I had a chance to try Omarchy past few days and it's just very different vs macOS. I honestly never had a problem with the windowing system ever since I built my own customization scripts (i.e. Hammerspoon). I can see the appeal for someone who wants ultimate customization though but macOS still wins overwhelmingly when it comes to polish, ecosystem, user experience, and apps (nothing comes close).

▲

cosmic_cheese 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

It’s not just Omarchy, there’s really not much out there in the desktop Linux sphere for those who are mostly happy with how macOS works out of the box. Everything is either in a similar vein to the Omarchy setup (hyper-minimal tiling WM), Windows-like (KDE, Cinnamon, most other DEs), or a chimera with a grab bag of design bits from every desktop and mobile platform (GNOME, Pantheon, COSMIC).

It’s a bit depressing because it means that if I ever feel forced to switch my daily driver, it won’t come without a dump truck load of friction, frustration, and lost productivity, which I’ve validated by using the various Linux desktops on secondary machines.

▲

kombine an hour ago | parent | next [-]

KDE Plasma is as good as it gets if you'd like to transition from MacOS:

https://pointieststick.com/2025/10/04/a-mac-like-experience-...

	▲	cosmic_cheese 43 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		I run KDE on a secondary machine and it's the best it's ever been, but for me it's best for single-purpose machines where desktop differences basically don't matter. It's about on par with one of the better Windows releases (XP or 7 maybe) in terms of how frustrating I'd find it to do work under.

▲

xiphias2 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

There were 1000 plugins created for Omarchy 4 in 2 days. That's why I don't feel it being hyper minimal anymore.

It's still not well integrated of course as those plugins are from different people, but I at least don't feel powerless as I know I can make any change easily.

▲

prmoustache 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

It is just regular resistance to change. Loss of productivity is exagerated, it indeed exists in which ever direction but it is only temporary.

	▲	cosmic_cheese 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Perhaps, but one of desktop Linux's defining philosophies is the machine working for and adapting to the user rather than the reverse, so it's a letdown that this only really applies if you're coming from Windows or have been a Linux user all along.

▲

xiphias2 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

It's interesting because I just haven't felt the polish.

For example when using PyTorch I wanted to try to speed up my NN kernel by 2x by just using half precision and haven't noticed any speedup at all. Also I was missing the easy to use GNU tools that had to be mixed with Apple's tools.

I loved using Arc browser as well, and I'm missing it, but I guess I will do without it somehow (Chrome's vertical tabs are just not the same).

My main program missing from going back to Linux was ChatGPT Desktop, but now it's there.

I just checked out Hammerspoon, I'm happy for you that you wrote it, and looks great, but it has the same problem that I had: for security reasons Apple stopped allowing the window APIs to get all important information on other workspaces. You can only do it with Accessibility API. I was trying to fight with it but have up.

	▲	cosmic_cheese 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		If the browser being Chromium-based isn’t a hard requirement, it may be worth checking out the Firefox-based Zen Browser[0]. Its UI is very similar to that of Arc, to the point that I’d call it Arc’s spiritual successor. [0]: https://zen-browser.app/