Thoughts on Omarchy

https://tedium.co/2025/10/13/omarchy-linux-distro-commentary/

by raybb • 9 months ago

58 83 9 months ago

bigyabai4• 9 months ago

Even putting the "ethics" of it aside, I think Omarchy is destined to go the way of LARBS. Many Linux distros are r/unixporn on the outside and a complete trainwreck on the inside. Regolith, Archlabs, Manjaro, dozens of distros have tried the "i3 but it's not like having teeth pulled" gimmick and it never works.

Much like LARBS, if I ever see you using Omarchy I just have to assume you don't know what you're doing. You can install Arch and rice i3wm in literally 10 minutes if your SSD and WiFi is fast enough.

rufugee3• 9 months ago

For me, it's not about ricing. I find Omarchy to be an incredibly productive setup, from the launchers for webapps to the focus on TUIs.

I'm conflicted about the drama and still learning more about it, so not ready to draw a conclusion yet. But Omarchy is definitely a very, very fun experience for me.

Granted, I've heavily customized it and am using hy3 for i3-like capabilities, so whatever path out of this for me is likely to i3wm or sway.

And, fwiw, I've been running linux since the late 90s, and most of that as my primary OS (with a decade-ish period of macOS I'd rather forget). I know what I'm doing.

BoredPositron5• 9 months ago

It's performative to it's core. In the next release they will probably add a matrix screensaver, burning windows and hack a gibson in the release video.

keldaris• 9 months ago

Same here, I have multiple decades of experience running Linux on desktops and servers alike, and Omarchy just saves me time and manages to be productive and fun at the same time.

Personally, I don't feel any moral obligation to investigate the personal views of people who write the software I use. Using software, especially free software, doesn't constitute an endorsement of the authors' views. Before this thread, I was blissfully unaware of this entire silly controversy, since Omarchy doesn't mention any politics anywhere as far as I can tell. If that ever changes, I'll delete it in a heartbeat (regardless of the kind of politics it happens to be), but so far the only people politicizing the issue seem to be its detractors.

CuriouslyC• 9 months ago

Saying people who use Omarchy don't know what they're doing feels elitist. If you agree with DHH's opinions it's just fine, some people don't want to fuck with shit, they just want to get to work.

bigyabai4• 9 months ago

A lot of people don't agree with DHH's opinionated setup, though - most of them don't even know what they're installing, and that's the problem. Like I said, we've seen hundreds of OSes that completely break on system updates because the user doesn't understand that the AUR package conflicts with the opinionated defaults.

They really don't know what they're doing, which isn't going to help you get things done on Linux. I empathize completely with people who want a one-and-done gorgeous r/unixporn desktop, but they should also know that those distros are a deal with the devil.

skydhash• 9 months ago

It’s almost the same with neovim and shell/terminal setup. A lot of people wants blings and are touting the most complicated setup. They balk at reading docs, and when their brittle config fails, blame the software (gnome subreddit).

dayyan2• 9 months ago

There is no ethics complication. That is an imaginary problem imagined by those who wish to force their politics on others. Open source should have no politics left or right.

throawayonthe• 9 months ago

this makes no sense

and even on a basic level, do you not think open source/free software is about the ethics?

zahlman6• 9 months ago

do you not think open source/free software is about the ethics?

It's not about trying to interfere with projects because you don't like the author's beliefs.

5. No Discrimination Against Persons or Groups
The license must not discriminate against any person or group of persons.
6. No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor
The license must not restrict anyone from making use of the program in a specific field of endeavor. For example, it may not restrict the program from being used in a business, or from being used for genetic research.

This includes persons and fields that the author considers harmful or distasteful. And forking and redistributing are core rights granted by the license.

Same thing with XLibre.

There are, apparently, people out there who think that their decision to use something that was provided et gratis et libre should depend on the beliefs of the thing's creator, as if doing so should somehow endorse those beliefs or cause them to rub off on the user. I can't understand this line of thought, however. Quite frankly I don't think that even applies to paid proprietary software. My moral intuition doesn't allow for that kind of transfer of guilt, which seems to be what people mean nowadays when they talk about "complicity".

Refreeze52242• 9 months ago

Absolutely not. DHH is someone I will never support, and I like knowing what projects he works on so that I can avoid them. Everything is political, whether we like it or not. Especially OSS.

His views are not just differences in tax policy, I find them grotesque, and I am glad people are aware of who is behind Omarchy and Hyprland so they can make informed decisions about whether to use them or not.

alberth• 9 months ago

Would you mind elaborating, for those of us uninformed.

AuthAuth• 9 months ago

why is Hyprland being thrown in next to Omarchy? They're completely different levels of bad. The lead dev of Hyprland is in trouble for something minor his unpaid discord mod did and he has apologized years ago.

wpm• 9 months ago

So what happens if someone is "informed" but chooses to use this software anyways?

brian-armstrong• 9 months ago

This is S-tier rage bait, I commend you.

dayyan2• 9 months ago

Cognitive dissonance creates pain, pain creates anger.

greekrich92• 9 months ago

This is like people suddenly getting mad at the band Rage Against the Machine for being political after listening to them for years

SanjayMehta• 9 months ago

Every proverb can be justified: in this case "looking a gift horse in the mouth."

The guy's giving away tons of work freely, and people are whining about his views. Instead of complaining about the free download, maybe they should stop paying for his real products? (But that won't happen because they haven't bought anything off him.)

orangea2• 9 months ago

Well, dhh considers torrents outdated (I’m not kidding, check the tweet), so it’s only officially being offered as a single download from a Cloudflare server. Which sounds cool until you’re on a weak-ass connection in constant danger of dropping halfway through the download.

That has nothing to do with bittorrent vs http; use a download manager instead of a browser.

mixmastamyk• 9 months ago

Huh, I used to use those every day about twenty years ago. But stopped for some reason. Faster connection? Maybe.

In the meantime, wget -C works to resume a download without a fancy program or browser extension.

throwaway89201• 9 months ago

Nit: it's `wget -c` or `curl -C -`

watty2• 9 months ago

But Omarchy is a reminder that we live in a world where software isn’t just software, but the people who make it.

I get people are totally within their rights to ban movies/software/sports, etc. for creators whose beliefs they disagree with. However, software is the people who make it? I rarely, if ever, know the authors who create software or what they believe in.

adriand• 9 months ago

I’m curious if anyone has heard an explanation for why Omarchy is pronounced “omar chee” instead of “omar key”. To me the word looks like monarchy, hierarchy, anarchy, etc. I’m not sure if words ending in -archy are always pronounced with a hard c but it seems like it.

moojacob• 9 months ago

My guess is it's based on Arch Linux. Om-arch-y.

slillibri• 9 months ago

I believe the answer is that English is a stupid language. Also, starchy (containing a relatively high amount of starch) doesn’t have a hard c.

dragonwriter• 9 months ago

I’m not sure if words ending in -archy are always pronounced with a hard c but it seems like it.

When it is etymologically derived from the greek arkhein (“to rule”) like all of your examples (but unlike, say, “starchy”, which also ends with -archy but has an unrelated etymology), yes, the “ch” sounds like “k”.

But the “-archy” in “omarchy” doesn't come from arkhein, in comes from Arch Linux, so...

httpsoverdns2• 9 months ago

So as someone that doesn't want to support DHH after what I've learned in this thread, but was interested in checking out omarchy based on some neat videos I've seen... What should I check out instead?

gedy2• 9 months ago

Omarchy is really just some packages and defaults, you can assemble yourself. (It was not a beginner friendly distro to begin with)

zahlman6• 9 months ago

In what sense are other distros more than "some packages and defaults"?

gausswho• 9 months ago

Omarchy is basically an opinionated set of libraries, largely centered around Hyprland tiling window manager, with minor celebrity marketing. I don't see why it's a distro, it may as well be a set of dotfiles.

Try out Hyprland yourself, it's fun and simpler to customize than its i3 ancestor.

_bent• 9 months ago

CachyOS is also an Arch based distro with a GUI installer including multiple desktop options, such as Gnome, KDE Plasma, but also preconfigured Hyprland or Niri with a Waybar, Alacritty and a spotlight-esque application launcher.

I'm currently dual booting Windows & CachyOS with Niri and installation was incredibly smooth, including setting up secure boot or playing Windows games.

https://cachyos.org/

hitekker• 9 months ago

For an article so certain about ethics, it ironically undercuts its own ethos: https://tedium.co/what-is-tedium/

If you like strange and unusual descriptions of common things, explained in extreme depth, the Tedium newsletter is a great place to look for those, because it’s what we specialize in. Rather than focusing on viral things, we instead write about things that would never go viral on their own, that need context and storytelling around them to highlight their importance. Sometimes, the best stories haven’t been properly contexualized. There’s room for someone to do that, and that’s where we come in.

I don't think their mission statement covers ongoing internet dramas & cancel campaigns. Rather, this article feels like mission creep, lacking novel insight. For me, the only new info I caught is the author's intimation that the founder of Framework laptops should be canceled.

time0ut2• 9 months ago

Could someone please point me to a concise summary of controversy around DHH? I have seen a few references recently, but I am out of the loop.

orangea2• 9 months ago

Why not read the source and decide for yourself? Here's a blog post linked in the article, as a start: https://world.hey.com/dhh/as-i-remember-london-e7d38e64

time0ut2• 9 months ago

Ah thank you. I had read the article, or so I thought, but stopped too soon.

fragmede• 9 months ago

DHH wrote a blog post complaining about how there are fewer "native Brits" in London, and then linked to Wikipedia's article about the number of white people in London. He also brought up a march by Tommy Robinson, but framed it as just a couple of exceeding normal guys out for a walk, and not a bunch of nationalists.

It came off as xenophobic and racist, so sponsors pulled funding while others (some quite high profile) refuse to work with DHH. There's a non-zero amount of reading between the lines, so here's the blog post so everyone can decide for themselves:

https://world.hey.com/dhh/as-i-remember-london-e7d38e64

elcritch• 9 months ago

How is BitTorrent considered better for a “guy in a cabin with weak internet”?

Bittorrent requires substantially more connections generally.

subract• 9 months ago

I think the specific feature he alludes to missing is resumable downloads.

throwaway7356• 9 months ago

Both HTTP and even ancient protocols like FTP support that. So it must be something else.

roryirvine• 9 months ago

Yeah, I use a mobile broadband provider for my home internet connection (albeit through a 5g router rather than tethering - but that shouldn't make a difference).

Normal web browsing etc is more or less indistinguishable from fibre or cable. Streaming - including high participant count Zoom meetings for work, as well as 4k Netflix etc - works perfectly well too.

But bittorrent? Nah. The sheer number of connections quickly overload the link, the speed drops to a max of only 1 or 2 Mbps, and it kills off anything else I'm trying to do at the same time.

Pushing / pulling containers has a similar issue - I have to set image_parallel_copies = 3 in /etc/containers/containers.conf as the default of 6 can cause problems, especially if two or containers are being pulled at the same time. I reckon that the comfortable limit for the number of parallel connections on 5g is probably somewhere around 10.

Plus, y'know, range requests have been supported since HTTP/1.1 way back in the mid 90s, so resuming downloads should work just fine with the likes of wget or any normal web browser.

Saying that, the author also mentions that he was WiFi - so why doesn't he just use that rather than tethering? Doesn't matter if it's slow, he could always do something else on the tethered connection while he waits...

hnt2025• 9 months ago

Shouldn't they stop using all of the computers altogether because they have parts produced in oppresive comunist country? I get it - DHH pissed off gay/lesb/non-binary community and now they're after him.

hackeraccount• 9 months ago

I have a PC running Omarchy and it's really nice. The little touches are really pleasant. I'm more a half assed Unix Admin though then a developer and there are some pain points that are making me give it up.

* I don't really like Hyprland. I want to use Niri and hacking at Omarchy to make that happen doesn't seem worth it.

* getting flatpaks working with it is painful

* it's too dependent on the aur which I try to avoid

A lot of the nicer features - some of the shell and nvim setup configs are things that I don't really care about.

I think this is really good setup for someone smarter then I am. I think at the end of the day I want something simpler then this - though it does say "opinionated" right on the tin and I had a blast playing around with it.

nchmy• 9 months ago

Consider PopOS - I just moved to that after flailing with omarchy/hyprland for a day. Very happy.

Thoughts on Omarchy

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