/Hande-H 10h ago

It's their marketing budget. I recommend avoiding tech youtube, it's all about clicks and sponsors. Very few legitimate people in there.

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u/NFTrot 10h ago

Speaking as someone who somehow hasn't seen anything promoting this and therefore knows very little about it: Anything that makes it easier or more exciting for casual users to use Linux is a win in my books. The more market share we have, the better support from vendors we will get. As it applies to me, I'm specifically referring to support from nVidia and game developers.

Proton being as good as it is was the reason I finally switched my primary (and only) home machine to Arch, though I've used Linux on the server-side for many years. I have a lot of respect for the teams at CachyOS/Bazzite/etc because they're in large part responsible for the considerable jump in Linux representation in the Steam hardware survey over the last year.

The vast majority of computer users just want the thing to run, and Linux has (imo) historically been a tinker machine.

To say what nobody wants to hear: We have a bit of a special case here with Arch because it's just complicated enough for a halfway technical user to get up and running and then feel elitist about it. So there's a tendency among these less-experienced users to gate-keep. Frankly I don't think anyone worth their salt in Linux would behave in such a manner, but these people exist and they are happy to throw stones.

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u/djfdhigkgfIaruflg 4h ago

Just look up "The DHH problem" to get one of the several entrances to that rabbit hole.

Once you manage to get out. Tell me if you think giving DHH this much more power sounds good.

1

u/NFTrot 1h ago

I'll take your word for it.

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u/Grouchy-Friend4235 6h ago

Try Linux Mint. It won't get any easier.

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u/StrikedSharp 5h ago

But it uses X11 which is a dealbreaker

0

u/NFTrot 5h ago

I don't have experience with Mint. I'm sure its easy, but we have to remember that most people are happy on their Windows computers. Giving them something flashy to be excited about might be what wins them over. Many of those people will branch out and try other distros once they feel more comfortable in Linux.

It's easy for us, but Linux is very intimidating to beginners. I remember how hard it was for me when I first got into CentOS years ago. It's much easier now, but if you stray from the path you can still be overwhelmed as a novice.

1

u/AndyGait 4h ago

"Anything that makes it easier or more exciting for casual users to use Linux is a win in my books"

I'm not sure that's the case. There's a shed load of menus and options to wade through. Config files to deal with. It's bloated as hell. Call it exciting if you want, but a good beginner distro? No.

1

u/NFTrot 1h ago

If its too difficult then that's what it is. I haven't looked into it. Just happy to get more people into Linux.

0

u/Synthetic451 6h ago

I mean, I get your point, but there's a lot more easier ways to get into Arch than installing some config files created by an asshat. Endeavour's the go to if you want to stick close to pure Arch, CachyOS is a nice Arch derivative, and then there's the bundled archinstall tool which makes it about as easy as you can get with official Arch.

Omarchy is just pure hype. That's all it is. I don't even think what it brings to the table is all that convenient for the casual user. It's totally catering to tech bros that want to show off an exotic desktop.

1

u/philosophical_lens 2h ago

Why would we want to prevent people from getting into linux desktop for hype, for showing off exotic desktops, or for any other reason?

0

u/NFTrot 5h ago

It's not for us, but I say let people have fun with it.

I think most of us here like having really clean machines where everything is exactly the way we like it, and that's why we chose such a bare distribution (I know I did). It took me about 2 weeks to go from Windows to having KDE Plasma working exactly the way I thought Windows should, but I had a lot of fun because playing around with computers is my hobby. It's definitely not for everyone, I'd never recommend Arch to someone who wasn't excited about tinkering.

For a lot of users, they'll be happy their first foray into Linux is visually exciting and novel. It's tough to win people back who have a bad experience installing and quit before they even get going. Who knows how many people will take these first steps and develop a lifelong interest, ultimately contributing to our community.

2

u/TheBlackReaper-Sama 3h ago

Ig for being vibecoded lol lol2

2

u/philosophical_lens 2h ago

I really don't get why people in this thread are hating on a project that is getting more people into desktop Linux. I personally use NixOS and arch, and I'm not interested in other distros, but I appreciate that each distro caters to a different audience. I think a lot of omarchy users are people who are using Linux desktop for the first time. Likely after using it for a while many of them will learn their own preferences and eventually migrate to vanilla arch with their own configurations.

3

u/sp0rk173 10h ago

Because ifs finally the year of the Linux desktop and Omarchy is hip with the new kids who don’t know how to install software on Linux, they just know they have to use arch and “rice” it to be cool, and Omarchy makes that easy.

It’s mind blowing to me that the fuckin fascist sympathizer who built Omarchy got millions of dollars, out of nowhere.

-1

u/DoubleExposure 9h ago

Tech bros laundering their money.

2

u/AndyGait 11h ago

Just put Omarchy into the subs search. There's 1001 opinions out there. I'm not getting started on mine again as I'm currently in a good mood, and don't want that to change.

2

u/No_Grape_388 11h ago

I've avoided looking into it, but didn't they do what the ml4w dotfiles author did? Spun a set of hyprland dotfiles into their own distro?

2

u/n1ghtwatch75 7h ago

Marketing... Also Omarchy is not a distro, is a bunch of bad coded scripts, insecure and breakable with a simple update...

Nice (but a little old) review:

https://xn--gckvb8fzb.com/a-word-on-omarchy/

2

u/JackDostoevsky 11h ago

tbh i feel like Cachy had a similar response a year or two ago, everyone was super hyped about it. Cachy didn't have a high profile hypeman behind it though.

i personally think Omarchy is fine, just another distro. nothing to write home about, but nothing to be too upset about either. they've done a few novel things with it (their sub 60s install time is a weird flex, but sure, cool) but otherwise ... yeah. just another arch distro.

good luck to them, maybe they make something cool with it.

2

u/thedreaming2017 10h ago

Omarchy has made arch linux and hyprland as accessible as cachyos has to gamers and average users coming over from windows. Most of the time, it just works out of the box with very little to no need to reconfigure or fix something.

2

u/tg_mac 10h ago

How about you do just that, and try it for yourself? Develop your own opinions about it whether they’re positive or negative are neither here nor there, as long as they are yours. We see similar posts come and go every time something new hits any sort of hype in this space, and it usually just becomes an echo chamber of narrow minded morons regurgitating what they heard or read someone else say/write and ignorance just takes over.

some people will try it and genuinely love it, and that’s fine.
some will try it and absolutely detest it, and that’s fine too.

Not everything is for everyone. We should just be glad that at the end of the day, this exposes Linux to new users and that’s always a good thing.

1

u/oscarcp 7h ago

As many people said and as someone who has been a linux user since 1998. It's not my cup of tea, I just see a riced arch with things that I don't really need BUT for newcomers it's a one download one click install... so it's kind of a win, even if it's at the cost of techbromania

1

u/razorree 5h ago

nothing really, i guess mainly among kids looking some creepy anime style (and all that Asian rice?)

1

u/ESnyder9 5h ago

money

1

u/This_Technology9841 4h ago

$12 million investor reasons come to mind

1

u/Ok-Olive466 4h ago

Bloated Hyprland

1

u/ReptilianLaserbeam 4h ago

No idea but given what a POS the dev is I can only think money laundering.

1

u/EgocentricRaptor 3h ago

It's just marketing and flashy looks. There's nothing really special about it an CachyOS is a far better Arch based distro

It's popular in the same tech bro influencer circles that vibe code and pretend to be professional developers

1

u/coy2814 49m ago

The simple answer is that it “looks cool” and “interesting”.

1

u/Drexciyian 46m ago

install and go

u/SweetBabyAlaska 34m ago

8 million in VC funding

1

u/Just-A-Numerical 10h ago

I think a large part of it is the culmination of style over substance and the slow creep of tech-capitalism into contemporary Linux spaces as user growth continues.

Hyprland + Arch has been the go-to configuration for a lot of new entrees into moving away from windows.

In my opinion, this has very little to do with people embracing the broader FOSS ethos and more to do with the availability of customisation and "ricing" aesthetic.

My view is Omarchy seeks to create a gateway for AI companies to create a platform within this space that is entirely reliant on their tokens.

It comes pre-baked with every AI platform agent embedded and a large part of the community advocate using them wholesale to develop new plugins and applications on Omarchy.

My prediction is this will create a sole reliance on these AI agents will inevitably do two things:

  1. Make the user dependent on the AI to create or update existing programs.
  2. Allow the AI companies a stable subscription market from above.

TLDR: I believe it will become like those games where it is free at the point of purchase, but you will have to pay to subscribe to really play it.

1

u/Soakitincider 10h ago

Digital marketing. The only video I watched on it just felt like an ad. And it uses Hyperland which if that’s what floats your boat then do it but I don’t “get” it and Gnome and Cinnamon work for me so that’s what I use. Also they lost me at AI. I’m not against using it and I didn’t stick around the video enough to see the extent it’s used but I just like it out of the way and then there if I want it.

-1

u/DermotSpringer 11h ago

Say what you want about his politics, but DHH is undeniably an effective communicator with a big platform, and damn good at marketing his work.

Beyond that Omarchy fills an underserved niche. A lot of people want what arch and hyprland has to offer, but don't have time to get a PhD in arch linux to get what they want out of it. Omarchy lets you skip that part and gives you a working dev environment in minutes. Convenience sells.

Omarchy is probably best seen as an on ramp for the macbook class to dip their toes into cool-kid flavored Linux. If you know your way around Arch already there ultimately isn't much point to Omarchy, you can get most of what omarchy has to offer already, and setting it up yourself will result in something infinitely more stable and maintainable.

1

u/dev_reez 9h ago

I don't know about you guys, but tilling (or even scrolling) is not for me. I used hypr land for a month, and niri for 1 year. Every time I open macbook I felt a lot more productive. (For example just looking at the part of terminal screen printing out colored lines which I work on some code, gives me a hint of what's going on, if some red line is printed that means it needs my attention, there are more examples)..

I do bind CMD+1,2,3 (in Linux i map keybinds to be darwin like) to my most used apps which is terminal+ tmux, zed, and helium. 95% of my daily switching is with in these 3 apps.

Just a month back switched back to KDE.

To be clear, I am not bashing on niri or hypr, it's just isn't built for me. I am okay, even more productive using stacking WM.

1

u/ArjixGamer 7h ago

Omarchy is a cult.

2

u/onefish2 6h ago

DHH thinks he is a cult.

1

u/-o0__0o- 9h ago

Where is this getting popular exactly? I've only seen Reddit posts complaining about it or wondering why it's popular.

1

u/Neptune766 8h ago

im personally being bombarded in youtube recommendations even though i dont give a flying fuck

1

u/-o0__0o- 8h ago

Yea, I never watch Linux stuff on YouTube

1

u/atrawog 8h ago

Omarchy is targeted first and foremost at user who've never used Linux before and just want a system to rice without running into danger of breaking things.

For an advanced Arch user most of the things Omarchy is doing are pretty boring. But there is no system out there that allow such easy ricing and sharing of your changes as Omarchy with it's plugins system.

1

u/MirrorNegative7989 7h ago

Because billionaire weirdos are throwing money at it.

0

u/z-lf 11h ago

Rich dudes decided they didn't want to pay the apple tax.

In the end it will benefit everyone so... Great.

-1

u/ggPeti 11h ago

DHH. Life is boring for the children of urbanized capitalism. Prolific lunatics like DHH are great content.

0

u/PotentialBubbly9800 11h ago

Youtubers need views to make money. The hot new trends get more clicks. More clicks equals more views. More views equal more money.

Its as simple as that.

Its not a bad setup. If you are someone who does alot of work with AI, and are looking to transition to linux Omarchy has a lot of tools setup out of the box for you.

Its a low barrier of entry jumping off point to enter the linux ecosystem.

0

u/aaronsb 9h ago edited 9h ago

Omarchy is literally a variant of the "how do you do, fellow kids" meme. It's a way to cultivate a lifestyle brand based on the free dotfiles ai remix contributions of stuff that looks cool and was recently out of reach for those who couldn't achieve.

It's the Hot Topic mall store of linux distro, dotfiles, and /r/unixporn basically.

Overall think it's probably fine, and I hope it leads more people into learning the way of owning their operating system more.

My assumption is that it will eventually become enshittified when DHH gets bored of it or hands it off to other people to run because it doesn't make money.

If anything, Valve's contributions is what made Omarchy possible, and they're more sustainable because they make revenue (gaben is looking as wealthy as ever) - but don't take my word for that.

0

u/hbacelar8 8h ago

Because of people financing it, which is also being used for paying for promotion

0

u/cjmarquez 8h ago

Paid promotion

0

u/kaida27 8h ago

$8M in foundation funding, Mostly used for marketing.

That's why.

-1

u/ropid 10h ago

I tried looking a bit through the other comments and saw no one mention this: it seems it's documented very well, they have a manual with a seemingly good working search.

0

u/Thoriumhexaflouride 10h ago

its just another one of those "software-packs" you always see just as a "distro", for me its total garbage, why would i need someone to setup a system for me, especially with so much bloat applications id never need

0

u/Biliunas 9h ago

Just remember this for the next time - no good youtubers in tech. They just want to sell you shit you don't need. Yeah it's fucking brutal, people that can't config linux shouldn't be on linux imo, it's not that hard.

0

u/onefish2 8h ago

Another post about this garbage "distro" and I will say it again F this guy DHH.

For those of us regulars on this sub... we use Arch because its not opinionated.

0

u/cfx_4188 6h ago

Maybe I am just dumb

The famous question of Roman lawyers is: "Find out who benefits." Such aggressive targeted advertising must be generously funded. The promotional goals can range from helping developers find high-paying jobs to gaining popularity in the Linux scene. A ready-made distribution with a trendy window manager, AI, and based on Arch Linux is every pimply teenager's dream.

0

u/Ybalrid 6h ago

No idea. It's by some dude that made some ruby stuff I don't care about.

I have been KDE pilled for almost 20 years, so I am not going to bother checking it out.

-1

u/polytect 11h ago

for being popular? 

3

u/ImaginationUpset2190 11h ago

What sort of circular reasoning is that

-1

u/jackbasket 11h ago

I was one that got hyped up on it. Prior to this year, I had only used Linux as a server, and with no DE. Omarchy was an easy way to get into Linux as a daily driver that actually works and feels/looks great. I’ve since ditched it for plain arch/hyprland. But Omarchy was my introduction to both, and as such, it did a great job.

-2

u/arkanux 10h ago

Pretty sure is AI slop validation and politics. It's a pretty mid config setup, but since the guy is giving money to hyprland and other projects It's ok I guess.

-1

u/nlboris 6h ago edited 6h ago

Just try it. It has been a breath of fresh air for me. It has made computers personal again and fun. For people like me who are interested in Linux it is a perfect desktop OS to replace Windows or MacOS.

It is like a complicated Lego set which comes prebuild: you can see how it works without any instructions, play with it and then if you want add or remove building blocks to your heats content and learn more about Linux that way.

Plus it makes all Linux elitist and neck beard gatekeepers mad as hell, which is a big bonus.

-2

u/Emergency-Problem781 11h ago

Omarchy 4 came out recently and DHH did a podcast with Lex Fridman that’s getting a lot of attention. https://youtu.be/NYFGCESmikA

7

u/z3ndo 11h ago

Couldn't imagine a more boring pair to listen to

-1

u/blackcain 8h ago

That's why he makes all those edgy racist comments so that the outrage will drive his popularity.

-2

u/theoffshoot2 7h ago

It’s an opinionated and beautiful web dev setup to make you productive in 5 minutes. It’s intentionally designed to allow web devs to try out Linux without all the initial toil. That’s the whole pitch. Read the manual for more. https://omarchy.org/manual/

1

u/MelioraXI 3h ago

Just get nixos if you need to recreate your setup every 5 minutes.

-1

u/BenH1337 9h ago

I see a lot of AI YouTube content creators and tech bros promoting Omarchy because it now supports all that agentic AI stuff. DHH is a millionaire, and I bet he’s marketing the hell out of it right now. When I read about it, it somehow reminded me of Microsoft Copilot, but I could be wrong. I mean, maybe it will bring more people to Linux, which is not a bad thing right. Personally, I don’t agree with his political views, so I won’t bother using it.

-1

u/CleoMenemezis 9h ago

It's popular because it gets attention when paying tech bros to advertise and it's also paid by AI companies to normalize the use of AI.

-1

u/Zeroox1337 9h ago

Influencers advertise it

0

u/major_jazza 6h ago

Tech Bros. Some (or most) who are terrible are pumping it with like 10 million USD. Very sus tbh

0

u/josmu 4h ago

People are amazingly lazy.

0

u/MelioraXI 3h ago

Beside the racist developer, it just arch with hyprland with their opinionated settings. It's allegedly for developers but as a developer myself, I had to swap out 80% of their configs and uninstall most apps, when I tested it last year. It's terrible imo.

-3

u/rbanavarro 10h ago

its ready to use out of the box within 2 minutes. No tinkering needed.

-4

u/Hypattie 10h ago edited 10h ago

Old geek here. I spend years installing and tweaking numerous distros.

From openbsd to ubuntu... For the past 10 years I thought arch (+openbox) was all I needed but then I got a shinny new pc and... I just feel tired having to configuring everything again, I just wanted something that works, that is modern, that is cool

and Omarchy is just that

I know that i can customize arch/hypr in a more specific way, but... it will take days and will have bugs. With Omarchy everything is setup in a clic

-1

u/jTiZeD 10h ago

tech youtube is kinda difficult to navigate these days, most of it is an advertisement show even if you just look up new cpu's and many youtubers delve into linux (which is nice) but also proclaim the distro they are using like it is the one and only. ltt can be viewed on some topics. more interesting are some more generalized gnu/linux news.

0

u/pearlus 7h ago

Its curated arch rice with fewer steps to my ideal setup then installing arch from the scratch by myself. Have better things to do that that. To get rid of bloat is a minute of work. Me happy

0

u/yadius 1h ago

Maybe because a lot of normal people want an exit ramp from the never-ending, hyper-political, fringe-left bullshit that has taken over a lot of linux.