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.
I have seen Omarchy to rapidly accept PRs that make it available and fully functional on older hardware. I think this is a very exciting progress even when I'm not into tiling DEs.
I heard about omarchy a while ago but didn't think it was this big !
I am proudly a Bazzite user, and honestly I think for the average end user an immutable atomic distro is better, but more money to the Linux desktop is always a win !
It's still being hashed out (publicly! On X, Discord, and GH issues), but I imagine it will have an opinionated focus on modern container, CI, and deployment options (eg. Kamal)
I imagine things like central Auth directory (eg. LDAP), central service for installer / image syncing, device managements, and other enterprise features.
> 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.
Omarchy is built on Arch and there is a flavor of Asahi for Arch as well, so there's no reason it couldn't support the same hardware that Asahi does, just that someone needs to do the work.
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.
If you're concerned about Apple's relationship to the Trump administration, it seems a bit odd not to mention DHH has much more discriminatory views and is not afraid to voice them loudly: https://blogs.gnome.org/alatiera/2025/11/06/dhh-and-omarchy-...
I tried Omarchy 10 months ago. I liked how easy it all was, like the PWAs installed, etc...
But I was completely lost with, and even offended by, how the tiling window manager worked. Windows were just moving around all over the place, changing sizes etc... It was by far the worst computing experience that I've had in a very long time. And it was particularly awful on a small laptop screen where you REALLY need to make the most of how your windows are arranged.
After a couple days, I installed Pop!_OS and, despite its new COSMIC desktop having tiling-like features, I've been happy with its normal Windows-like UI, where I can just use windows/super key + arrow keys to move and resize windows to the side or corner of the screen, and they stay there.
Yet, so many people are raving about tiling window managers. Surely it cant be as awful of an experience as I had. What was I doing wrong? Is there some configuration that I wasn't using in order to set preferences for applications or profiles or something?
I think tiling makes much less sense on a laptop and more sense when you use a large display.
I had a similar experience initially. I disliked many of the defaults. But it's quite easy to use an agent to customize everything to your liking. And I haven't really run into a situation where I couldn't accomplish what I wanted.
I'm still deciding how I feel about hyprland. I use a unique hyperkey shortcut to focus each app and I usually want that app (chrome, ghostty, etc) to take up the entire screen rather than caring about having tiled splits in a workspace, so I'm generally putting each app to its own workspace. I'm sure there's more to learn about hyprland and I can imagine it being superior to what I'm used to (macOS with some hammerspoon binds for window management/layouts).
Nothing. Tiling managers just have a bit of a steep learning curve. That said, I'd argue they're better about using space on small screens (no title bar, everything tiled efficiently, etc).
The Omarchy Manual does a good job of covering it, but again, there's a learning curve. I was a late adopter to tiling, but now I can't do without it. I even use macOS and Windows tiled.
Agreed. I might be showing my age, but I remember the days of LightStep and associated window managers that did the same thing. This looks more like a highly connected techie raising a slush money fund of $8 million to put out his opinionated re-skin of Ubuntu and window manager settings file. The "year of the linux desktop" has nothing to do with some UI preferences but it probably sold well in whatever room he was in.
It must be nice to enter the blowhard stage of life where you can share your bash profile at a cocktail party in SF and go around the table collecting $1 million checks from all your yuppie friends.
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.
which laptop do you recommend, though? i type this on an m4 air that i wish i didnt buy; but i love its keyboard. i havea. t480s and do not like its keyboard...
I've been using ThinkPad E14 (AMD Ryzen 7, 16GB RAM, 512 SSD) - very happy with it. No problems with performance, battery, etc. at all. The new Dell XPS 13/14/16 is also good. Just get one with Windows and wipe it clean when installing Linux.
In fact, I was going to buy a $4K M4 MacBook before I saw Omarchy and decided to give it a try with a new $730 ThinkPad. Exceeded all my expectations. Omarchy literally saved me thousands of dollars.
The high end one that's recommended is the New Dell XPS 14 that essentially looks like Macbook Pro. Also Michael Dell is a notable supporter of Omarchy, so hopefully that means some good support and stability.
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.
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 does an "exclusive sponsorship" of Hyperland mean?[1] Sorry for the rhetorical question. I think I mean, why does a foundation need to be the exclusive sponsor of a project?
"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.
Cool! I used Larbs.xyz for a while. I love a good dotfiles repo.
I guess I think there's a lot more in Omarchy than a dotfiles repo, I was very impressed with the demo video. Even just creating the menu and updating system is non-trivial. Mirroring the entire distro through Cloudflare seems significant also. I've not seen those in another dotfiles project.
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?
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.
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.
It was not my intention to say that, I'm actually following it very closely and think Omarchy is a great way to get more people on Linux. A user friendly, pre-packaged and opinionated setup will convince more people than "Install Ubuntu and then learn how to administer Linux").
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.
In my opinion, you wouldnt. You might sooner pick up a distro like Arch (which is what Omarchy uses; it is not a distro in itself) if you want to imperatively manage everything, or NixOS with basic hyprland or Plasma or COSMIC config, etc., and then you can declaratively handle your dots and config.
Either of these routes would teach you more about Linux and give you the ability to build a simple desktop for your needs.
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).
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.
Google is telling me it doesn't support Nvidia drivers out of the box. That functionally defines it as a vanity project. Aside from the more surface level vanity.
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..
Love it. Installed Omarchy on a 30€ (yes) used Chromebook that is EOL. It fit the 32GB ssd and works surprisingly well. With a good keyboard and after getting used to everything being behind a keybind, I felt more in control with that PoS machine than I do on my battlestation.
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.
I have a really hard time getting excited by this. I'm a Hey customer, and it's one of my biggest regrets. DHH promises a lot, then gets sidetracked with killing DEI or spending years migrating off AWS (for all the supposed savings, I certainly haven't seen any) or bending over backwards to have a framework to avoid front end frameworks or whatever the hot new flavor of the month is. Meanwhile, my Android app email client performs terribly when I'm on LTE (!) and I'm strong armed into using a calendar app that I don't want or need, while obvious spam and phishing emails routinely doesn't get caught and the search feature is less than useless. If changing email addresses was less tedious, I'd have done it already. I'll never trust DHH with another of his company's products, let alone trust him with my computer's operating system.
I quit hey three years ago for the reason you listed and my hey.com email address forwards to my new address indefinitely. Don’t know if they changed that, but migrating away was pretty easy that way
I came to Omarchy from Arch. The value for me is that the whole keyboard-first environment comes assembled as one simple system instead of being a weekend of choosing and wiring together individual pieces. Omarchy is interesting because it treats the defaults themselves as the product.
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.
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
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 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.
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 by many folks like you and people who contributed to OSS in general.
And I am not just talking about Linux, but also all the things around Linux like KDE, Gnome,Hyprland, Niri, waybar open source applications which support Linux and are actually becoming/are some really great tools, the list is just endless.)
Thanks!
I think the whole of Linux, its philosophy and its implementations is one of the things which does give me hope. I might be romanticizing it a bit now but isn't it so hopeful what groups of people from all around the world unite on to actually build a better future. I wonder how vastly things could've been different without Open source. Although OSS is having some issues right now in terms of moderation and AI spam, I hope that this is just a bump on a smooth road. It's just so cool. It just makes me so happy when I really think about it. It also joys me that maybe this comment is read by someone who has helped in all of it.
It's not all roses and rainbows but when you see open source from its own completeness, zooming out. It's so nice on where we are and where from we have come and for that I must once again thank everyone involved. In short though, OSS in general is genuinely a gift to humanity.
(Gentle reminder to please donate to relevant organizations which really need the funding/money folks!, Open source would really help from these donations.)
However, if it helps to move Linux into the mainstream desktop choice. I'm all for it. Obviously I won't be using it any time soon - but if some rich dudes want to throw millions into marketing and getting Linux mainstream, seems like a net positive to me.
My gripe with omarchy is that it could be a script applied on top of bare arch or bare cachyos, i'm not sure why it needs to be a standalone distribution. Also try as I might - I cannot get down with hyprland. KDE for life! All this being said, positivity and investment in the Linux ecosystem is always a good thing.
I don't really get Omarchy, it seems like the hype is about "sensible defaults" when those defaults include a bunch of random paid software and links to websites DHH likes? (Plus all of 37signals offerings, of course.) I'm sure people use some of them, but I don't praise Android phones for preinstalling Facebook.
You don't have to get it. Omarchy isn't for everyone and that's okay. There's a ton of other options.
I've been using Omarchy since almost the beginning and it's been fantastic. I get a usable "power user" setup with very little tweaking. Omarchy is for me.
> when those defaults include a bunch of random paid software and links to websites DHH likes?
I'm not sure what you're talking about with "a bunch of random paid software". I've only seen a handful, they are sensible options, and they are not in your face. If you mean these apps[1] then most of Omarchy's user base uses most of them, and if they don't they're trivial to change. A huge portion of people use ChatGPT, Google apps, X, YouTube, WhatsApp, Discord and so on.
If you look in Omarchy issues, it's pretty clear it's not just DHH dictating decisions, it's been a community effort.
But again, it sounds like Omarchy probably isn't your cup of tea.
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.
I have seen Omarchy to rapidly accept PRs that make it available and fully functional on older hardware. I think this is a very exciting progress even when I'm not into tiling DEs.
I heard about omarchy a while ago but didn't think it was this big !
I am proudly a Bazzite user, and honestly I think for the average end user an immutable atomic distro is better, but more money to the Linux desktop is always a win !
What would be the point of Omarchy Server? I thought the desktop experience was the main selling point...
It's still being hashed out (publicly! On X, Discord, and GH issues), but I imagine it will have an opinionated focus on modern container, CI, and deployment options (eg. Kamal)
I imagine things like central Auth directory (eg. LDAP), central service for installer / image syncing, device managements, and other enterprise features.
> 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.
Omarchy is built on Arch and there is a flavor of Asahi for Arch as well, so there's no reason it couldn't support the same hardware that Asahi does, just that someone needs to do the work.
> 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.
If you're concerned about Apple's relationship to the Trump administration, it seems a bit odd not to mention DHH has much more discriminatory views and is not afraid to voice them loudly: https://blogs.gnome.org/alatiera/2025/11/06/dhh-and-omarchy-...
Oh wow. Wasn’t aware about DHHs opinions. Not thank I cared too much, but it kind of shows you why you should never look up to these people.
I tried Omarchy 10 months ago. I liked how easy it all was, like the PWAs installed, etc...
But I was completely lost with, and even offended by, how the tiling window manager worked. Windows were just moving around all over the place, changing sizes etc... It was by far the worst computing experience that I've had in a very long time. And it was particularly awful on a small laptop screen where you REALLY need to make the most of how your windows are arranged.
After a couple days, I installed Pop!_OS and, despite its new COSMIC desktop having tiling-like features, I've been happy with its normal Windows-like UI, where I can just use windows/super key + arrow keys to move and resize windows to the side or corner of the screen, and they stay there.
Yet, so many people are raving about tiling window managers. Surely it cant be as awful of an experience as I had. What was I doing wrong? Is there some configuration that I wasn't using in order to set preferences for applications or profiles or something?
I think tiling makes much less sense on a laptop and more sense when you use a large display.
I had a similar experience initially. I disliked many of the defaults. But it's quite easy to use an agent to customize everything to your liking. And I haven't really run into a situation where I couldn't accomplish what I wanted.
I'm still deciding how I feel about hyprland. I use a unique hyperkey shortcut to focus each app and I usually want that app (chrome, ghostty, etc) to take up the entire screen rather than caring about having tiled splits in a workspace, so I'm generally putting each app to its own workspace. I'm sure there's more to learn about hyprland and I can imagine it being superior to what I'm used to (macOS with some hammerspoon binds for window management/layouts).
> What was I doing wrong?
Nothing. Tiling managers just have a bit of a steep learning curve. That said, I'd argue they're better about using space on small screens (no title bar, everything tiled efficiently, etc).
The Omarchy Manual does a good job of covering it, but again, there's a learning curve. I was a late adopter to tiling, but now I can't do without it. I even use macOS and Windows tiled.
Agreed. I might be showing my age, but I remember the days of LightStep and associated window managers that did the same thing. This looks more like a highly connected techie raising a slush money fund of $8 million to put out his opinionated re-skin of Ubuntu and window manager settings file. The "year of the linux desktop" has nothing to do with some UI preferences but it probably sold well in whatever room he was in.
It must be nice to enter the blowhard stage of life where you can share your bash profile at a cocktail party in SF and go around the table collecting $1 million checks from all your yuppie friends.
He is also committing 1 million
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.
which laptop do you recommend, though? i type this on an m4 air that i wish i didnt buy; but i love its keyboard. i havea. t480s and do not like its keyboard...
I've been using ThinkPad E14 (AMD Ryzen 7, 16GB RAM, 512 SSD) - very happy with it. No problems with performance, battery, etc. at all. The new Dell XPS 13/14/16 is also good. Just get one with Windows and wipe it clean when installing Linux.
In fact, I was going to buy a $4K M4 MacBook before I saw Omarchy and decided to give it a try with a new $730 ThinkPad. Exceeded all my expectations. Omarchy literally saved me thousands of dollars.
The high end one that's recommended is the New Dell XPS 14 that essentially looks like Macbook Pro. Also Michael Dell is a notable supporter of Omarchy, so hopefully that means some good support and stability.
In this video, DHH mentions Dell XPS and the AMD 395 Plus (he holds up the actual laptop, which I think is a HP ZBook Ultra G1a)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zIdg-QBU6GU
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.
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 does an "exclusive sponsorship" of Hyperland mean?[1] Sorry for the rhetorical question. I think I mean, why does a foundation need to be the exclusive sponsor of a project?
[1]: https://omarchy.org/news/2026/08/omacom-foundation-to-be-exc...
"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.
Cool! I used Larbs.xyz for a while. I love a good dotfiles repo.
I guess I think there's a lot more in Omarchy than a dotfiles repo, I was very impressed with the demo video. Even just creating the menu and updating system is non-trivial. Mirroring the entire distro through Cloudflare seems significant also. I've not seen those in another dotfiles project.
> 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
That has big Dropbox comment energy (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224)
Omarchy is not a product though.
What's your definition of "product"?
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
Honestly same, BUT if those 8M go towards financing Linux desktop projects I'm all for it.
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.
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.
Your linked post has about nothing to do with omarchy today.
It was not my intention to say that, I'm actually following it very closely and think Omarchy is a great way to get more people on Linux. A user friendly, pre-packaged and opinionated setup will convince more people than "Install Ubuntu and then learn how to administer Linux").
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.
Wondering why start a new foundation? Why not support the existing Linux distro? :thinking:
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.
In my opinion, you wouldnt. You might sooner pick up a distro like Arch (which is what Omarchy uses; it is not a distro in itself) if you want to imperatively manage everything, or NixOS with basic hyprland or Plasma or COSMIC config, etc., and then you can declaratively handle your dots and config.
Either of these routes would teach you more about Linux and give you the ability to build a simple desktop for your needs.
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
It takes less than a minute to install
> 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 :)
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.
Google is telling me it doesn't support Nvidia drivers out of the box. That functionally defines it as a vanity project. Aside from the more surface level vanity.
the Nvidia gpus on both machines I have Omarchy on worked out of the box
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 have had so much fun with Omarchy! great news!
Love it. Installed Omarchy on a 30€ (yes) used Chromebook that is EOL. It fit the 32GB ssd and works surprisingly well. With a good keyboard and after getting used to everything being behind a keybind, I felt more in control with that PoS machine than I do on my battlestation.
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.
I have a really hard time getting excited by this. I'm a Hey customer, and it's one of my biggest regrets. DHH promises a lot, then gets sidetracked with killing DEI or spending years migrating off AWS (for all the supposed savings, I certainly haven't seen any) or bending over backwards to have a framework to avoid front end frameworks or whatever the hot new flavor of the month is. Meanwhile, my Android app email client performs terribly when I'm on LTE (!) and I'm strong armed into using a calendar app that I don't want or need, while obvious spam and phishing emails routinely doesn't get caught and the search feature is less than useless. If changing email addresses was less tedious, I'd have done it already. I'll never trust DHH with another of his company's products, let alone trust him with my computer's operating system.
I quit hey three years ago for the reason you listed and my hey.com email address forwards to my new address indefinitely. Don’t know if they changed that, but migrating away was pretty easy that way
I came to Omarchy from Arch. The value for me is that the whole keyboard-first environment comes assembled as one simple system instead of being a weekend of choosing and wiring together individual pieces. Omarchy is interesting because it treats the defaults themselves as the product.
This is absolutely incredible. And the caliber of the people funding it is incredible!
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.
Anything that gets hyprland on more devices is a beautiful thing in my book
This is dope. Love to see any efforts to get Linux on the desktop more ready to use.
Related: DHH is appearing live on Primeagen's twitch/yt/kick channel in 5 min (10am PST).
https://www.twitch.tv/theprimeagen
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!
Maybe I am just incredibly ignorant, but isn't this just another Linux distro?
It isnt a Linux distro, its dotfiles for Arch.
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
Omarchy is not a distro.
macOS is finally getting some serious competition with an open platform!
I hate the terminal.
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.
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 by many folks like you and people who contributed to OSS in general.
And I am not just talking about Linux, but also all the things around Linux like KDE, Gnome,Hyprland, Niri, waybar open source applications which support Linux and are actually becoming/are some really great tools, the list is just endless.)
Thanks!
I think the whole of Linux, its philosophy and its implementations is one of the things which does give me hope. I might be romanticizing it a bit now but isn't it so hopeful what groups of people from all around the world unite on to actually build a better future. I wonder how vastly things could've been different without Open source. Although OSS is having some issues right now in terms of moderation and AI spam, I hope that this is just a bump on a smooth road. It's just so cool. It just makes me so happy when I really think about it. It also joys me that maybe this comment is read by someone who has helped in all of it. It's not all roses and rainbows but when you see open source from its own completeness, zooming out. It's so nice on where we are and where from we have come and for that I must once again thank everyone involved. In short though, OSS in general is genuinely a gift to humanity.
(Gentle reminder to please donate to relevant organizations which really need the funding/money folks!, Open source would really help from these donations.)
I like and use CachyOS, but Omarchi runs on devices that can't even run CachyOS installer
It definitely seems to be.
However, if it helps to move Linux into the mainstream desktop choice. I'm all for it. Obviously I won't be using it any time soon - but if some rich dudes want to throw millions into marketing and getting Linux mainstream, seems like a net positive to me.
its a fantastic distro, i guess if its 'vibe coded' then vibe coding is capable of creating a high quality linux distro at this point
> 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).
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?
I would not personally sign onto (or put money) behind a DHH-run project because of his frankly abhorrent political views:
- https://po-ru.com/2026/07/29/it-doesnt-matter-whether-matz-i...
- https://blogs.gnome.org/alatiera/2025/11/06/dhh-and-omarchy-...
How do you feel that your boss funded this Linux distro?
Do you think it is time to leave Stripe?
My gripe with omarchy is that it could be a script applied on top of bare arch or bare cachyos, i'm not sure why it needs to be a standalone distribution. Also try as I might - I cannot get down with hyprland. KDE for life! All this being said, positivity and investment in the Linux ecosystem is always a good thing.
These guys are fighting the good fight.
I don't really get Omarchy, it seems like the hype is about "sensible defaults" when those defaults include a bunch of random paid software and links to websites DHH likes? (Plus all of 37signals offerings, of course.) I'm sure people use some of them, but I don't praise Android phones for preinstalling Facebook.
https://omarchy.org/manual/commercial-apps-services/ https://omarchy.org/manual/web-apps/
You don't have to get it. Omarchy isn't for everyone and that's okay. There's a ton of other options.
I've been using Omarchy since almost the beginning and it's been fantastic. I get a usable "power user" setup with very little tweaking. Omarchy is for me.
> when those defaults include a bunch of random paid software and links to websites DHH likes?
I'm not sure what you're talking about with "a bunch of random paid software". I've only seen a handful, they are sensible options, and they are not in your face. If you mean these apps[1] then most of Omarchy's user base uses most of them, and if they don't they're trivial to change. A huge portion of people use ChatGPT, Google apps, X, YouTube, WhatsApp, Discord and so on.
If you look in Omarchy issues, it's pretty clear it's not just DHH dictating decisions, it's been a community effort.
But again, it sounds like Omarchy probably isn't your cup of tea.
1. https://omarchy.org/manual/web-apps/