

Join the discussion
Write your take first — we'll ask for email only when you're ready to publish.
- Hacker News
- What does an "exclusive sponsorship" of Hyperland mean?[1] Sorry for the rhetorical question. I think I mean, why does a foundation need to be the exclusive sponsor of a project?
[1]: https://omarchy.org/news/2026/08/omacom-foundation-to-be-exc...
by thomascountz - Means that they are fully covering all of his financial needs.by machomaster
- TIL a really good r/unixporn post is worth $8M
- more like DHH is worth that much. unlike the sister comment, i don't think it is marketing alone, if at all, but rather DHH networking and connections. it might be marketing in the sense that the people funding this believe that DHH is able to attract a lot of people. which is interesting given that he also has attracted some controversy recently.by em-bee
- The better takeaway is that marketing is important and the technical details, don't always matter as much (https://xn--gckvb8fzb.com/a-word-on-omarchy/) as having a complete package. Similarly to how Apple often packages existing tech into an appealing package for the mass market and there's nothing wrong with that.
DHH has the gift that he's both a good technologist, but also a good marketer.
by dewey - I use it every day for work and it is really fun. It's different from Mac and takes a while to get the gist of it, but for me it has been worth it.
I don't care if people see it as a hyped-up collection of scripts, it's calm and fun.
by crilopesp - Can someone explain why I (a relatively Linux-naive engineer) would use Omarchy over Ubuntu or other popular distros? I'd like to take a look, but i'm having the hardest time understanding the value proposition.by sankumsek
- It takes less than a minute to installby TiredOfLife
- The demo video is comprehensive and impressiveby sroerick
- It’s Ruby on Rails in the world of distros. If you find other distros tasteless and unpolished, you may want to try Omarchy. At least that’s how I see it (I find most Linux distros and development frameworks tasteless and unpolished).
- In my opinion, you wouldnt. You might sooner pick up a distro like Arch (which is what Omarchy uses; it is not a distro in itself) if you want to imperatively manage everything, or NixOS with basic hyprland or Plasma or COSMIC config, etc., and then you can declaratively handle your dots and config.
Either of these routes would teach you more about Linux and give you the ability to build a simple desktop for your needs.
by tfrancisl - I highly encourage anyone e.g. on MacOS to get a cheap laptop and give Omarchy a try. My feeling of using this system compared to MacOS is a whole another level. And now one of the promises of Omarchy Quattro is that AI agents will help you tweak it to your liking very easily, avoiding having to spend dozens of hours ricing your system.by euazOn
- "what the malleable computer of the future looks like" ??? Excuse me? This is just a linux shell script repository. What is the point of having $8m to maintain a shell script?by huslage
- Might be shocking, but entirely true: They might have shared secret and private plans of what they're building to investors (donators?), where "malleable computer" is a part of those plans, and the full 100% implementation might not be in the source repository at this very moment. Just a guess from my side though, who knows, maybe shellscripts are what they see as malleable computers?
- Honestly same, BUT if those 8M go towards financing Linux desktop projects I'm all for it.by LelouBil
- I think their bet is that 8M is what it will take to go from a repo of dotfiles to Linux on the Desktop.by thomascountz
- If it's a cheap, why hasn't someone else done this at this consistency? Where are the other distros easily applying a theme to basically everything on your system for example? It ships a custom theme builder Aether, Quickshell to build desktop ui elements, a new launcher and its own cli.by jasonvorhe
- That has big Dropbox comment energy (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224)by dewey
- Omarchy Quattro is pretty dang good. It's a lot more than any shell script I've written, certainly. If you've written a more complex one I'd love to see it.
Having agents in the default environment, having everything configurable through text files, and having default agents automatically file bug reports on crashes - these are tangible quality of life improvements that you can't get on other systems.
Maybe Windows and MacOS should write some shell scripts.
by sroerick - I installed Omarchy on an old laptop yesterday and was impressed with the smooth installation. The UI is definitely a different approach, I can see any developer who prefers the keyboard to the mouse would love it.
Good to see some innovation. Desktop Linux feels like it has been stalled for years and needs new ideas.
Also, having an AI to pre-flight compatibility issues and help with UEFI and BIOS configs makes life so much more pleasant.
by pnw - Been a happy Omarchy user for over a year, it's changed how I work with lots of Hyprland grouped windows spread across multiple virtual desktops which I can easily get to each with just a few keystrokes, it's a pretty fluid workflow after you get used to the keybindings.
Things I like about Omarchy:
Also something I only started doing recently is whenever I hit any Linux issue I now just paste it into ChatGPT and let it fix it for me which saved a lot of time porting my customizations over to Quattro. There's now built-in support for passing the crash info to your default AI Agent when a process crashes.- Great job at blending Native Desktop, Web and CLI Apps - they launch & look the same - Polished themes - applied to most Apps (inc. running) - Built in installers for most dev tools, lets you get setup with most popular programming langs in a few secs - Built-in Windows (run in Docker container) great to have when you need itI'm using AI to power a lot of my desktop tasks now, even ended up buying Davinci Resolve yesterday since the paid version had scripting support which let me use ChatGPT to implement some video effects.
by mythz - Lots of negativity in this post. As someone who is an engineer and not a software engineer, this has improved my technical capability tremendously by giving me training wheels and removed decision paralysis because there's so much crap out there and everyone is so opinionated. I don't have time to try out pi and herdr and opencode and codex...by carterbeagle
- I tried Omarchy 10 months ago. I liked how easy it all was, like the PWAs installed, etc...
But I was completely lost with, and even offended by, how the tiling window manager worked. Windows were just moving around all over the place, changing sizes etc... It was by far the worst computing experience that I've had in a very long time. And it was particularly awful on a small laptop screen where you REALLY need to make the most of how your windows are arranged.
After a couple days, I installed Pop!_OS and, despite its new COSMIC desktop having tiling-like features, I've been happy with its normal Windows-like UI, where I can just use windows/super key + arrow keys to move and resize windows to the side or corner of the screen, and they stay there.
Yet, so many people are raving about tiling window managers. Surely it cant be as awful of an experience as I had. What was I doing wrong? Is there some configuration that I wasn't using in order to set preferences for applications or profiles or something?
by nchmy - Agreed. I might be showing my age, but I remember the days of LightStep and associated window managers that did the same thing. This looks more like a highly connected techie raising a slush money fund of $8 million to put out his opinionated re-skin of Ubuntu and window manager settings file. The "year of the linux desktop" has nothing to do with some UI preferences but it probably sold well in whatever room he was in.
It must be nice to enter the blowhard stage of life where you can share your bash profile at a cocktail party in SF and go around the table collecting $1 million checks from all your yuppie friends.
by iamleppert - If it helps: memorize the shortcut for displaying the keyboard shortcuts which also has fuzzy search. That helped me whenever I was stuck due to lack of experience with tiling WMs.by jasonvorhe
- It's come a LONG way in user friendliness in 10 months. Combine Omarchy with a LLM and you can literally change any behavior you want in minutes. I have heavily customized mine, but have been able to remove some of those customizations on Quattro because upstream incorporated similar features.by rufugee
- For me, it just clicked. For a secondary laptop where I don't want to run anything extra and want to stay clear on what I'm running, it just worked, even while its MASSIVELY different from how I run my main machines.
Separately from using it on a secondary laptop, I have no idea if I could actually make it a daily driver though. Usually I have literally 50 windows, 200+ chrome tabs open, and use that state to "extend" my forgetful mind. Whole different approaches.
by maxlin - I think tiling makes much less sense on a laptop and more sense when you use a large display.
I had a similar experience initially. I disliked many of the defaults. But it's quite easy to use an agent to customize everything to your liking. And I haven't really run into a situation where I couldn't accomplish what I wanted.
I'm still deciding how I feel about hyprland. I use a unique hyperkey shortcut to focus each app and I usually want that app (chrome, ghostty, etc) to take up the entire screen rather than caring about having tiled splits in a workspace, so I'm generally putting each app to its own workspace. I'm sure there's more to learn about hyprland and I can imagine it being superior to what I'm used to (macOS with some hammerspoon binds for window management/layouts).
by jsuth - I have had a similar experience regarding tiling window managers. Been trying i3, but everything becomes just super complicated, and I learned I somehow actually appreciate having a feel for windows moving around, and having the freedom to open a small mini terminal above all the others for some quick tasks etc.
For me, XFCE (On Linux Mint currently) turned out to be the answer. Has configurable keyboard shortcuts for pretty much anything you need, like tiling to top/right/bottom/left, corners, moving or resizing windows etc.
To me, that is the best of both worlds - a normal window manager with keyboard shortcuts for tiling the windows when you want.
by samuell - > What was I doing wrong?
Nothing. Tiling managers just have a bit of a steep learning curve. That said, I'd argue they're better about using space on small screens (no title bar, everything tiled efficiently, etc).
The Omarchy Manual does a good job of covering it, but again, there's a learning curve. I was a late adopter to tiling, but now I can't do without it. I even use macOS and Windows tiled.
by runjake