It’s a really strong UX that’s rapidly improving without a profit motive and people are excited about it.
Closest thing to the “it just works” experience that Mac was always known for and it runs great on older hardware. Even goes so far as to optimize the install time down to about 1 minute.
I was running i3 when an Ubuntu update borked my entire setup so I made the switch. The difference is night and day in the level of polish.
Small example, running Zoom on i3 caused a tile cascade every time I turned on my Bluetooth headset because Zoom bypassed the main notification system. Issue resolved here.
One of many little quirks that no longer happen.
It’s nice to see excitement around Linux because nothing from the big names was really creating it.
> Closest thing to the “it just works” experience that Mac was always known for
I see this repeated a lot, but the people I know who tried Omarchy were always fixing something or dealing with breakage from an update.
The best argument I’ve heard for Omarchy that is actually consistent with what I’ve observed is that it ships with cool looking default configs for everything that make it feel fun to use.
The belief that everything just works seems more like a belief perpetuated by the messaging push behind it. Every time real issues pop up they get explained away as being due to someone’s local config changes or forgiven because it’s a young project. Even in this thread there are dozens of comments downplaying security issues as not a problem because they will get fixed, which is a symptom of a project where the messaging has gotten ahead of the facts.
The main case for Omarchy to me is the OOTB experience, which is more "good to go" than pretty much any other distro, also the hotkeys and config setup are both power user friendly. You are correct that updates have had brick-risk, though I think they've gotten better. I prefer some elements of plasma to the hyprland setup, but agents are very good at making config changes, it's much faster than navigating menus or finding lines in a config file (human work time, maybe not wall clock time).
More stuff people actually use is installed by default with Omarchy, whereas Ubuntu packages a lot of stuff I don't think people use to try and come to checkbox parity to windows, while missing useful commercial software. Omarchy comes with vscode, 1password, obsidian, chromium, discord, docker, OBS, zoom, signal/whatsapp, etc pre rolled and configured.
It's not difficult to figure out, it's just friction, and there's a difference between preinstalling malware, sports tickers, etc and preinstalling stuff I would have installed anyhow, and taking the time to configure it nicely.
1. These are trivial to install on any other mainstream distro. I’m talking one-click through discover or Gnome software.
2. Most of these are not even desirable for most people. Obsidian? 1password? Come on, these have vanishingly small amounts of users. It’s not chromium.
3. Any hand-rolled arch based distro is going to be more maintenance and higher friction than fedora, Debian et al. That’s just the name of the game. It’s what makes arch desirable, too, so no, it won’t change.
4. WMs are much higher friction than full service desktops like KDE and GNOME. Again, name of the game. And it also won’t change, because that’s what makes WMs desirable.
I think people who think Omarchy “just works” have not used enough Linux distros. Which is fine, not everyone is a Linux veteran. But then don’t go around claiming it’s sooo much better than other distros. It’s not. Give Debian, fedora, even Ubuntu a shot if you want something that works OOTB.
And based on just on the list above that'd be at least 11 clicks (a lot more since you'd need to find the app in the software manager first before you can click install"
I guess we can compromise and say two clicks and some key presses.
On KDE: Press meta, type "discover", type "discord", click "install". Or, if you use KRUnner, press alt-space, type "discord", click "Get Discord", click "install"
Bear in mind this is how it works for all software in a proper desktop environment. Steam works the same way, or Zed, or whatever VPN you use.
I ran it daily like up to 4 months ago. Updates would regularly break hyprland and most games I wanted to play needed much more tinkering than on vanilla arch with the same dependencies installed.
> Closest thing to the “it just works” experience that Mac was always known for and it runs great on older hardware. Even goes so far as to optimize the install time down to about 1 minute.
He would have had better success by literally prompting his agents to copy Apples desktop environment.
Are all the updates still handled by clobbering bash scripts?
Last time I looked into it, the technical approach was equivalent to throwing a bunch of things at a gas fire. It's just a pre-configured arch install that introduces a metric ton of tech debt.
First time huh? They already have investors (called "patrons" so far). OpenAI shown the non-profit status can be used to jump start for-profit ventures, I'm sure everyone involved here studied closely exactly how Altman pulled it off.
Without a profit motive huh? Let's examine that... From Omarchy's website: "Incubated at 37signals (makers of Basecamp and HEY)." For those unfamiliar with 37signals, here's their take on the profit motive:
> 04. Profit motive
>
> The tech industry is especially good at losing money. Growth is electric, but profits are elusive. We take an old school, economics 101 approach: Make more than you spend. That’s why we’ve been profitable every year we’ve been in business. It’s the responsible way to be reliable and take care of customers over the long haul.
Oof, they explicitly say they want the opposite of what you claim.
I mean it should be pretty obvious, when an open source project kind of comes out of nowhere like this and suddenly everybody's talking about it, it's not organic growth. It's an incredibly transparent marketing campaign designed to trick people into joining the cargo cult. You need to learn to recognize these things.
Closest thing to the “it just works” experience that Mac was always known for and it runs great on older hardware. Even goes so far as to optimize the install time down to about 1 minute.
I was running i3 when an Ubuntu update borked my entire setup so I made the switch. The difference is night and day in the level of polish.
Small example, running Zoom on i3 caused a tile cascade every time I turned on my Bluetooth headset because Zoom bypassed the main notification system. Issue resolved here.
One of many little quirks that no longer happen.
It’s nice to see excitement around Linux because nothing from the big names was really creating it.