Omarchy Is Out
66 comments
·August 24, 2025lucideer
<offtopic> Minor website feedback:
Setting the `download` property on all of your screenshot image anchors is a very odd choice: not only does it make it very difficult to view the images quickly & easily in-browser, it also clogs up my Downloads directory with things I don't intend to keep.
Not only that, but it goes beyond client-side measure: someone has gone to the extra trouble of also setting `content-disposition: attachment` on each of the image HTTP response headers to make absolutely sure they can't be viewed easily in browser, even with workarounds.
quesera
I suspect it's a Hey-wide thing.
But if you trim off the `?disposition=attachment` from the URL, it loads in the browser. At least for me in Firefox.
siliconc0w
I might be in the minority but I actually like overlapping windows - often the entire window is not necessary to get the data I am interested in. Right now I'm running tests in another window and I have a sliver of that window visible while the majority of the screen real-estate gets used for the browser in primary window.
nickjj
I'm beginning to really like scrolling window managers.
It's optimized for minimal splits (let's say 2-3 windows) per view but it makes it effortless to flip between apps. Floating windows is also an option and making any of them full screen is available too.
Imagine tiling a bunch of pieces of paper on your floor and now you want to focus on a few of them at a time. That's basically what a scrolling window manager allows, you can either swipe on a touchpad, hit the arrow keys or use your mouse wheel to cycle between stuff. Of course you can customize these, that's just a reasonable default.
It's so much faster than manually dealing with workspaces IMO.
I'm currently taking a look into both Hyprland's scrolling plugins and if that fails then Niri. I wish Hyprland's official scrolling plugin was not in an alpha state. I want to stick with Hyprland because everything else about it is really nice.
All of this stuff works independent of Omarchy too since it's 100% related to your window manager.
Here's a video demo: https://youtu.be/r0JUm77inIA?t=319
[Note: I'm not the author of the video but I jumped to a timestamp where he's showing Niri's scrolling features]
01HNNWZ0MV43FF
That sounds like exactly what I've wanted - Sort of like those blackboards / whiteboards that you can roll around.
What's your favorite? Right now I'm on xfce and KDE as my daily drivers but I'll shop around next time I wanna shake things up
nickjj
> Sort of like those blackboards / whiteboards that you can roll around.
Yes exactly. Since I was a kid, I always envisioned a future world where all of my walls were a monitor and I could just move across them as needed to focus on things. A scrolling manager isn't quite that but it's in the right direction.
I don't like switching between full screen windows because mentally it's so much easier (IMO) to keep things in context when I see all the important things at once. I want to see my code, the terminal output, search results and the docs in 1 view but when I don't care about the search results and docs I want to quickly throw them off to the side, but still have them available if needed on demand.
Situational splitting with scrolling allows for the above without the cognitive load of hitting a million hotkeys to move things to workspaces and balance your splits.
I've always felt like with traditional tiled window managers you're trading 1 problem for another. Instead of meddling with every floated window's size and position you're meddling with split sizes and workspace management.
> What's your favorite?
It's too soon to say as I've only recently discovered them. I do think Niri and Hyprland with https://github.com/cpiber/hyprscroller or https://github.com/hyprwm/hyprland-plugins are places to start. Niri has scrolling as a first class feature. The first Hyprland link is a fork of a deprecated plugin and the 2nd link is an official new plugin but it's super bare bones and a big WIP.
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browningstreet
I have all my windows centered but pyramid stacked. I can see a bit of everything but my main browser is in the center. Slack is in the upper right, and the browser leaves a bit of the Slack screen open. I keep Obsidian in the lower left such that I can see the organization panel.. it helps me keep a mental map of the notes I'm working with.
In the center are two Chrome browsers representing two separate profiles.. a personal profile for some flows, and a work profile for others. Again, stacked so that I can see most of the tabs.
I've never dared to dream that I could combine this habit with some Hyprland-style "spontaneous windows launched by keybinds". I'd love that. A prime stack of core windows and an omega stack of ephemeral windows.
When I have multiple screens I also tend to stack one above the other, as opposed to left and right.
Corner case all the way.
ivape
I think I do something similar. I have 3-4 windows side by side, overlapping each other. That way I can click into any of the four windows from any arrangement. In other words, Window N is available to click into no matter which window happens to be in the active forefront. It is similar to a deck of four cards overlapping each other, with the active window coming into the forefront taking up something like 60% of the screen (active workspace), with the other three windows easily available.
This eliminates the need for alt+tab or finding windows that were minimized (nothing is minimized since we define our workspace as just four windows on reasonably sized monitors. You may only be able to achieve 3 windows on a laptop, or more windows on a bigger monitor).
I don't like vertical stacking because vertical real estate is limited on modern monitors unless you flip your monitor vertically, in which case you can just use the same pattern in a vertical way.
A typical workflow is Editor, LLM chat, Browser, and Terminal. That's all.
[ [ !1] 2] 3] 4] ]
[!1] is the active window
[ [ 1[ !2] 3] 4] ]
[!2] is the active window, it now overlaps 1, 3 and 4.
*Each of the four windows is not just 25% width of the monitor. They are all actually about 50-60% width, just layered in a way you can click into each one.
You can get to any of the four windows visually with a click at any time. Keyboard shortcuts are already freely available here since you only have a few windows and can alt-tab through them, but I can definitely see attuning muscle memory to Shift+[1...n], but again, visually, the pattern requires only one click to move between things.
Hopefully I explained that well.
mrinterweb
(CMD|CTRL)+TAB is all I usually all I need. I know this may sound wasteful considering that I have two eyes, but I have only ever been able to focus my eyes on a single thing at a time. I usually make the window take up the full window, and I just switch between windows. It is fast to do this. I tried multi-monitors, but it wasn't for me.
thomasfromcdnjs
Same here, multiple monitors, overlapping windows has never worked for me. I don't need big monitors for the same reason. I also make sure to keep the number of things I have open to a minimum. Then simply tabbing or using a tiling manager like i3 (without using actual tiling) (they are just faster than running full desktops). It also means I can be productive with any setup anywhere e.g. a laptop
jm4
I tried Omarchy for a bit. It's a nice setup and DHH made some good choices, but I'm right there with you.
Most often, I use maximized windows for the things I'm actively working on and floating windows for something like popping over to a file manager for a quick operation. In Hyprland, this often meant using separate workspaces for the main apps I always have open and workspace switching is more effort than alt+tab. I'm also a heavy user of hotkeys for my most frequent apps. They are set up to focus or launch the app.
I ended up gaining little to nothing from the Hyprland setup that I didn't already have or could easily implement in Plasma so I went back after several days. I was also having weird problems launching some games in Steam. In particular, Balatro wouldn't launch under Hyprland even though it works fine under Plasma/Wayland. I spent some time troubleshooting to no avail before deciding it just wasn't worth it.
I did get some new ideas from Omarchy though. I never thought to set up xcompose before. I also like what DHH did with PWAs.
In any case, I like what DHH is doing because it's making people try Linux when they otherwise may not have. What's especially cool is he's proving that you don't need to dumb things down, which is exactly what everyone else has tried to do all these years. Omarchy is 100% a power user setup and does an awesome job of showing what Linux is capable of while still being very accessible to newcomers.
cosmic_cheese
You’re not alone. I can’t make full-time tiling or even tiling-dominant work for me. With how my mind works, full floating 98% of the time with the occasional tile is the right blend. I tile so infrequently that tiling being keybound has net zero impact.
0x457
Majority of time I only have 2-4 apps open: terminal/IDE, browser, music player and some IM. Floating windows seems like a waste of space. Browser is full-screen on any regular proportion screen (i.e. not ultra-wide).
I rarely use floating windows, even on windowed-WMs.
cosmic_cheese
I’m sure there’s differences in workflow styles. I tend to have multiple tasks in flight at any given moment and switch between them often enough that closing+opening sets of apps and windows represents showstopping overhead, so lots of things just sit open. Floating windows on mutliple desktops with dual monitors suits this style well.
It’s worth noting that I don’t spend large amounts of time in terminals and text editors, but instead in graphical apps and chrome-heavy IDEs which are awkward in tiling setups because of how much screen space they demand. If I were more terminal-heavy I’m sure tiling would make more sense.
yjftsjthsd-h
What I really want, but don't have the technical skill to write unfortunately:), is a window manager or compositor that lets me set the size of a window and the viewport into that window independently. That is, formalize the approach that yes this window is rendering as if it was taking up half the screen but I only need to actually see this tiny slice of it, so just give me a window that shows that piece
porridgeraisin
This should be possible on X11 using standard extensions. XCompositeRedirectWindow to render your window to a virtual buffer, get pixmap, bind pixmap to new croppedWindow as a GL texture, here apply a crop transform. Then optionally unmap original window. Finally, we have to remap input events. This is trivial browser-style event interception, XSelectInput, change x,y, XSendEvent. I can try to make it work sometime this week. A CLI tool you'd use like `xcropwindow windowID x y dx dy`. As a side effect, this way you can have multiple viewports into different parts of a window. But there's probably a few deal-breaker edge cases I'm missing.
On the other hand, the Great Wayland Security Theater probably doesn't admit such riff-raff.
bigstrat2003
I don't think you're in the minority (I also prefer floating windows), it's just that as the default style of window management there's not much to say on the topic. So people don't bother.
kace91
My only problem with tiling is that I usually have 2-3 apps tiled that are stable and a “gap” where I quickly pop things I only need momentarily (slack, an extra terminal, postman, whatever). I never managed that quick readjustment in tiling managers, maybe it was just lack of practice.
Also some seemed to interact badly with software that brought pop up windows/dialogs.
42lux
Floating for gui and tiling for cli.
hd4
The real story with Omarchy is Hyprland. Feels like the first time the desktop Linux is not only fun but that there's a far better case being made for switching to desktop Linux over Windows, not only because of less resource usage, but also a new (old) paradigm in tiling windows, repackaged in a way that doesn't make people want to smash their computer.
Hyprland itself comes with such nice defaults that it isn't surprising at all that it's getting as much attention as it is, for better or worse.
directmusic
I can absolutely echo your sentiment. I recently released some software which has Wayland support. Immediately, I got some bug reports from Hyprland users so I setup a partition with EndeavourOS + Hyprland to work out the issues. I was pleasantly surprised to find that, as you said, the defaults are nice. Configuring it was a breeze as well. Now about 2 weeks later I am daily driving the system I setup for testing and am working to switch fully to it from macOS.
umbra07
What was the hyprland-specific issue?
nickjj
Windows still has advantages for certain use cases, as much as I want to like Hyprland for everything.
For example, imagine this screencast recording set up:
- You have a 4k monitor
- You only want to record a 1920x1080 section of your screen (OBS can do this in both set ups)
- You only want certain windows to appear in that 1920x1080 zone
- You want other adhoc windows (notepad, etc.) floating around that recording zone
- You want to easily be able to pick and flip between the apps in that 1920x1080 zone
With Hyprland this isn't as easy to pull off. A maintainer mentioned to me that I'd likely have to write a Hyprland plugin which would be C++. I'm not a C++ developer though.
I guess you could probably make a workable but not as good solution by hyprctl dispatching commands in a shell script to position specific windows into the zone and then have a notepad like app dedicated to always floating, but when you record hundreds of videos you want an optimized solution to the highest degree.
In Hyprland's defense I've only been using it for a few days but I saw nothing in their docs or the internet that would indicate there's features built into the tool to make this less painful.
If I could find a solution for this, I'd install it on my main machine.
ireadmevs
I haven’t the tried Hyprland, but I use i3, which I assume it should be similar. I do this sort of thing quite often when presenting on zoom at work. Suppose I want to present only the top-left section of my screen, then I split vertically first and the left side I split horizontally. This other 2 zones I use to put other supporting windows and to search stuff out of screen. When I need to present more apps, i3 also allow you to stack windows in a specific zone. It’s quite easy to switch between all the windows and have full control of the layout.
uberduper
I'm probably not thinking about your use case the same way you are, but it seems like you could run a nested hyprland session in a 1920x1080 window and screenshare just the nested hyprland window. Run the apps you want to share inside that nested hyprland session.
I don't know of any reason that wouldn't work, but I haven't tried it so I'm not certain it would.
nickjj
I didn't even know that was possible but I think it would be the perfect solution, as long as it ran efficiently and managing the hotkeys between both sessions wasn't a problem. I wonder how that would work if you used the same configs.
If it were possible to pull off, that would be the perfect combo:
- A dedicated 1920x1080 recording zone, using Hyrpland's config file to automatically resize and position this Hyprland session in whatever spot makes the most sense (top middle of a 4k monitor, etc.)
- The nested session could use 1.5x or 2x scaling so fonts are larger on video[0]
- There's no BS or manual steps because the nested session is a full fledged Hyprland set up, so tiling, floats, workspaces and app launching is fully working
- Free to float whatever you want around the recording zone from the main Hyprland set up
Edit:
The Hyprland docs mentions you should make a separate config and also avoid running any exec/exec-once commands. That could be a problem because I would want my wallpaper, mako, waybar and walker to come up in the videos which means running multiple copies of these.
Maybe it could work tho in the end. I will play with it and see how it goes. Thank you for introducing me to the idea, even if it doesn't work, it's an interesting concept.
aidenn0
I hear Hyprland second only to Gnome in the NixOS world (where it's arguably easier to try different desktop environments compared to e.g. Ubuntu).
Now it could just be that Hyprland users are more vocal than XFCE or plasma users, so it's not definitive, but it definitely has "buzz"
umbra07
That's... surprising. GNOME and Nix has very contrasting philosophies.
Anyways, Hyprland is primarily driven by the Arch side of things, considering that:
* there are way more Arch users than Nix users
* Arch is much more trendy amongst non-developer/Linux users.
* Arch is easier to setup and use - less friction
* Arch is more popular in the unixporn reddit/YouTube world, which is where Hyprland gained much of its popularity
* the Hyprland developer uses Arch, and has recently started selling customized dot files, advertised as "supported on Arch- based and Fedora distributions."
Nix users are simply not a driving force in the Linux userland world.
Imustaskforhelp
yes as an hyprland user, the community is definitely more vocal. I myself convinced one of my friends to use hyprland fedora as his first linux experience which is wild
(I also use nixos too but I use nix plasma and arch hyprland, i mean I barely use nix, arch is my goto but you get my point)
I agree it has buzz but its just cool open source software man, I like it. it isn't as plug n play even still as plasma or gnome for example but that's the point. Makes for a really good minimalist system but for me somethings don't usually work that "just" work on other desktop environments but I learnt a lot and now its a really enjoyable experience.
One example I can give of where I really had a big issue with hyprland was consistent schema around every application. I think its still broken on my system for qt apps which I had fixed but then broke again I think, but I now don't have the time to fix it and its a minor inconvenience at best. nothing wrong to hyprland, that's just fundamentally how it works if you try hyprland like me.
Omarchy seems to be promising the premise of hyprland with "it just works" Maybe if my arch system bricks, I will give omarchy a try. Untill then, I am happy with my theme and hyprland. Its cool. Dhh is also cool for making omarchy tbh.
hd4
The reason it's wild is someone has managed to make a tiling WM that isn't just usable and nice, but actually created incredible hype around it, and made people want to give it a chance and switch away from something as entrenched as DEs. It's really a wondrous achievement, something the majority of the Linux community never thought could be done until it was.
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Spivak
Is Hyperland the thing that finally convinces hacker types that Wayland is the future? A Wayland compositor that gives you Xorg like scripting via a UNIX control socket, easy to set up, and is much much less opinionated than GNOME.
So many of the criticisms of Wayland around the internet end up being things that Mutter doesn't let you control directly.
hd4
It's less a Wayland story imo and more a tiling WM story.
Spivak
Right! Which is my point. It's finally a "killer app." It's not a situation where the Wayland thing is technically better but to a user is essentially the same except new $limitations. Now there's a new cool trendy thing that happens to run on Wayland. Folks will want to make the switch to get the new shiny.
marstall
For mac users interested in tiling (ish) managers, but not willing to make the leap DHH made, I highly recommend the Magnet app, which gets me most of the goodness he is demoing in the first part here ... (and maybe a little more?)
jeswin
The world needs people like DHH.
When he saw issues with the Apple ecosystem, decides to make useful, well thought-out tooling for helping developers adopt Linux. When he saw how expensive the cloud can be, goes on to build open source tooling for deploying on bare-metal servers. Both have been successful.
Not just blog posts. Blog posts followed by hard work to fix the problem.
bdcravens
It's worth noting that some of it may be inspired by some of the spats he's had with Apple over the years that aren't really related to their desktop operating system. A couple that come to mind is the fact that his wife wasn't approved for an Apple credit card, and the difficulty he had in getting the Hey app approved in the App Store. (Of course, it could be that once Apple lost its "shine" for him he became more critical of other products in a way that tribe-members won't)
mxuribe
I don't know DHH personally, but seeing what he did by introducing ruby on rails, plus listening to his thoughts via the rework podcast, also reading about his company's move away from the hyperscaler cloud providers, and now both the omakube and omarchy offerings...yeah, we need more folks (with his kind of fame of sorts) to help others as well.
anaisbetts
I want to love Omarchy but replacing the boot splash screen with its logo is rough, I wish there was a clear way to disable that
ramblerman
The whole point of omarchy is to give you great defaults, and then it being linux everything is completely customizable.
Which with ChatGpt/Grok is trivial these days for even a non linux native.
jm4
You can. You can either change the logo or disable the splash screen altogether by removing a kernel parameter.
martini333
That's a deal breaker for you?
lbrito
There's over a dozen posts about this, most recent one from 19 days ago, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44811905
ezekg
It's making the rounds again because it just hit 2.0.
juancn
TIL that the "Super" key is the "Windows" key.
coreyh14444
Hyprland was a bit too far from what I'm used to, and required too many changes in my workflow, but all of this DHH pushing convinced me to try out Linux on a day to day basis and I'm switching to Fedora/Gnome so that's still a win for the cause I'd say.
pmdr
I've been using Linux on and off since 2005. I've mostly stuck with Ubuntu after briefly using Slackware, but found myself using Windows like 95% of the time in the last few years.
Then DHH launched Omakub and, for me, it's been a game changer. It's not like he invented anything revolutionary, but he did something I hadn't had the time to do: customize it in a sensible way that, for me, is now superior to using Windows 10/11. Also caught the Lazyvim/neovim bug thanks to him, which led to other improvements such as Vimium in browsers.
I haven't tried Omarchy yet, but I will as soon as I find the time to tinker with it.
harel
I've been using Ubuntu exclusively since around 2005 when they sent you CD-ROMs (remember those?). I've been trying to switch to Arch for about 5 years now. Not because Ubuntu was broken, but because I wanted something new. I sometimes install it on an old laptop, marvel at the perceived speed increase of that old(er) machine, tell myself I'll switch tomorrow when I can find a spare day for it, and 5 years later it still didn't happen. My older laptop now runs Omarchy. And it's great and all, but I still don't think it will happen. My next laptop, for sure, will switch to Arch. Possibly. Maybe.
ximm
Last time I checked hyprland was pretty much despised in the wider linux developer community. See for example https://drewdevault.com/2023/09/17/Hyprland-toxicity.html. Has anything about that changed?
umbra07
Yes. Hyprland has burnt bridges with many of the classic/pre-existing Linux dev communities. Amongst other things, the main developer was banned from freedesktop.
But they have a very, very large user base, which means lots of contributors - especially young, first-time-FOSS/Linux contributors. In a way, Hyprland has partially done what Linus was hoping to do by adding Rust to the kernel (attract the next-generation of young developers). And they have an active BDFL - no "led by committee" issues.
risho
the linux developer community is not a monolith and drew devault is an extremist activist gatekeeper.
indy
The linux developer community has quite a diverse set of opinions so it would be unfair to say that they despise hyprland. At most it's just a small number of developers who hold such an extreme position.
This article is from June 26th.
The real news is that Omarchy 2.0 has just been released, as well as an Omarchy distribution ISO based on Arch. Installation is fairly quick (~5 minutes on a fresh machine), given you have bandwidth.
https://github.com/basecamp/omarchy/releases/tag/v2.0.0
Here is the updated Omarchy Manual to get a good feel for things: https://learn.omacom.io/2/the-omarchy-manual