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Omarchy Is Not A Distro

abyss.fish

101–110 of 186 posts

Re: Omarchy Is Not A Distro

#101

Usually these types of articles are written about things that challenge status quos. I remember reading a lot about Ruby on Rails in the same vein "ruby isn't a real language", "rails is just a collection of scripts", and "you can't build real web apps with it." If Omarchy is upsetting the Linux establishment as much as this article implies (unclear if this is just a one-off) then it's probably worth a look!

> If Omarchy is upsetting the Linux establishment as much as this article implies It’s not upsetting anyone other than people who like to argue about inconsequential things on social media. I actually don’t think it would be as popular without all of the manufactured drama and controversy around. Some people (like the parent comment) are drawn to the controversy and feeling of rebellion. I bet 99% of people do not ca…

I don’t even think Omarchy is particularly popular. I see a lot of activity and user preferences around Linux Mint, Bazzite, and CachyOS, in addition to the traditionally popular choices like Ubuntu and Fedora.

I’d be more inclined to ignore it entirely if I was a blog author.

Re: Omarchy Is Not A Distro

#103

Usually these types of articles are written about things that challenge status quos. I remember reading a lot about Ruby on Rails in the same vein "ruby isn't a real language", "rails is just a collection of scripts", and "you can't build real web apps with it." If Omarchy is upsetting the Linux establishment as much as this article implies (unclear if this is just a one-off) then it's probably worth a look!

> If Omarchy is upsetting the Linux establishment as much as this article implies It’s not upsetting anyone other than people who like to argue about inconsequential things on social media. I actually don’t think it would be as popular without all of the manufactured drama and controversy around. Some people (like the parent comment) are drawn to the controversy and feeling of rebellion. I bet 99% of people do not ca…

It's also upsetting people who judge work mainly by the political stances of its authors, not by the merrits of the work itself.

We've seen the same thing play out with Harry Potter for example.

Re: Omarchy Is Not A Distro

#104
post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

CachyOS (an Arch distro) has done something kid of like this, where it bundles eg a default setup for hyprland and several other desktop environments. It’s not perfect, but I like their model a lot. I mean it’s very Arch to be able to choose whatever you want, but nice to have some opinionated defaults.

Re: Omarchy Is Not A Distro

#105
post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

>My question for people is whether their objection has to do with Omarchy itself or with the person or people behind it

both because as I said there's no distinction with a project like this, and I'll give you a technical example for this. The manual which I briefly read through says this on the monitor configuration:

"Omarchy assumes you're running on a 2x-capable retina-class display by default[...] It's what you'd want to run on a 27" 5K Apple Studio Display [...] But if you're not running a display with a PPI of 218 or above, you'll want to change the monitor settings ..."

then it proceeds to tell you what config files to edit by hand. Monitors with that PPI have a market share of . This isn't a system for people who want things out of the box, it's his personal dotfiles that people use because they know his name. It's like buying Jordan sneakers and thinking they'll make you great at basketball, it's an influencer product. How many people, given that the appeal is to not read anything, have consulted that part of the manual? If this was a nobody's repo it'd have 10 stars and people would ask why the fonts look like crap.

If you want stuff working out of the box for non-technical people give them an Ubuntu LTS release, not window managers on release version 0.x. maintained by people in a discord

Re: Omarchy Is Not A Distro

#107
I agree with the author's general sentiment, but I would give Omarchy credit for some design features that I find either really innovative or well executed.

I find the launch menu the most interesting I've seen out of any desktop environment / OS. It puts easy access to your apps front and center and above esthetics, and yet it still looks great. It's not a sane request, but I'd love to be able to swap the launcher/start menu in another DE for a fully customizable version of that.

Omarchy also has a very smooth way to 'install' web apps. There exist packages that do that for you, but I've tested several and wouldn't recommend any of them. They're bloated (this should really only be a couple lines of bash, like Omarchy's [0]), some use web views (I really want an actual browser under the hood so I can have my extensions), and all that I've tested leave litter on your machine after removing apps or the software. I find web apps as .desktop files so useful that I'm actually using a hacky DIY script now (which I'm considering releasing under GPL if I ever find time to clean it up).

Also, whether you're a beginner or a pro, having a sane starting config for Hyprland is just convenient. Which tells you something about it imho. My conclusion would be similar to the OP's, if you're Omarchy-curious, try Cosmic on your distro of choice. Or at least a cleaned up version with the most egregious personal preferences (like a global keybind for opening Twitter/X) removed, if anybody cares to maintain that.

[0] https://github.com/basecamp/omarchy/blob/dev/bin/omarchy-web...

Re: Omarchy Is Not A Distro

#108
This is a little cringe, it's fine you don't like it, dont use it. There have been other distros based on arch which are also mostly just rices. I've never seen people complain about them, but Omarchy is different, probably because DHH is involved.

I tried Omarchy and thought it was decent, I liked a lot of the settings and visuals.

Re: Omarchy Is Not A Distro

#109
post #11

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 suspic…

DHH has an enormous following and is extremely influential. I don’t think it’s surprising that it gained popularity so quickly. He’s really good at shamelessly plugging his work (as well I hope he should be). But yeah, I think the vast majority of people using it are first timers to Linux in general. It attracts these people because it doesn’t ask too much of them. I don’t know why anybody would complain about growin…

I'm not negative to the growth of Linux. However, we should ask ourselves what it means that there has apparently been such a gap in the market of Linux distributions that this project has been able to fill it so swiftly, and why established distributions with steadier technical communities were not able to capture it already.

Re: Omarchy Is Not A Distro

#110
post #89
post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Did dhh provide a recipe to install hyprland properly without having to install a full "distribution"? (I don't know, it's a real question) I would guess in typical DHH fashion he would say it is Open Source. And I don't understand where this just Arch + Hyprland installation is coming from? They have also customised the OS / distro so it install in less than 2 min on a super fast USB. Getting Laptops, both Framewor…

> Getting Laptops, both Framework and Dell are now on board, tested on Omarchy so they work out of the box. And so many other tiny things that just make the experience better. I say better but to most consumer, those are expected in the first place. And this "expectation" people have been waiting for more than a decade. As a fan of boring Dell laptops/desktops and owner of many, I can tell you they have been well sup…

Dell has been selling machines with official Ubuntu support for ages iirc
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