For a very long time, I used Windows for gaming and OSX for everything else, but recently there's been a lot of hype around the Omarchy distro by DHH, so I decided to give it a quick try.
My first impressions are awful.
How to try it
This part is actually very smooth. You can go to the Try Omarchy website, download a small launcher, and run it as a QEMU app. This is a much easier experience than booting from USB sticks or setting up a dual boot.
The launcher / installer asks you some basic questions, but notably fails to ask you about your keyboard layout and region, or to autodetect them from your existing system. So it decided to use a UK QWERTY keyboard without asking, even though the system uses Dvorak. Dvorak isn't too common, but various regional keyboard layouts are, so it's still a stupid thing to miss. And in any case, why the hell did it pick UK QWERTY and not at least US QWERTY?
Inside Omarchy
I'm running a 4K monitor, and Omarchy decided not to do any kind of UI scaling, so all the text is unreadable. To make matters worse, it uses an extremely low contrast theme (light grey on darker grey). I even did an accessibility check from a screenshot, and the contrast ratio is just 1.52:1. Accessibility recommendations are 4.5:1, and it's painful to read even when resized, let alone when everything is already too tiny.
So I already had two things to do before I could even really try the system: UI scaling and keyboard layout.
Launching apps
You can use Win+Space to start the launcher, and it has, or can download, a browser (Chromium) and editor (VSCode), the two most important apps. Settings, on the other hand, are completely missing. There's no way to change the UI scale, keyboard layout, or do any of the basic things you'd expect from a settings menu on every other operating system ever made (probably even GNOME and KDE have them, but it's been ages since I last used either).
Default editor
I tried to look for some input settings, and the best I could do was edit the raw input.lua file. This isn't a serious solution for such a basic thing, but I tried. And Omarchy went full retard and launched Neovim.
I cannot think of a worse default choice for any operating system in the history of operating systems. I tried to close it, but while all the other windows had an X in the corner to close them, Neovim's window somehow lacked one.
Let's list all the issues at this point:
- completely wrong UI scale
- dramatically low contrast, going against all accessibility guidelines
- wrong, vibe-guessed keyboard layout
- utterly retarded editor choice
- unclosable window
The fails just kept piling up higher and higher.
Editor settings
I somehow remembered how to exit Neovim, on the wrong keyboard layout and unable to read anything in its window.
Two settings I could find in the launcher were Editor (Setup > Defaults) and Editor (Install). OK, I can at least switch to VSCode.
But to change the keyboard layout, I still needed to edit input.lua. I uncommented the file, then tried a lot of combinations of layout and variant, like "dvorak", "en / dvorak", and a few others. Nothing worked, so I asked AI, and it finally told me the right combination was "us / dvorak".
That worked, but I got a popup about two errors in some hl.gesture stuff that had nothing to do with what I edited. I can comment it back out, but I ran into another issue - that error message wasn't possible to select and copy&paste! How the hell are people supposed to google or AI error messages if they can't be copied?
At least copy and paste between Windows and Omarchy worked just fine - that was helpful for getting Omarchy running at all.
Operating system with sane defaults
Anyway, this was a good point to stop this experiment. Yes, I could vibe config my way out of it, and get UI scale, contrast, and everything else working. But Omarchy proclaims itself as "a distribution that ships Arch + Hyprland with sane defaults".
By now, it's clear to me that the defaults are anything but sane, being a mix of things that are unimplemented (settings system), questionable (no keyboard layout selector), broken (UI scaling, contrast), and retarded (Neovim). If I wanted vibe coded Arch Hyprland distro, I'd likely be better off vibe coding it myself.
Maybe they'll make good use of that $18.5m in funding to get it all to a saner state. But in its current state, 2026 is also not going to be the Year of the Linux Desktop.
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