The main thing keeping me from trying out Omarchy is the pain of setting up multiple displays. I haven't tried Hyprland, but whenever I've tried a non-mainstream desktop/wm in Linux that was the worst, especially if your setup changes often (as in, you have a laptop and move around and plug it in different places).
May be that just means I'm not enough of a tinkerer for these setups.
Is it a hard problem to remember more than one configuration and link them to the displays connected to your computer? Or is it just that Omarchy users really don't mind editing monitor.conf[1] often?
I use swaywm and kanshi [0]. It's write once, forget forever. I have one config for each of the display compositions I have (office, home, gaming, eDP...), and "it just works".
I don't really need it, but maybe my setup is too simple. I set my laptop monitor to auto-right, external display to auto-left and that's it. Set it and forget it for me.
I used to have this issue too but was pleasantly surprised I don't have this issue with my new machine using EndeavourOS w/ wayland. I switch displays a couple times per day and it's been fine.
Since Hyprland still supports wlr-output-management (AFAIK) you can use tools like wlr-randr and nwg-displays. I don't use Hyprland but I used Sway for many years and support for multiple outputs was top notch. You did have to edit your text-based Sway config file, since a major part of the draw for Sway was an i3-like mantra, but you could do declarative configuration for both output and input devices, and it worked well with hot plugging. Combined with handling mixed DPI setups better, the general situation feels a lot better for using multiple monitors with Linux these days.
Editing a text file to configure displays is definitely an acquired taste, though. Maybe Omarchy needs some utilities to provide a UI around those config files.
I was worried about that too but switching from one monitor to multiple ended up being plug and play for me. I installed hypermon before thinking I would need it, but I didn't as I got lucky that the monitors positioned themselves correctly and there was nothing else that needed to be changed otherwise.
I just have a bash script that runs on startup which just greps the output of xrandr to determine if I am connected to home/office/no monitors and then runs the appropriate xrandr commands to config them.
On the occasion when I (dis)connect monitors without restarting the laptop, I just have some command line aliases (home/office/laptop) which run the appropriate config
Yes, but you can have a similar setup to what he is describing, just with different commands.
I'm using niri instead hyperland.
I can either use `sed` on it's configuration file (on/off, resolution, position) or for some of its configurations I can use the cli (for output scale).
I recently moved my gaming desktop to CachyOS from Manjaro, but I have no idea what Omarchy is or whether or not I want it, and there's not a single link in the README.
Its not really a distro, nor does it pretend to be. What it really is, is an Arch Linux install, with a preconfigured set of apps & workflow, and a set of tools to easily allow the user to customise to their preferences - within the confines of the original config/workflow.
> Omarchy skips installation of a login display manager. Instead, Hyprland autostarts and password protection is provided upon boot by the LUKS full disk encryption service.
> Also not ideal for security if you like to sleep/hibernate on a laptop.
Why not? I presume you're still running a lockscreen that will trigger on sleep/hibernate via whatever the equivalent of swayidle+swaylock is.
> Who am I kidding, how many laptops actually sleep or hibernate properly when running Linux anyway...
More than you think, though it does depend on hardware. I have no use for hibernation, but I couldn't tell you the last laptop I owned that didn't sleep fine on Linux.
> Why not? I presume you're still running a lockscreen that will trigger...
Maybe I misunderstood; I thought the suggestion was that there was no lock screen/login screen at all and that the LUKS password was the only barrier to entry.
> More than you think, though it does depend on hardware
It was an educated-"joke", I'm quite particular about my laptop hardware, I've had quite a few for work and home over the past couple of decades I've been running Linux, and lately, fewer and fewer that meet my other criteria have had the hardware support for proper sleep/standby/hibernate; by that I mean I want to be able to shut the lid at the end of the work day, or at the end of the evening (for my personal laptop) and have my work laptop not be at 0% in the morning, or for my personal laptop to last a week or so for when I next come to use it, but I'd also like to be able to open the lid and be back at my desktop within no more than the time it takes to enter my password plus 2-3 seconds if I need to.
Typically I just leave them plugged in all of the time when I'm at home and put them back on the charger when I'm done to work around this, but that's not great for their batteries; more of an issue for my personal laptop as I tend to replace it less often than work replaces my work one.
My desktop box is running bazzite and is only used for gaming. I treat it has a console really, it isn't even connected to the internet and doesn't even receive updates unless I want to download a new game. It doesn't have any private data, the only secret I might have is that steam is already logged on but I don't have any payment account/card setup on my steam account.
Appart from the internet connection that might be useful for those gaming online I would expect most gamer machines would be like that.
I ran Bazzite for a little while on my desktop to see how it was for gaming, and it was great, but I do a lot besides gaming, gaming is a small percentage of my time spent on the PC, and I as a full-time Linux user, work and home, I needed something more traditional, I've switched over to CachyOS now which meets my needs well.
Well I don't mix work, gaming (especially with random proprietary code) and personnal stuff on the same device unless there is a good decent separation of the environments. Since gaming is the only usage that warrant a big heavy desktop with a GPU, that I like the conveniency of a laptop for personnal use and have a dedicated work laptop provided by my employer, it is fairly easy to separate duties.
Unix systems are inherently very multi-user (check how many lines are in your /etc/passwd!). Other login users would just need to log into via other means (ssh/etc..).*
Right...you still need a regular login user (and probably a good idea to have a password set)...also for things like sudo. But that facet wasn't one that actually concerned me with this setup
Generally the compositor doesn't allow you back in. You can go to a console and do some emergency stuff from there, but you're locked out of your original session.
OP here: The README.md assumes the reader knows what CachyOS and Omarchy are. A quick primer for those who are coming to this fresh...
- CachyOS is an Arch-based Linux distribution with built-in performance optimizations tuned to high end computing and gaming. See more at https://cachyos.org
- Omarchy is a Hyprland-based "desktop" crafted by DHH that is slowly turning into its own distribution, also based on Arch. See more at https://omarchy.org
Why would you want to use this instead of vanilla CachyOS?
You want to use Hyprland and want a very strong starting configuration. CachyOS includes its own configuration of Hyprland, but I find it's pretty anemic. There are other pre-packaged Hyprland "spins" to try as well, including MyLinux4Work ands JaKoolit. I've found Omarchy to be the most refined. If you have no interest in Hyprland, neither this script nor Omarchy are for you.
Why would you want to use this instead of vanilla Omarchy?
You prefer CachyOS's defaults and/or enhancements to vanilla Arch, or you do not like all of the out-of-the-box decisions Omarchy makes via its auto-install of Vanilla arch (such as LUKS disk encryption or the enforcement of a single user login.)
Normally I'd say I would be exactly the type of person that would use such a thing. But what scares me away and makes me stay with vanilla KDE Plasma is that perceived upfront cost of having to relearn everything and having to customize for hours to then have something that feels 100% better in some and 100% worse in other situations.
Maybe that just means I am currently at a point in my life where I haven't got the time or energy to play around with these things. I'd rather have KDE Plasma with a hint of tiling window manager than a tiling window manager with a hint of Plasma, if you get what I mean.
Omarchy and CachyOS are very interesting but they do not look serious about security [0] [1].
I mean in this day and age we all agree you need disk encryption (for a least 20 years) but what about SELinux, application sandboxing for example?
Especially for a desktop OS like Omarchy shipped with a bunch of apps and "plugins".
This has been a Linux Desktop weakness for more than a decade (compared to macOS, Windows and Android). App sandboxing is a bit sketchy and hard to get right.
The fact they do not explicitly state their strategy regarding those things make me believe this is a bit amateurish.
> Especially for a desktop OS like Omarchy shipped with a bunch of apps and "plugins".
Omarchy is _just_ a set of scripts to have a nice looking Arch Linux and some helper scripts for day to day tasks. It's not a distribution per se, it doesn't have repositories or packages of its own.
Therefore, your criticism of app sandboxing is more for Arch than Omarchy IMHO.
> Therefore, your criticism of app sandboxing is more for Arch than Omarchy IMHO.
I've never been an Arch user but deeply respect the project since their wiki as always been my favorite documentation.
From what I understand Arch is very much DIY, non opinionated and you you need to decide and build the security level / strategy that fit your needs. It seems you can go Flatpak, SELinux but only if you want.
I was kind of lurking for an equivalent of SecureBlue in the Arch world, meaning an Arch derived distro with a strong security posture. Allowing me to get started without worrying too much about it.
At the end of the day, you do you, but my experience with SElinux is that using it on the desktop is vastly overkill.
At a high level, the essence of SElinux is to limit the possibilities of exploitation and escalation by carefully specifying which process can access which resources in which context. Now that makes sense for a server opened to the www, or a host shared with untrusted users. But Omarchy is a _sole developer_ focused flavor of Arch Linux, think your typical dev laptop. There's no service exposed there, you most likely can't even listen on the internet behind your typical home router. The realistic threats that you face is your laptop being stolen (which is why LUKS is a default) or your laptop sitting unlocked (which is why hypridle & hyprlock are a default).
Of course there's always the tails of a compromised software, but it's much more unlikely.
The distributed development model makes it tricky, because distributions themselves aren't necessarily the developers of sandboxing solutions, there's multiple approaches, many are incompatible with each other, none are fully mature and support every tool users could realistically want to run.
Same with selinux/apparmor/competitors, they're all mutually exclusive to some degree and have different pros and cons. RHEL shoves selinux down everyone's throat without caring how well that works in practice, and coincidentally 100% of RHEL systems I've interacted with have it disabled.
Until there's solutions that are mature, the best solution for distros is still to let users choose the lesser evil for their specific use case.
I skipped through the 38 minutes and landed on like 8 instances were he was switching themes/wallpaper and 4 showing of bash scripts that opens a webpage. It looks like all the fluxbox/openbox themed minimal desktops in the 2000s - function follows form. Feels really performative.
They made a "micro fork" of chrome to support having it auto update to the system theme.
That's... Dedication. I guess. But it's dedication at the wrong spot for my tastes.
And having to hear him recall those forced keyboard commands just makes me itchy. Here you hit space to select, over there it's "d" for default. Here it's enter, this menu is actually vim, so it's !wq here...
Want to configure those monitors? Just come edit this file! Bleh. Hope you know the name of the things you want to touch!
Some of the dev tool suggestions are fine, but those are all standalone tools (mise, yay, lazy docker, etc).
Basically: I'm glad there's space for people to do this. It's not my cup of tea.
To much attention to things I don't care about. Too much magic in the things I do. Too much crap that's entirely specific to this guy (who the fuck wants a default top level hot key for opening Twitter. It's not me, that's for sure).
Its basically LARBS or an autoricing script. But its happening in kind of a cultural moment where Linux gaming is good enough and Windows is bad enough for people to see ricing and say "I want that!"
I think it is function follows form, but it turns out a lot of people actually want that.
Not to mention - if you're coming from Windows or MacOS and you've never had real tiling before, you could install a bunch of goofy electron launchers or whatever and still get form improvements.
I'm not a Rails guy, so I've always kind of thought their scaffolding system was a little silly. It's going to autogenerate a config and then I also have to edit it?
But I'm coming to terms with the idea that there is actually tremendous value to lowering the barrier to entry as much as possible, and providing scaffolding for people to learn along the way
DHH switched from Mac to Linux and is in the process of experimenting with his setup, but since he's famous within tech, it's getting a lot of attention. There's really nothing special about it.
Haven't "launchers" existed for decades at this point though? I remember Crunchbang (RIP) having something similar for example, and that must have been almost two decades ago at this point.
May be that just means I'm not enough of a tinkerer for these setups.
Is it a hard problem to remember more than one configuration and link them to the displays connected to your computer? Or is it just that Omarchy users really don't mind editing monitor.conf[1] often?
[1]: https://learn.omacom.io/books/2/pages/86
[0] https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/emersion/kanshi
I don't really need it, but maybe my setup is too simple. I set my laptop monitor to auto-right, external display to auto-left and that's it. Set it and forget it for me.
I used to have this issue too but was pleasantly surprised I don't have this issue with my new machine using EndeavourOS w/ wayland. I switch displays a couple times per day and it's been fine.
Editing a text file to configure displays is definitely an acquired taste, though. Maybe Omarchy needs some utilities to provide a UI around those config files.
On the occasion when I (dis)connect monitors without restarting the laptop, I just have some command line aliases (home/office/laptop) which run the appropriate config
There are some utilities for this though. nwg-displays comes to mind
I'm using niri instead hyperland. I can either use `sed` on it's configuration file (on/off, resolution, position) or for some of its configurations I can use the cli (for output scale).
The README on this github link does not explain to me why this is necessary, or why someone is doing it.
I recently moved my gaming desktop to CachyOS from Manjaro, but I have no idea what Omarchy is or whether or not I want it, and there's not a single link in the README.
Guess I'll go look it up.
Basically, it's a "curated Arch linux"
Pretty unconventional...Is this a bad idea?
There's space for both - some people do need password protected separate users, but not all of us do.
Who am I kidding, how many laptops actually sleep or hibernate properly when running Linux anyway...
Why not? I presume you're still running a lockscreen that will trigger on sleep/hibernate via whatever the equivalent of swayidle+swaylock is.
> Who am I kidding, how many laptops actually sleep or hibernate properly when running Linux anyway...
More than you think, though it does depend on hardware. I have no use for hibernation, but I couldn't tell you the last laptop I owned that didn't sleep fine on Linux.
Maybe I misunderstood; I thought the suggestion was that there was no lock screen/login screen at all and that the LUKS password was the only barrier to entry.
> More than you think, though it does depend on hardware
It was an educated-"joke", I'm quite particular about my laptop hardware, I've had quite a few for work and home over the past couple of decades I've been running Linux, and lately, fewer and fewer that meet my other criteria have had the hardware support for proper sleep/standby/hibernate; by that I mean I want to be able to shut the lid at the end of the work day, or at the end of the evening (for my personal laptop) and have my work laptop not be at 0% in the morning, or for my personal laptop to last a week or so for when I next come to use it, but I'd also like to be able to open the lid and be back at my desktop within no more than the time it takes to enter my password plus 2-3 seconds if I need to.
Typically I just leave them plugged in all of the time when I'm at home and put them back on the charger when I'm done to work around this, but that's not great for their batteries; more of an issue for my personal laptop as I tend to replace it less often than work replaces my work one.
Appart from the internet connection that might be useful for those gaming online I would expect most gamer machines would be like that.
Or period?
My 2015-ish Macbook Air was unreliable at waking up from sleep, and so is my Windows ASUS ROG Zephyrus from ~2021.
- CachyOS is an Arch-based Linux distribution with built-in performance optimizations tuned to high end computing and gaming. See more at https://cachyos.org
- Omarchy is a Hyprland-based "desktop" crafted by DHH that is slowly turning into its own distribution, also based on Arch. See more at https://omarchy.org
Why would you want to use this instead of vanilla CachyOS?
You want to use Hyprland and want a very strong starting configuration. CachyOS includes its own configuration of Hyprland, but I find it's pretty anemic. There are other pre-packaged Hyprland "spins" to try as well, including MyLinux4Work ands JaKoolit. I've found Omarchy to be the most refined. If you have no interest in Hyprland, neither this script nor Omarchy are for you.
Why would you want to use this instead of vanilla Omarchy?
You prefer CachyOS's defaults and/or enhancements to vanilla Arch, or you do not like all of the out-of-the-box decisions Omarchy makes via its auto-install of Vanilla arch (such as LUKS disk encryption or the enforcement of a single user login.)
Maybe that just means I am currently at a point in my life where I haven't got the time or energy to play around with these things. I'd rather have KDE Plasma with a hint of tiling window manager than a tiling window manager with a hint of Plasma, if you get what I mean.
I mean in this day and age we all agree you need disk encryption (for a least 20 years) but what about SELinux, application sandboxing for example?
Especially for a desktop OS like Omarchy shipped with a bunch of apps and "plugins".
This has been a Linux Desktop weakness for more than a decade (compared to macOS, Windows and Android). App sandboxing is a bit sketchy and hard to get right.
The fact they do not explicitly state their strategy regarding those things make me believe this is a bit amateurish.
- [0] https://wiki.cachyos.org/cachyos_basic/faq/#security--best-p...
- [1] https://learn.omacom.io/2/the-omarchy-manual/93/security
Omarchy is _just_ a set of scripts to have a nice looking Arch Linux and some helper scripts for day to day tasks. It's not a distribution per se, it doesn't have repositories or packages of its own.
Therefore, your criticism of app sandboxing is more for Arch than Omarchy IMHO.
I've never been an Arch user but deeply respect the project since their wiki as always been my favorite documentation.
From what I understand Arch is very much DIY, non opinionated and you you need to decide and build the security level / strategy that fit your needs. It seems you can go Flatpak, SELinux but only if you want.
I was kind of lurking for an equivalent of SecureBlue in the Arch world, meaning an Arch derived distro with a strong security posture. Allowing me to get started without worrying too much about it.
At a high level, the essence of SElinux is to limit the possibilities of exploitation and escalation by carefully specifying which process can access which resources in which context. Now that makes sense for a server opened to the www, or a host shared with untrusted users. But Omarchy is a _sole developer_ focused flavor of Arch Linux, think your typical dev laptop. There's no service exposed there, you most likely can't even listen on the internet behind your typical home router. The realistic threats that you face is your laptop being stolen (which is why LUKS is a default) or your laptop sitting unlocked (which is why hypridle & hyprlock are a default).
Of course there's always the tails of a compromised software, but it's much more unlikely.
It's totally right to point out that it's amateurish but it seems unfair to single out an individual project when it's an ecosystem level issue.
Same with selinux/apparmor/competitors, they're all mutually exclusive to some degree and have different pros and cons. RHEL shoves selinux down everyone's throat without caring how well that works in practice, and coincidentally 100% of RHEL systems I've interacted with have it disabled.
Until there's solutions that are mature, the best solution for distros is still to let users choose the lesser evil for their specific use case.
They made a "micro fork" of chrome to support having it auto update to the system theme.
That's... Dedication. I guess. But it's dedication at the wrong spot for my tastes.
And having to hear him recall those forced keyboard commands just makes me itchy. Here you hit space to select, over there it's "d" for default. Here it's enter, this menu is actually vim, so it's !wq here...
Want to configure those monitors? Just come edit this file! Bleh. Hope you know the name of the things you want to touch!
Some of the dev tool suggestions are fine, but those are all standalone tools (mise, yay, lazy docker, etc).
Basically: I'm glad there's space for people to do this. It's not my cup of tea.
To much attention to things I don't care about. Too much magic in the things I do. Too much crap that's entirely specific to this guy (who the fuck wants a default top level hot key for opening Twitter. It's not me, that's for sure).
I think it is function follows form, but it turns out a lot of people actually want that.
Not to mention - if you're coming from Windows or MacOS and you've never had real tiling before, you could install a bunch of goofy electron launchers or whatever and still get form improvements.
I'm not a Rails guy, so I've always kind of thought their scaffolding system was a little silly. It's going to autogenerate a config and then I also have to edit it?
But I'm coming to terms with the idea that there is actually tremendous value to lowering the barrier to entry as much as possible, and providing scaffolding for people to learn along the way
In this case, Walker is the launcher being used in Omarchy, https://github.com/abenz1267/walker. It's not specific to Omarchy.
One of Walker's features is being able to create your own custom menus quite easily with shell scripts.