62 – RakuOS and Omarchy

In episode 62, Dale and Majid are back with another round of distro hopping. In “Beautiful Failures,” Dale finishes his highly customized Xfce desktop on Debian stable. He also makes the case for using AI sensibly: it helped him find failed systemd units on his old ReadyNAS, write a Syncthing update script, and track down a file with a hidden line feed in its name. His rule is to trust but verify, and to be careful what you paste in. Majid fits a trip to India and a conference in Spain around some local LLM experiments on Fedora. He also tells the story of his third attempt to make an iPad work for him, which ended after two days with a profit on eBay. In the updates, Majid reports on a buggy Kubuntu 26.04 LTS install, and Dale explains how an MX Linux boot partition filled up.

This month’s reviews cover two very different distros. Majid takes on Omarchy, the Arch-based, Hyprland-powered setup that installs in under four minutes. It looks great and has AI agents built in, but he found it overwhelming as a non-developer, and he and Dale discuss how much the project’s high-profile creator affects its appeal. Dale reviews RakuOS, an atomic Fedora spin built on a bootc container image. It keeps DNF packages and Flatpaks, and it has its own package manager, Rum. He covers the long installs, a bad update that he fixed with a quick bootc rollback, and whether this could be the future of Linux.

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