alt Hacker News>My question for people is whether their objection has to do with Omarchy itself or with the person or people behind it
both because as I said there's no distinction with a project like this, and I'll give you a technical example for this. The manual which I briefly read through says this on the monitor configuration:
"Omarchy assumes you're running on a 2x-capable retina-class display by default[...] It's what you'd want to run on a 27" 5K Apple Studio Display [...] But if you're not running a display with a PPI of 218 or above, you'll want to change the monitor settings ..."
then it proceeds to tell you what config files to edit by hand. Monitors with that PPI have a market share of <2%. This isn't a system for people who want things out of the box, it's his personal dotfiles that people use because they know his name. It's like buying Jordan sneakers and thinking they'll make you great at basketball, it's an influencer product. How many people, given that the appeal is to not read anything, have consulted that part of the manual? If this was a nobody's repo it'd have 10 stars and people would ask why the fonts look like crap.
If you want stuff working out of the box for non-technical people give them an Ubuntu LTS release, not window managers on release version 0.x. maintained by people in a discord
> If you want stuff working out of the box for non-technical people give them an Ubuntu LTS release, not window managers on release version 0.x. maintained by people in a discord
"Technical people" covers a vast variety of people. I can and have configured many different non-mainstream WMs and implemented different bars, and found workarounds to different issues that arise from them, both in wayland and X11. A person can be just as technical as I am and still have no interest nor desire to set that all up, but still want to explore or use the paradigm shift that something like a tiling or scrolling WM offer.
The problem is that these paradigms people find appealing aren't decoupled. You can't just drop it in to your current desktop because the window management is so tightly coupled to the compositor. You can try things like PaperWM, of course, but you don't really get to experience Niri unless you install it, and then figure out how to handle everything else you need in a way that you'd want.
If Omarchy used GNOME or Plasma, there's zero chance it'd have taken off in the same way it has. Yes, it is definitely a case of its virality being tied to an influencer, but it isn't ultimately why someone would stick with it. It gets rid of a lot of the gatekeeping that exists. Anyone that can install a linux distro can install Omarchy and get a fully functional system. That is something we need more of, not less.