I really appreciate that he included a video with great narration. So much better than the animated gifs that provide too little context and go too fast.
I find it moderately amusing that it seems like this ships with Chromium instead of Firefox, and doesn't note this anywhere in the manual. The manual just says "Browser" but like, really. I also find that this is definitely throwing someone off the deep end (Hyprland + neovim are not that difficult to learn, but not exactly intuitive), but I guess that's what Omakub is for (to not throw people off the deep end but still be on Linux instead of macOS).
I've been following his journey here since Omakub. I plan on refurbishing a 2015 MBP that had its HDD die to run Omarchy this weekend. I've heard it runs well on old hardware. Will be nice to have a mobile dev machine again.
I'm going to try this out. I used i3 as my main desktop for a long spell. I don't remember the specifics but I eventually moved back to Mate due to some inconveniences. I've never heard of Hyprland TBH.
I've been using this on a mini pc I bought and I'm really digging it. I could see myself using it as my daily driver instead of macOS one day. I also am floored by how low the resource consumption is on it
I used the one he put together for Ubuntu. My setup had become old and clunky. My dotfiles had become a mass. It was nice to go from 0 to something useful without effort. Now I just make changes as I see fit.
I used to run Linux on my home computer between 1998-2007 (Slackware, Gentoo, Arch Linux) but it often felt like there was a lot of extra work with configuring and fixing drivers and so on. After that I switched to MacOS and never looked back until now.
The appeal of Omakub & Omarchy to me is that it minimizes the amount of time wasted on getting everything setup.
I setup Omakub on a 2015 MBP at the beginning of this year. I'll definitely be switching to Omarchy soon.
My only thought is that it would be nice if Omarchy/Omakub used something more declarative than a bunch of bash scripts, like nix or something else.
Observing the progression of DHH's Linux journey has been entertaining, and I don't mean that in a condescending way! A mix of lighthearted enjoyment, and anticipation of which part of the tech tree is next for him. Will the next rabbit hole he stumbles into be immutable distros? If so, will he take the Silverblue path or the NixOS path?
I mean, if you think DHHs workflow might work for you, I don't see the harm in trying it out. It just feels like one of those things where people think that they'll become just like the author, if they adopt their tooling.
Super cool and I want to try it out. My only issue is that sometimes my wife uses my laptop occasionally. She can navigate Gnome + Dock easily, but a tiling WM might be a step too far...
I thought I had missed a new development here but it's still not a distro, it's a set of scripts to /configure/ a distro, just like Omakub. Which I actually prefer.
Having it be "just scripts" leaves all of the energy and time to be spent on the itch that DHH wants to scratch instead of all the plumbing that others have solved several times already. It also removes a plethora of thresholds someone has to overcome before they get to start developing their app in Linux.
I think Omakub and Omarchy are great examples of something that should be in the base repo of most distros. A package-manager installable tool that lets you completely transform the default desktop, preferences, plugins and installed apps to a specific purpose and aesthetic.
Kind of a theme manager that also includes functionality.
The config is really well setup - i am using Omarchy on a second pc (main one being a mac). Some thoughts:
DHH has good taste - leaving besides application choices (some of which I changed, e.g <insert_browser> instead of Chromium, no 1password), the configuration defaults all make sense (coming from a mac) - especially the key bindings.
Arch Linux by itself is a bit scary and requires config to make it "nice" so basically Omarchy takes away all the choices and config learning / pain - this tweet is a good summary:
> I've poured in endless hours configuring Hyprland + Arch, GTK/QT theming/scaling, auxiliary apps, and more to give you a superb base that can either be taken as-is or used to keep tweaking.[1]
Tiling window managers are great - I have young kids using computers for their hw and they prefered this over mac - windows. Which suprised me as personally it is a much bigger change for me after decades of regular windows/mac window management.
Linux / Hyperland Pros:
- I had a old pc from 2014 - which I put a minimal fresh new install of windows 10 - and it has been dog slow enough that it was waiting to be replaced. After installing Omarchy (Arch + Hyperland) it's perfectly fast and usable.
Cons:
1. Its designed to be a single user setup - the idea being u use HD encryption and login straight to the one true user. So for a shared pc its not ideal - the way its currently configured I think you need to run the omarchy bash install script for each user and also update individually for each one - not ideal for a pc shared with kids.
Really interested to see where Omarchy ends up. Its also given my usability ideas for my mac.
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https://projectbluefin.io/
Right!
The appeal of Omakub & Omarchy to me is that it minimizes the amount of time wasted on getting everything setup.
I setup Omakub on a 2015 MBP at the beginning of this year. I'll definitely be switching to Omarchy soon.
My only thought is that it would be nice if Omarchy/Omakub used something more declarative than a bunch of bash scripts, like nix or something else.
And so on.
Having it be "just scripts" leaves all of the energy and time to be spent on the itch that DHH wants to scratch instead of all the plumbing that others have solved several times already. It also removes a plethora of thresholds someone has to overcome before they get to start developing their app in Linux.
I think Omakub and Omarchy are great examples of something that should be in the base repo of most distros. A package-manager installable tool that lets you completely transform the default desktop, preferences, plugins and installed apps to a specific purpose and aesthetic.
Kind of a theme manager that also includes functionality.
DHH has good taste - leaving besides application choices (some of which I changed, e.g <insert_browser> instead of Chromium, no 1password), the configuration defaults all make sense (coming from a mac) - especially the key bindings.
Arch Linux by itself is a bit scary and requires config to make it "nice" so basically Omarchy takes away all the choices and config learning / pain - this tweet is a good summary:
> I've poured in endless hours configuring Hyprland + Arch, GTK/QT theming/scaling, auxiliary apps, and more to give you a superb base that can either be taken as-is or used to keep tweaking.[1]
Tiling window managers are great - I have young kids using computers for their hw and they prefered this over mac - windows. Which suprised me as personally it is a much bigger change for me after decades of regular windows/mac window management.
Linux / Hyperland Pros:
- I had a old pc from 2014 - which I put a minimal fresh new install of windows 10 - and it has been dog slow enough that it was waiting to be replaced. After installing Omarchy (Arch + Hyperland) it's perfectly fast and usable.
Cons: 1. Its designed to be a single user setup - the idea being u use HD encryption and login straight to the one true user. So for a shared pc its not ideal - the way its currently configured I think you need to run the omarchy bash install script for each user and also update individually for each one - not ideal for a pc shared with kids.
Really interested to see where Omarchy ends up. Its also given my usability ideas for my mac.
[1]: https://x.com/dhh/status/1932130355663761794