Sayonara Omarchy

I was a relatively early adopter of Omarchy over a year ago. When I installed it I was struck by how thoughtful it was in its UI. While not something I would have recommended to my family, I did find it great as a programming environment, with everything a keyboard shortcut away. The general criticisms at the time were ones that I thought I could live with. Esentially, the complaints were:

1. Omarchy was glossy bloatware, skinned to look pretty but hiding a series of inefficiencies.
2. DHH was a loudmouth who espoused problematic views.

As time has gone on, and I looked into it more, I realized that these two things were more problematic than I initially thought.

Omarchy is glossy bloatware

I’ll be honest, I really didn’t think this one was that bad at first. As a person who always spent several days configuring and tweaking my Linux installs, configuring the catppuccin color theme on everything, and then getting my particular nerdfont cascaded across all the necessary apps, it felt nice to have that stuff all configured. And then there were the sensible menus and the config scripts that made Omarchy feel like it was coherent and nice to use.

Sure, DHH put his own webapps on there by default, but it’s his install, so that made sense, even if I didn’t care for it.

I also found it odd that he kept referring to Omarchy as a distribution, when it was definitely on the low-end of what a distribution is, compared to what you see from organizations like Canonical, Debian, or Red Hat. I chalked it up to DHH being a marketing guy, and genuinely enthusiastic about what he had built.

However, cracks started appearing almost immediately. Every upgrade felt like it broke the system configs. Small tweaks that used to be easy now had cascading impacts across applications. These things kept piling on, and the forum suggestions on how to fix felt like they got more and more convoluted, not less, with every release.

What I slowly realized is that with each successive iteration, the install base was getting more and more vibe coded. After watching his unhinged keynote speech at Rails World 2026 I realized that what I thought were growing pains of a heavily riced Arch install were actually the ever weakening foundations of a perpetually vibe coded stack. The hyper focus on initial install time, for example, is a fixation on things that don’t matter to a day-to-day user seeking a stable experience. And then there was the hissy fit around whether to build Omarchy around NixOS or Arch. It became apparent that stability was not a goal of the project and that the general belief of the team was that you could vibe code your way out of any problems. It also became clear that DHH didn’t welcome other opinions on the path forward. Any criticisms were hand waved away and dismissed outright. This seemed very strange coming from a person who was previously a web developer and was now operating right above the hardware on an OS “distribution”.

I finally hit my breaking point on this one and had to make a change.

DHH is a loudmouth who has problematic views.

I’ll be honest, it’s getting a little hard to keep track of who’s an ally and who’s not these days. The dumbest views keep popping up in the oddest places. I really do want to put time and support around projects that generally uplift people of all types and move society forward. I really hope I don’t get too much flak from the internet when I confess that I really didn’t know how bad DHH’s takes were. This is an area where even a cursory level of research would have shown that by the time Omarchy came about, the wrting was already on the wall that this was a project that really didn’t deserve my consideration.

I knew about the Basecamp team implosion from a few years ago and definitely didn’t like it. But I have to admit my business executive bias is showing on this one. Running a company is hard, and there are plenty of times where you can have the best intentions and end up with a bad decision that you are essentially stuck with. My (very wrong) reading between the lines on this one was that the execs at Basecamp had reacted too slowly to a serious issue because key employees were at the center of it. Then they tried to fix the problem and ham-fisted the response, got called out for it by their employees, and then got stuck in a doom loop where they felt that most responses were going to be “too little, too late”. While I disagreed with DHH’s actions, and definitely sided with the employees who quit, I also wasn’t ready to attribute the actions of DHH and Fried to explicit racism, as they appeared to stem more from cluelessness and spinelessness in the face of criticisms.

Unfortunately, I got this entirely wrong and if I had spent more than five minutes thinking about it, I would have realized it. Since the Basecamp incident, DHH has gone on to have a series of blog posts, interviews, X posts and just about every other conceivable means of communication, where he always doubles down on his mysoginistic and racist views. He’s shown a complete disdain for anyone who doesn’t agree with him on these stances and then goes home to cry about culture warriors who are out to get him. It’s typical “Blame the Victim” gaslighting, and he deserves to be called out for it. I’m just really ashamed that I got there later than I should have.

Where does this leave me?

I’ve uninstalled Omarchy and Hyprland along with it. There were a few things that I really liked about the distribution that I decided to take with me. For example:

• I decided that the keybindings for Web App and Package management were really useful, and I build a fuzzel and gum wrapper around that idea.

• I also took forward the idea that I can automate most of my customizations in my own “distribution”. This should make it more efficient to install in the future. I’ve started creating some build scripts to automate most of these installs and customizations that I need.

My search for a Hyprland replacement led me to niri and noctalia, which are gorgeous and super-useful. And my start-from-scratch mentality led me back to Debian as the distribution to build on top of. It’s blend of cutting-edge features, wide application compatibility, and rock-solid core stability are really rewarding to use after coming from Arch.

The best part of this is that the new setup is better than Omarchy for me, and it’s been eye-opening to realize how much of the Omarchy stack is not some glorious DHH customization at all. It’s just some independent, open-source solutions that are ready to be customized and strung together to get you exactly what you need. On the back-end of doing my custom configuration, I’ve realized it’s true: Omarchy IS just some glorified config files on top of Arch.

I think the thing that is most surprising about all of this is how quickly you can move away from Omarchy, without any pain at all. From start to finish, from deciding that I wanted to customize my install and config, and getting all the pieces I cared about locked into bash scripts, config files, etc. was two weeks, with a week of travel in between that where I wasn’t working on it all. All told, I probably spent 8 hours getting everything set up the first time. Subsequent installs will be down to an hour or two. DHH will haughtily proclaim that he can install Omarchy in under 5 minutes. I would respond that I don’t have an $18mm foundation helping me do my optimizations, and I don’t particularly care because I’m only doing the install once for each machine. I’ll chalk that extra hour up to the tax I have to pay for not supporting an asshole.