I cannot for the life of me understand the Omarchy hype. The Linux community has been theming their distribution installs for decades. What distinguishes this from that?

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.

The great strength of Omarchy is the fact that they've repackaged every good things from many different projects (arch, hyperland, and many packages) so I can install a fully functional distro with nice defaults, and every hardware working (bluetooth etc...), in less than 3 minutes without any interaction whatsoever. And it just works. Not because of Omarchy per se, but because they scripted the hell out of it so it just works™.

It's not magic, but damn it's nice.

Omarchy isn’t for me, but for those who find a minimal tiled Linux desktop interesting but don’t want to get lost in the jungle setting their own thing up, I don’t think you can possibly do better. It’s throughly thought through, polished, streamlined, and designed specifically to be accessible to newcomers.

It's a way for web developers to easily work in the linux sphere without getting burdened too heavily. Not saying that as a dig to web devs, I'm a web deb but that's all it really appears to me. Popular dude in web dev community made it slightly easier for other web devs to do a thing.

The interesting part is, how not dev-friendly their website looks and acts. It smells more like a toy for r/unixporn than something that actually caters to real developers. How old is this project? Is this just a result of lacking manpower?

Developers oftentimes struggle to understand how important marketing is.

First time I've heard of omarchy, that said often when I really don't understand the hype of a product I have to remember it's possibly just not for me.

I've been a desktop linux user since the 90's and entirely since 2003 (excluding gaming) so I'm not the target user.

Cute in the video on the omarchy page that they use Edward Hopper's - Nighthawks painting (~11m) - that was my default wallpaper for about 15 years on Linux.

It's "hannah montana linux" (https://linuxreviews.org/Hannah_Montana_Linux) for the late 2020s.

It's a dead-simple distribution with an opinionated setup that, well, mostly just works. It's a techie's version of a non-tech distribution where you don't have to tweak anything (or almost anything) to get a nice experience out of the box.

Think of it as "Ubuntu, but explicitly marketed for devs" Plus hype because DHH is a well-known figure.

Linux fandom really doesn't understand the power of defaults and the power of user experience. I mean, in the first versions of Omarchy installer you had to type in some CLI commands just to select and connect to wifi. This comes from Arch, a " a lightweight and flexible Linux® distribution that tries to Keep It Simple" [1] What's more simple than connecting to one of the most ubiquitous connection types via iwctl [2] during OS installation.

So DHH decided to make an opinionated config that mostly just works and provide you with a few conveniences out of the box.

[1] Yes, those capital letters are on their website https://archlinux.org

[2] https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Iwd#iwctl

Omarchy is DHH of rails fame. Lots of us like ruby a lot (myself very much included), that being said I've got Omarchy running on a vm as a test case and in the <2 minutes I've looked at it i dont really think it's very intuitive.

> At its core, Omarchy embraces Linux . . . makes a version of it that is accessible and fun to use for developers that don’t have a deep background in operating systems.

out of box experience that provides sane defaults with minimal effort to get to working mode

I don't think it's that crazy. Hyprland has, for a long time, looked really lovely when configured. But most don't want to configure it, the linux ricing community is really small in proportion to even the people who want to install Linux. Omarchy is dead-simple to install, has good documentation, decent opinions[1], and has huge influence because of DHH himself. I stopped running it myself after while, in favor of configuring my own Hyprland install, but it's an easily accessible shiny new thing by someone with a big following. Seems reasonable to me that people like it.

[1]: I don't agree with all of them, e.g. the chatbot shortcuts. But they're trivial to disable and/or redirect and, indeed, the project does a good job of trying not to mess with your changes.

You just need to watch the video to get the hype: it's the specific person leading the hype, with pretty good presentation and loyal audience. At least to me it made sense once I've seen it (the hype made sense, not the distro).

It's so opinionated but many people find it okay. And it's hard to install Arch successfully. Compared to Ubuntu Arch's package manager (also combined with AUR) are great.

I use every possible opportunity to say "Fuck Ubuntu Snaps"

The Linux community has, to my knowledge, never had someone with DHH's outreach experience and promote a "come-to-Linux" moment. Especially after using Apple products for 20 years.

Also, it has sane, sensible and appealing defaults. It's installable in a few minutes, so it saves time. I'm a happy Omakub user, even if I first used Linux back in 2005.

Basically, it comes from DHH, who has a kind of big following. Primeagen also made some videos, and it's good enough.

It's just a very simple Linux install meant for developers. It's not for people who have used Linux before but meant to be a way for new people to try it for the first time.

And it's getting a lot of attention because of DHH. Doesn't look half bad either which helps.

I think it started when PewDiePie released his Arch/Hyprland video, then DHH jumped on the train and made it super easy to install, now everyone can feel like a hacker/ricer easily.

Maybe I'm boring but I'm sticking to Debian/Gnome...

It's popularity I think comes from a) it's brain dead easy to get running while also being a very usable and nice hyprland config b) it's from DHH which has cult following status

I'd argue there's a fairly big niche of people who want a tiling WM but also don't want to have to start from scratch, figure out what accompanying utilities and programs they want to satisfy things like runner/menu, status bar, etc.

Other dots aren't as opinionated, or don't come with such a detailed user guide that Omarchy does, nor a set up script.

I'd even argue that Omarchy isn't really for other Linux users looking to distro hop, but like Omakub, it's for mac users curious about Linux, wanting an equally opinionated set up.

Dude, if you ever find out, let me know. I don't get it, and it makes me incredibly skeptical of people that acted like Linux was unusable until this god-send of a shipped default config came around. I cannot possibly roll my eyes harder. Just goes to show how much hype accounts for, still, even in nerd circles.

>What distinguishes this from that?

More eyes on it, DHH has a big following.

Not going to lie, the big Grok ad in that homepage video made me nope out pretty quick.

Reminds me of the rsync Dropbox comment lol.

It's created by dev Jesus /s