Frequently the desktop app and the safari extension won't be in sync and missing a recently added password, or doesn't show up on my other devices hours later. I still have no idea how the extension vs desktop app actually work together, or if they do at all.
Sometimes 1password (safari extension) is "locked" - but the desktop app isn't locked? and No amount of clicking the little 1password icon, that's supposed to unlock it does anything. Just a completely no-op button. Quitting safari _and_ the desktop app seems to be what's required to fix it.
I've been thinking about just moving back to native macOS keychain, but I haven't bothered to check on linux+windows support.
I agree that it is almost suspicious how quickly it has risen to prominence. There has been a surge of hugely popular amorphous open source projects by single or few maintainers, often created very recently. In my experience, most of the users of Omarchy are inexperienced with Linux, and use it because it doesn't require them to form their own opinions and workflows, which can be both positive and negative.
Omarchy was my first entry back into desktop Linux since the early 2000s, when I ran enlightenment. The promises of Omarchy are big, and the idea of somebody trying all the tons of available bits of desktop Linux and assembling their favorites is very compelling!
I've since moved to KDE Plasma on that initial Omarchy install, but kept some other parts like the Bash completion system. I would love to get back to having single key sequences to bring up, say, a Claude window, but not enough to set it up in Plasma. If somebody else did it for me though... that's the appeal of Omarchy.
But yeah, I think the vast majority of people using it are first timers to Linux in general. It attracts these people because it doesn’t ask too much of them. I don’t know why anybody would complain about growing the ecosystem. More people using Linux is always a good thing for the community.
If so then that’s your answer. Why isn’t this obvious?
Giving someone a box of parts vs an assembled product is a huge difference. Yes there are some who prefer the box of parts, but they’re an extreme minority.
Linux should be hard and shitty and it should break all the time! What is this newfound obsession with distros that just works and have some great setups and defaults.
Where do we end up if you can just close your laptop lid or copy paste with the same key or or or if even… gasp… the theme is automatically applied across all apps?
DHH? More like literal devil.
No sir! Let me write a blogpost post haste!
Yeah! What a mystery. What could make people install omarchy or pop os over debian, arch or gentoo?
What could possibly be the reason
There aren’t really any rules to what to find this or not. Just because something is more opinionated than other solutions doesn’t mean it’s invalid.
In fact, I would say that that’s the primary reason people gravitate towards Omarchy. Many developers coming from the competing operating systems want stuff that just works out of the box, including proprietary software!
If you don’t like it, just ignore it and move on. I thought we were past this “I dislike this thing on the internet therefore everyone who likes it is wrong” phase of the internet. It’s also discourse like this that specifically discourages people from trying Linux.
And I know Omarchy is not the only one out there doing something similar, and that there is a spectrum. It is not a problem. The problem is not the existence of the spectrum, the problem is that at some point, we should just call a cat a cat instead of arguing "well, being a cat is a spectrum, so every year we can call a new thing in the adjacent spectrum a cat and pretend it has all the quality one would expect from a cat".
The more interesting question is, do people actually want a hyper-opinionated Linux install? Based on the reactions to Omarchy that I've seen, the answer is obviously yes. Broadly, people seem ok with just not using some of the suggested software if the defaults get them most of the way there.
More generally, I would say that configuring one's own Linux installation is not in itself virtuous. It used to be a way to identify people who were "committed" to using it via gatekeeping. The OP says that Omarchy is just DHH "cashing in" on new inexperienced Linux users, but as long as we don't value customizing one's own installation just for the sake of customization (I certainly don't anymore!), why is this a problem?
Summarizes my feeling about this article and the author.
And yes I did actually end up going thru archinstaller first as the other route failed, but turned out it was archinstall failing to start with, failing to clear the existing Chrome OS partitions even after selecting the disk (full disk!) properly. I managed to install it on a N23 Chromebook I got for 30€, with just a 32GB SSD on it. Now I am on the edge of making my work laptop dual boot it, so I can run some heavier software on it. Haven't used as much Desktop Linux in the previous 15 years as I have the previous month.
It's supposed to be opinionated to start with. It absolutely is better that way. Probably one of the easiest to mod too, changed my battery indicator to show current wattage with an one-line change.
As it says - Chef's choice. I want my food to be edible to start with when I'm hungry.
This is not a judgement of using a prepared meal box.
DHH tends to build things for himself first, then share it with the world (sometimes free, sometimes paid) to see if others find value in it too.
Most of those things never become broadly adopted, which is clear from the long list of products 37signals has shut down over the years: Breeze, Writeboard, Backpack, Sortfolio, and others.
But every once in a while, there’s a huge success … like Rails, Basecamp, Hey, and apparently now Omarchy.
I honestly don’t think it’s much more complicated than that. He enjoys building things he personally wants. And when he sees others getting joy from what he built, he gets excited and doubles down.
Things like Omarchy are a boon to Linux because they bring in people that otherwise wouldn't have given it any thought. It's demonstrating what is possible as a little gateway drug. Things like SteamOS are much better at this, but more is better. It's not doing any harm.
It feels very strange (and wrong) to me: if there is difficulties in installing something, try to help people instead of packaging the solution with other things that are not related. It feels a bit like if uv was mainly providing their "uvOS" to solve the difficulties of dealing with python packages.
So the purpose of Omarchy was to get devices quickly set up with some opinionated defaults.
The out of box experience with Omarchy is highly functional, aesthetically pleasing and challenges users to lean more on keyboard shortcuts than they’d typically be used to. That’s clever because once you’re whizzing around with these shortcuts you feel accomplished, productive, and that generates loyalty towards the distro.
None of this is a bad thing, anything that makes Linux more accessible and interesting is good. Bucking trends that were making Linux harder to adopt or less culturally relevant is good too.
Here’s a fact - Omarchy opened up Arch to a whole crowd of people that would have never tried Arch given its notorious difficulty to the uninitiated.
awesan•39m ago
tptacek•34m ago
clouedoc•33m ago
peesem•32m ago
sodapopcan•14m ago
Was helpful to me. I now know not waste my time.
CooCooCaCha•32m ago
A thing can’t even be in the same category as the things I like so I have to bend over backwards to justify that it’s not actually the same type of thing.
jjtheblunt•25m ago
the poster seems to have skipped over the point that "Omarchy" is just the default configuration of Arch for 37signals internal use, and enthusiasm over it working well caught on, so it's shared as open source.
CachyOS is another set of UI configurations of Arch and is also just handy.
disclaimer: i use both and they work well.
epistasis•20m ago
The idea of enabling proprietary software in the default install is apparently verboten to some, and getting that viewpoint out there helps people understand why Linux on the desktop is where it is.
sodapopcan•15m ago
It's a blog post, a medium where people can self-publish their writing for no other purpose than expressing themselves. These things have been around for decades at this point.
arjie•10m ago
p-o•10m ago
There are plenty of strange things that gets publish every day, I don't see why you get hung up on this post.