Omarchy and Omacom Foundation

This is so unbelievably weird. Just use a real distro led by people who know how to do this, rather than former Mac users who figured out how to share their half-baked dotfiles.

Linux, brought to you by some of the world's most unpleasant people. I like the notion and hope a group of people with souls can put together a similar concept.

Do we really need to promote a Linux distro by the author of this blog post https://world.hey.com/dhh/wolves-sheep-and-gypsies-ba44af6a

As an experiment I've been running Arch + Hyprland (the stack Omarchy is based on) for a number of weeks on a Dell XPS 13 2026 16GB which is now well supported as of kernel 7.2. Good battery life, good screen, decent Linux performance for "normal" everyday tasks. 16GB min. is absolutely required for any fans of a web browser with multiple tabs open.

As a Mac user it would be a difficult transition to do this full time. Getting used to a tiling window manager, which is what Hyprland is, requires some time but for those who become fans of it it's a nice but different way to do things. Configuring Hyprland from scratch does take a number of weeks of initial setup + ongoing little tweaks and assembling the lego pieces one by one as you realize why you need each one (wallpaper mgr, lock mgr, notifications, idle mgr, on-screen volume/brightness display) but when you get there you get a pretty comfortable setup. A bunch of Gnome apps will also need to be installed - newsreader, maps, weather, etc - generally the Gnome apps look better w/ this tiling wm imo compared to KDE apps, and Gnome apps use a thin overlay scrollbar similar to MacOS unlike KDE apps which use a thicker always visible scrollbar. Momentum/kinetic scrolling on Linux desktops is an impossible goal atm - on Hyprland you need to install and configure hypr-kinetic-scroll which helps with a bunch of GTK-based apps, but in some apps either clashes with the built-in scrolling or has no effect depending on the toolkit used. But - a lot of the multimedia apps are based on KDE, so if you need OBS, DaVinci Resolve, VLC, game emulators (Dolphin etc) and a bunch of others, you'll wind up with a Frankensteined setup like it or not. There are also differences in menus, open file dialogs and other aspects not just between Gnome and KDE but also between versions of each (GTK 2 3 4, KDE/Qt 2 3 4 5 6). And you'll find out for ex. that Mathematica uses Qt because you go to open a file and see wut, some old Qt file dialog. Imo the email/calendar/contacts apps are all pretty ugly regardless of which ones you use. LibreOffice is pretty good - on Hyprland it runs using the GTK UI so it blends in well enough.

Of course you won't get the integration with the rest of the Apple stuff - clipboard, messages, contacts, notes. LocalSend works well enough an AirDrop alternative, but for the rest there's no good option.

Who is this Hyprland Linux desktop stuff for:
* Developers - for sure. Great home for dev work, containers, Docker, AI. Especially for refugees from craptacular Windows garbage who are not tied into Apple stuff
* Normal people - nope
* Productivity/multimedia people - can be. Though there are reports of various aspects of video editing that don't work well yet compared to Mac/Windows. But KDE is an easier path, and with a lot of the big multimedia stuff being KDE/Qt, might as well live on KDE
* Gamers - can be. Steam works well here, no real issues. Use Hyprland as a Steam launcher - great

Also - compared to the Linux alternatives, MacOS apps tend to be 2x to 10x or more better than anything Gnome or KDE. For ex. ForkLift, Screens, Things, Fantastical, Reeder, Rogue Amoeba apps, CleanShot, PixelSnap, and most off Apple's own apps and many others are significantly nicer looking, better designed, with significantly more features and settings, not a fair fight in any galaxy. The Gnome apps in particular tend to be extremely bare bones by design with typically very little configurability. A couple of examples - Mac Reeder vs. Gnome's "premier" RSS reader Newsflash. Newsflash looks superficially similar to Reeder but is imo garbage by comparison. Apple Maps vs. Gnome Maps - Gnome Maps is almost 100% useless, aside from being able to zoom into a location. I was completely unable for ex. to search for a McDonald's near the location that was visible onscreen, it only does a some stupid global search that ignores the current selected location. The Gnome Weather app once took 100% of a CPU core so I no longer keep it running. Some KDE apps are a better imitation of some of the apps on Mac because they tend to have more features. But I was unable to find any KDE RSS reader app that wasn't a horrible ugly piece of junk, even worse than Gnome Newsflash. Not putting Linux apps down, just know what you'll find there, and if your work focuses on the terminal rather than nice polished GUI apps you'll be good on Linux.