Seeing the real value in existing products

The point of a successful product is not necessarily to create new technology that nobody else can make. It is to provide value by giving users an elegant, easy, and inexpensive way to use that technology or tool, without spending a lot of money or time learning it. They can just start using it right away and enjoy it.

This tweet by DHH comparing Omarchy to Dropbox inspired me to write this.

View DHH’s post on X

Developers could, for example, create a network file system somewhere, mount it on their Linux machines, and use it to synchronize files across multiple machines. They could also create an FTP server and do the same thing for file access or sharing. Most of the functionality Dropbox provides out of the box could be supported with rudimentary knowledge of the Linux or Unix ecosystem and a bit of engineering. It was not too difficult, and there were already many articles online explaining how to do it yourself.

But Dropbox was one of the first companies to successfully democratize file sharing and synchronization on a widespread scale, although they had already been possible for a few people for many years. Suddenly, these existing technologies became cool new tech that everyone loved to use. Dropbox was so elegant and cheap at a time when storage was still relatively expensive and limited. That made it almost silly not to use Dropbox.

Omarchy has recently gained a lot of traction on X because its creator, DHH (creator of Ruby on Rails and co-owner of 37signals, the company behind Basecamp), has promoted it there. But at its core, it is nothing new. It is another distribution built on top of an already great Linux distribution, Arch. Developers and engineers have built better Linux distributions in the past, so building a new distribution is not groundbreaking by itself.

Ubuntu, for example, is a very stable, elegant, and popular Linux distribution. Ubuntu Desktop, in particular, has worked well on most of the machines I have used.

But the way Omarchy is presented as a substitute for macOS and Windows, together with DHH’s attitude toward using AI agents to fix bugs and extend it, has made waves.

Omarchy itself is not much simpler to use than something like Ubuntu, but it is simple to install. Many of the hardware issues you would otherwise face during or after installing Linux have already been solved. When I installed Omarchy on my Intel MacBook Pro, it ran almost perfectly, although I encountered a few bugs.

The main difference for me between Omarchy and other Linux distributions was how easy it was to identify and fix those bugs. An AI agent and the Omarchy skill were already installed, so I could run the agent natively on the Linux distribution itself. It identified the issues and fixed them for me without any hassle. I even opened a pull request on GitHub with the fix, so hopefully other users with the same laptop will not encounter the same issues when a newer version of the distribution is released.

Omarchy’s small memory footprint lets it run easily on older machines, making it inexpensive to keep using them at a time when RAM prices are high and expected to rise even further. It is fast and stable enough, and there are many tutorials online—especially on YouTube—explaining how to install it. Older Macs that can barely run macOS can run very smoothly with Omarchy. The same applies to older laptops with a maximum of 4 GB of RAM that cannot be upgraded. New operating systems, such as recent versions of Windows, simply do not run well on them, but Omarchy does.

View DHH’s post about running Omarchy on older hardware

View a post pushing back against the hype around Omarchy

The conclusion is simple: some developers are pushing back against the hype DHH has created around Omarchy, saying that it is nothing new. But that is not the point. What makes it groundbreaking is how easy it is to install and how much value you gain from using it.