To me, personally, the value of Omarchy is more like a pre-riced developer environment, nothing else, and I am totally cool with that. Some people say it's not a distro, but then again, that would mean that kubuntu is also not a distro... btw, I work with fedora, so take my posture on this with a pinch of salt.
I’m very impressed with how easy Omarchy is to get going for someone who knows enough about Linux and computers to take over the rudder and steer the ship to wherever they are going. Proprietary tools like 1Password and Spotify are in place. It works wonderful in a Mac centric SaaS organisation. Actively developed and refined. It would be great to have a traditional taskbar oriented distro like this. But in the meantime I can run this and forget about my OS for a while.
You are absolutely right and thank you for your level headed response! Omarchy genuinely provides value to our organization. It isn't just a Linux distribution---it is a political statement!
I'm a fan of omakase computing but in an "install stock fedora or debian" sense. I find the maintainers have great taste. I'm not sure any more ink needs to be spilt than that.
In all fairness that would be a really weird bookshelf icon with "books" with no shelves and the few books it has are floating somehow in the top left corner of it. I bet it's more of a "sidebar menu" icon.
Though yes, it would be much better a hamburger icon - or just having that sidebar menu open as default.
Listened to DHH on The Primeagen’s The Standup podcast - talking about how Macs are complete trash and can’t be used “for agents”. Like a dumb marketing droid parroting some inane talking points his VP has come up with to sound “AI relevant”.
I watched the same and I didn’t hear any marketing speak. He’s excited about his ideas, puts in the work and genuinely trying to make Linux accessible.
About calling Mac trash, I think he should have added “for engineers”. I like/use macOS and Omarchy both and they are meant for different audiences.
In that podcast DHH was talking about how in Omarchy you can change the system settings, monitor setup, themes, window chrome, installed programs, window manager config, keyboard shortcuts, etc. using agents. This is facilitated by Omarchy because all that stuff is dictated by text files that agents can directly interface with.
Whatever the merits of MacOS, and there are many, it is not the paradigm there that all your system settings and config are stored in text files. That's what he was talking about.
Ah, the irony of posting "Your Mac is slowing you down" on the bloated JS hellsite that is X. That page took 10s to appear on my machine (before even thinking of rendering the video) whereas the HN front page is <1s.
"it is not the paradigm there that all your system settings and config are stored in text files."
This is inherently untrue. A .plist in XML is nothing but text. It might be formatted text, but it is still text nonetheless, like almost every other configuration file in existence.
I do this with Claude. I don't add skills files, since I figure if they worked that well then Anthropic would just put it in Claude code.
I just open Claude in a new directory (no agents.md file or claude.md file), tell it what I'd like it to build, and figure that Anthropic would give it any tooling it needs. If some skill etc worked so great, it would just be part of Claude Code.
(However, I do think it writes some memories based on things that worked well or poorly before - it does really well at projects now, I think it does much better than a stock installation, so I think it does make use of memory files. I see its notes when it writes certain lessons to memory.)
DHH had been anti AI first. Then he got a board seat at Shopify. Shopify needs to maintain the AI narrative to maintain the illusion of easy shop creation.
Now DHH pushes AI in a simple Linux distribution, one of millions of others. And the money flows in.
Why would DHH want to keep foreigners out if he wants to make everyone unemployed? The same applies to Musk. It is interesting that these two figures support DEI when it comes to unemployment: Everyone but snowboarders (Lütke) and "race car drivers" (DHH) should be unemployed regardless of skin color! True equality!
> classic Linux culture. Where there's been a strong belief that everyone should know everything about all of their tools, and that they should preferably configure every last one from them from scratch.
Huh, what Linux culture is this Ruby-on-Rails fanboi talking about? Arch Linux I guess comes closest to it, but still isn't "everyone has to know everything about all tools", but I guess if you're launching some closed source platform or whatever the author is up to, you probably want it to sound like Linux forces you to know everything about everything, so you can sell your service to the people who don't want that. Good luck I guess.
This reads as a blogpost from someone who is mad at Linux for some reason, yet cannot fully describe why?
Yeah... KDE, GNOME and soon COSMIC will be fine for most people. Ricing IS fun but this is more similar to taking a kitted out car that used to belong to your cousin to the car meet, part of the culture is stumbling around forums and asking around. There's been stuff in the past like Regolith that did similar things but now a semi-famous person is spearheading this so everybody wooos and ahhhs.
Stock Fedora or nearly all the other Linux distributions are a thousand times more stable and secure than Omarachy is.
https://xn--gckvb8fzb.com/a-word-on-omarchy/
To me, personally, the value of Omarchy is more like a pre-riced developer environment, nothing else, and I am totally cool with that. Some people say it's not a distro, but then again, that would mean that kubuntu is also not a distro... btw, I work with fedora, so take my posture on this with a pinch of salt.
Well I guess that's the problem with
> getting something beautifully curated and integrated from someone they trust to make competent, tasteful decisions
I’m very impressed with how easy Omarchy is to get going for someone who knows enough about Linux and computers to take over the rudder and steer the ship to wherever they are going. Proprietary tools like 1Password and Spotify are in place. It works wonderful in a Mac centric SaaS organisation. Actively developed and refined. It would be great to have a traditional taskbar oriented distro like this. But in the meantime I can run this and forget about my OS for a while.
You are absolutely right and thank you for your level headed response! Omarchy genuinely provides value to our organization. It isn't just a Linux distribution---it is a political statement!
This is not a distro. It's a masterpiece in trolling.
I'm a fan of omakase computing but in an "install stock fedora or debian" sense. I find the maintainers have great taste. I'm not sure any more ink needs to be spilt than that.
[delayed]
I have no idea how to navigate to the homepage of this website
- https://learn.omacom.io/
(It is not very discoverable? The "bookshelf-like" icon on top ...)
This website sucks so bad, holy cow
Please use standard hamburger menu icon or equivalent. The bookshelf icon does not represent a menu or a navigation indication.
In all fairness that would be a really weird bookshelf icon with "books" with no shelves and the few books it has are floating somehow in the top left corner of it. I bet it's more of a "sidebar menu" icon.
Though yes, it would be much better a hamburger icon - or just having that sidebar menu open as default.
Listened to DHH on The Primeagen’s The Standup podcast - talking about how Macs are complete trash and can’t be used “for agents”. Like a dumb marketing droid parroting some inane talking points his VP has come up with to sound “AI relevant”.
I watched the same and I didn’t hear any marketing speak. He’s excited about his ideas, puts in the work and genuinely trying to make Linux accessible.
About calling Mac trash, I think he should have added “for engineers”. I like/use macOS and Omarchy both and they are meant for different audiences.
In that podcast DHH was talking about how in Omarchy you can change the system settings, monitor setup, themes, window chrome, installed programs, window manager config, keyboard shortcuts, etc. using agents. This is facilitated by Omarchy because all that stuff is dictated by text files that agents can directly interface with.
Whatever the merits of MacOS, and there are many, it is not the paradigm there that all your system settings and config are stored in text files. That's what he was talking about.
You can use the ‘defaults’ CLI to manage settings files for the OS and applications.
For example: https://macos-defaults.com/
Other than being a proprietary OS that's getting more locked down every year, its disk performance is trash.
https://x.com/theo/status/2090528543746965991
Ah, the irony of posting "Your Mac is slowing you down" on the bloated JS hellsite that is X. That page took 10s to appear on my machine (before even thinking of rendering the video) whereas the HN front page is <1s.
"it is not the paradigm there that all your system settings and config are stored in text files."
This is inherently untrue. A .plist in XML is nothing but text. It might be formatted text, but it is still text nonetheless, like almost every other configuration file in existence.
> Whatever the merits of MacOS, and there are many, it is not the paradigm there that all your system settings and config are stored in text files.
Maybe not, but the agent can call `defaults write` too, no?
I love Omakase, but not because I don’t know what I want.
It is because I want to experience an artist’s work.
I do this with Claude. I don't add skills files, since I figure if they worked that well then Anthropic would just put it in Claude code.
I just open Claude in a new directory (no agents.md file or claude.md file), tell it what I'd like it to build, and figure that Anthropic would give it any tooling it needs. If some skill etc worked so great, it would just be part of Claude Code.
(However, I do think it writes some memories based on things that worked well or poorly before - it does really well at projects now, I think it does much better than a stock installation, so I think it does make use of memory files. I see its notes when it writes certain lessons to memory.)
DHH had been anti AI first. Then he got a board seat at Shopify. Shopify needs to maintain the AI narrative to maintain the illusion of easy shop creation.
Now DHH pushes AI in a simple Linux distribution, one of millions of others. And the money flows in.
Why would DHH want to keep foreigners out if he wants to make everyone unemployed? The same applies to Musk. It is interesting that these two figures support DEI when it comes to unemployment: Everyone but snowboarders (Lütke) and "race car drivers" (DHH) should be unemployed regardless of skin color! True equality!
> classic Linux culture. Where there's been a strong belief that everyone should know everything about all of their tools, and that they should preferably configure every last one from them from scratch.
Huh, what Linux culture is this Ruby-on-Rails fanboi talking about? Arch Linux I guess comes closest to it, but still isn't "everyone has to know everything about all tools", but I guess if you're launching some closed source platform or whatever the author is up to, you probably want it to sound like Linux forces you to know everything about everything, so you can sell your service to the people who don't want that. Good luck I guess.
This reads as a blogpost from someone who is mad at Linux for some reason, yet cannot fully describe why?
Yeah... KDE, GNOME and soon COSMIC will be fine for most people. Ricing IS fun but this is more similar to taking a kitted out car that used to belong to your cousin to the car meet, part of the culture is stumbling around forums and asking around. There's been stuff in the past like Regolith that did similar things but now a semi-famous person is spearheading this so everybody wooos and ahhhs.
Yes, I am salty.
He's talking about Linux neckbeards and gatekeepers, not, say, cultural idiosyncrasies of any given distro.
"Huh, what Linux culture is this Ruby-on-Rails fanboi talking about?"
Probably Gentoo, since that's where the truly competent Linux users that do understand their tools tend to migrate.
>> classic Linux culture. Where there's been a strong belief that everyone should know everything about all of their tools,
That’s weird, imagine saying to mechanics, artists,… to not learn all about their tools.
> Ruby-on-Rails fanboi
Lol. The author is the creator of Rails
DHH means this is, for me, a hard pass.