Thoughts on Omarchy: Slick Distro, Complicated Ethics

Summary

As a Linux user, I’m a relative normie. I actually like GNOME. I have sidestepped the vim vs. emacs debate by preferring nano, and I run Bazzite these days because, while sold as a gaming OS, it is also a stable distro that rarely gives me problems.But I keep an eye on what’s happening in the world of Linux.And honestly I’ve never seen anything quite like Omarchy, which sells itself as a “Beautiful, Modern & Opinionated Linux.” Developed by 37signals co-founder and Ruby on Rails creator David Heinemeier Hansson (a.k.a. dhh), it’s pre-loaded with the kind of software that many newish Linux users transitioning from, say, MacOS, tend to grab for themselves.Chromium? Check. 1Password? You got it. An office suite? Of course. Signal? ChatGPT? Not exactly the default apps you’d expect in a Linux distro. In one sense, you’re getting a single dude’s Linux distro. But in another, you’re buying into that guy’s opinions of what an operating system should be.I was willing to put the damn thing on bare metal just to understand why it was worthy of so much hype. But then I realized that the opinions started all the way from the beginning of the download process. I’m currently tethered on a smartphone with relatively limited Wi-Fi, which slowed down the ISO download process significantly. The reason? Well, dhh considers torrents outdated (I’m not kidding, check the tweet), so it’s only officially being offered as a single download from a Cloudflare server. Which sounds cool until you’re on a weak-ass connection in constant danger of dropping halfway through the download.Tethering was too slow, so I eventually downloaded the thing on my phone and copied it over to my machine, at which point I was met with another show-stopper. I was willing to give this thing half a terabyte of breathing room, except when I launched the installer, it insisted on deleting my entire drive. I have multiple SSDs in my laptop, and the only thing on that drive was a copy of Windows I only run when I have ...