I just switched over to it from Ubuntu. So far the nice thing is that it gives you a fully decked out hyprland setup without any of the hassle and pretty good UX.

The problem I've always had with trying out a tiling window manager like hyprland is you're going to spend a very long time trying to get everything just right. With Omarchy I get a really nice hyprland setup right out of the box.

Well the whole point is to have a good foundation and then make it actually yours, and the only necessary key binds are probably SUPER+K for the key bind cheatsheet and SUPER+SPACE for the menu.

Also the community is large so there's usually someone that has already had your issue and resolved it. The amount of themes and plugins are growing everyday.

A bare arch+hyprland install really feels terrible to use and has a much larger barrier to entry than Omarchy.

https://plugins.omarchy.org

https://omarchythemes.com

There's definitely appeal in key-driven window managers in general. Projects like i3 and Niri are popular. But you can get that with any Linux distro (albeit not many have it set up that way by default). You don't generally choose a distro just for whatever DE/WM it happens to start with.

What I don't get is that VS Code has solved this perfectly via the command palette - you just bring up the prompt and start typing and it will find you the command you actually need without having to memorize anything.

That is the appeal. It's an opinionated distro designed around keyboard navigation.

I got here because it was the first time I saw a tiling window manager on an Omarchy video. I was on windows my entire life, so when i saw it and how bad windows got, I decided to give it a try. A few months since I de-omarchyfied the system and went straight back to arch. And now still on it.

I should have gone with something like cachyos as games are important to me, but I think at the time hyperland wasn't an option (i don't remember). I know it is now.

There's a segment of people who are into customizing their desktop environment as a hobby and end in itself.

Personally I've never really been into it, and these days I have a broad and revolving set of machines I have to use, so this sort of thing is absolutely not worth the bother. I just install KDE Plasma and use the computer.

On average, you can either have a discoverable GUI for noobs, or a configurable, keyboard driven system that's a giant pain to learn and configure.

Omarchy aims to find a middle ground between those two.

Then it's not for you, or you can't vision how 5 minutes of learning can save you hours of future time.

Having to know like 5 keybinds and no taskbar is absolutely the point and it's a beautiful concept of how to use your computer. And it works, if you are open to relearning just a bit.

Being hyprland keybinding skilled removes a lot of the desktop interaction surface, it's a worthwhile investment. People who've used tiling window managers for a while will tell you that it gets natural at a point, then a whole class of friction that normal WMs cause just goes away.

I recently customized my own Bazzite install to use hyprland plus other customizations, there's really not much different than what omarchy did. It's pretty much that with some pre installed apps. Anyone that gave them funding is an idiot IMO.

We had people salivating over a spinning Compiz 3D cube 20 years ago, and some still don't understand the ricing factor.

I for one hold out for them releasing an optimized XFCE variant - don't by any means dislike keyboard driven software but I like it as an extension of a regular functional UI experience not as a "argh the windows are stuck in xyz pattern until I re-remember xyz combo"-experience: the UI surface is not the speed limit in my optics, rather it is the apps I use or (increasingly due to local AI) the computational hardware limits of my machine.

> I saw a couple video demos recently, and was horrified that it seemed one had to memorize a dozen key binding shortcuts to really use it.

Whoa! You have to _learn_ something to use it well? Yikes. Not for me.