Omarchy

Okay, I’ll admit it: I love the ambitiousness of 37Signals rolling their own Arch-based Linux distro (called Omarchy) and the obvious enthusiasm DHH has for the project. The minimalist distro has now reached what they are calling 2.0 and DHH made another demo video of himself geeking out over the capabilities.

I think the Omarchy feature that I find most endearing is its tight coupling of the OS and its apps with the theming mechanism. They even created a micro-fork of the Chromium browser to add more integrated theme capabilities. In the aughts, I used to love the Windows theming scene, but it seemed like there were always pieces of the OS or installed apps that didn’t have the OS skin applied and it kind of spoiled the whole experience. It seems 37Signals is trying its level best to prevent such inconsistencies with Omarchy, and the result (at least in the videos) appears to be a consistent look and feel across the OS and supporting apps.

Omarchy is geared towards developers, and it shows in the kinds of apps and capabilities that are being promoted. The first application listed in the manual is Neovim, and it seems no one loves a screen full of system stats and monitors like software developers, so there are apps like Fastfetch to give you granular details into your rig’s resource usage. The interface is highly keyboard-driven and largely text-based. It certainly has a distinct look, and you’re not going to confuse it with any of the commercial operating systems.

If you are into tinkering and visually and functionally different computing paradigms, this OS looks like it may be something fun to play around with. Or, if you want a more traditional OS, you could just theme macOS to look like Linux.