Many distros don't bother with any of that. Calamares is a fine off-the-shelf installer. GRUB has fine defaults. Desktops have fine defaults. And many distros use those. Custom dotfiles and a way to apply them to a fresh system doesn't make a distro.
That's, truly, completely fine for a fledgling project, that's how many start before expanding beyond that... But why is Omarchy getting funding that's more in line with a distro that already has its own infrastructure?
>why is Omarchy getting funding that's more in line with a distro that already has its own infrastructure?
A few reasons spring to mind but I'll focus on the one I care about: It's damn good.
I've used Linux for over 20 years and it really stands out. Nothing has ever been as easy and fast to install and dropped me into a more polished, simple yet productive environment immediately.
I think the tiling VM will limit its appeal, and hope to see projects inspired by Omarchy put the same level of detail, pruning, curation and polish to Gnome and KDE-based distros.
> 'custom dotfiles and a way to apply them to a fresh system'
Latest Omarchy 4 is a full ISO installer, with a quickshell-based desktop - not scripts, their own system apps, taskbar, notifications, etc. I'm failing to see how it is less of a distro than most, and the fact it doesn't try to customize the kernel or filesystem is a plus for me. May be time to take another look at it.
I think the "set of dotfiles" was called Omakub. Omarchy is a distro like any other - custom installer, bootloader, desktop and WM setup, etc.