Omarchy

I made the jump to Linux in 2019, and I've been using it regularly ever since.
I must admit that distro hopping is fun. I've done my fair share of it in the past. I've tried Ubuntu, Arch, Manjaro, Mabox, and Debian for extended periods, and many more just briefly.
This year I spent my August holidays at home with my wife to save money, because we are building a house. It was one of those summer days: between a bike ride and a homemade ghiacciolo, I stumbled upon an Omarchy post on Reddit. After a quick read through the manual, I decided to give it a try out of curiosity.

The premise is intriguing.
The homepage describes it as "an opinionated Linux distro". Basically, you get a ready-to-use Arch-based distro with plenty of customization already in place, some easy-to-use scripts to install optional packages only when you actually want them, and the freedom of Linux to customize it even further!
The look is very clean and cohesive, with Hyprland as the preconfigured tiling WM and a theming system that you can easily extend to almost any package with just a .toml file and a symlink.
Building a desktop like this by myself from bare-bones Arch would be a full-time job (and I would probably never get around to it LOL).

The installation was smooth.
Just a handful of questions (keyboard layout, username, password, and single or dual boot) and less than a minute of waiting.
The ISO was pretty big (~5 GB), but it doesn't require an internet connection during installation, so I find it appropriate.
I don't understand why installation wizards on other distros are often so much more confusing, especially during the partitioning, where you're asked a ton of questions.
Well, actually I know why.
Omarchy asks fewer questions because it makes most of the choices for you. But that's a fair trade, because if I want a particularly intricate disk setup, I can use the advanced options. For most users, though, the installer should simply present the most common setup options.
Once you're in, that's pretty much it. You can start browsing and playing around because all the drivers work out of the box. In 2026, this is no longer unusual even on smaller distros, but it's still surprising to find this level of polish in such a young project.

After installing it, I spent a couple of weeks reading all the documentation, the design philosophy, and tweaking the system to fit my preferences.
The main things I wanted to change were the Hyprland keybindings, since I'm already used to my custom ones from dwm.
Then I had to deal with the "LazyVim situation". Neovim is the default Omarchy editor, and it comes heavily customized. Since I'm used to a quasi-vanilla Vim setup, I had to disable the autocompletion, autopairs, and autothings plugins that threw my workflow off.
I added my dotfiles, yazi, and Lite XL to complete the recipe.
All these changes were straightforward, and the new apps picked up the system theme with very little effort.

A core (marketing?) feature of Omarchy is that it provides several AI agents that you can install if you want, letting you choose which ones you prefer to use. I haven't tried them because I'm not really into AI, but I like how this is handled: since nothing is installed until I choose, it never gets in my way (apart from a few directories).
It's a far cry from Microsoft approach, where Copilot is integrated even into the hardware.

The timing of Omarchy Quattro's release feels particularly appropriate.
Many users are frustrated with the stagnation and decline of Windows and macOS. Linux, in all its flavors, has never felt as promising as it does now, and Omarchy is a fresh alternative that deserves a spot alongside the major Linux distros.

The Omacom Foundation (the non-profit behind Omarchy) has attracted significant funding.
This is good because it gives the project more resources to develop the OS, support more hardware (like Apple's M-series and Qualcomm's Snapdragon), and sponsor some of the projects it is built on.
I have one worry, though. Many of the patrons are CEOs of companies whose services are included in Omarchy.
On Windows, even a clean installation comes with a slew of pre-installed programs (Candy Crush, I'm looking at you) that many users don't need and that take up disk space and resources. So far, everything extra in Omarchy is opt-in, but my concern is that a sponsorship model could eventually lead to something similar to Windows, forcing the project to default to sponsors' services or become bloated.

Obviously, there's an elephant in the room: DHH, the person behind the project. He's best known for Ruby on Rails, but he has also been at the center of controversy because of some of his public posts.
Personally, I believe in separating programmers from their code, just as I separate singers from their music. Kanye's controversial statements don't prevent me from listening to his songs, just as DHH's ideas don't keep me away from Omarchy.

As for who should try it, I don't think this distro is the easiest starting point for a Linux beginner. This is mainly because of the tiling workflow, which comes with a lot of keybindings to learn, and the default editor, which has its own learning curve (and many more keybindings too). But if you already have some experience with Unix-like systems, it's definitely worth a try!

I started this out of curiosity, expecting it to be just another stop in my distro-hopping journey, but I think I'll stick with it for a while and see where it goes.
With this level of funding and the plan to invest it over the next three years, I'm curious to see what comes next.