Omarchy Is Not A Distro

It is understandable to be frustrated at a project without technical merit gaining so much traction when, as in the author's words, "longstanding distros like Debian have struggled with funding and sponsorship for decades". However, I do feel the author fails to come up with any conclusion as to why there is such a disparity between interest in traditional distributions and this rice.

I agree that it is almost suspicious how quickly it has risen to prominence. There has been a surge of hugely popular amorphous open source projects by single or few maintainers, often created very recently. In my experience, most of the users of Omarchy are inexperienced with Linux, and use it because it doesn't require them to form their own opinions and workflows, which can be both positive and negative.

I’m sorry, but what is the actual definition of a distro? What makes Omarchy different than, say, Cachy which is also an opinionated DE and set of packages on top of Arch.

There aren’t really any rules to what to find this or not. Just because something is more opinionated than other solutions doesn’t mean it’s invalid.

In fact, I would say that that’s the primary reason people gravitate towards Omarchy. Many developers coming from the competing operating systems want stuff that just works out of the box, including proprietary software!

If you don’t like it, just ignore it and move on. I thought we were past this “I dislike this thing on the internet therefore everyone who likes it is wrong” phase of the internet. It’s also discourse like this that specifically discourages people from trying Linux.

The author is so close. “decades of debian and it never got any traction. Why?“

Yeah! What a mystery. What could make people install omarchy or pop os over debian, arch or gentoo?

What could possibly be the reason

Yeah Linux will be shitty and break all the time if it doesn’t come preinstalled with Brave and a shortcut to open Grok.

Its rise is not suspicious to me at all, the author has tremendous reach influence in the developer community, that drives adoption easily.

Omarchy was my first entry back into desktop Linux since the early 2000s, when I ran enlightenment. The promises of Omarchy are big, and the idea of somebody trying all the tons of available bits of desktop Linux and assembling their favorites is very compelling!

I've since moved to KDE Plasma on that initial Omarchy install, but kept some other parts like the Bash completion system. I would love to get back to having single key sequences to bring up, say, a Claude window, but not enough to set it up in Plasma. If somebody else did it for me though... that's the appeal of Omarchy.