Concerning Omarchy and Distro Philosophy

There has been quite a bit of controversy surrounding DHH’s Omarchy. If you haven’t heard of it, Omarchy is a pre-configured Arch Linux setup/distro using Hyprland. It’s sleek, beautiful, and comes with all the bells and whistles. The big driving factor for building this is DHH himself moved from MacOS to Linux and spent a lot of time configuring his setup, and thought it would be useful for others who want to make the switch. Personally I think it’s an admirable goal to build something that actually helps people move towards tech they otherwise would avoid. Linux is incredibly useful and powerful, especially for programmers. Omarchy has done so well that there is a massive community behind it and DHH’s company now uses it as the default for employees.

Naturally as a serial tinkerer, I had to try it. I actually went down the Arch + Hyprland path a couple of years ago on a Thinkpad T480 (I know, pumpkin spice latte levels of basic). It was a great learning experience and I enjoyed all the ricing. Omarchy gave me the excuse to buy a BeeLink SER8 as a home server that I’ve wanted for a while now. I ran the install script (before there was an image) and quickly started playing around with Omarchy. Overall it was pretty solid. I think at the time I used the install that left out a lot of the gui apps that I didn’t want. After a while, I started finding pieces I wanted to customize, and that’s where things got a bit hairy. Even today the process of trying to customize doesn’t seem that simple, and that’s where I want to dig in particularly.

Distros are built to give you a starting point. Arch on its own is a Linux distro. While it does take a lot more configuration, it still puts some of the most crucial pieces together for you. Another distro like Manjaro uses Arch but adds a desktop environment and all the basic setup people expect in a desktop computer experience. Depending on how much you want to customize your experience will greatly influence what distro you pick; the more you want to customize, the harder it will be to use an opinionated distro.

Neovim is very similar. You can either start a config from scratch or you can use a distro like LazyVim. It’s generally good to start with LazyVim and see what it’s like, however it’s also very opinionated. Over time the chances are high that you will find your own preferences and want to configure it differently. When that time comes, you’ll find customizing a Neovim distro is a horrible experience. It also generally ends up in a bloated complicated mess. Once you take the time to truly understand how to configure it, the manual from scratch approach is a breath of fresh air. It’s completely tailored to you and your needs, not someone else’s.

For some people distros are the end game; you use it, you’re happy. For others, the distro is just the gateway to a wholly different setup. It really does depend on the context, ie Arch Vanilla vs Arch Manjaro, but the whole reason so many people use Linux is to customize it. How far that customization goes depends on the person, but I generally find there is a balance of what is easier to customize and what is not. In my personal experience, Omarchy was not easy to customize. I ended up doing a fresh installation of Arch and slowly added piece by piece as the need arose, including a window manager. The result is an incredibly lean configuration that fits my personal needs, and that is what is most important to me.

By all means if you enjoy Omarchy, use it! It’s a damn cool distro to play with. However, if something doesn’t feel right, or you want to change more than seems possible, consider building your setup from scratch. It will be bumpy. You will get stuck. However the knowledge you gain and the tailored experience will be well worth the journey. Call distros for what they are, and don’t treat them as the end-all-be-all of desktop experiences.