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Omarchy Is Not A Distro

abyss.fish

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Re: Omarchy Is Not A Distro

#91

Post by Kon5ole »

Having tried both Omakub and Omarchy I think Omakub is the more interesting approach, and it certainly matches the OP's description - just a set of scripts and defaults applied to a standard Ubuntu.

I'd love to see a bunch of similar projects based on slackware, debian, suse or whatever.

I think most current distros/DE's dump "everything and the kitchen sink" at the user leaving him or her to finish the setup themselves. They stop short of actually presenting a good, unified experience. That's how it has been for ages of course, and Omakub is basically a "distro skin" that IMO has been lacking from distros all this time.

Picking a set of sensible default apps and making them 100% integrated and well documented is just nice. Ubuntu with Omakub just feels more like a finished OS than Ubuntu itself does.

Omarchy on the other hand is as much a distribution as most other popular distributions. Sure, based on arch, but if that disqualifies it then most distros are "not distros" all of a sudden. So I call Omarchy a distro.

I get why it exists and I use it for convenience since I like Arch anyway - but I would actually have preferred a few more variants on omakub, personally.

Re: Omarchy Is Not A Distro

#92

Post by c-hendricks »

andrewjf wrote: post #36
mbirth wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was better when it was still a native app and not this Electron nonsense.

Quality in general seems to be going downhill, too. Frequently the desktop app and the safari extension won't be in sync and missing a recently added password, or doesn't show up on my other devices hours later. I still have no idea how the extension vs desktop app actually work together, or if they do at all. Sometimes 1password (safari extension) is "locked" - but the desktop app isn't locked? and No amount of clic…

Since the extension works flawlessly in all other browsers I've chalked it up to Safari extensions being a pain.

But yes the Safari 1Password extension constantly shits The bed.

Re: Omarchy Is Not A Distro

#93

Post by hkpack »

wrren wrote: post #43

We seem to have arrived at a set of assumptions that states that if a large number of people like something that we don’t, or don’t subscribe to some cultural norms that we doggedly adhere to, then there has to be something sinister afoot. The out of box experience with Omarchy is highly functional, aesthetically pleasing and challenges users to lean more on keyboard shortcuts than they’d typically be used to. That’s…

> then there has to be something sinister afoot.

Not sinister, but just a simple strategy of a business to increase sales of his products (such as hey.com) as well as pushing his personal preferences (grok) to younger audience masquerading as being done for public good.

It is just repulsive for people who see through this. But I think it is an OK business strategy which may be somewhat successful.

Values of DHH and his businesses on one side and Linux community on the other are not very well aligned, so it will inevitably cause these kind of tensions.

But if the goal is to target younger people who are not part of Linux community yet, then it may work, and that's the play here.

Re: Omarchy Is Not A Distro

#95

Post by kokada »

wrren wrote: post #43

We seem to have arrived at a set of assumptions that states that if a large number of people like something that we don’t, or don’t subscribe to some cultural norms that we doggedly adhere to, then there has to be something sinister afoot. The out of box experience with Omarchy is highly functional, aesthetically pleasing and challenges users to lean more on keyboard shortcuts than they’d typically be used to. That’s…

The author of the blog post makes valid criticisms, I remember when Ubuntu had a shortcut for Amazon in the default desktop installation because they had a sponsorship with Amazon and people rightfully criticized the distro for it. The author is doing the same for DHH promoting things like Grok/Hey/X. Also I am sure if any distro started shipping things like NordVPN in the default installation people would complain.

> and _why_ does it have a conference, sponsors, and merchandise? especially when longstanding distros like Debian have struggled with funding and sponsorship for decades?

I agree with the author that this is the thing that mostly gets me about Omarchy: yes, it is fine for you to use Omarchy, but in the end this is just a collection of dotfiles from DHH. We should be investing this money in some other distro that is actually doing some actual work (like packaging programs, maintaining infrastructure, etc.), instead of a hobby project from a millionaire.

Re: Omarchy Is Not A Distro

#97

Post by voidnap »

wrren wrote: post #43

We seem to have arrived at a set of assumptions that states that if a large number of people like something that we don’t, or don’t subscribe to some cultural norms that we doggedly adhere to, then there has to be something sinister afoot. The out of box experience with Omarchy is highly functional, aesthetically pleasing and challenges users to lean more on keyboard shortcuts than they’d typically be used to. That’s…

True! I love it when I buy a computer pre-installed with windows and it has a bunch of extra software bundled in like norton antivirus, dropbox, and opera. Plus the OEM makes money and I get a bunch of free apps. It's a win win. I hope the author of omarchy gets sponsor money for including nordvpn, spotify, and 1password. I love seeing linux become more conventionally attractive and steer in the direction of windows and macos because they're popular so linux will be more popular. Everything should be for everyone.

Re: Omarchy Is Not A Distro

#100

Post by least »

Barrin92 wrote: post #60
wrren wrote: post #43

We seem to have arrived at a set of assumptions that states that if a large number of people like something that we don’t, or don’t subscribe to some cultural norms that we doggedly adhere to, then there has to be something sinister afoot. The out of box experience with Omarchy is highly functional, aesthetically pleasing and challenges users to lean more on keyboard shortcuts than they’d typically be used to. That’s…

>then there has to be something sinister afoot. because most of the time there is. We live in a world that is dominated by obnoxious social media influencers and 'taste makers' who push people to the every day. This is the linux version of Mr. Beast lunchables. Having a conference and corporate sponsorships for what is 500 lines of bash scripting is beyond silly. And like the other half dozen arch based 'desktop resk…

No Linux distribution offers a good out-of-the-box experience with anything outside of XFCE, GNOME, or KDE Plasma. On the other end, these alternative WMs lack all of the shell features that people expect from a desktop experience.

I run regular Arch with Niri and Noctalia Shell, which is based on Quick Shell. It is a pretty solid experience. But even with Quick Shell, which has taken a lot of the pain out of closing the gap between traditional DEs and these tiling WMs, it’s still a decent chunk of configuration.

Without it, I’d be doing a ton more configuration with a bar and scripts to display some information. And then those would be hardly functional, since really they’re just showing some stdout from the terminal. If I wanted to actually, say, connect to a new Bluetooth device, I’d still be heading to the terminal to connect.

That gap is what makes Omarchy interesting to me, and presumably to the people who seem to really like it.

Omarchy lets someone install it just like another “real” distribution and get a working OS without having to do hours of configuration and ensuring they have all the additional utilities they’d expect to have.

I think it does kind of have to be a “distro” because the appeal is that you don’t maintain the scripts yourself. You can just install it and get sensible defaults from a fresh install.

There’s nothing stopping Ubuntu, Fedora, or another major distribution from creating something like this. They already have Plasma and GNOME variants that include bundled software and sensible defaults customized from the delivered version of those DEs.

My question for people is whether their objection has to do with Omarchy itself or with the person or people behind it. I get that even without a controversial figure behind it, people might still object to some of the technical decisions behind it. But I find it hard to argue against the idea. It is filling a niche by making alternative WMs like Hyprland more accessible.

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