A Word on Omarchy • Hacker News Board

Re: A Word on Omarchy

#71

Post by wyclif » Wed, Oct 22, 2025, 3:47 PM UTC

ethersteeds wrote: post #48

neeeeeeal wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agree with this 100%. The article reads as a super gatekeepy “he made different choices than me so I’m going to trash it and him” piece. The author’s perspective seems to be “how dare he use bash scripts! REAL programmers use system level languages”. Come on buddy. Author claims there is no structure to the project but one look in the GitHub repo says there clearly is. Also, how many users will now try Arch (or Ubunt…

I'll admit I read only the summary linked at the beginning, so I surely skipped over minutae that might have lost me. That said, I disagree with this and gp: the conclusion strikes me not as gatekeepy but reasonable and humane to inexperienced users: > In fact, it is Omarchy that complicates things further down the line, by including a number of unnecessary components and workarounds, especially when it comes to its…

That commentary proves that the guy doesn't get it or is being a willfully obtuse hater. One of the big reasons people have been gravitating toward Omarchy is because they don't want to spend hours ricing or tweaking their desktop, they want to be getting shit done after a sub-15 minute install. And Omarchy does that very well. That's what omakase and "opinionated" mean.

Re: A Word on Omarchy

#72

Post by yjftsjthsd-h » Wed, Oct 22, 2025, 3:50 PM UTC

anthonylevine wrote: post #70

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since it's so flimsy and insecure, you should guess so you can prove how insecure it is. Alternatively, you could fail to do that, because 10 guesses is safe even against an awful password.

lol But what if, and I know this sounds absolutely insane, the person who stole your laptop knows you and isn't a total stranger on the internet? In your security guru mind, would that effect the probability of them guessing right? Or are you of the opinion that you don't need to worry about people close to you breaking into your stuff?

If someone steals your laptop, then sudo limiting guesses is completely irrelevant. Note that I started with

> I will absolutely say that a distro making that claim should not worry about the difference between 3 and 10 password attempts on sudo (i.e. when you're already logged in).

If you'd like to point out that it's really important to require a high-entropy password for the lockscreen or disk encryption, then I'll agree, but that isn't the argument we're in right now.

Re: A Word on Omarchy

#73

Post by wyclif » Wed, Oct 22, 2025, 3:51 PM UTC

sph wrote: post #9

mfro wrote: post #6

The gap this fills is simple: those who just want a flashy arch installation to post on socials. These people have no concerns about quality because they haven’t used Linux extensively and aren’t using their OS for genuine work.

/r/unixporn type distro for Hacker News types that just decided to move away from Windows/macOS They’ll move to something serious like vanilla Arch, Debian or Fedora soon enough

I've installed and used vanilla Arch from scratch on at least three different machines, but this time around I wanted Arch on a ThinkPad but didn't want to spend a few hours configuring and ricing it to my liking.

Omarchy scratches that itch.

Re: A Word on Omarchy

#74

Post by wyclif » Wed, Oct 22, 2025, 3:52 PM UTC

timeon wrote: post #50

mickeyp wrote: post #18

It is so sad to see so many people -- including the article, to an extent -- and also people in the comments cast shade on this distro and the people who may try Linux either for the first time, or perhaps one more time, because they tried and failed to switch before. Calling it flashy is an especially amusing critique. You couldn't kick your way through the 90s and 2000s without the endless parade of semi-transparen…

I think many people have problem with the project because it is from alt-right environment.

If you seriously think DHH and collaborators are "alt-right", you haven't met many alt-right people.

Re: A Word on Omarchy

#75

Post by matltc » Wed, Oct 22, 2025, 4:04 PM UTC

$100 says this guy has a Bluesky account

Re: A Word on Omarchy

#76

Post by Kon5ole » Wed, Oct 22, 2025, 4:53 PM UTC

chinathrow wrote: post #51

Why is this flagged? I'm a long term Linux user (since 2003) and I have a brand new Lenovo Thinkpad X1 13th Gen sitting here with a blank boot medium and I have to decide what to install as an OS now. Ubuntu again? Fedora maybe due to more recent drivers? Omarchy due to - why not? That article helped - the flagging? Not so much.

> Why is this flagged?

Probably the juvenile title-altering script that could get people in trouble depending on where they’re from.

Re: A Word on Omarchy

#77

Post by bsnnkv » Wed, Oct 22, 2025, 5:15 PM UTC

On another discussion forum I saw someone posted[1] the results of running shellcheck against the bash scripts that make up Omarchy:

    λ omarchy master Ɇ » shellcheck -f checkstyle bin/* **/*.sh | grep error | wc -l
    451
    λ omarchy master Ɇ » cloc .
         662 text files.
         473 unique files.
         253 files ignored.

    github.com/AlDanial/cloc v 2.06  T=0.07 s (6645.0 files/s, 133055.1 lines/s)
    --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
    Language                      files          blank        comment           code
    --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
    Bourne Again Shell              125            704            319           3344
    Bourne Shell                    237            499            229           1952
    CSS                              41            122             22            653
    TOML                             19            113              9            612
    XML                               3              6             12            437
    Lua                              12              0              0            151
    INI                              14             20              0             78
    JSON                             13              0              0             67
    YAML                              4              4              0             50
    Text                              2              0              0             36
    JavaScript                        1              1              0             20
    Markdown                          1              5              0              5
    SVG                               1              0              0              1
    --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
    SUM:                            473           1474            591           7406
    --------------------------------------------------------------------------------

[1]: https://lobste.rs/s/iuvukw/word_on_omarchy#c_slymk9

Re: A Word on Omarchy

#78

Post by lcnPylGDnU4H9OF » Wed, Oct 22, 2025, 5:43 PM UTC

pelagicAustral wrote: post #13

zvmaz wrote: post #11

[flagged]

You seem to be the one equating 'brit' to skin color.

No, really, DHH does that in the linked article.

> Chiefly because it's no longer full of native Brits. In 2000, more than sixty percent of the city were native Brits. By 2024, that had dropped to about a third. A statistic as evident as day when you walk the streets of London now.

I personally don't see how it could be "as evident as day" simply by walking around and observing without bringing skin color into it. Walking the streets of London doesn't reasonably include the activity of investigating the citizen status of everybody one sees so he's presumably not observing "native or not". And if he's not observing that, then it seems reasonable to think he's observing their skin color. At least, it does without him clarifying what he was otherwise observing.

But some of the words also link to a wikipedia article (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnic_groups_in_London) which doesn't actually support his point unless you look at numbers that explicitly concern race. More specifically, I can't find the race-agnostic numbers which corroborate the specific (approximate) numbers he gave. There's a "White British" row in a table that has a value of 36.8% for the 2021 census. It shows 59.79% for the 2001 census.

It's hard to compare strictly with citizenship using the numbers he linked to, which seems another reason to assume he was thinking in terms of skin color. On top of the fact that the wiki article is titled "Ethnic groups in London", which is not relevant to citizenship status, nor whether they "natively" got their citizenship. I mean, seriously, what evidence could he even be using to make the claim that a mere 1/3 of London's population is comprised of "native Brits", if we start with the assumption that it's not what he observed of others' skin color? (Not rhetorical despite the tone, please answer if you have an idea.)

Re: A Word on Omarchy

#79

Post by freehorse » Wed, Oct 22, 2025, 5:56 PM UTC

wyclif wrote: post #71

ethersteeds wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll admit I read only the summary linked at the beginning, so I surely skipped over minutae that might have lost me. That said, I disagree with this and gp: the conclusion strikes me not as gatekeepy but reasonable and humane to inexperienced users: > In fact, it is Omarchy that complicates things further down the line, by including a number of unnecessary components and workarounds, especially when it comes to its…

That commentary proves that the guy doesn't get it or is being a willfully obtuse hater. One of the big reasons people have been gravitating toward Omarchy is because they don't want to spend hours ricing or tweaking their desktop, they want to be getting shit done after a sub-15 minute install. And Omarchy does that very well. That's what omakase and "opinionated" mean.

That sounds fine for those first 15 minutes and maybe first weeks though. What if a certain `curl | sh` fails after a month? What if I need some other stuff down the road? If anything the article's criticism makes sense from the perspective of needing to get work done, and omarchy seems to be focused more on the aesthetics. A package manager is exactly what is needed to get shit done instead of tweaking and troubleshooting stuff.

Omarchy is fine as an (opinionated) collection of dotfiles and configurations, but there are reasons proper distros are useful aside from wanting to spend time tweaking stuff or whatever. I don't see how the article talks about anything else than practical issues with it.

Re: A Word on Omarchy

#80

Post by srid » Wed, Oct 22, 2025, 6:19 PM UTC

I've found Pop!_OS 24.04 beta, with COSMIC, to be more suitable for my preferences than Omarchy. You get the best of both worlds -- hybrid tiling experience. You can toggle between tiling (like Hyprland) and regular desktop environment (like GNOME).

https://srid.ca/pop-os