DHH made an Arch distro. Let that sink in for a second. The guy who brought us Ruby on Rails and Hot Takes™ decided that Arch Linux, the notoriously DIY distribution, needed an opinionated makeover. The result is Omarchy, and honestly, it’s kind of brilliant.
The Premise
Arch Linux is great if you like making decisions. Hundreds of them. What init system? Which display manager? Desktop environment or window manager? Every choice is yours to make, which is either liberating or exhausting depending on your caffeine levels.
DHH looked at this and thought “what if we just made all the decisions for you?” Not in a hand-holding Ubuntu way, but in a “these are the objectively correct choices” way that only DHH can pull off.
What You Get
Omarchy ships with Hyprland, a tiling window manager that’s honestly gorgeous. Not in a “technically impressive” way, but genuinely pretty. Smooth animations, translucent windows, gaps between tiles that actually look intentional. It’s Wayland-based, which means everything feels fluid in a way X11 never quite managed.
The Aesthetics Matter
This is what got me interested. Most Linux setups are either ugly and functional or pretty and broken. Omarchy is both functional and actually pleasant to look at. The color schemes work together. The fonts are readable. The window decorations don’t look like they’re from 2003.
It’s weird to care about how your terminal looks, but here we are. When you’re staring at code for eight hours, having things look nice isn’t shallow, it’s self-care. The whole setup has this cohesive design language that feels intentional. Someone actually thought about how things would look together instead of just cobbling together whatever packages were popular on Reddit that week.
What’s Actually Included
Git, Docker, Obsidian for notes, OBS Studio for screen recording. The usual developer stuff. It also ships with LibreOffice, which I wasn’t expecting but makes sense if you ever need to open a document like a normal person.
The package selection feels curated rather than comprehensive. It’s not trying to be everything to everyone. It’s trying to be a good starting point that you can build on.
The Philosophy
The whole point is to skip the setup phase and get to the actual work. Arch users will tell you that the setup is part of the fun, and they’re not wrong. But sometimes you just want a working system without spending three days reading the wiki.
Omarchy is still Arch under the hood, so you get the rolling release model, the AUR, and all the documentation. You can still customize everything. It’s just that the defaults are actually usable instead of nonexistent.
Is It For You?
If you’re the kind of person who wants to rice their desktop and spend hours tweaking i3 configs, probably not. If you want Arch but don’t want to spend a weekend setting it up, maybe.
Either way, it’s nice to see someone making Linux setups that don’t require a PhD in system administration. Even if that someone is DHH.
You can check it out at https://omarchy.org if you’re curious. Just don’t blame me if you end up down the tiling window manager rabbit hole.