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It began with Omakub

Before Omarchy, there was Omakub. A humble omakase developer setup for Ubuntu. One command turned a fresh installation into as good a base for developers as the rather rigid and limited base would allow.

Omakub — turn a fresh Ubuntu installation into a fully-configured, beautiful, and modern web development system by running a single command

Early Aesthetics

The Omakub desktop: GNOME overview with a misty forest wallpaper, dock, and workspaces
There's only so much you can do with GNOME, but I did what I could.
Neovim and a terminal running inside Zellij, showing the Omakub file tree
Neovim and Zellij out of the box.
The omakub theme command in a terminal, with the Omakub ASCII banner
Even then, one command could re-theme multiple apps.

The road to Omarchy

Omakub proved the thesis: give developers a beautiful, complete Linux out of the box, and they’ll show up! Tens of thousands did.

But it also found the ceiling. Omakub was a layer of opinion on top of Ubuntu and GNOME, and those come with strong opinions of their own. The ideas I actually cared about — tiling, everything on the keyboard, a system that treats the terminal as the center of the universe — kept fighting the platform instead of flowing from it.

So the omakase moved from Ubuntu to Arch, from GNOME to Hyprland, and became Omarchy. Not a layer on top of somebody else’s distribution, but the whole meal. Everything Omakub was reaching for, without asking anyone’s permission first.

The retirement home is staffed

Omakub itself is now retired. The repositories are archived on GitHub — omakub and omakub-site. But good ideas don’t retire, they get forked! Omabuntu is a community fork continuing on the omakase-Ubuntu thread. If Arch is a step too far and Ubuntu is home, that’s where you should go.

Thanks to everyone who ran it, contributed to it, and showed off their desktops. Omakub walked so Omarchy could run.