Omarchy,a Linux distro by DHH

A few days ago, I was talking to one of my friends about what distro I should hop next to. I have only used Debian and so far good'ol Debbie has been excellent at what it does. But seemingly there were newer features in Linux and I wanted to check them out too. And just a day after DHH, the guy who made Ruby on Rails and many other cool things, released Omarchy 2.0

First Impressions

After using it for maybe two days, I can tell you this Omarchy is a very, very different distro. Needless to say, it's my new daily driver.

First of all, it only asked me like 5 questions, and within about 10 minutes the whole OS was done, compared to the stress I had when installing Debian (I tore out my hair once because of the installation time) this was nothing.

So basically, Omarchy is a distro based on Arch Linux. It uses Hyprland as the window manager, which means it focuses on a more keyboard-heavy workflow, and I think it's basically built for developers who want to get work done. Yeah, I emphasized that part because a lot of devs who use Linux seemingly use it because it's really fun to customize, but in reality, it's a mighty efficient system that can also be customized to a dev's needs.

Special Stuff

Linux has some obscure distros which feel unneeded, which is not the case with Omarchy, it has a lot of new stuff dedicated for a dev.

• Prebuilt development environments (Go, Rust...)
• A simple central menu that handles everything
• TUIs with prebuilt themes, fonts, backgrounds, and very nice screensavers
• Pre-installed software that's usually needed by anyone (Alacritty, Discord, OBS Studio...)
• Many CLIs have been preinstalled (gh, zoxide...)
• Excellent choice of Keybindings
• Big company backing the distro maintenance (37Signals)

App finder in Omarchy

Installing latest Rust compiler using the menu UI

Batteries Included?

Now, most Linux ISO images are ~1GB or less, and Arch Linux is one of the lightest among them. But in the case of Omarchy, the image is ~7GB. The OS is full of software, not necessarily bloatware. I can vouch for this because Omarchy has set up many utilities that I need as a developer beforehand. It has mise, neovim (which I think should be the standard editor, BTW), and even stuff like Steam and Spotify (both essential for development).

But an OS like this is bound to have many, many issues, especially UI-related stuff, but so far the only issue I have is having those default GNOME windows for Bluetooth and some other things. I think they'll probably be replaced soon, but that's okay for now.

One of the main things that you'll notice about this OS is its very opinionated way of getting work done. It has its own menu, its own UIs, and even setting up developer environments for languages is done in a specific way. This begs the question... what if we don't like that? Like, what if I don't like using mise for installing NodeJS? Well, it's Arch Linux at its core, so you can use your terminal and get things done easily.

So far, those are the things that I have seen, and I can say that this is a beginner-friendly Linux distro. It's gonna have a bright future.