To me, personally, the value of Omarchy is more like a pre-riced developer environment, nothing else, and I am totally cool with that. Some people say it's not a distro, but then again, that would mean that kubuntu is also not a distro... btw, I work with fedora, so take my posture on this with a pinch of salt.
I’m very impressed with how easy Omarchy is to get going for someone who knows enough about Linux and computers to take over the rudder and steer the ship to wherever they are going. Proprietary tools like 1Password and Spotify are in place. It works wonderful in a Mac centric SaaS organisation. Actively developed and refined. It would be great to have a traditional taskbar oriented distro like this. But in the meantime I can run this and forget about my OS for a while.
You are absolutely right and thank you for your level headed response! Omarchy genuinely provides value to our organization. It isn't just a Linux distribution---it is a political statement!
It's a top to bottom approach. Get the UI/UX working, make incredible marketing, sort out the technical foundation later. Excellent executed from a strategic point of view. Let's see if Arch is the best foundation for such a project. I don't know.
Personally, I hope, Debian isn't shutting the door on LLM-supported coding to improve their legacy tooling. I believe we have a very short window to use almost-free LLM fixing internal debt and outstanding issues with our FOSS setup.
Over the past 30 years I have witnessed multiple approaches to try and capture the normies. Ubuntu was the first one to try and market a "just works" approach, introducing a graphical package manager that looked like the play store or apple store; Mint was trying to clone the Windows or MacOS appearance. Then there was the Compiz frenzy, that was selling graphical features as eye candies. They all had their reason to exist.
Omarchy, on the other hand, is this close to be a scam: marketed as "the AI distro" just because it has a keyboard shortcut to launch claude-code or codex basically. "opinionated" because it ships with a default desktop manager and a default text editor, just like any other freaking distro out there. Not to mention the fact that it's financed by people who have nothing to do with FOSS.
I'm a fan of omakase computing but in an "install stock fedora or debian" sense. I find the maintainers have great taste. I'm not sure any more ink needs to be spilt than that.
I just installed Omarchy yesterday wanting to try it out. Mainly dealing with not having a mouse for my second computer but maybe you gotta give it a few days as your main machine.
But I prefer the sub pixel font rendering in macOS to the one in Linux. I always have. And that hasn’t changed with Omarchy.
The theo video about the file systems being way faster is what got me to consider it. Working with node modules folders a lot, and occasionally working with docker (orbstack is great) I’m curious about considering this as my dev machine.
We’ll see how it goes but I wasn’t blown away the way the videos say. At least not yet.
Listened to DHH on The Primeagen’s The Standup podcast - talking about how Macs are complete trash and can’t be used “for agents”. Like a dumb marketing droid parroting some inane talking points his VP has come up with to sound “AI relevant”.
I watched the same and I didn’t hear any marketing speak. He’s excited about his ideas, puts in the work and genuinely trying to make Linux accessible.
About calling Mac trash, I think he should have added “for engineers”. I like/use macOS and Omarchy both and they are meant for different audiences.
> talking about how Macs are complete trash and can’t be used “for agents”.
DHH has always been a contrarian who speaks highly confidently in extremes. He does well in topics where he can show up and act like a beacon of sane and helpful takes in a world where everyone other than him is wrong.
Some times he’ll find a clear wedge topic and hook his message to that, appealing to people on one side of the wedge.
At other times he’ll manufacture some strawman arguments and present them as indisputable facts that he’s revealing to you, dear listener, as a trusted guide who has seen the light.
His sudden flip to being anti-Mac after years of being pro-Mac follows the pattern. He had some small real grievance at some point and saw an opportunity to become known for Omarchy, so he flipped to extreme takes like “Macs are complete trash” and saying weird things like how they can’t be used for agents.
In that podcast DHH was talking about how in Omarchy you can change the system settings, monitor setup, themes, window chrome, installed programs, window manager config, keyboard shortcuts, etc. using agents. This is facilitated by Omarchy because all that stuff is dictated by text files that agents can directly interface with.
Whatever the merits of MacOS, and there are many, it is not the paradigm there that all your system settings and config are stored in text files. That's what he was talking about.
Do you have a non-video, non-X summary of what he’s talking about?
I’m not watching a 31 minute video on X to figure out what this is about. Theo is another influencer who thrives on being contrarian, embellishing negative claims about things he’s not pumping right now, and trying to get everyone to ignore negative things about what he is pumping. I would not trust his judgment on topics like this without some third party benchmarks and deeper claims because the first priority of influencers in this category is to be contrarian and ride divisive topics. Being factually correct is secondary.
Ah, the irony of posting "Your Mac is slowing you down" on the bloated JS hellsite that is X. That page took 10s to appear on my machine (before even thinking of rendering the video) whereas the HN front page is <1s.
"it is not the paradigm there that all your system settings and config are stored in text files."
This is inherently untrue. A .plist in XML is nothing but text. It might be formatted text, but it is still text nonetheless, like almost every other configuration file in existence.
In all fairness that would be a really weird bookshelf icon with "books" with no shelves and the few books it has are floating somehow in the top left corner of it. I bet it's more of a "sidebar menu" icon.
Though yes, it would be much better a hamburger icon - or just having that sidebar menu open as default.
I do this with Claude. I don't add skills files, since I figure if they worked that well then Anthropic would just put it in Claude code.
I just open Claude in a new directory (no agents.md file or claude.md file), tell it what I'd like it to build, and figure that Anthropic would give it any tooling it needs. If some skill etc worked so great, it would just be part of Claude Code.
(However, I do think it writes some memories based on things that worked well or poorly before - it does really well at projects now, I think it does much better than a stock installation, so I think it does make use of memory files. I see its notes when it writes certain lessons to memory.)
DHH had been anti AI first. Then he got a board seat at Shopify. Shopify needs to maintain the AI narrative to maintain the illusion of easy shop creation.
Now DHH pushes AI in a simple Linux distribution, one of millions of others. And the money flows in.
Why would DHH want to keep foreigners out if he wants to make everyone unemployed? The same applies to Musk. It is interesting that these two figures support DEI when it comes to unemployment: Everyone but snowboarders (Lütke) and "race car drivers" (DHH) should be unemployed regardless of skin color! True equality!
Almost everyone was anti AI first until they a) found out about agents b) found out about how to deal with halluciation and context management c) best practices in tests, prompts, skills.
> classic Linux culture. Where there's been a strong belief that everyone should know everything about all of their tools, and that they should preferably configure every last one from them from scratch.
Huh, what Linux culture is this Ruby-on-Rails fanboi talking about? Arch Linux I guess comes closest to it, but still isn't "everyone has to know everything about all tools", but I guess if you're launching some closed source platform or whatever the author is up to, you probably want it to sound like Linux forces you to know everything about everything, so you can sell your service to the people who don't want that. Good luck I guess.
This reads as a blogpost from someone who is mad at Linux for some reason, yet cannot fully describe why?
Yeah... KDE, GNOME and soon COSMIC will be fine for most people. Ricing IS fun but this is more similar to taking a kitted out car that used to belong to your cousin to the car meet, part of the culture is stumbling around forums and asking around. There's been stuff in the past like Regolith that did similar things but now a semi-famous person is spearheading this so everybody wooos and ahhhs.
None of them, at least the one's I've encountered in my 20 something years, have had the idea of "everyone has to know everything about all tools", although they've certainly been annoying in other ways.
Lol, he should try signing his post, literally had no idea! Thought it was weird to fanboi so much over someone else's framework, but now it totally makes sense, DHH has a tendency to toot his own horn a lot.
I disagree. Technology is inherently political, and it’s valuable and important to get informed and reminded about the many horrible people that are directly or indirectly tied to any mentioned organizations and projects.
Honestly who cares. Liking and using an open source project has nothing to do with supporting the creators political beliefs. Separate the art from the artist and enjoy things. This miserable attitude is holding us all back from being better.
Many people care and should care. Of course if a piece of software (or any project/tool, really) gets a lot of usage, it’ll indirectly make its creators more powerful. I wouldn’t want to make a person more powerful if they support horrible causes (like in DHH’s case), especially if there are many alternative routes to choose from that are less questionable.
You can separate the art from the artist in the sense that you can say "ok, this is a cool tech", but by using it, you are still supporting the nazi artist.
Stock Fedora or nearly all the other Linux distributions are a thousand times more stable and secure than Omarachy is.
https://xn--gckvb8fzb.com/a-word-on-omarchy/
Well I guess that's the problem with
> getting something beautifully curated and integrated from someone they trust to make competent, tasteful decisions
To me, personally, the value of Omarchy is more like a pre-riced developer environment, nothing else, and I am totally cool with that. Some people say it's not a distro, but then again, that would mean that kubuntu is also not a distro... btw, I work with fedora, so take my posture on this with a pinch of salt.
I’m very impressed with how easy Omarchy is to get going for someone who knows enough about Linux and computers to take over the rudder and steer the ship to wherever they are going. Proprietary tools like 1Password and Spotify are in place. It works wonderful in a Mac centric SaaS organisation. Actively developed and refined. It would be great to have a traditional taskbar oriented distro like this. But in the meantime I can run this and forget about my OS for a while.
You are absolutely right and thank you for your level headed response! Omarchy genuinely provides value to our organization. It isn't just a Linux distribution---it is a political statement!
What even is this comment?
I think it might just be DHH creating a new account (49 minutes old) to glaze Omarchy.
This is not a distro. It's a masterpiece in trolling.
It's a top to bottom approach. Get the UI/UX working, make incredible marketing, sort out the technical foundation later. Excellent executed from a strategic point of view. Let's see if Arch is the best foundation for such a project. I don't know.
Personally, I hope, Debian isn't shutting the door on LLM-supported coding to improve their legacy tooling. I believe we have a very short window to use almost-free LLM fixing internal debt and outstanding issues with our FOSS setup.
Over the past 30 years I have witnessed multiple approaches to try and capture the normies. Ubuntu was the first one to try and market a "just works" approach, introducing a graphical package manager that looked like the play store or apple store; Mint was trying to clone the Windows or MacOS appearance. Then there was the Compiz frenzy, that was selling graphical features as eye candies. They all had their reason to exist.
Omarchy, on the other hand, is this close to be a scam: marketed as "the AI distro" just because it has a keyboard shortcut to launch claude-code or codex basically. "opinionated" because it ships with a default desktop manager and a default text editor, just like any other freaking distro out there. Not to mention the fact that it's financed by people who have nothing to do with FOSS.
I'm a fan of omakase computing but in an "install stock fedora or debian" sense. I find the maintainers have great taste. I'm not sure any more ink needs to be spilt than that.
I just installed Omarchy yesterday wanting to try it out. Mainly dealing with not having a mouse for my second computer but maybe you gotta give it a few days as your main machine.
But I prefer the sub pixel font rendering in macOS to the one in Linux. I always have. And that hasn’t changed with Omarchy.
The theo video about the file systems being way faster is what got me to consider it. Working with node modules folders a lot, and occasionally working with docker (orbstack is great) I’m curious about considering this as my dev machine.
We’ll see how it goes but I wasn’t blown away the way the videos say. At least not yet.
Listened to DHH on The Primeagen’s The Standup podcast - talking about how Macs are complete trash and can’t be used “for agents”. Like a dumb marketing droid parroting some inane talking points his VP has come up with to sound “AI relevant”.
I watched the same and I didn’t hear any marketing speak. He’s excited about his ideas, puts in the work and genuinely trying to make Linux accessible.
About calling Mac trash, I think he should have added “for engineers”. I like/use macOS and Omarchy both and they are meant for different audiences.
> talking about how Macs are complete trash and can’t be used “for agents”.
DHH has always been a contrarian who speaks highly confidently in extremes. He does well in topics where he can show up and act like a beacon of sane and helpful takes in a world where everyone other than him is wrong.
Some times he’ll find a clear wedge topic and hook his message to that, appealing to people on one side of the wedge.
At other times he’ll manufacture some strawman arguments and present them as indisputable facts that he’s revealing to you, dear listener, as a trusted guide who has seen the light.
His sudden flip to being anti-Mac after years of being pro-Mac follows the pattern. He had some small real grievance at some point and saw an opportunity to become known for Omarchy, so he flipped to extreme takes like “Macs are complete trash” and saying weird things like how they can’t be used for agents.
In that podcast DHH was talking about how in Omarchy you can change the system settings, monitor setup, themes, window chrome, installed programs, window manager config, keyboard shortcuts, etc. using agents. This is facilitated by Omarchy because all that stuff is dictated by text files that agents can directly interface with.
Whatever the merits of MacOS, and there are many, it is not the paradigm there that all your system settings and config are stored in text files. That's what he was talking about.
You can use the ‘defaults’ CLI to manage settings files for the OS and applications.
For example: https://macos-defaults.com/
Other than being a proprietary OS that's getting more locked down every year, its disk performance is trash.
https://x.com/theo/status/2090528543746965991
Do you have a non-video, non-X summary of what he’s talking about?
I’m not watching a 31 minute video on X to figure out what this is about. Theo is another influencer who thrives on being contrarian, embellishing negative claims about things he’s not pumping right now, and trying to get everyone to ignore negative things about what he is pumping. I would not trust his judgment on topics like this without some third party benchmarks and deeper claims because the first priority of influencers in this category is to be contrarian and ride divisive topics. Being factually correct is secondary.
Ah, the irony of posting "Your Mac is slowing you down" on the bloated JS hellsite that is X. That page took 10s to appear on my machine (before even thinking of rendering the video) whereas the HN front page is <1s.
> Whatever the merits of MacOS, and there are many, it is not the paradigm there that all your system settings and config are stored in text files.
Maybe not, but the agent can call `defaults write` too, no?
"it is not the paradigm there that all your system settings and config are stored in text files."
This is inherently untrue. A .plist in XML is nothing but text. It might be formatted text, but it is still text nonetheless, like almost every other configuration file in existence.
I have no idea how to navigate to the homepage of this website
- https://learn.omacom.io/
(It is not very discoverable? The "bookshelf-like" icon on top ...)
Please use standard hamburger menu icon or equivalent. The bookshelf icon does not represent a menu or a navigation indication.
In all fairness that would be a really weird bookshelf icon with "books" with no shelves and the few books it has are floating somehow in the top left corner of it. I bet it's more of a "sidebar menu" icon.
Though yes, it would be much better a hamburger icon - or just having that sidebar menu open as default.
This website sucks so bad, holy cow
I do this with Claude. I don't add skills files, since I figure if they worked that well then Anthropic would just put it in Claude code.
I just open Claude in a new directory (no agents.md file or claude.md file), tell it what I'd like it to build, and figure that Anthropic would give it any tooling it needs. If some skill etc worked so great, it would just be part of Claude Code.
(However, I do think it writes some memories based on things that worked well or poorly before - it does really well at projects now, I think it does much better than a stock installation, so I think it does make use of memory files. I see its notes when it writes certain lessons to memory.)
DHH had been anti AI first. Then he got a board seat at Shopify. Shopify needs to maintain the AI narrative to maintain the illusion of easy shop creation.
Now DHH pushes AI in a simple Linux distribution, one of millions of others. And the money flows in.
Why would DHH want to keep foreigners out if he wants to make everyone unemployed? The same applies to Musk. It is interesting that these two figures support DEI when it comes to unemployment: Everyone but snowboarders (Lütke) and "race car drivers" (DHH) should be unemployed regardless of skin color! True equality!
Almost everyone was anti AI first until they a) found out about agents b) found out about how to deal with halluciation and context management c) best practices in tests, prompts, skills.
Last year I wrote a gist to collect tweets to record the approximate date when known industry people made the change https://gist.github.com/rmoriz/133d6aaf759ee9341bea0029f03bd...
Something, something [1].
[1] https://youtu.be/goh2x_G0ct4?is=yb-7gQhRCMelk-BH
> classic Linux culture. Where there's been a strong belief that everyone should know everything about all of their tools, and that they should preferably configure every last one from them from scratch.
Huh, what Linux culture is this Ruby-on-Rails fanboi talking about? Arch Linux I guess comes closest to it, but still isn't "everyone has to know everything about all tools", but I guess if you're launching some closed source platform or whatever the author is up to, you probably want it to sound like Linux forces you to know everything about everything, so you can sell your service to the people who don't want that. Good luck I guess.
This reads as a blogpost from someone who is mad at Linux for some reason, yet cannot fully describe why?
Yeah... KDE, GNOME and soon COSMIC will be fine for most people. Ricing IS fun but this is more similar to taking a kitted out car that used to belong to your cousin to the car meet, part of the culture is stumbling around forums and asking around. There's been stuff in the past like Regolith that did similar things but now a semi-famous person is spearheading this so everybody wooos and ahhhs.
Yes, I am salty.
He's talking about Linux neckbeards and gatekeepers, not, say, cultural idiosyncrasies of any given distro.
None of them, at least the one's I've encountered in my 20 something years, have had the idea of "everyone has to know everything about all tools", although they've certainly been annoying in other ways.
>> classic Linux culture. Where there's been a strong belief that everyone should know everything about all of their tools,
That’s weird, imagine saying to mechanics, artists,… to not learn all about their tools.
"Huh, what Linux culture is this Ruby-on-Rails fanboi talking about?"
Probably Gentoo, since that's where the truly competent Linux users that do understand their tools tend to migrate.
> Ruby-on-Rails fanboi
Lol. The author is the creator of Rails
Lol, he should try signing his post, literally had no idea! Thought it was weird to fanboi so much over someone else's framework, but now it totally makes sense, DHH has a tendency to toot his own horn a lot.
Omarchy is AI slop from an outspoken racist. Use a real distro.
DHH means this is, for me, a hard pass.
It is 2026 and you can still sell the old "my opinionated Linux distribution" to cult members and investors. DHH is laughing all the way to the bank.
[flagged]
This kind of trite partisan comment does not belong on HN imo.
I disagree. Technology is inherently political, and it’s valuable and important to get informed and reminded about the many horrible people that are directly or indirectly tied to any mentioned organizations and projects.
Sadly, HN has increasingly become an echo chamber for 90% of the same kinds of partisan politics.
[dead]
That's a good one, got a laugh out of me!
I skimmed their Wikipedia page and I can't figure out how they relate to this post. What's the connection?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Heinemeier_Hansson#Polit... would be the section on Wikipedia to find
Removing someone from the Ruby project for a political belief is oh so Ruby. Opinionated language for highly opinionated people
Honestly who cares. Liking and using an open source project has nothing to do with supporting the creators political beliefs. Separate the art from the artist and enjoy things. This miserable attitude is holding us all back from being better.
Many people care and should care. Of course if a piece of software (or any project/tool, really) gets a lot of usage, it’ll indirectly make its creators more powerful. I wouldn’t want to make a person more powerful if they support horrible causes (like in DHH’s case), especially if there are many alternative routes to choose from that are less questionable.
You can separate the art from the artist in the sense that you can say "ok, this is a cool tech", but by using it, you are still supporting the nazi artist.
You should spend less time seething over stuff you disagree with, and more time enjoying beautiful things in life...
Like Omakase.
I love Omakase, but not because I don’t know what I want.
It is because I want to experience an artist’s work.