I'm surprised so many people who want to use Arch aren't in it for the fiddling.

I've had publicly installable dotfiles with a "1 command and ~5 minutes later" you have your development environment set up for a few years now. It is command line focused since my main box is running WSL 2 with Arch Linux. The script works for Debian, Ubuntu, Arch and macOS since I use a work laptop that's running a MBP.

It was a lot of fun building things up and learning about the process as I went.

When I got a laptop to install native Linux a little while back, Omarchy was just coming out and I figured ok since I will want a solution to trick out a window manager / DE I'll want more than command line tools so I took a look.

I ended up avoiding it for a few reasons but the main one was I don't want to ask for permission or maintain a fork to deviate from the Omarchy defaults that cannot be customized without a fork.

I love Rails and the philosophy behind it but I don't think the same model applies to something as intimate and personal as your OS. Your OS is more like a custom application made for you, especially if you're going down the Arch (or Linux in general) route.

▲ marginalia_nu 4 days ago | parent [-]

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.

▲ nickjj 3 days ago | parent [-]

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 3 days ago | parent [-]

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

	▲	nickjj 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		It's more than the PWAs. There's: https://github.com/basecamp/omarchy/blob/master/install/omar... https://github.com/basecamp/omarchy/blob/master/install/omar... There's around 180 packages being installed, most of which are considered base packages. 1password and tons upon tons of other apps and tools.