There's never been a better time to give Linux on the Desktop a shot.
Yesterday, I wrote about how AI made being a Linux user so much more bearable. Today I was going through my usual morning routine (aka coffee and youtube and a dump before real work starts) and I saw that typecraft uploaded a new video about omarchy, an opinionated arch setup for developers. It reminded me quite a bit of DHH's Omakub, until a few minutes into the video where he mentioned this was also a DHH project.
DHH, for those of you who don't know, is one of the people behind 37Signals (basecamp, hey.com, ruby on rails) and is either loved or hated in the community. I never bothered to ask why people hate him, but I know podcasters I've listened to have bitched about him in the past.
Anyway, here's the concept. Configuring a Linux install to fit your needs takes a lot of time, less with AI, but still takes time, effort and requires a bit of thought behind it. Linux gives you freedom of choice to just use whatever you want, but what if you don't know what you want? That's where these Omakase setups come in. DHH has already pre-selected whatever he thinks is the best choice of tools for you and you just get to clone his setup.
This idea isn't new, in fact true nerds in the linux community have been sharing their dotfiles with each other for decades. Some people on reddit were up in arms about DHH taking the concept of dotfiles and glorifying it, the way Apple does most of their features. However, I don't see this as a bad thing. Yes, dotfiles are great, but as linux nerds, we're not really marketers so we don't know how to get the word out.
DHH's projects basically take the concept and make it more approachable for the less nerdy, and to back that all up, he creates excellent documentation for you. I can see both sides here, the linux devs think this is a bastardization of linux and the joy is in doing it for yourself, and the non-purists who want something better than Mac or Windows, but don't necessarily want to have to figure out everything themselves.
I for one, am all for this. Had I not already had my Arch linux setup the way I wanted, I probably would've gone with Omarchy. In fact, while a macbook air is still my travel machine due to the insane battery life, I had once considered getting a framework 13 and was strongly weighing either Omakub or ML4W (hyprland dotfiles) because Omakub didn't have an Arch/Hyprland option at the time.
About a year ago, I hired a developer who was using Windows but hated it. I gave him the option of taking couple of days off to switch to Linux and get familiar with it before getting back to work. He was hesitant at first because of how daunting it seemed, so I just sent him the link to omakub. He's now a die-hard linux user who has built his own hyprland setup, something he wouldn't have had the confidence to do if omakub didn't give him that initial push.
So to all the arch purists out there, what I would say is, let's not gatekeep our shit. People deserve to try Linux, and if people want to make it easy for others to try Linux, let them. No one's taking your freedom or setups away. We can all coexist peacefully.