The real news is that Omarchy 2.0 has just been released, as well as an Omarchy distribution ISO based on Arch. Installation is fairly quick (~5 minutes on a fresh machine), given you have bandwidth.
Setting the `download` property on all of your screenshot image anchors is a very odd choice: not only does it make it very difficult to view the images quickly & easily in-browser, it also clogs up my Downloads directory with things I don't intend to keep.
Not only that, but it goes beyond client-side measure: someone has gone to the extra trouble of also setting `content-disposition: attachment` on each of the image HTTP response headers to make absolutely sure they can't be viewed easily in browser, even with workarounds.
Ah... that makes sense. I hadn't heard of Hey before but it appears Hey World is a pretty newly added feature to a platform primarily built for & around email - attachments do make some deal of sense in that context, though I'd imagine I might still like to browse image attachments in my email client from time to time rather than stash them in downloads.
Might just be teething issues for a new product though.
I might be in the minority but I actually like overlapping windows - often the entire window is not necessary to get the data I am interested in. Right now I'm running tests in another window and I have a sliver of that window visible while the majority of the screen real-estate gets used for the browser in primary window.
I'm beginning to really like scrolling window managers.
It's optimized for minimal splits (let's say 2-3 windows) per view but it makes it effortless to flip between apps. Floating windows is also an option and making any of them full screen is available too.
Imagine tiling a bunch of pieces of paper on your floor and now you want to focus on a few of them at a time. That's basically what a scrolling window manager allows, you can either swipe on a touchpad, hit the arrow keys or use your mouse wheel to cycle between stuff. Of course you can customize these, that's just a reasonable default.
It's so much faster than manually dealing with workspaces IMO.
I'm currently taking a look into both Hyprland's scrolling plugins and if that fails then Niri. I wish Hyprland's official scrolling plugin was not in an alpha state. I want to stick with Hyprland because everything else about it is really nice.
All of this stuff works independent of Omarchy too since it's 100% related to your window manager.
I recall being able to set FVWM2 desktop size larger than the screen size. Some people went really large with this, but I found it way too easy to lose track of windows. I’m curious as to how these new window managers are different.
I'm not a big fan of "workspaces" but I do love tiling WM with multiple screens.
My desktop at home is Ubuntu + i3 but I keep experimenting on my laptop with different WM. It's currently running Regolith but I'm probably going to try Omarchy 2.0...2.1 maybe? Let it simmer a little.
I saw a scrolling WM video recently and _loved_ what I saw, just too busy to set it up right now. Lots of potential there.
(CMD|CTRL)+TAB is all I usually all I need. I know this may sound wasteful considering that I have two eyes, but I have only ever been able to focus my eyes on a single thing at a time. I usually make the window take up the full window, and I just switch between windows. It is fast to do this. I tried multi-monitors, but it wasn't for me.
Same here, multiple monitors, overlapping windows has never worked for me. I don't need big monitors for the same reason. I also make sure to keep the number of things I have open to a minimum. Then simply tabbing or using a tiling manager like i3 (without using actual tiling) (they are just faster than running full desktops). It also means I can be productive with any setup anywhere e.g. a laptop
I tried Omarchy for a bit. It's a nice setup and DHH made some good choices, but I'm right there with you.
Most often, I use maximized windows for the things I'm actively working on and floating windows for something like popping over to a file manager for a quick operation. In Hyprland, this often meant using separate workspaces for the main apps I always have open and workspace switching is more effort than alt+tab. I'm also a heavy user of hotkeys for my most frequent apps. They are set up to focus or launch the app.
I ended up gaining little to nothing from the Hyprland setup that I didn't already have or could easily implement in Plasma so I went back after several days. I was also having weird problems launching some games in Steam. In particular, Balatro wouldn't launch under Hyprland even though it works fine under Plasma/Wayland. I spent some time troubleshooting to no avail before deciding it just wasn't worth it.
I did get some new ideas from Omarchy though. I never thought to set up xcompose before. I also like what DHH did with PWAs.
In any case, I like what DHH is doing because it's making people try Linux when they otherwise may not have. What's especially cool is he's proving that you don't need to dumb things down, which is exactly what everyone else has tried to do all these years. Omarchy is 100% a power user setup and does an awesome job of showing what Linux is capable of while still being very accessible to newcomers.
I have all my windows centered but pyramid stacked. I can see a bit of everything but my main browser is in the center. Slack is in the upper right, and the browser leaves a bit of the Slack screen open. I keep Obsidian in the lower left such that I can see the organization panel.. it helps me keep a mental map of the notes I'm working with.
In the center are two Chrome browsers representing two separate profiles.. a personal profile for some flows, and a work profile for others. Again, stacked so that I can see most of the tabs.
I've never dared to dream that I could combine this habit with some Hyprland-style "spontaneous windows launched by keybinds". I'd love that. A prime stack of core windows and an omega stack of ephemeral windows.
When I have multiple screens I also tend to stack one above the other, as opposed to left and right.
You’re not alone. I can’t make full-time tiling or even tiling-dominant work for me. With how my mind works, full floating 98% of the time with the occasional tile is the right blend. I tile so infrequently that tiling being keybound has net zero impact.
Majority of time I only have 2-4 apps open: terminal/IDE, browser, music player and some IM. Floating windows seems like a waste of space. Browser is full-screen on any regular proportion screen (i.e. not ultra-wide).
I rarely use floating windows, even on windowed-WMs.
What I really want, but don't have the technical skill to write unfortunately:), is a window manager or compositor that lets me set the size of a window and the viewport into that window independently. That is, formalize the approach that yes this window is rendering as if it was taking up half the screen but I only need to actually see this tiny slice of it, so just give me a window that shows that piece
This should be possible on X11 using standard extensions. XCompositeRedirectWindow to render your window to a virtual buffer, get pixmap, bind pixmap to new croppedWindow as a GL texture, here apply a crop transform. Then optionally unmap original window. Finally, we have to remap input events. This is trivial browser-style event interception, XSelectInput, change x,y, XSendEvent. I can try to make it work sometime this week. A CLI tool you'd use like `xcropwindow windowID x y dx dy`. As a side effect, this way you can have multiple viewports into different parts of a window. But there's probably a few deal-breaker edge cases I'm missing.
On the other hand, the Great Wayland Security Theater probably doesn't admit such riff-raff.
I sometimes do this as well. Most tiling wms do support overlapping windows thouhg it isn't the default. But then many regular window managers will support placement of windows in various splits manually with a keypress or two so in reality the wins for tiling wms are very small in normal use. I think you have to have a crazy rate of opening and closing windows to benefit from automatic tiling which doesn't fit with my actual usage outside the terminal where I use a terminal specific tiling.
Several times I have tried to move to scrolling as I like it a lot more than tiling.
My only problem with tiling is that I usually have 2-3 apps tiled that are stable and a “gap” where I quickly pop things I only need momentarily (slack, an extra terminal, postman, whatever). I never managed that quick readjustment in tiling managers, maybe it was just lack of practice.
Also some seemed to interact badly with software that brought pop up windows/dialogs.
I don't think you're in the minority (I also prefer floating windows), it's just that as the default style of window management there's not much to say on the topic. So people don't bother.
The real story with Omarchy is Hyprland. Feels like the first time the desktop Linux is not only fun but that there's a far better case being made for switching to desktop Linux over Windows, not only because of less resource usage, but also a new (old) paradigm in tiling windows, repackaged in a way that doesn't make people want to smash their computer.
Hyprland itself comes with such nice defaults that it isn't surprising at all that it's getting as much attention as it is, for better or worse.
I can absolutely echo your sentiment. I recently released some software which has Wayland support. Immediately, I got some bug reports from Hyprland users so I setup a partition with EndeavourOS + Hyprland to work out the issues. I was pleasantly surprised to find that, as you said, the defaults are nice. Configuring it was a breeze as well. Now about 2 weeks later I am daily driving the system I setup for testing and am working to switch fully to it from macOS.
Windows still has advantages for certain use cases, as much as I want to like Hyprland for everything.
For example, imagine this screencast recording set up:
- You have a 4k monitor
- You only want to record a 1920x1080 section of your screen (OBS can do this in both set ups)
- You only want certain windows to appear in that 1920x1080 zone
- You want other adhoc windows (notepad, etc.) floating around that recording zone
- You want to easily be able to pick and flip between the apps in that 1920x1080 zone
On Windows this is quite possible and requires almost nothing to be done. You could install a tool like Sizer to resize and position windows into a specific spot and just drag / drop everything else around as needed. You could also optimize things with AHK to make it easier to only open apps in that zone.
With Hyprland this isn't as easy to pull off. A maintainer mentioned to me that I'd likely have to write a Hyprland plugin which would be C++. I'm not a C++ developer though.
I guess you could probably make a workable but not as good solution by hyprctl dispatching commands in a shell script to position specific windows into the zone and then have a notepad like app dedicated to always floating, but when you record hundreds of videos you want an optimized solution to the highest degree.
In Hyprland's defense I've only been using it for a few days but I saw nothing in their docs or the internet that would indicate there's features built into the tool to make this less painful.
If I could find a solution for this, I'd install it on my main machine.
I haven’t the tried Hyprland, but I use i3, which I assume it should be similar. I do this sort of thing quite often when presenting on zoom at work. Suppose I want to present only the top-left section of my screen, then I split vertically first and the left side I split horizontally. This other 2 zones I use to put other supporting windows and to search stuff out of screen. When I need to present more apps, i3 also allow you to stack windows in a specific zone. It’s quite easy to switch between all the windows and have full control of the layout.
I'm probably not thinking about your use case the same way you are, but it seems like you could run a nested hyprland session in a 1920x1080 window and screenshare just the nested hyprland window. Run the apps you want to share inside that nested hyprland session.
I don't know of any reason that wouldn't work, but I haven't tried it so I'm not certain it would.
That's... surprising. GNOME and Nix has very contrasting philosophies.
Anyways, Hyprland is primarily driven by the Arch side of things, considering that:
* there are way more Arch users than Nix users
* Arch is much more trendy amongst non-developer/Linux users.
* Arch is easier to setup and use - less friction
* Arch is more popular in the unixporn reddit/YouTube world, which is where Hyprland gained much of its popularity
* the Hyprland developer uses Arch, and has recently started selling customized dot files, advertised as "supported on Arch- based and Fedora distributions."
Nix users are simply not a driving force in the Linux userland world.
yes as an hyprland user, the community is definitely more vocal. I myself convinced one of my friends to use hyprland fedora as his first linux experience which is wild
(I also use nixos too but I use nix plasma and arch hyprland, i mean I barely use nix, arch is my goto but you get my point)
I agree it has buzz but its just cool open source software man, I like it. it isn't as plug n play even still as plasma or gnome for example but that's the point. Makes for a really good minimalist system but for me somethings don't usually work that "just" work on other desktop environments but I learnt a lot and now its a really enjoyable experience.
One example I can give of where I really had a big issue with hyprland was consistent schema around every application. I think its still broken on my system for qt apps which I had fixed but then broke again I think, but I now don't have the time to fix it and its a minor inconvenience at best. nothing wrong to hyprland, that's just fundamentally how it works if you try hyprland like me.
Omarchy seems to be promising the premise of hyprland with "it just works"
Maybe if my arch system bricks, I will give omarchy a try. Untill then, I am happy with my theme and hyprland. Its cool. Dhh is also cool for making omarchy tbh.
Is Hyperland the thing that finally convinces hacker types that Wayland is the future? A Wayland compositor that gives you Xorg like scripting via a UNIX control socket, easy to set up, and is much much less opinionated than GNOME.
So many of the criticisms of Wayland around the internet end up being things that Mutter doesn't let you control directly.
Hyperland is one part (it's amazing), but the other is a distro embracing the keyboard 100% and not treating it as an option where I need to think about how to set it up.
The only problem I have is that I bought a new beelink Pro9, put Omarchy on it and Hyperland locks up every day, and I don't know if it’s only me or not.
> I don't know when we'll literally get "The Year of Linux on the Desktop"
Not for as long as we keep telling people that the best software is like this:
> Because I do think that Hyprland deserves its reputation of being difficult! Not because the core tiling window manager is hard, but because it comes incredibly bare-boned in the box. You have to figure out everything yourself. Even how to get a lock screen or idle timing or a menu bar or bluetooth setting or... you get the idea.
My mom just bought a replacement Windows laptop, and even that needs some gentle prodding before it can be used by a regular human person - and that's only gentle because we told her that she should buy the Professional version of Windows, and not the adware-riddled Home one.
I guess as long as we assume that the Year of Linux on the Desktop has arrived when a slightly higher percentage of nerds who are happy to endlessly tinker with settings adopts it as their daily driver, then sure. It's any day now.
There's also Omikub or any of the other "user friendly" distros.
Hyprland is definitely a power user environment. And I think that's okay.
There have been great "user friendly" distros for decades, and in the last 5-10 years they've gotten very good, but I think everybody is a little surprised to find that the thing that is actually drawing thousands of new linux desktop users is hyprland, an awesome tiling window experience, and ricing.
>she should buy the Professional version of Windows, and not the adware-riddled Home one
Interesting and disappointing. When I googled the difference between the two versions I only came up with the fact that one supported disk encryption (which I didn't really feel was necessary for a desktop)
I would have loved a stripped down install of windows without all the bloat, but the only option I knew of was the LTSC version which is supposedly janky for gaming
When he saw issues with the Apple ecosystem, decides to make useful, well thought-out tooling for helping developers adopt Linux. When he saw how expensive the cloud can be, goes on to build open source tooling for deploying on bare-metal servers. Both have been successful.
Not just blog posts. Blog posts followed by hard work to fix the problem.
It's worth noting that some of it may be inspired by some of the spats he's had with Apple over the years that aren't really related to their desktop operating system. A couple that come to mind is the fact that his wife wasn't approved for an Apple credit card, and the difficulty he had in getting the Hey app approved in the App Store. (Of course, it could be that once Apple lost its "shine" for him he became more critical of other products in a way that tribe-members won't)
I don't know DHH personally, but seeing what he did by introducing ruby on rails, plus listening to his thoughts via the rework podcast, also reading about his company's move away from the hyperscaler cloud providers, and now both the omakube and omarchy offerings...yeah, we need more folks (with his kind of fame of sorts) to help others as well.
I just watched the Rails 8 presentation, and was tremendously impressed. It made me wish I was a Rails dev. The philosophy of a framework designed for a lone developer to deploy extremely quickly is very cool.
I've actually searched quite a bit on how to disable it and can't find anything (partially because there aren't great search terms for it), if you've got a clue I would love to hear it but I assure you it is not obvious.
Readit News
The real news is that Omarchy 2.0 has just been released, as well as an Omarchy distribution ISO based on Arch. Installation is fairly quick (~5 minutes on a fresh machine), given you have bandwidth.
https://github.com/basecamp/omarchy/releases/tag/v2.0.0
Here is the updated Omarchy Manual to get a good feel for things: https://learn.omacom.io/2/the-omarchy-manual
Deleted Comment
Setting the `download` property on all of your screenshot image anchors is a very odd choice: not only does it make it very difficult to view the images quickly & easily in-browser, it also clogs up my Downloads directory with things I don't intend to keep.
Not only that, but it goes beyond client-side measure: someone has gone to the extra trouble of also setting `content-disposition: attachment` on each of the image HTTP response headers to make absolutely sure they can't be viewed easily in browser, even with workarounds.
But if you trim off the `?disposition=attachment` from the URL, it loads in the browser. At least for me in Firefox.
Might just be teething issues for a new product though.
It's optimized for minimal splits (let's say 2-3 windows) per view but it makes it effortless to flip between apps. Floating windows is also an option and making any of them full screen is available too.
Imagine tiling a bunch of pieces of paper on your floor and now you want to focus on a few of them at a time. That's basically what a scrolling window manager allows, you can either swipe on a touchpad, hit the arrow keys or use your mouse wheel to cycle between stuff. Of course you can customize these, that's just a reasonable default.
It's so much faster than manually dealing with workspaces IMO.
I'm currently taking a look into both Hyprland's scrolling plugins and if that fails then Niri. I wish Hyprland's official scrolling plugin was not in an alpha state. I want to stick with Hyprland because everything else about it is really nice.
All of this stuff works independent of Omarchy too since it's 100% related to your window manager.
Here's a video demo: https://youtu.be/r0JUm77inIA?t=319
[Note: I'm not the author of the video but I jumped to a timestamp where he's showing Niri's scrolling features]
https://github.com/dawsers/scrollhttps://github.com/dawsers/hyprscroller
What's your favorite? Right now I'm on xfce and KDE as my daily drivers but I'll shop around next time I wanna shake things up
I'm not a big fan of "workspaces" but I do love tiling WM with multiple screens.
My desktop at home is Ubuntu + i3 but I keep experimenting on my laptop with different WM. It's currently running Regolith but I'm probably going to try Omarchy 2.0...2.1 maybe? Let it simmer a little.
I saw a scrolling WM video recently and _loved_ what I saw, just too busy to set it up right now. Lots of potential there.
Most often, I use maximized windows for the things I'm actively working on and floating windows for something like popping over to a file manager for a quick operation. In Hyprland, this often meant using separate workspaces for the main apps I always have open and workspace switching is more effort than alt+tab. I'm also a heavy user of hotkeys for my most frequent apps. They are set up to focus or launch the app.
I ended up gaining little to nothing from the Hyprland setup that I didn't already have or could easily implement in Plasma so I went back after several days. I was also having weird problems launching some games in Steam. In particular, Balatro wouldn't launch under Hyprland even though it works fine under Plasma/Wayland. I spent some time troubleshooting to no avail before deciding it just wasn't worth it.
I did get some new ideas from Omarchy though. I never thought to set up xcompose before. I also like what DHH did with PWAs.
In any case, I like what DHH is doing because it's making people try Linux when they otherwise may not have. What's especially cool is he's proving that you don't need to dumb things down, which is exactly what everyone else has tried to do all these years. Omarchy is 100% a power user setup and does an awesome job of showing what Linux is capable of while still being very accessible to newcomers.
In the center are two Chrome browsers representing two separate profiles.. a personal profile for some flows, and a work profile for others. Again, stacked so that I can see most of the tabs.
I've never dared to dream that I could combine this habit with some Hyprland-style "spontaneous windows launched by keybinds". I'd love that. A prime stack of core windows and an omega stack of ephemeral windows.
When I have multiple screens I also tend to stack one above the other, as opposed to left and right.
Corner case all the way.
Deleted Comment
I rarely use floating windows, even on windowed-WMs.
On the other hand, the Great Wayland Security Theater probably doesn't admit such riff-raff.
https://github.com/dawsers/scroll?tab=readme-ov-file#content...
Several times I have tried to move to scrolling as I like it a lot more than tiling.
Also some seemed to interact badly with software that brought pop up windows/dialogs.
Deleted Comment
Hyprland itself comes with such nice defaults that it isn't surprising at all that it's getting as much attention as it is, for better or worse.
For example, imagine this screencast recording set up:
On Windows this is quite possible and requires almost nothing to be done. You could install a tool like Sizer to resize and position windows into a specific spot and just drag / drop everything else around as needed. You could also optimize things with AHK to make it easier to only open apps in that zone.With Hyprland this isn't as easy to pull off. A maintainer mentioned to me that I'd likely have to write a Hyprland plugin which would be C++. I'm not a C++ developer though.
I guess you could probably make a workable but not as good solution by hyprctl dispatching commands in a shell script to position specific windows into the zone and then have a notepad like app dedicated to always floating, but when you record hundreds of videos you want an optimized solution to the highest degree.
In Hyprland's defense I've only been using it for a few days but I saw nothing in their docs or the internet that would indicate there's features built into the tool to make this less painful.
If I could find a solution for this, I'd install it on my main machine.
I don't know of any reason that wouldn't work, but I haven't tried it so I'm not certain it would.
Now it could just be that Hyprland users are more vocal than XFCE or plasma users, so it's not definitive, but it definitely has "buzz"
Anyways, Hyprland is primarily driven by the Arch side of things, considering that:
* there are way more Arch users than Nix users
* Arch is much more trendy amongst non-developer/Linux users.
* Arch is easier to setup and use - less friction
* Arch is more popular in the unixporn reddit/YouTube world, which is where Hyprland gained much of its popularity
* the Hyprland developer uses Arch, and has recently started selling customized dot files, advertised as "supported on Arch- based and Fedora distributions."
Nix users are simply not a driving force in the Linux userland world.
(I also use nixos too but I use nix plasma and arch hyprland, i mean I barely use nix, arch is my goto but you get my point)
I agree it has buzz but its just cool open source software man, I like it. it isn't as plug n play even still as plasma or gnome for example but that's the point. Makes for a really good minimalist system but for me somethings don't usually work that "just" work on other desktop environments but I learnt a lot and now its a really enjoyable experience.
One example I can give of where I really had a big issue with hyprland was consistent schema around every application. I think its still broken on my system for qt apps which I had fixed but then broke again I think, but I now don't have the time to fix it and its a minor inconvenience at best. nothing wrong to hyprland, that's just fundamentally how it works if you try hyprland like me.
Omarchy seems to be promising the premise of hyprland with "it just works" Maybe if my arch system bricks, I will give omarchy a try. Untill then, I am happy with my theme and hyprland. Its cool. Dhh is also cool for making omarchy tbh.
Deleted Comment
So many of the criticisms of Wayland around the internet end up being things that Mutter doesn't let you control directly.
The only problem I have is that I bought a new beelink Pro9, put Omarchy on it and Hyperland locks up every day, and I don't know if it’s only me or not.
Not for as long as we keep telling people that the best software is like this:
> Because I do think that Hyprland deserves its reputation of being difficult! Not because the core tiling window manager is hard, but because it comes incredibly bare-boned in the box. You have to figure out everything yourself. Even how to get a lock screen or idle timing or a menu bar or bluetooth setting or... you get the idea.
My mom just bought a replacement Windows laptop, and even that needs some gentle prodding before it can be used by a regular human person - and that's only gentle because we told her that she should buy the Professional version of Windows, and not the adware-riddled Home one.
I guess as long as we assume that the Year of Linux on the Desktop has arrived when a slightly higher percentage of nerds who are happy to endlessly tinker with settings adopts it as their daily driver, then sure. It's any day now.
Hyprland is definitely a power user environment. And I think that's okay.
There have been great "user friendly" distros for decades, and in the last 5-10 years they've gotten very good, but I think everybody is a little surprised to find that the thing that is actually drawing thousands of new linux desktop users is hyprland, an awesome tiling window experience, and ricing.
Steam goes a long way too
Interesting and disappointing. When I googled the difference between the two versions I only came up with the fact that one supported disk encryption (which I didn't really feel was necessary for a desktop)
I would have loved a stripped down install of windows without all the bloat, but the only option I knew of was the LTSC version which is supposedly janky for gaming
When he saw issues with the Apple ecosystem, decides to make useful, well thought-out tooling for helping developers adopt Linux. When he saw how expensive the cloud can be, goes on to build open source tooling for deploying on bare-metal servers. Both have been successful.
Not just blog posts. Blog posts followed by hard work to fix the problem.
However he seems to have the ability to build movements, and I don't know why.
Dead Comment
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Plymouth
Which with ChatGpt/Grok is trivial these days for even a non linux native.