I'm not sure anyone cares, but here's my update on my desktop #Linux journey. Keep in mind, I’ve been using Linux for about 27 years, and a few were on my primary workstation. That was primarily Mandrake in like 2002-2003. I stopped using it around 2004, and shifted to Mac OS X > OS X > macOS.

I decided it was time to try it again, primarily because I’m just not in love with the direction macOS is heading, and I wanted a backup plan. So I bought a Thinkpad and dove into the deep end. /cont

I’m used to Ubuntu and a Debian-base, but my goal was a beautiful, integrated desktop. Something that felt professional, beautiful, usable but badass. I don’t want to manage it all manually, if possible. So I started with Fedora, thinking it would be the most polished. That’s when I learned that Gnome just doesn’t feel right for me anymore. The Dock/panel being hidden behind a gesture, it all just felt unfamiliar. And this is odd, because Gnome used to be my primary ages ago. /cont

I got everything working - Dropbox, Slack, Feedly, Kiro, 1Password, Firefox, etc - but decided it was time to switch to Ubuntu LTS - I knew the underpinnings better. I installed and, for fun, I also added Xubuntuand KDE Neon packages as alternatives. KDE felt much better. I could live with this, but I still felt like it was missing the full integration I wanted. Breeze looks great. But it wasn’t exciting enough. /cont

Next I installed Pop!_OS. I think there are some really interesting things happening here. The COSMIC desktop looks great. I didn’t spend as much time in Pop!_OS, but I like where it’s going. I think it’s still a little Gnome-y, but there’s real promise here. Definitely a contender. /cont

I decided to push on, so I installed OpenSUSE Tumbleweed. The OpenSUSE theming is nice. I really just don’t know why I’d choose this as my own desktop. If I were running a company, this would be a good option alongside Fedora or Ubuntu, but I don’t know much about YaST anymore, so I just kept chugging. /cont

Finally, I reluctantly tried Omarchy. I know there are some potentially problematic politics with the driver of this distro. I was a HEY! user, I know a lot about Basecamp, but I wanted to explore something different. And I’m glad I did. Because politics aside, I immediately fell in love with Omarchy. It really is just so well built and everything feels like a unified system. Adding webapps works perfectly, whereas some panel applets on other systems just appear as a copy of the browser. /cont

Using Arch underneath means things I can’t quickly add via Omarchy can be added via yay or pacman. So far, this is the thing that’s sticking. The modifier key navigation is great, Hyprland is great, the fully integrated theming is great. I’m probably going to stick with this for the time being. I know I could “build” this without Omarchy, but to be honest, I don’t want to. I’m really feeling like this is a fun change of pace - like I felt about macOS with Jaguar, or BeOS with r5. /cont