So this is announcement. I was thinking if it is going to be Omarchy Server edition. But reading the names of all founding members I can see why it is worth the hype.
I guess for now most people will be trying Omarchy on their old PC laptops. Especially when new one is expensive. It would be great if there are certain test case or certification to make sure given laptops works with Omarchy.
I don't think there has been anything close to Omarchy for Linux Desktop momentum. ChromeOS isn't one because most of it usage is like a consumption devices appliance used for education. And those Download numbers and Internet video views seems to back it up.
There are roughly 30 - 50M professional software developers, I wouldn't be surprised if it is closer to 100M if we include hobbyist and other adjacent roles. Even if it is 10% of this market is a sizeable trunk.
On the other hand it is sad to witness the birth of Omarchy is precisely because of Apple macOS, iOS and its software ecosystem. I hope we have more senior leadership changes in the coming months once John is officially CEO.
> On the other hand it is sad to witness the birth of Omarchy is precisely because of Apple macOS, iOS and its software ecosystem.
I'm not sad at all, this is great news. I'm only bummed that the install path for Omarchy on Mac isn't easier, but money like this may change that. Apple has been stagnant in this department for years and its high time they faced some thought-leadership competition on OS UX. They brought this on themselves and I wholeheartedly welcome efforts like this.
Apple does not represent the average developer, they hamstrung macOS for petty reasons. There's no NTFS support, no official Vulkan support, broken/outdated CUDA/Mesa GPU drivers, and no modern UEFI or documented devicetree drivers. If Intel or Microsoft did this to their customers, we would be partying in the streets when their hardware died. There would be mass protests against the idea that a company could impose that level of anti-competitive restriction on their users.
The sadness is that the developer landscape is so insecure and tribal. We could have ditched macOS decades ago if people weren't defending Apple's indefensible decisions.
Been a happy Omarchy user for over a year, it's changed how I work with lots of Hyprland grouped windows spread across multiple virtual desktops which I can easily get to each with just a few keystrokes, it's a pretty fluid workflow after you get used to the keybindings.
Things I like about Omarchy:
- Great job at blending Native Desktop, Web and CLI Apps - they launch & look the same
- Polished themes - applied to most Apps (inc. running)
- Built in installers for most dev tools, lets you get setup with most popular programming langs in a few secs
- Built-in Windows (run in Docker container) great to have when you need it
Also something I only started doing recently is whenever I hit any Linux issue I now just paste it into ChatGPT and let it fix it for me which saved a lot of time porting my customizations over to Quattro. There's now built-in support for passing the crash info to your default AI Agent when a process crashes.
I'm using AI to power a lot of my desktop tasks now, even ended up buying Davinci Resolve yesterday since the paid version had scripting support which let me use ChatGPT to implement some video effects.
Switching to Omarchy was one of the best decisions I made last year that improved my everyday computing experience so much, and introduced me to so many amazing tools like neovim, tmux, tiling window managers, Arch Linux, and countless TUIs.. Haven't touched my old MacBook this year at all.
If you're in the market for a new laptop / operating system, I highly recommend you give it a try.
I installed Omarchy on an old laptop yesterday and was impressed with the smooth installation. The UI is definitely a different approach, I can see any developer who prefers the keyboard to the mouse would love it.
Good to see some innovation. Desktop Linux feels like it has been stalled for years and needs new ideas.
Also, having an AI to pre-flight compatibility issues and help with UEFI and BIOS configs makes life so much more pleasant.
I really want a good local LLM setup. It's kind of funny now that the best deal for LLMs is an M5 Macbook, Macs have become very uncool, especially I have been running Linux on my computers for over a decade.
I guess people who aren't poor can afford a 5090 or even RTX 6000. Plus the latest Linux desktops look cooler.
Lots of negativity in this post. As someone who is an engineer and not a software engineer, this has improved my technical capability tremendously by giving me training wheels and removed decision paralysis because there's so much crap out there and everyone is so opinionated. I don't have time to try out pi and herdr and opencode and codex...
"what the malleable computer of the future looks like" ??? Excuse me? This is just a linux shell script repository. What is the point of having $8m to maintain a shell script?
Omarchy Quattro is pretty dang good. It's a lot more than any shell script I've written, certainly. If you've written a more complex one I'd love to see it.
Having agents in the default environment, having everything configurable through text files, and having default agents automatically file bug reports on crashes - these are tangible quality of life improvements that you can't get on other systems.
Maybe Windows and MacOS should write some shell scripts.
> It's a lot more than any shell script I've written, certainly. If you've written a more complex one I'd love to see it.
I've been maintaining https://github.com/nickjj/dotfriedrice for around 8 years, it's my dotfiles that have an installer, theming and other things. I'd still absolutely classify this is a shell script / dotfiles project. I've added just enough customization to make it easy to modify most things without needing to fork the repo.
I only added a GUI last year after my hardware was finally compatible with native Linux, otherwise I would have switched almost 10 years ago. Before that, it focused on command line tools and your terminal, that's because I ran it under Windows with WSL 2 but it also worked fine on native Linux even back then, macOS too because I use it on a company issued laptop.
All that to say, I don't see the above as anything special. It's a batteries included dotfiles, nothing more nothing less. With that said, I'm thrilled by the environment it's allowed me to create and niri is so good. I wish I could get $8 million dollars in funding, because I'd give $7 million of that to the author of niri.
My understanding is that it only goes to Omarchy, and only with explicit permission from the user, so maybe "automatically" is a misnomer - but the diagnosis process feels very snappy
Might be shocking, but entirely true: They might have shared secret and private plans of what they're building to investors (donators?), where "malleable computer" is a part of those plans, and the full 100% implementation might not be in the source repository at this very moment. Just a guess from my side though, who knows, maybe shellscripts are what they see as malleable computers?
The better takeaway is that marketing is important and the technical details, don't always matter as much (https://xn--gckvb8fzb.com/a-word-on-omarchy/) as having a complete package. Similarly to how Apple often packages existing tech into an appealing package for the mass market and there's nothing wrong with that.
DHH has the gift that he's both a good technologist, but also a good marketer.
Was about to sell the parts of my old Haswell Hackintosh which I did replace with a M1 Mac Mini a couple of years ago after 10 years in use, but now I might just dust off my old Lian Li case build it back together for Omarchy as my dev and tinker machine. Still has double the RAM of my Mini..
I highly encourage anyone e.g. on MacOS to get a cheap laptop and give Omarchy a try. My feeling of using this system compared to MacOS is a whole another level. And now one of the promises of Omarchy Quattro is that AI agents will help you tweak it to your liking very easily, avoiding having to spend dozens of hours ricing your system.
Can someone explain why I (a relatively Linux-naive engineer) would use Omarchy over Ubuntu or other popular distros? I'd like to take a look, but i'm having the hardest time understanding the value proposition.
It’s Ruby on Rails in the world of distros. If you find other distros tasteless and unpolished, you may want to try Omarchy. At least that’s how I see it (I find most Linux distros and development frameworks tasteless and unpolished).
Does anyone have experience with Dell XPS / Omarchy/Arch and docking stations? I've had a lot of trouble getting it to work reliably with my ThinkPad. I'd switch if I knew it was plug and play on Arch/Omarchy.
insofar as this gets people off macos/windows and onto linux, especially among younger people where macos has managed to hold on to the position of a default that developers are comfortable e.g. being the only platform they support, this is a good thing imo
the fact that it's largely hype-driven is par for the course for how things work these days
I'm more excited to get up and use my computer on Omarchy. Working on it feels more like a video game where I have to solve fun puzzles everyday.
I run it on a Framework Laptop 12, an old MBP, and a recently built gaming PC (VR primarily). There are tradeoffs, but I haven't enjoyed working on computers this much since the 2010 era, first learning to build web apps with Ruby on Rails. The distro is merely 6 gigs and takes minutes to install. And the video DHH just released Quattro with is worth a watch to get a feel for it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F7fe9pa8OeE
I installed Arch from scratch. Honestly, other than a couple of minor "squirrel catchers" associated with disk formatting it isn't that big of a deal. You don't have to be a graybeard monk to use Linux - Omarchy or not.
I did as well a bunch of times but it's annoying to maintain those installations after a while (particularly if you use WM and not a DE) even if it's not especially difficult. I don't use Arch anymore so it's not for me, but Omarchy has a legitimate use case even if I don't really get what the 8 million is supposed to be for.
It was (pretty much) just dot files and curated software, although I think that description downplays the value of having a perfectly tuned system out of the box - like saying a log cabin is just a bunch of sticks. The assembly matters and the end result is something greater than the sum of its parts.
That aside, the latest release (Quattro) has also added a bunch of bespoke software (technically quickshell configuration, if you don't want to call it software) which has added a new layer of polish. For my taste it has been a real joy to use and a lot of fun to explore and play around with. Could be worth checking out if you haven't looked in a while!
Noob friendly, I believe was the implication. Perhaps an implication that on average, the young are more attracted to the surface level ui features that omarchy amplifies, and the easyness of the installation. For us older heads, we also got into linux quite young, but there were not options for easy install, so the install was an integral part of the process that forced you to somewhat deeply learn your machine inside and out, and for me at least, that became a huge part of the appeal. Anecdotally, when i did my first install off a red hat disc in 1995 at age 14, i could not figure out how to configure xwindows so i just gave up and spent 4 solid years in the terminal. This was a formative experience in my life, and one that I would have missed out on if i started with omarchy.
Yeah I must admit that Linux is good for us young people and it's certainly getting some more mass appeal. I have been a linux evangelist within my group and although there are a lot of things to complain in the world that we have inherited as the next generation, linux isn't one of them but rather the lack of knowledge about Linux (of how so many people don't know about it) might be it, which is the reason why I have tried to generally promote Linux.
although I am on a mac now but I love Linux and I love it so much :)
It was fun talking in college to one of my friends about how my PC used to boot from start in 3-5 seconds. (I was using archlinux + systemd boot manager, it was fast to boot!)
I have read some Hackernews comment which went into more details of some issues in Linux of the time that you mention. I must admit that compared to it, its a smooth sail now and I wish to thank everyone within the open source contributing to it. What I and my generation/maybe next might be taking for granted is created from the sweet laborious efforts within Open source for the whole ecosystem (not just Linux, but rather KDE, Gnome,Hyprland, open source applications which support Linux and are actually becoming some really great tools, the list is just endless)
So this is announcement. I was thinking if it is going to be Omarchy Server edition. But reading the names of all founding members I can see why it is worth the hype.
I guess for now most people will be trying Omarchy on their old PC laptops. Especially when new one is expensive. It would be great if there are certain test case or certification to make sure given laptops works with Omarchy.
I don't think there has been anything close to Omarchy for Linux Desktop momentum. ChromeOS isn't one because most of it usage is like a consumption devices appliance used for education. And those Download numbers and Internet video views seems to back it up.
There are roughly 30 - 50M professional software developers, I wouldn't be surprised if it is closer to 100M if we include hobbyist and other adjacent roles. Even if it is 10% of this market is a sizeable trunk.
On the other hand it is sad to witness the birth of Omarchy is precisely because of Apple macOS, iOS and its software ecosystem. I hope we have more senior leadership changes in the coming months once John is officially CEO.
[delayed]
What would be the point of Omarchy Server? I thought the desktop experience was the main selling point...
> On the other hand it is sad to witness the birth of Omarchy is precisely because of Apple macOS, iOS and its software ecosystem.
I'm not sad at all, this is great news. I'm only bummed that the install path for Omarchy on Mac isn't easier, but money like this may change that. Apple has been stagnant in this department for years and its high time they faced some thought-leadership competition on OS UX. They brought this on themselves and I wholeheartedly welcome efforts like this.
> it is sad to witness the birth of Omarchy is precisely because of Apple macOS, iOS and its software ecosystem.
Sad for whom? People that get excited paying $99/year to fund Donald Trump's next golden manufacturing trophy? https://www.theverge.com/news/737757/apple-president-donald-...
Apple does not represent the average developer, they hamstrung macOS for petty reasons. There's no NTFS support, no official Vulkan support, broken/outdated CUDA/Mesa GPU drivers, and no modern UEFI or documented devicetree drivers. If Intel or Microsoft did this to their customers, we would be partying in the streets when their hardware died. There would be mass protests against the idea that a company could impose that level of anti-competitive restriction on their users.
The sadness is that the developer landscape is so insecure and tribal. We could have ditched macOS decades ago if people weren't defending Apple's indefensible decisions.
Been a happy Omarchy user for over a year, it's changed how I work with lots of Hyprland grouped windows spread across multiple virtual desktops which I can easily get to each with just a few keystrokes, it's a pretty fluid workflow after you get used to the keybindings.
Things I like about Omarchy:
Also something I only started doing recently is whenever I hit any Linux issue I now just paste it into ChatGPT and let it fix it for me which saved a lot of time porting my customizations over to Quattro. There's now built-in support for passing the crash info to your default AI Agent when a process crashes.I'm using AI to power a lot of my desktop tasks now, even ended up buying Davinci Resolve yesterday since the paid version had scripting support which let me use ChatGPT to implement some video effects.
Switching to Omarchy was one of the best decisions I made last year that improved my everyday computing experience so much, and introduced me to so many amazing tools like neovim, tmux, tiling window managers, Arch Linux, and countless TUIs.. Haven't touched my old MacBook this year at all.
If you're in the market for a new laptop / operating system, I highly recommend you give it a try.
Hadn't realised (until your comment) that Omarchy doesn't work on non-intel macs; that's a shame. https://github.com/basecamp/omarchy/blob/quattro/manual/44-m...
Intel Macs have first party Linux drivers. They're much easier to support since they just behave like any normal x86 laptop would.
I installed Omarchy on an old laptop yesterday and was impressed with the smooth installation. The UI is definitely a different approach, I can see any developer who prefers the keyboard to the mouse would love it.
Good to see some innovation. Desktop Linux feels like it has been stalled for years and needs new ideas.
Also, having an AI to pre-flight compatibility issues and help with UEFI and BIOS configs makes life so much more pleasant.
I really want a good local LLM setup. It's kind of funny now that the best deal for LLMs is an M5 Macbook, Macs have become very uncool, especially I have been running Linux on my computers for over a decade.
I guess people who aren't poor can afford a 5090 or even RTX 6000. Plus the latest Linux desktops look cooler.
Lots of negativity in this post. As someone who is an engineer and not a software engineer, this has improved my technical capability tremendously by giving me training wheels and removed decision paralysis because there's so much crap out there and everyone is so opinionated. I don't have time to try out pi and herdr and opencode and codex...
"what the malleable computer of the future looks like" ??? Excuse me? This is just a linux shell script repository. What is the point of having $8m to maintain a shell script?
Omarchy Quattro is pretty dang good. It's a lot more than any shell script I've written, certainly. If you've written a more complex one I'd love to see it.
Having agents in the default environment, having everything configurable through text files, and having default agents automatically file bug reports on crashes - these are tangible quality of life improvements that you can't get on other systems.
Maybe Windows and MacOS should write some shell scripts.
> It's a lot more than any shell script I've written, certainly. If you've written a more complex one I'd love to see it.
I've been maintaining https://github.com/nickjj/dotfriedrice for around 8 years, it's my dotfiles that have an installer, theming and other things. I'd still absolutely classify this is a shell script / dotfiles project. I've added just enough customization to make it easy to modify most things without needing to fork the repo.
I only added a GUI last year after my hardware was finally compatible with native Linux, otherwise I would have switched almost 10 years ago. Before that, it focused on command line tools and your terminal, that's because I ran it under Windows with WSL 2 but it also worked fine on native Linux even back then, macOS too because I use it on a company issued laptop.
All that to say, I don't see the above as anything special. It's a batteries included dotfiles, nothing more nothing less. With that said, I'm thrilled by the environment it's allowed me to create and niri is so good. I wish I could get $8 million dollars in funding, because I'd give $7 million of that to the author of niri.
> default agents automatically file bug reports on crashes
Is this only sending bug reports to Omarchy or to the upstream developers? I'm not sure many of them would be fond of AI slop bug reports en masse.
My understanding is that it only goes to Omarchy, and only with explicit permission from the user, so maybe "automatically" is a misnomer - but the diagnosis process feels very snappy
He needs funds to write more racist articles about brown people in the UK
Might be shocking, but entirely true: They might have shared secret and private plans of what they're building to investors (donators?), where "malleable computer" is a part of those plans, and the full 100% implementation might not be in the source repository at this very moment. Just a guess from my side though, who knows, maybe shellscripts are what they see as malleable computers?
I think it's implemented and demoed in the Quattro release
I use it every day for work and it is really fun. It's different from Mac and takes a while to get the gist of it, but for me it has been worth it.
I don't care if people see it as a hyped-up collection of scripts, it's calm and fun.
TIL a really good r/unixporn post is worth $8M
The better takeaway is that marketing is important and the technical details, don't always matter as much (https://xn--gckvb8fzb.com/a-word-on-omarchy/) as having a complete package. Similarly to how Apple often packages existing tech into an appealing package for the mass market and there's nothing wrong with that.
DHH has the gift that he's both a good technologist, but also a good marketer.
Was about to sell the parts of my old Haswell Hackintosh which I did replace with a M1 Mac Mini a couple of years ago after 10 years in use, but now I might just dust off my old Lian Li case build it back together for Omarchy as my dev and tinker machine. Still has double the RAM of my Mini..
I highly encourage anyone e.g. on MacOS to get a cheap laptop and give Omarchy a try. My feeling of using this system compared to MacOS is a whole another level. And now one of the promises of Omarchy Quattro is that AI agents will help you tweak it to your liking very easily, avoiding having to spend dozens of hours ricing your system.
> We’re going to make the prophecy of The Year of Linux on the Desktop come true. All the pieces are now in place. Time to go all in!
Let's go :)
Can someone explain why I (a relatively Linux-naive engineer) would use Omarchy over Ubuntu or other popular distros? I'd like to take a look, but i'm having the hardest time understanding the value proposition.
It’s Ruby on Rails in the world of distros. If you find other distros tasteless and unpolished, you may want to try Omarchy. At least that’s how I see it (I find most Linux distros and development frameworks tasteless and unpolished).
The demo video is comprehensive and impressive
I have had so much fun with Omarchy! great news!
Anything that gets hyprland on more devices is a beautiful thing in my book
Does anyone have experience with Dell XPS / Omarchy/Arch and docking stations? I've had a lot of trouble getting it to work reliably with my ThinkPad. I'd switch if I knew it was plug and play on Arch/Omarchy.
Must be nice to have 1M to throw into hobby projects, happy for them.
insofar as this gets people off macos/windows and onto linux, especially among younger people where macos has managed to hold on to the position of a default that developers are comfortable e.g. being the only platform they support, this is a good thing imo
the fact that it's largely hype-driven is par for the course for how things work these days
The hype is real though. It's a great distro
This is dope. Love to see any efforts to get Linux on the desktop more ready to use.
I'm more excited to get up and use my computer on Omarchy. Working on it feels more like a video game where I have to solve fun puzzles everyday.
I run it on a Framework Laptop 12, an old MBP, and a recently built gaming PC (VR primarily). There are tradeoffs, but I haven't enjoyed working on computers this much since the 2010 era, first learning to build web apps with Ruby on Rails. The distro is merely 6 gigs and takes minutes to install. And the video DHH just released Quattro with is worth a watch to get a feel for it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F7fe9pa8OeE
Same here. Using my ThinkPad became much more fun after I installed Omarchy on it.
Breathing new life into old hardware is such a refreshing feeling!
macOS is finally getting some serious competition with an open platform!
Related: DHH is appearing live on Primeagen's twitch/yt/kick channel in 5 min (10am PST).
https://www.twitch.tv/theprimeagen
These guys are fighting the good fight.
Vibe coded techbro Linux? No, thanks.
Isn’t Omarchy a vibe coded Linux distro with Claude?
Seems you can just vibe code anything and get funding for slop if you’re rich.
If this is needed for the “year of Linux on the desktop” have at it I guess.
It's Linux for very young men who don't use Linux.
I installed Arch from scratch. Honestly, other than a couple of minor "squirrel catchers" associated with disk formatting it isn't that big of a deal. You don't have to be a graybeard monk to use Linux - Omarchy or not.
I did as well a bunch of times but it's annoying to maintain those installations after a while (particularly if you use WM and not a DE) even if it's not especially difficult. I don't use Arch anymore so it's not for me, but Omarchy has a legitimate use case even if I don't really get what the 8 million is supposed to be for.
What don't you like about Omarchy? I'm not young and I used Fedora before Omarchy. I think it's excellent
The last state of Omarchy to me was its arch but a script to install that one guys dot files.
Nobody has given me a reason to move of Fedora Atomics.
It was (pretty much) just dot files and curated software, although I think that description downplays the value of having a perfectly tuned system out of the box - like saying a log cabin is just a bunch of sticks. The assembly matters and the end result is something greater than the sum of its parts.
That aside, the latest release (Quattro) has also added a bunch of bespoke software (technically quickshell configuration, if you don't want to call it software) which has added a new layer of polish. For my taste it has been a real joy to use and a lot of fun to explore and play around with. Could be worth checking out if you haven't looked in a while!
What makes it for very young men?
Noob friendly, I believe was the implication. Perhaps an implication that on average, the young are more attracted to the surface level ui features that omarchy amplifies, and the easyness of the installation. For us older heads, we also got into linux quite young, but there were not options for easy install, so the install was an integral part of the process that forced you to somewhat deeply learn your machine inside and out, and for me at least, that became a huge part of the appeal. Anecdotally, when i did my first install off a red hat disc in 1995 at age 14, i could not figure out how to configure xwindows so i just gave up and spent 4 solid years in the terminal. This was a formative experience in my life, and one that I would have missed out on if i started with omarchy.
For what its worth, I am part of the very young men you mention* (currently 18) and I have talked to people my age on discord who use Linux.
My opinion is that I think that cachyos is a much more suitable option over omarchy.
Personally out of so many of the distros that I have tried including Omarchy, I found Cachyos to be somewhat perfectly balanced (atleast for me).
So I highly recommend Cachyos if you haven't already!
(On a side note: Fedora is something that I wish to try a bit more as well to be honest and for servers, I mostly use debian/ubuntu or alpine)
You young people have it good. When I was 18 I started with Slackware.
Yeah I must admit that Linux is good for us young people and it's certainly getting some more mass appeal. I have been a linux evangelist within my group and although there are a lot of things to complain in the world that we have inherited as the next generation, linux isn't one of them but rather the lack of knowledge about Linux (of how so many people don't know about it) might be it, which is the reason why I have tried to generally promote Linux.
although I am on a mac now but I love Linux and I love it so much :)
It was fun talking in college to one of my friends about how my PC used to boot from start in 3-5 seconds. (I was using archlinux + systemd boot manager, it was fast to boot!)
I have read some Hackernews comment which went into more details of some issues in Linux of the time that you mention. I must admit that compared to it, its a smooth sail now and I wish to thank everyone within the open source contributing to it. What I and my generation/maybe next might be taking for granted is created from the sweet laborious efforts within Open source for the whole ecosystem (not just Linux, but rather KDE, Gnome,Hyprland, open source applications which support Linux and are actually becoming some really great tools, the list is just endless)
Thanks!
First put $1M of your own money into a project then talk
I’m assuming you’ve already put down $1M for someone else’s open source project this week?
> Seems you can just X anything and get funding for slop if you’re rich.
Always been true, extra true for people who are "famous" in their niche(s).