Other than hype, what's the appeal here?
I saw a couple video demos recently, and was horrified that it seemed one had to memorize a dozen key binding shortcuts to really use it. Is that rather common now? I'm just a Gnome pleb who prefers discoverability via UI.
I just switched over to it from Ubuntu. So far the nice thing is that it gives you a fully decked out hyprland setup without any of the hassle and pretty good UX.
The problem I've always had with trying out a tiling window manager like hyprland is you're going to spend a very long time trying to get everything just right. With Omarchy I get a really nice hyprland setup right out of the box.
Github is awash with people's dotfiles including fully featured DEs built on top of things like Hyprland and Noctalia, and they don't require you to use a mess of a distro to use them.
Yeah, I mean when I set up my last distro I just installed claude and told it what I wanted and in about 30 minutes it was up and running. No need to install random distros!
100% this, either use a DE like GNOME or Cosmic if you can't be bothered, or spend a little time looking at someone's dotfiles.
No need to use a whole distribution with 1000 other poor decisions made for you.
> No need to use a whole distribution with 1000 other poor decisions made for you.
I used Vim for a decade (and Linux for much of that time) and the constant tweaking and changing things drives you mad after a while. The more you invent it yourself the more it changes. This is why I prefer MacOS+VSCode these days, which comes with good defaults and simpler VIM-style bindings.
Omarchy sounds like those popular vim configs such as https://astronvim.com/, which I also tried using and also ended up heavily customizing myself. It provided some nice defaults as a baseline but was ultimately comes with too much hyper-customization (which has a lot to do with vim/neovim trying to act like other more modern editors).
There's a way to have 1000 poor decisions with your arch sure. I use Omarchy to avoid just that.
So, one config file? Why would you use a distribution for that?
Well the whole point is to have a good foundation and then make it actually yours, and the only necessary key binds are probably SUPER+K for the key bind cheatsheet and SUPER+SPACE for the menu.
Also the community is large so there's usually someone that has already had your issue and resolved it. The amount of themes and plugins are growing everyday.
A bare arch+hyprland install really feels terrible to use and has a much larger barrier to entry than Omarchy.
https://plugins.omarchy.org
https://omarchythemes.com
Hey, do you have any concerns about malware, in case of using the plugins or themes from these websites ? I was a bit skeptical, considering all the malwares that are being found in the package managers and plugins are pretty much the same thing but as extensions.
There's definitely appeal in key-driven window managers in general. Projects like i3 and Niri are popular. But you can get that with any Linux distro (albeit not many have it set up that way by default). You don't generally choose a distro just for whatever DE/WM it happens to start with.
What I don't get is that VS Code has solved this perfectly via the command palette - you just bring up the prompt and start typing and it will find you the command you actually need without having to memorize anything.
That is the appeal. It's an opinionated distro designed around keyboard navigation.
It is kind of nuts how little attention this more-than-controversial-enough aspect of it gets compared to anything else, to the point people don’t even know this about it.
I happen to hate Omarchy for the precise reason I don’t want that sort of interface, but apparently everyone else does, and if they do that’s up to them.
I got here because it was the first time I saw a tiling window manager on an Omarchy video. I was on windows my entire life, so when i saw it and how bad windows got, I decided to give it a try. A few months since I de-omarchyfied the system and went straight back to arch. And now still on it.
I should have gone with something like cachyos as games are important to me, but I think at the time hyperland wasn't an option (i don't remember). I know it is now.
you can pick the best things out of cachy without moving to it wholesale. Like their proton, maybe kernel or mesa
There's a segment of people who are into customizing their desktop environment as a hobby and end in itself.
Personally I've never really been into it, and these days I have a broad and revolving set of machines I have to use, so this sort of thing is absolutely not worth the bother. I just install KDE Plasma and use the computer.
On average, you can either have a discoverable GUI for noobs, or a configurable, keyboard driven system that's a giant pain to learn and configure.
Omarchy aims to find a middle ground between those two.
> either have a discoverable GUI for noobs, or a configurable, keyboard driven system
Absolutely wrong. Windows is both and it can be 100% keyboard driven.
Try editing key-values in Regedit using only the keyboard.
You start regedit.
cursor up/down, page up/down, or F3 to search, hitting enter to follow directories, until you reach the key.
Hit enter on the key. The values will be displayed.
Hit tab until you are on the key you want to edit.
Hit enter. A popup with the value will appear.
Type the new value, hit enter.
A much more painless process than I anticipated, honestly, and it refreshingly uses the same conventions that used to be used everywhere in windows.
Set-ItemProperty -Path "HKCU:\Software\MyNewKey" -Name "Example" -Value "Blah" :)
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Or at least, XP could.
Being hyprland keybinding skilled removes a lot of the desktop interaction surface, it's a worthwhile investment. People who've used tiling window managers for a while will tell you that it gets natural at a point, then a whole class of friction that normal WMs cause just goes away.
I recently customized my own Bazzite install to use hyprland plus other customizations, there's really not much different than what omarchy did. It's pretty much that with some pre installed apps. Anyone that gave them funding is an idiot IMO.
We had people salivating over a spinning Compiz 3D cube 20 years ago, and some still don't understand the ricing factor.
Then it's not for you, or you can't vision how 5 minutes of learning can save you hours of future time.
Having to know like 5 keybinds and no taskbar is absolutely the point and it's a beautiful concept of how to use your computer. And it works, if you are open to relearning just a bit.
I for one hold out for them releasing an optimized XFCE variant - don't by any means dislike keyboard driven software but I like it as an extension of a regular functional UI experience not as a "argh the windows are stuck in xyz pattern until I re-remember xyz combo"-experience: the UI surface is not the speed limit in my optics, rather it is the apps I use or (increasingly due to local AI) the computational hardware limits of my machine.
> I saw a couple video demos recently, and was horrified that it seemed one had to memorize a dozen key binding shortcuts to really use it.
Whoa! You have to _learn_ something to use it well? Yikes. Not for me.
conventions are a good things so you can minimise relearning.
Learn emacs once and use ratpoison, readline and rlwrap everywhere.