A Word on Omarchy

Summary

Pro tip: If you’ve arrived here via a link aggregator, feel free to skip ahead to the Summary for a conveniently digestible tl;dr that spares you all the tedious details, yet still provides enough ammunition to trash-talk this post in the comments of whatever platform you stumbled upon it.In the recent months, there has been a noticeable shift away from the Windows desktop, as well as from macOS, to Linux, driven by various frustrations, such as the Windows 11 Recall feature. While there have historically been more than enough Linux distributions to choose from, for each skill level and amount of desired pain, a recent Arch-based configuration has seemingly made strides across the Linux landscape: Omarchy.Google Search Trends showing an increase for OmarchyThis pre-configured Arch system is the brainchild of David Heinemeier Hansson, a Danish web developer and entrepreneur known as one of the co-founders of 37signals and for developing the Ruby on Rails framework.Omwhat?The name Omarchy appears to be a portmanteau of Arch, the Linux distribution that Hansson’s configuration is based upon, and お任せ, which translates to omakase and means to leave something up to someone else (任せる, makaseru, to entrust). When ordering omakase in a restaurant, you’re leaving it up to the chef to serve you whatever they think is best. Oma(kase) + (A)rch + y is supposedly where the name comes from.It’s important to note that, contrary to what Hansson says in the introduction video, Omarchy is not an actual Linux distribution. Instead, it’s an opinionated installation of Arch Linux that aims to make it easy to set up and run an Arch desktop, seemingly with as much TUI-hacker-esque aesthetic as possible. Omarchy comes bundled with Hyprland, a tiling window manager that focuses on customizability and graphic effects, but apparently not as much on code quality and safety.However, the sudden hype around Omarchy, which at this point has attracted attention and seemingly even funding from compani...