The Hyped Distro

As a Linux user, I’m a relative normie. I actually like GNOME. I have sidestepped the vim vs. emacs debate by preferring nano, and I run Bazzite these days because, while sold as a gaming OS, it is also a stable distro that rarely gives me problems.

But I keep an eye on what’s happening in the world of Linux.

And honestly I’ve never seen anything quite like Omarchy, which sells itself as a “Beautiful, Modern & Opinionated Linux.” Developed by 37signals co-founder and Ruby on Rails creator David Heinemeier Hansson (a.k.a. dhh), it’s pre-loaded with the kind of software that many newish Linux users transitioning from, say, MacOS, tend to grab for themselves.

Chromium? Check. 1Password? You got it. An office suite? Of course. Signal? ChatGPT? Not exactly the default apps you’d expect in a Linux distro. In one sense, you’re getting a single dude’s Linux distro. But in another, you’re buying into that guy’s opinions of what an operating system should be.

I was willing to put the damn thing on bare metal just to understand why it was worthy of so much hype. But then I realized that the opinions started all the way from the beginning of the download process. I’m currently tethered on a smartphone with relatively limited Wi-Fi, which slowed down the ISO download process significantly. The reason? Well, dhh considers torrents outdated (I’m not kidding, check the tweet), so it’s only officially being offered as a single download from a Cloudflare server.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.

Tethering was too slow, so I eventually downloaded the thing on my phone and copied it over to my machine, at which point I was met with another show-stopper. I was willing to give this thing half a terabyte of breathing room, except when I launched the installer, it insisted on deleting my entire drive. I have multiple SSDs in my laptop, and the only thing on that drive was a copy of Windows I only run when I have to. But that was too far for me.

So I installed something else I was hoping to experiment with (the new Pop!_OS beta with the COSMIC window manager, which would otherwise the most hyped Linuxy thing if not for this) and decided to move this to a virtual machine.

Omarchy: Cool looks, but it’s probably not for you

So, let’s start with the basics: Visually, it looks cool. When I stepped away from the VM for a second, it showed a legit Omarchy-branded screensaver, which is something GNOME does not do. And it’s not like this is the first attempt to build a cool-looking modern distro. But the combination of the creator, who is loved and hated in equal measure, and its approach, which essentially leans into the UNIX-porn vibes of Hyprland, makes it stand out.

Hyprland, for those not familiar, is a tiling window manager that relies on the Wayland compositor. It essentially allows you to keep adding windows to your interface that get laid out automatically, allowing for easy organization and (once you know the right keyboard commands, or key bindings) fast window management. It has been on the fringes of the Linux world for a couple of years. Omarchy is an attempt to make this budding trend a bit more mainstream.

Omarchy is well-documented, but it doesn’t hold your hand. It simplifies the install and setup, but it doesn’t try to fundamentally reshape Hyprland. Dedicated tiling window managers tend to expect the user to edit their settings in config files, which has the effect of scaring away the less technically inclined. So, too, does Omarchy. The key-binding setup is also quite different from a Windows or Mac-style approach, which centers the GUI, in favor of something that can easily launch apps. It tends to rely on a launcher, akin to Spotlight or Alfred on the Mac, but there’s generally no dock to be seen, let alone desktop icons.

This is kind of the knock against tiling window-manager interfaces like Hyprland and Sway in general, and part of the reason why they’ve stayed out of the mainstream. But if you know what you’re doing, this style of interface can become like second nature, only making you more efficient over time. There’s an audience for stuff like this because hackers are hackers and hackers are particular. With that in mind, Omarchy assumes that your skill level (and hardware) is in the ballpark of what dhh can do, or that you can get there. It defaults you to Neovim, an editor with a significant learning curve, with the idea that, once you figure it out, you’re going to 10x yourself.

At the same time, though, it weirdly does not concede the niceties of what a former Mac user might want. This is the first distro I’ve tried that comes with Obsidian built-in. I love Obsidian and have even done some plugin experiments with it, but this is an interesting choice for a Linux distro, because the tool is not open-source. (Nor is the other included markdown editor, Typora.) Which I think speaks to the intent of this project: It’s not to create the end-all be-all FOSS project, but to create a compelling package that gets a developer moving fast.

Yes, some will probably respond that you can find a bare-bones version of Omarchy without all of dhh’s favorite apps—or, at least, easily delete Neovim. Or that there are ways to set up Arch without nuking your entire SSD for the sake of a single distro. But that’s the thing—this is kind of sold as an out-of-the-box experience that devs can jump right into. If anything, the genius of what dhh has made here is the realization that nobody had done this for Hyprland, a buzzy project, so there was an open lane that someone could easily fill. It was a thought that crossed my mind over a year ago, watching Brodie Robertson videos explaining the whole deal with Hyprland. In one sense, I’m glad someone noticed it and did something with it.

The fact that it has approachable docs is a big differentiator—as you’re usually kind of just thrown into distros like these. It was one reason that Derek Taylor, mastermind of the distro-review YouTube channel DistroTube, was quick to praise it over the weekend, noting that while it comes with some very large software packages, it’s overall well-considered.

“I’m really quite impressed with this,” he said. “It’s hard to impress me with Linux distributions these days, because I’ve literally taken a look at hundreds of distributions.”

I could see Omarchy becoming a favorite of dev shops that invested thousands of dollars in the Apple ecosystem during the late 2010s—say, people who bought a 2019 MacBook Pro with 64 gigs of RAM. Those people found themselves stranded by Apple Silicon, with perfectly good machines that unfortunately are no longer getting upgrades.

Some work has been done to make Omarchy support these exact models, which makes me think that was a real factor. Given that these models sell for under $600 on the used market and are still quite capable, it is smart to target them.

And given that this is coming from 37signals, a software company that likely has a lot of old Macs lying around, it only makes sense, right? (Certainly, that’s what dhh implied in a LinkedIn post from earlier this year.)

When Omarchy calls itself “opinionated,” it’s not just talking about the software

The fact that someone with an existing rep outside of the Linux space filled the user-friendly Hyprland void means that it ultimately expands Linux’s user base. That cuts in ways good and bad. I think the target audience is probably people like dhh—experienced developers who have largely spent the past decade and a half using MacOS, who like beautiful things but don’t need the training wheels. (Case in point: The tool has bindings for specific high-end Apple monitors that only a tiny percentage of Omarchy users are likely to have.)

By dhh making the choices for you, you don’t have to make them yourself if you don’t want to, removing a stopper for getting going with an Arch-based approach to Linux. If you hate those choices, blow them out of the water. And if you know what Neovim is, even better.

All that is fine. But Omarchy is a reminder that we live in a world where software isn’t just software, but the people who make it. And dhh, despite his rep as a dev’s dev, comes with a hell of a lot of baggage. Recently, the Ruby on Rails community has been through some things, and dhh himself has proven a lightning rod on multiple occasions, most recently for a post many saw as xenophobic.

Linux itself has become a culture-war target in recent years, with some commentators in the space even making drama their whole brand. Omarchy, on a software level, feels like a net-positive for the Linux ecosystem, but like Hyprland itself, the culture around it feels divisive. Simply being associated with it will likely make people mad. The CEO of Framework, who has contributed code to Omarchy and has expressed excitement over the distro, is already feeling a bit of backlash from his community.

This is not the only example of this—the community around NixOS has faced a similar sort of controversy because of one of its primary users is the military contractor Anduril, Palmer Luckey’s company. (Side note: What the hell, Casey Neistat?)

If you’re jumping into FOSS with both feet, you’re probably doing so with a sense of ethical grounding. But just because someone else is embracing FOSS doesn’t mean they’re automatically on your side.

When Omarchy describes itself as “opinionated,” it refers to the decisions that the distro has made for its users before they even turn it on. The problem is, Omarchy is opinionated in a completely different way, and some people won’t be able to separate the opinions from the software.

Omarchy solves a problem in the Linux ecosystem—an onramp for the experienced dev who cares about looks. But it introduces a new one: Divisive politics. That’s a whole layer of drama that goes beyond the traditional KDE vs. GNOME, Rust vs. C, Arch vs. Fedora debates that tend to drive the community.

Given all that, if you ask me, the config files may not be worth the snappy interface.