A Word on Omarchy
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.
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.
Is this a deeply petty article? Yes. Is it wrong? I can’t see anything indicating that.
Either way, I appreciate the opinionated and researched review. It was a good read, and certainly highlighted some of the ways Omarchy is… odd.
(Also, the JavaScript is annoying, especially when reading on a phone which backgrounds the tab when you lock it…)
> After initially downloading the official ISO file, the first boot of the system greets you with a terminal window informing you that it needs to update a few packages. And by “a few” it means another 1.8GB. I’m still not entirely sure why the v3.0.2 ISO is a hefty 6.2GB, or why it requires downloading an additional 1.8GB after installation on a system with internet access. For comparison, the official Arch installer image is just 1.4GB in size.
That is interesting.
I would respect the article a lot more if it spent words on actually investigating things like this, rather than repeated nitpicking.
I really just dislike the tone of this.
The author is remarkably negative without actually trying to help anything. The globbing is borked on some shell scripts in a very young Linux distribution? Submit a pull request rather than writing a blog post.
And then the tab changes its name to something dumb when you leave to try to get you to disable JS.
They're mad things come pre-installed. They're mad things don't. They just like being mad.
Dudes got the vibe of a cat.
Besides the gatekeeping, "imperfect" and "unserious" tools can be valid so that people try the thing. "Do your research and try elsewhere" hasn't worked so far, has it?
Very detailed and solid analysis of Omarchy project.
I don't understand why the link is now [flagged] by HN?
Flagged already? People do not really like critical opinions in here.
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-transparent terminal windows running on various shades of windowmaker, enlightenment, kde, etc. all to show off how much more advanced the graphics pipeline and customisation was compared to Windows or Mac at the time. So this is hardly a new thing.
Let's hope this distro picks up steam; that it helps convert people who are fed up with Apple and Microsoft to another way of doing things. Arch + hyprland is a fine place to start.
This blog pranks you with changing titles when you switch tabs (some nsfw), then welcomes you back with a paragraph inciting you to disable Javascript. That's nice, but I actually need Javascript in my browser to do real stuff.
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).
The author seems very set on following "the proper way of doing things in the linux ecosystem". If I remember correctly, a key principle from Linus himself is: "Talk is cheap. Show me the code". So did the author open any PR to fix any of the issues he surfaced ?
> Omarchy feels like a project created by a Linux newcomer, utterly captivated by all the cool things that Linux can do, but lacking the architectural knowledge to get the basics right
I've used Omarchy over the last few months and I don't think this is a fair assessment of the project. Sure, it definitely fells hacky in some places but I don't think it's that bad.
Even though I don't fully agree with the article, I think the conclusion is right. If you already knows your way around linux, Omarchy probably won't be a good option for you in the long term.
I fully switched to linux around 2008 and never looked back. I went through most of the major distos, from Gentoo to Ubuntu. I'm not an expert, but I have a pretty good understanding of how things work under the hood.
Even with all this knowledge I stumbled upon a bug that I wasn't even sure on how to start debugging. In my desktop I have 2 monitors and when the system wakes up from sleep my secondary monitor starts up faster than my main monitor and this puts them in the wrong order, as if I had swapped them left-to-right.
This is a trivial issue, I'm sure that ChatGPT could guide me through this issue in no time. But it made me realize that if I choose to stick with Omarchy I will need re-learn a lot of things, I will need to learn about several new tools and configuration schemas. And I don't want to do it right now, that's not a good time investment for me. Especially if there are no guarantees these tools will still be relevant in 10 years.
And this is why I'll be switching back to old and boring Fedora.
The author recommends using "Do Not Track", but this has been deprecated for some time. Safari and Firefox have both removed the option completely. Perhaps the author meant GPC?
For all of the security suggestions in this article I was also surprised to see the author recommending ungoogle-chromium, which has a number of security issues. See: https://qua3k.github.io/ungoogled/
The primary issue I take with the article is the chosen tone. I think there are ways that these points could have been made without being overly cynical and negative. I think speaking authoritatively throughout the article has the effect of equating the importance of subjective preferences (like the choice of which terminal emulator to include), with legitimate security concerns (bash shortcomings, migrations, firewall misconfiguration, piping curl | sh to install software).
I wouldn't use Omarchy, but I am glad it exists. It's bringing more people into the desktop Linux ecosystem, which should be positive sum. Omarchy comes off to me as a little hacky and immature, but at this stage that seems.. mostly fine? Perhaps they should be more clear about that in their marketing, but I understand the goals and I admire the enthusiasm from DHH.
I guess Omarchy looks cool but I remember Linux distros being just as cool in 2002 with Enlightenment and many other custom scripts and setups. Unfortunately, Linux on the desktop hasn't moved on much.
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
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I am surprised Omarchy got such a large audience, DHH had already dropped an opinionated Ubuntu 'distro' - Omakub - but seemingly didn't gain popularity.
Even though I haven't used it, I don't mind Omarchy existing if it works. I had issues with omakub when I had tried it in the distant past.
That said, I think a lot of peoples criticism of DHH and Omarchy is based on their personal opinions of DHH or that they don't like that an opinionated Arch variant is opinionated, which is a bit of a ridiculous criticism too.
tl;dr of the summary: Omarchy is a toy, not a proper tool, and dangerously "naive".
Why is even the summary longer than most articles nowadays? I will maybe read te full article later, but probably will just let it rot on my pile of readlaters.
Is this enough trash-talk now? Is the Pro-tip pleased?
> And by “a few” it means another 1.8GB. I’m still not entirely sure why the v3.0.2 ISO is a hefty 6.2GB, or why it requires downloading an additional 1.8GB after installation on a system with internet access.
Sounds like bloatware.
Super pretentious, nitpicky, and makes it sounds like the author has an axe to grind, which seems to be trending as much as DHHs distro these days...
[dead]
[flagged]
$100 says this guy has a Bluesky account
These criticisms all feel very nitpicky and subjective. So many of them seem to boil down to, "this is an opinionated configuration, but their opinions differ from my opinions."
This part was where I stopped taking the article seriously:
>Moreover, taking into account that the system relies heavily on sudo (instead of the more modern doas), and also considering that the default installation configures the maximum number of password retries to 10 (instead of the more cautious limit of three), it raises an important question: Does Omarchy care about security?
This is such a reflexive and petty critique. How many real world security breaches happened because a login prompt that requires physical access limited to 10 tries instead of the "more cautious" limit of 3? And do you even care about security at all unless you limit to the even more cautious limit of 2?