Over the past several weeks, I’ve been testing out Omarchy. A relatively new Arch based Linux distribution spearheaded by David Heinemeier Hansson (or DHH), the CTO of Basecamp.
Omarchy is a heavily customized, opinionated Arch based distribution paired with the Hyprland tiling window manager, lots of extra theming, plugins and out of the box compatibility with agents.
The concept is interesting (if flawed). I’d be lying if I said I don’t find it intriguing. I do. But putting Omarchy on one side and Fedora on the other, I just don’t think there’s a contest.
Fedora is better. Here’s why.
What Omarchy tries to be
One of DHH’s stated goals with Omarchy and the Omacom foundation as a whole is to make this the year of the Linux desktop. By that he intends to finally make Linux a mainstream OS for businesses, gamers, content creators, students, and everyone in between.
To that end, he bills Omarchy as a fun, beginner-welcoming entry point into Linux.
To be clear, I like a lot of what Omarchy is trying to be. It looks fun and has some really nice improvements over plain Arch with Hyprland. Whether or not it’s the right choice for the average user though is debatable.
Even so, Omarchy presents itself as a reasonably complete, modifiable Arch spin that is intended for all types of users. What you get with Omarchy is a Linux distro that is reasonably ready to go out of the gate, with many of the apps and services you’re likely to want already configured for you from the start.
And installing more takes mere seconds from the Omarchy menu. To be sure, Omarchy provides a refreshing, (eventually) fun experience that’s hard to not love.
But Fedora just seems like the smarter choice. For the moment.
Seasoned option vs new kid on the block
While it’s far from perfect, I do put a lot of stock in the fact that Fedora isn’t a new project. It has the benefit of having been around for literally decades. It’s a known quantity. Not a newcomer trying to earn its way and impress everyone.
Omarchy is relatively new. Brand new, really, in the grand scheme of the Linux time scale. Its first official release was on June 26, 2025. Fedora, on the other hand, has been around since September 22, 2003.
The fact of Fedora’s longevity makes it a far more trustworthy name in my opinion. While I don’t necessarily agree with everything the Fedora team does, I can at least look back at the long track record of the distro and extrapolate from there.
It’s anyone’s guess whether or not DHH and team will be able to keep up with Omarchy long term. I hope they can. Certainly. But do I know that? No.
If Omarchy is a brand new Ferrari, Fedora is an older model Toyota. One is fancy and shiny. The other is a little drab, but it’s tried and true. Trustworthy. You don’t need that special high octane fuel. Just your typical unleaded. And you know it’ll get you to where you need to go.
That matters.
In time, Omarchy will likely reach Toyota levels of trust, but for now, it’s just the new kid on the scene. It looks cool. It’s kinda fun to use, if I’m being honest, but we do not grant it the rank of Jedi Master.
Not yet.
When I need to get work done and need something that’s stable, known to be solid and secure, I’d have to go with Fedora. Not because I think Omarchy can’t be awesome. I do think that it’s on its way there (with caveats). But it hasn’t proven itself yet.
Not in my book at least.
Simple setup vs editing dot files
Linux has a reputation for being hard to use and configure. While that’s not really true as much today as it once was, some things can be a bit more difficult. Let’s be real. But for the most part, major distros like Ubuntu and Fedora make changing things like mouse scrolling, display options, and things of that nature very easy. You don’t usually need terminal commands. And it can all be done with nice, polished GUI settings menus.
That’s not the case with Omarchy though.
I was a bit taken aback, honestly, when I first tried to set up natural scrolling on my Framework Laptop 13 with Omarchy. In Ubuntu and Fedora, that’s just a couple of clicks in the Settings app. In Omarchy, I had to run a terminal command, figure out how to edit a Lua file to set natural_scroll equal to “true” and then save the file.
When I figured out that I had to edit a config file to change what I consider to be a very basic setting, I was more than a little put off if I’m being honest here. It’s not that I don’t appreciate the ability to edit dot files. I do. And every Linux distro gives users that ability as far as I’m aware.
It’s just that I don’t want to be required to edit dot files to change such basic settings. That’s the difference.
To my chagrin, it was the same for my monitor setup. I use a Thunderbolt dock with two external 4K monitors. In Fedora, Ubuntu, CachyOS, and others I can just open my settings and arrange them however I want. In Omarchy, it’s not that simple. I have to edit a dot file. Again.
Now thankfully there is a plugin available that makes this process a little bit more GUI friendly, but that’s not there out of the box.
To be fair, this is perhaps more a complaint about the Hyprland window manager than Omarchy itself, but since Omarchy relies heavily on Hyprland, it seems fair to point out here.
It’s stuff like this that leads me to suggest that Fedora is far, far more user friendly. Especially for new users. Not that newcomers couldn’t get used to editing dot files, and honestly that’s not a bad skill to have. It’s never a bad idea to know how to do that.
But it shouldn’t be needed, in my opinion, if you want to claim that your Linux distro is user friendly.
Predictable stability
Fedora and Omarchy share two very different bases. Fedora is based more or less directly on the Linux kernel and its own RPM package ecosystem. Omarchy is based on Arch.
Fedora is used, in fact, as the upstream for Red Hat Enterprise Linux. A commercial Linux distribution that is used by large enterprises in mission critical environments.
Arch Linux is a move fast and break things sort of distro. Updates aren’t guaranteed to not break your system, though they do try hard not to. Of course. Fedora updates more frequently and faster than something like Ubuntu, but it still errs on the side of stability.
Fedora is designed to be an up to date but very stable option for people who need reliability. Arch can be stable, especially if you know what you’re doing and are diligent to read package news as notices become available. But it sometimes takes a bit more work out of the box.
Omarchy isn’t directly Arch, however. And it updates more slowly than Arch by default. By default, Omarchy runs about a month behind Arch to help catch any issues before they reach end users. But Omarchy can’t escape its Arch roots completely, or the risks that come with it.
Again, that’s not to say that Omarchy can’t be stable. It certainly can be. But the biggest difference here in my mind is the philosophy behind these two distros.
Of them, Fedora is the distro that is designed to be a true workstation operating system. An OS that may not be super exciting, but is stable, fast and secure.
All of that matters for people who just want to get things done.
AUR concerns
Linux isn’t immune from security threats. As much as some might like to claim otherwise. And in recent months, the Arch User Repository (AUR) has fallen victim to several instances of serious malware.
As a general rule, I think it’s best for new users to steer clear of the AUR. Not that there aren’t some cool tools there or that it’s necessarily all bad. There are, and it isn’t.
But Omarchy puts the AUR right in front of users with no warning, no notice and really no friction at all.
For example, on my Omarchy system, I just typed the word “Chrome” in the Omarchy menu hoping to find and install Chrome. Omarchy did, dutifully look for and find an installation candidate. The problem? Without asking me, it started pulling from the Arch User Repository. It never notified me that the AUR can be risky or asked me if I wanted to use the AUR at all. It just did it. No questions.
That’s kinda scary.
Fedora doesn’t include AUR and is, in fact not compatible with it. I consider that a feature. Not a bug. While Fedora has its own optional equivalent in the form of the Fedora Copr, it’s not enabled by default and requires manual, explicit activation.
Omarchy on the other hand just plugs the user right into the AUR without a second thought. Yikes.
Very different takes on AI
As I’ve written before, DHH is all in on AI. He’s practically in love with it, it seems. Consequently, Omarchy is centered around AI and agents. DHH calls Omarchy an “agentic Linux.”
When you first load up Omarchy, you’re prompted to choose your default agent, which then integrates right into the system.
The good news is that once you dismiss that prompt, Omarchy doesn’t bug you any further. No reminder popups to choose your agent. No “hey you should be using AI” notifications. It’s just there for those who want it and out of sight for those who don’t. I can appreciate that.
Fedora, on the other hand, does not include any built-in AI features. At least as of the time of this writing. Users are welcome to bring their own AI tools if they want, but none are included by the Fedora team. I prefer that route, personally.
That said, I do think it’s worth noting that Omarchy is proudly vibe coded. By that I mean DHH and crew publicly state that they use agents to develop the operating system. Now you may be fine with that and shrug it off. That gives me serious pause.
As I’ve said before, I’m not saying that AI can’t or shouldn’t have any role to play in the development process, but I need to know that the code I’m running on my computer has at the very least been thoroughly checked and validated by a human. Not just green lit by a machine.
Vibe coding might play out well for Omarchy in the long run. I’m not saying that it couldn’t. But I’m also not convinced that a vibe coded operating system is ideal for someone who values privacy, security and stability.
Fedora does, to my disappointment, accept AI-assisted code but only under certain rules. Fedora requires that humans remain responsible for the code they submit and contributors are required to disclose that AI was used.
The ideal user
Despite what Omarchy or Fedora claim to be, it’s clear in my mind that these Linux distributions are right for completely different types of people.
With respect to DHH, Omarchy is just not the right choice for new users. It easily could be with tweaks and some perhaps custom GUI tools for managing mouse scrolling, input and monitor setups. That would go a long way toward making it user friendly.
And Fedora? What can I say about Fedora? It’s solid. Not perfect, but it does what it says it does, and it does it well.
In my opinion, Omarchy feels like the new and exciting choice for the sort of user who is tired of all the other options. We’ve seen GNOME and KDE and Cinnamon toting distros for ages. Hyprland is something rather alien to what a lot of people have used before (though tiling window managers are certainly not new.) And the hype around Omarchy is real. So it’s tempting to buy into it and ride the wave.
Fedora feels best for the sort of user who just wants to be able to get stuff done, doesn’t necessarily care about all the latest flashy features and hype and just wants a solid, stable, well-supported system with an established track record and strong community.
At the end of the day, I think either distro could serve someone well as long as he’s honest about which of the camps he falls into.
And as long as he understands some of the risks involved with running Omarchy. Because let’s be real. It’s a fun distro. But it’s not without its risks.
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