The Short Happy Life of my Omakub Installation
Omarchy got both good and bad press lately. I never considered it as an option because, even if I like its general aesthetics and the TUI/keyboard-oriented approach, for me its whole user experience is more "look I'm an hacker, and I use arch btw" fun than real function. Also, I'm not that much interested in Arch. But Omarchy has a smaller sibling - Omakub - that I have been considering for some time. It looks less opinionated and more practical.
When I decided to configure a new-ish machine to play with local LLMs/SLMs, I looked at Omakub as "Omarchy vibe lite": I would have installed Ubuntu anyway - it's the less painful way to use Nvidia software stack - so why not?
TL, DR: everything is quite meh and not "opinionated" enough, I'm afraid. If you want the longer story, keep reading.
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Omakub is "installed" via wget on a fresh Ubuntu 24 or 25 installation. Change anything on your new OS before launching Omakub, and some part of it probably won't work properly. As we'll see, Omakub is just a collection of scripts which will work as intended only if the base system is untouched.
Looking closely at what the installation does - nothing is obfuscated, mind you - things get... weird. The first wget seems to exist just to show a short, lean installation command on a web page. It downloads a second (less posh) script which installs git and clones the Omakub repo: 170+ scripts installing, configuring, uninstalling modules and apps in your system.
I think it's unfair to judge Omakub - and, to some extent, Omarchy - without considering who its intended users are. Not Linux experts or someone fluent in all things Linux, but developers coming from a commercial OS (mostly macOS, I guess) and wanting a sleek posh new Linux desktop without actually learning how to manually install all the stuff they need. For them, having a big "Ubuntu post-installer" is useful. Also, after the first run the Omakub "app" (a textual menu launching specific scripts to do specific stuff) is still there to customize again your work environment. Handy.
If you're not this kind of user, and have an average Linux knowledge, you see Omakub for what it is: a bunch of scripts for stuff that, most of the times, you can install with a simple CLI command. So: meh. There's more: sometimes those scripts don't work properly or fail. And - but I'm not the best expert here - they often seem convoluted and with no solid error checking. So I wasn't that much surprised when the first run of my new Omakub environment showed some quirks: Super key not working, the app launcher closing immediately at launch, an erratic dock.
The most "formative" side of Omakub is ironically here. You should devote some time exploring its scripts to understand what they've just done to your system and what they can do in general. A thing, I suppose, its intended users will never do.
So, ok. Omakub is not rocket science. But is it "opinionated" as it presents itself? Which strong choices do real men devbros take, to use their decks at their best?
The main Omakub (and Omarchy) mantra: you only use your keyboard to interact with OS. Which is ok, but leads to strange choices. One of the weirdest is a heavy use of "fake apps" on the Dock: you have icons (Activity, Docker, Basecamp, Whatsapp...) just to launch Alacritty with a command or Chrome pointed to some webpage (like, "Docker" is just Alacritty + lazydocker). Why? Because in Omakubworld you press Alt+(number n) to launch the n-th app of the Dock, you don't click on its icon (it's slower and meh). Apps are pinned at the start, so if you change the Dock order, Omakub initial philosophy gets broken.
Second choice: an heavy use of workspaces. Each of the six main apps in Omakub (Chrome, Neovim, VScode, Alacritty, lazydocker and some other thing I forgot) launches in its own workspace and at fullscreen. Then you jump from one workspace to another with the keyboard (Super + number) and with the help of Space Bar, one of the many Gnome Extensions Omakub installs.
Third choice: tiling, tiling, tiling. Starting main apps in fullscreen is very notebook-oriented, but when the devbros come in the office they have a huge display to play with. At least is what I guess, based on how much Omakub loves tiling. The idea is that you keep repositioning windows with fingers flying on the keyboard: there's another Gnome Extension - Tactile - for that (Ubuntu/Debian spares you the Hyprland drama).
Another opinionated Omakubworld mantra is that you go TUI and not GUI whenever possible. Quite hacker-y, huh? Not that much in Omakub, where the only TUI "opinionated" choices are lazydocker, to manage containers via a textual interface and not bothering with docker CLI commands (Docker per se is installed by Omakub), and lazygit, to do the same for Git (again, installed by Omakub). The rest of the TUI world in Omakub doesn't seem opinionated or revolutionary: Alacritty and Neovim are, at best, mainstream, Doom Emacs (optional) is... well, you love it or hate it.
All the rest is... nothing special. Default or optional choices, for other modules, are quite obvious from a developer standpoint: mandatory or trendy languages (Ruby on Rails, Node.js, Go, PHP, Python, Elixir, Rust, Java), databases (MySQL, Redis, PostgreSQL... all run as containers), obvious Linux apps (Pinta, Gimp, LibreOffice, Audacity... no risky choices), commercial apps a Linux fanboi would never use (Zoom, 1Password, Spotify, Basecamp...). Plus, some UI sugar and some utilities and extensions you may or may not like.
The general impression here is that Omakub is "opinionated" mostly in trying to turn Ubuntu into a macOS-ish environment with an hacker/cyber makeup, forcing the average non-Linux developer to use their keyboard more (I approve this).
So, you ask, the final word? I'd close this wall of text judging Omakub "mostly harmless" (cit.) because that's what it is, if you know how to navigate the Linux seas. Problem is, not everything works. I experienced issues ranging from minor UI quirks to conflicts in Docker configuration. My fault, because I've changed many things after Omakub's first install? Could be. Omakub's fault because reasons? Who knows. And I don't like this sense of unreliability (flatpaks on Ubuntu? hmmm...).
If you know Linux, my advice: read Omakub scripts on github, understand what's under the hood, take the "opinionated" ideas you like and then apply them elsewhere, maybe on your own Ubuntu fresh install. You'll have a working environment you made, configured and now fully control.