Omarchy is nice, but Arch is better
Use Omarchy to feel the hype that DHH feels.
That’s a good hype as it will soon lead you to better things.
Set it up in your old laptop.
Or get one for fun.
Always good to have something to tinker, and also to train for the (imminent) future
where Apple/Microsoft are going to make personal computing hard.
Tinker with it.
Read the Omarchy docs.
Ask questions in the discord.
But then get to know the official Arch docs too.
Swim upstream and learn linux via the Arch docs while on Omarchy.
For instance, you can learn about systemd, users & groups, chroot, firewall, and even bash right from the wiki.
Why learn from these rather than from their respective official sources?
Well, because the official docs for these are dense. (See systemd.io.)
The ArchWiki counterparts require far less RAM in your head,
and time in your hand to be able to grok these topics.
Stay with Omarchy for a few weeks.
But don’t swear your allegiance yet.
Don’t commit and push those new dotfiles.
Trust me on this. The best is yet to come.
Now, be ready to install Arch directly.
Get the iso image on an usb stick.
Install Arch NOT through the steps mentioned in the official installation guide.
Instead install it through this package called “archinstall”.
It’s already there in your usb drive. You just have to run archinstall in the command prompt to start the guided installation.
Just like Omarchy, archinstall too is an automatic installer, but it lets you choose/configure various things that Omarchy gives to you directly.
With archinstall, you can choose/configure:
- bootloader
- audio config
- root password
- additional users and their password, and if they have sudo access or not
- partitioning (you may screw this up once or twice, but you’ll learn and get it right)
- full disk encryption
- desktop environment (kde, gnome or xfce etc)
- hostname
- timezone, keyboard configs
- and all extra packages you might want right away
What if you don’t know what values to choose when archinstall presents you with options?
You can google/reddit each of the options to decide for yourself.
Or, you can follow the good-enough defaults that Omarchy provided earlier in its manual.
Like me, you might like the good old KDE/GNOME desktop environments better than the tiling window managers like hyprland.
Like me, you might like the trusted konsole terminal app better than the fancy terminal emulators like alacritty or kitty or wezterm etc.
Now you can build your dotfiles and start the lifelong practice of grooming it.
Because, now you know you don’t have any middle layer between you and The Linux.