It’s a new distro that’s putting effort into marketing. The last time I saw a distro really market was Ubuntu, nearly 20 years ago.

Anything that gets people in the door is a good thing.

I ran Omarchy for a few days, but switched over to Fedora after a few security incidents were announced. A vibe coded system made me nervous, but I was trying to put my vibe coding prejudices aside.

There are dozens of distros out there that are little more than a specific desktop environment with a new customizations and a theme. Hating on Omarchy any more than the others doesn’t make too much sense to me.

Omarchy is popular for the same reason Manjaro was popular, people want Arch without the time, decisions, and maintenance of starting from nothing.

It also did look pretty cool, and the themes were a nice touch. Most people don’t have the patience to do all of that themselves.

All that said, I don’t think Omarchy is going to be the gateway to Linux for the mainstream. Coming with a timing window manager will scare away most average users… or frustrate them into leaving. Very few people want a learning curve on moving a window around.

The Linux community as a whole can learn something from all this. Make stuff look cool, easy to use, and add in a little marketing, and it will get a lot of attention. Also, that last 10% to take something from functional to smooth and enjoyable matters a lot. It seems like Linux has always had trouble with that, as not a lot of people want to do that finishing work. If they do a really good job, no one will notice. People only notice when it’s bad.

Influencers job is all about creating hype, that's how they make money so if you find them annoying just ignore them.

AFAIK Omarchy is created for a specific audience i.e tech enthusiast and people who are just getting into Linux will surely find it amazing. We all have been through these phases: New to Linux -> start on standard Gnome or KDE (or Unity back in the day) -> get to know about ricing/customization/window managers -> get bored and go back to standard Gnome or KDE.

There is nothing wrong with it, this is the nature of open ecosystem of Linux. You should use whatever you like and most importantly do not get upset if something else is getting more hype these day.

The creator of Omarchy is a pretty controversial figure because of culture war stuff and also a prominent software industry entrepreneur, so it intersects those two other spheres to give it more prominence than it would have otherwise.

Personally I think it's a bit pointless, but you seem to be taking it personally somehow. Can you simply choose to ignore it and not get annoyed? It's just water under the bridge and won't matter at all in the big scheme of things.

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There are two groups of people who are really loud about DHH projects. The first is ones who are really on board with his racism https://web.archive.org/web/20260721200429/https://world.hey...

And the second is people who liked some of his earlier software, aren't overly bothered by the racism, and are worried that the anti-racists will get DHH cancelled and then the good software will stop. They feel like they have to loudly hype the project just to offset the negativity.

DHH is marketing his Linux distro. He was willing to help the Arch Linux community and reached out to the AUR maintainers who were struggling. They said no.

So they are building their own distro, package repositories and now everyone is upset about that, even with the funding?

I don't really care about Omarchy, but if you think it is worth getting annoyed about it, maybe you should ignore it?

It's just a distro. What is disrespectful about the freedom to build your own distro?

Why don't you install it in a VM and try it instead of embracing biased presuppositions that may or may not be correct?

Also, I disagree that it has 0 improvements. For example:

1. Defaulting to the Windows key instead of Control for cut, copy, and paste out of the box is a nice touch that brings keybinding consistency across the terminal and other apps and makes transitioning over to Linux easier for Mac users.

2. Having Hyprland pre-configured as nicely as Omarchy is something few other distributions do, and none do as well.

3. I've used the AI integration to find and fix a segfault issue in one of the apps I regularly use, as well as fixing a LUKS issue on my laptop that all Arch-based distros exhibit. It took a couple of minutes and saved me hours of debugging. Very nice!

Yes, I could set all this up myself, and I have, but isn't the point of creating and using different Linux distributions to have things work the way you want them to, without all the hassle of doing it yourself?

I switch distributions all the time just to see what's going on in the Linux world. I've used Omarchy for about six months now and like it as much as any other Linux distribution (especially the 4.x release). I haven't found it or its community disrespectful at all. DHH is just enthusiastic about his latest interests. In my opinion, that enthusiasm has made him successful.

I think there's been dramatically more disrespect on DHH and the omarchy maintainers. Straight up calling these people "fascists", quite sickening behavior.

I've been using Linux on and off since Ubuntu 7.10 gutsy gibbon, then moved to linux mint, then arch, then random distros to try, this is the first linux os that stuck with me. I've been using it as my primary driver for months now. Don't miss windows or mac.

There is merit to the os. And all these lunatics going crazy about it is not a good look for them.

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