5 ms·

I'm somewhat out of the loop, and it's not really mentioned in the article, but what's with Omarchy getting this crazy amount of financial support from this lis

by Hugsbox 1mo ago

I'm somewhat out of the loop, and it's not really mentioned in the article, but what's with Omarchy getting this crazy amount of financial support from this list of fairly prominent individuals? Until a few weeks ago I'd never heard of it, then what I did hear is that it's being made by a very... uhh, eccentric(?) individual, and now it's suddenly got a crazy amount of funding. What am I missing?

tonyhart7 1mo ago
it get picked up by Hype because DHH
barkerja 1mo ago
It's being largely driven by DHH (creator of Rails, and co-founder of 37signals). He has a massive following and a lot of influence (and money).
cogman10 1mo ago
Looks like nothing. It's arch with a bunch of pre installed apps and a few goodies on top. My guess is relationships and fame went a long way towards getting those funds.
- theshrike79 29d ago
  And Dropbox is just rsync and cron =) Packaging and marketing matters.
Retr0id 1mo ago
It's a political statement disguised as a FOSS project (which itself is fine, all software is political). The funders are not funding the development of a Linux distro, they are co-signing the political statement.
- ngcazz 1mo ago
  [flagged]
  - dgellow 1mo ago
    Financed by controversial figures too
    - panzi 1mo ago
      I'm so disappointed that The Standup was platforming him.
      - ilogik 1mo ago
        that's when I unsubscribed
      - totalperspectiv 1mo ago
        Finally got me to unsubscribe. I'm surprised that the whole crew of them were cool with reposting the snippet of DHH calling linux maintainers "clowns and goblins" amongst other things. https://x.com/thestanduppod/status/2091511392717213707?s=20 https://x.com/thestanduppod/status/2091511392717213707?s=20
        dgellow 1mo ago
        Yeah that video is disgusting. He’s completely unhinged
      - ngcazz 1mo ago
        Pragmatic Engineer too
    - rbanffy 1mo ago
      You misspelled "fascist".
      - dgellow 1mo ago
- jeffnv 1mo ago
  Is it? What's the statement?
  - Retr0id 1mo ago
    It's quite a loud one, but it's broadcast above 25KHz or so
    - iamnotamouse 1mo ago
      [flagged]
      - Retr0id 1mo ago
        U+1F921
      - hananova 1mo ago
        Yes that is one part of how dog whistles work. Disguise it well enough to get rubes to run interference for you. You’re doing that very well.
        iamnotamouse 1mo ago
        [flagged]
    - jordanf 1mo ago
      wut? haha
      - lambda 1mo ago
        Just to explain because not everyone is necessarily a native English speaker or gets the reference. This is a reference to a dog whistle. Above 25kHz are sounds that dogs can hear but humans generally can't. The term dog whistle is used to refer to phrases that racists use to indicate their racism, while sounding plausibly deniable. The idea is that it's a phrase that will make other racists realize that you are one of them, while not sounding openly racist to others. DHH himself has gone beyond dog whistles. He's directly compared what he considers undesirable ehtnic populations to wolves who need to be shot. He's just openly calling for ethnic cleansing by now. But support for Omarchy itself can be seen as a dog whistle. It's widely known that DHH is a fascist, but you have some plausible deniability by donating to Omarchy because you're just politically neutral and think it's cool tech, or something like that.
- rvz 1mo ago
  [flagged]
  - nisegami 1mo ago
    >So a "hello world" program is now political? There's an implicit political statement in being able to write a simple one line hello world program and run it, using free software and information. Consider the counterfactual world where to even begin programming you have to pay for certification and training or specialized equipment/software. I know paid compilers, proprietary languages and closed specifications exist, but we can still just save print('hello world') to a file and run it using python which is freely available, or even better we can open devtools in our browser and jump into the console and run console.log('hello world') without even installing anything.
    - 0xcde4c3db 1mo ago
      Also, the book that popularized "hello world" was very consciously advancing a programming-first pedagogical agenda, as opposed to building up a theoretical foundation first: > The only way to learn a new programming language is by writing programs in it.
  - hananova 1mo ago
    You’re deliberately bringing up irrelevant minimal counter examples in bad faith.
    - sophrosyne42 1mo ago
      Then you should be able to say where the political statement in omarchy resides, and what it is
      - c-hendricks 1mo ago
        It's right there, it's the guy who started it and can't help but share his politics unprompted
    - 1mo ago
- safety1st 1mo ago
  [flagged]
  - Philpax 1mo ago
    "political histrionics" is an interesting way to refer to calling for ethnic cleansing
  - teekert 1mo ago
    Thank you, this is exactly my experience with reporting on Omarchy. There is a small vocal group that is very determined to pull politics into it somehow, but to most (a more silent, big majority) this is not even known. I.e., when Omarchy is reported on in my country (on local blogs) nobody ever replies with anything political, it's just about the tech. But in some circles this is very different, somehow.
    - nixosbestos 1mo ago
      > There is a small vocal group that is very determined to pull politics into it somehow I'd suggest you go look at DHH's own account, own tweets and then delete this embarrassing comment.
      - teekert 1mo ago
        Do you have examples? With Nitter and Xcancel down I can't even access twitter anymore, and it's not my habit to looking into the political views of developers. I don't really care. I liked FOSS because it was apolitical. Imagine Linus taking a political stance against all parties he doesn't agree with that use Linux. Imho this obsession with people's politics just has to stop. Omarchy. NixOS, LLMs. All interesting tech, and then a lot of shouting parties around it, sometimes both sides call each other nazis. I try to ignore them.
        randomgermanguy 1mo ago
        When was FOSS apolitical ?
- JeremyNT 1mo ago
  > The funders are not funding the development of a Linux distro, they are co-signing the political statement. It's not even a Linux distro. It's an Arch respin with tweaks that DHH likes. This is for people who want to work like DHH.
  - 0xcde4c3db 1mo ago
    Right; it's not political in the sense of "vote for candidate/party/policy XYZ", it's political in the sense that Omarchy is distinguished by being a vehicle for DHH's opinions, and by promoting Omarchy one can promote the general idea that DHH is a respectable guy with good opinions while still remaining firmly situated in "technical" subject matter.
- mattstir 1mo ago
  > which itself is fine, all software is political I don't mean to get distracted from the topic at hand, but is that really true? If I create my own software stack for the TRMNL display I received as a gift because I think it's fun and interesting, is that a political statement? What politics does that involve? If someone makes a small Rust library that implements some days structure and a few hundred people find it useful, what political stance is intrinsically baked in by the author? It's exhausting to go through life if you think every field is a battlefield.
  - kingkongjaffa 1mo ago
    Isn't there always a political angle in the act of creating software? In essence the human right and ability to learn and change and wield computers at an unlocked and low level is a policy decision. What if governments said programs must be from companies and users should not be allowed to write their own programs, operating systems must be locked down to keep users safe or some bs 'think of the children' excuse. Especially Linux and OSS is a political manifesto design specifically to stop this kind of government overreach from taking root. It would certainly benefit shareholders of large computer companies to the detriment of the individual user's freedoms. It's easy to see a perspective like that where software is political. Politics is not a battlefield, that's an American two party system trick. Seeing the word politics doesn't immediately mean bad or divisive.
  - Retr0id 1mo ago
    I mean, yeah, you can't have politics in a vacuum. But any software that does anything interesting interfaces with the outside world at some point (via human proxy or otherwise). That your TRMNL even allows you to write software for it is a choice (a cool one at that), and contributing to their ecosystem supports that choice.
  - bayindirh 1mo ago
    > It's exhausting to go through life if you think every field is a battlefield. You don't have to think every field as a battlefield, but your choices are affected by and are about your beliefs and stance. For example, some people believe that going all SaaS for everything in their life is not bad, and they can afford that, so they do that. I personally don't trust companies much, and value my freedom a lot. So I self host the things I can and find valuable. I have my small infra which is not accessible from open internet, and I install services there if I want them to be unavailable to the public. I mean, nobody will try to get my mundane code from my hands, but having it in a box in front of me makes me happier and feel better, so I do it. Also, stances doesn't have to be loud/violent/up to the nose. You can be yourself with your own stance, and build it calmly and slowly. You can be just happy about achieving what you wanted to achieve. On the other hand, software licenses are of course political and the issue can get heated and gets heated semi-regularly. We're humans and being opposed to each other in various forms is our base nature. So, don't stay at DEFCON 1 all the time, but aware that range from 1 to 5 is always a possibility.
- mylidlpony 1mo ago
  I think a better fitting definition of what it is – notably absent from this entire comment section – is virtue, or rather vice, signaling.
- s__s 1mo ago
  It wasn’t that long ago that omarchy got started. As far as I could tell it was a direct response to DHH giving up on Apple. He was in a dispute with them in regards to App Store publishing and sales. He seems to have since made it his personal mission to move off of the Apple ecosystem.
vends 1mo ago
DHH effect. He has a very strong following, and there's a certain amount of trust/prestige attached to his name in the tech/startup world. For a lot of these people, DHH building something is probably enough to get them interested and willing to throw money at it.
- noir_lord 1mo ago
  Among some, for others (including me) him been attached to it is very much a counter signal.
  - brightball 1mo ago
    Why? I watched all of the supposed controversies around him happen in real time and they were all non stories. “Hey, you can be political on social media but don’t bring it into our work chats. We are here to do a job. If that is a problem, here’s a generous 6 month severance package.” That was what politically blew him up and he was unwilling to apologize for a completely reasonable take. Now he’s giving his time and money freely to make a great Linux distro. It says more about the anti-DHH crowd than it does about him.
    - tao_oat 1mo ago
      You're skipping his recent blog posts; I think that's where the bulk of people's complaints come from. See for example https://tekin.co.uk/2025/09/the-ruby-community-has-a-dhh-problem https://tekin.co.uk/2025/09/the-ruby-community-has-a-dhh-pro...
    - IshKebab 1mo ago
      I agree about most of what he's said (e.g. "The London I remember" is totally inaccurate but not actually offensive), but did you see this? https://world.hey.com/dhh/three-sacred-cows-that-must-die-so-europe-can-live-1afb203d https://world.hey.com/dhh/three-sacred-cows-that-must-die-so... > Because the sacred cow here is not just that mass migration must stop going forward. It's also that millions who are already in Europe must go. He's suggesting we round up all the brown people and deport them... (He's smart enough to not put it in those words but I don't see what else it could mean.)
mdotmertens 1mo ago
omarchy is the new "i use arch, btw". I'm too altruistic (or dumb) to understand why you would pump money into a riced arch install. In some way I feel people just try to buy into "street cred" on the other hand omarchy could be a great launchpad for a distro that is customizable, easy enough to use and may provide a great MDM solution at some point.
- tuananh 1mo ago
  im pretty sure arch users dont want to associate with ormachy :))
  - krisroadruck 1mo ago
    I don't think it's aimed at them. I think it's mostly aimed at windows and mac users who are computer enthusiasts but never really made the jump to Linux as a desktop daily driver. Just supposed to be a cool on-ramp - basically mint but different and with some marketing behind it?
    - emsign 1mo ago
      Then why chose a distro that is being maintained by one person. I would NEVER recommend a Windows/Mac and first time Linux user to switch to such a distro. Not just his political views no quite practical implications are key here: what if this guy has a heart-attack? The distro will be abandoned. What if his development PC gets compromised? The distro is fried in both cases. The more developers are on the team holding the credentials and responsibilities the better, the safer a distro is. Omarchy is nothing more than an experimental distro and shouldn't be used productively or as your main OS. Simply because it's run by one guy, one single point of failure. It's the same reason why you mustn't recommend CachyOS to newcomers either, they're still just two people running the show, although they're aware of the risks that comes with it and trying to expand their core team.
      - krisroadruck 1mo ago
        I wasn't making a value judgement on who should respond to the offer, just commenting on who the offer was probably aimed at. Though I do think the sudden spike in investment and the little foundation around it now means probably more than "just one guy".
rfgplk 1mo ago
It's a shame because DHH seems to be going fully agentic (or at least that's his public stance), so no idea why he isn't rolling a proper distro. Looking at his repo it's just pure shell scripts (why?) and using prebuilt software. He could have rolled a custom renderer + pipeline + other software needed to make a distro work (ie a modern KDE).
- grey-area 1mo ago
  Yes he could have, if agents were capable of it. Why didn’t he? Why didn’t you?
  - qarl2 1mo ago
    Oh, I believe agents are fully capable of it. Would you like to issue a challenge like that? I'd love to demonstrate their capabilities to you.
    - grey-area 1mo ago
      Go ahead and do it. Would love to see an improved Linux rewritten with agents. My personal belief is it would take a long time, lots of money and much human intervention/guidance but if you think they’re capable alone just do it this afternoon and see how it goes.
      - qarl2 1mo ago
        Come come, let's spec something real. You seem extremely doubtful, why don't you let me show you?
        grey-area 1mo ago
        In all seriousness, if you have the time the money and the inclination, you should give yourself a challenge like this, and try to complete it. It would be an interesting exploration of the limits of current agents. You don't need someone else to do that for you.
dgellow 1mo ago
Just DHH being loud about it, getting his billionaire friends to join, and their usual tech-bro following astroturfing it (they somehow see it as a culture war thing to fight against the oppression from other distros and FLOSS projects that have code of conducts and don’t want to work with racists)
brightball 1mo ago
It’s a really strong UX that’s rapidly improving without a profit motive and people are excited about it. Closest thing to the “it just works” experience that Mac was always known for and it runs great on older hardware. Even goes so far as to optimize the install time down to about 1 minute. I was running i3 when an Ubuntu update borked my entire setup so I made the switch. The difference is night and day in the level of polish. Small example, running Zoom on i3 caused a tile cascade every time I turned on my Bluetooth headset because Zoom bypassed the main notification system. Issue resolved here. One of many little quirks that no longer happen. It’s nice to see excitement around Linux because nothing from the big names was really creating it.
- mdotmertens 1mo ago
  I ran it daily like up to 4 months ago. Updates would regularly break hyprland and most games I wanted to play needed much more tinkering than on vanilla arch with the same dependencies installed.
  - brightball 1mo ago
    I haven’t tried installing games on Linux in years, so that’s a gap for my experience.
    - qup 1mo ago
      Mostly you install steam, install game from inside steam, and it just works with nothing further. A far cry from 15 years ago.
  - hokumguru 1mo ago
    I've run it since launch without issue. That is: to each their own really
    - gilrain 1mo ago
      Not really: as far as we know, you use it for nothing; the person you replied to gave examples.
krisroadruck 1mo ago
I think there is a pretty decent swath of people willing to rally behind someone who says they are trying to make a cool project specifically for people who want to be away from the "insufferable injection of identity politics". How large that swath is relative to the other is up for debate but it doesn't have to be particularly large. You'll get funding from people who are both interested in the actual product AND the posture, some from people who are just into the posture, and some who are just into the product. Ditto with interest from people to try it and or contribute time to it's development.
- tao_oat 1mo ago
  dhh is very strongly associated with identity politics, though? (as in, "western"/white identity)
  - krisroadruck 1mo ago
    [dead]
  - emsign 1mo ago
    This. The alt right in German speaking countries are calling themselves "Identitäre", which was inspired by French Les Identitaires. For all their criticism of what once was just a niche and fringe academic leftist movement, they are hypocritically are mirroring at least mirroring it if not more so. I believe they have actually helped progressive identity politics become mainstream as a reaction to their attacks on minorities, as a reaction to their hatred the mainstream has signaled their solidarity with minority identities, this is the main reason for Rainbow flags, to show solidarity against hatred.
  - ed_voc 1mo ago
    Are there any examples of identity politics influencing the Omarchy product? I think the comment is more about how identity politics kept infecting products through 'woke 1.0'. donglegate, language policing, default branch names, speaker progressive stacks, diversity hiring practices and blacklisting. I don't think I've seen these political issues influence DHH products the same way.
novafunc 1mo ago
Just billionaires giving money to a friend's project.
dathinab 1mo ago
isn't it a typical SV investor money hype train situation: - project overpromise to a point of absurdity (e.g. Tesla (still has questionable full self driving), SpaceX (in recent times there had been absurd differences between claimed rocket load and what we then find out the rocket actually could load, like 100 Tons being only 15 Tons IRL level of differences), etc. etc.) - project jumps on some hype train (e.g. AI) - project has some eccentric owner which is good at selling it, even if it doesn't do what is sold - owner also goes with the "move fast break things" - owner acts widely (likely actually criminally) negligent in "safety" topics, shipping something is more important then the damage the negligence will causes, in some such such cases even if it's close to guaranteed that the negligence will kill people. Another way to phrase this point is they follow the "move at ANY cost so fast that competition can't keep up until you win by default" motto. - owner has some "Vitamine B" connections to rich risk friendly investors (aka. the "friends help friends", "cartel-like", "kinda looks like corruption" structures we have been seen from time to time in the background of SV-related startup investments) So I don't think you are missing anything about Omarchy, it's more like the whole investor culture around SV is severely broken, unhealthy and in their recklessness IMHO more damaging to society then its helpful. Not speaking about how this background structures twist the founding/startup marked in a way which may look to the outside to be "fair and open" but in fact isn't, if you don't "bow" to the right people and their ideology you aren't getting anywhere.
arnorhs 1mo ago
it's amazing from a historical perspective that there are HNers around now who don't know who DHH is, when he was such a prevailing voice in the HN scene back in the day. He is the author of rails and there are so many founders who were inspired by 37 signals and their takes on things back in the day. The golden years of HN.
- pjmlp 1mo ago
  Would have rails taken off if he was equally open about his politics back then?
  - cpursley 1mo ago
    Yes, people were more mentally resilient and mature then and it was pre Reddit, which has completely broken and warped many people’s minds.
    - pjmlp 1mo ago
      As Gen X, I think they were already softies back then.
  - noir_lord 1mo ago
    It's impossible to know what his politics was back then in fairness. People's politics do often (but not always) change as they age.
    - CuriouslyC 1mo ago
      10 years ago Joe Rogan was basically a stereotypical Bernie bro.
      - thesuitonym 1mo ago
        10 years ago Joe Rogan was a well known douchebag far-right conspiracy theorist, what are you talking about?
pjmlp 1mo ago
A techbros project that really cares close to nothing about FOSS ideals, apparently sided with far right politics.
HumansEatHumans 1mo ago
[dead]
throwaway613746 1mo ago
[dead]
micromacrofoot 1mo ago
rich guy has rich friends, cult of personality
Your_ID_Collect 1mo ago
It is going to be marketed to the AI bros. Possibly to Shopify customers as an "advanced AI distro" to create shops with. The openclaw guy just sponsored Omarchy. It's a vibe coding distro, so of course there is no security to begin with. DHH is also on the Slopify board, so AI is mandatory.
slome 1mo ago
I'm surprised HN failed to mention the real reason in this thread. It's AI. The goal of the project is to have users build (fix, maintain, expand etc) the distro themselves through AI generated (bug) reports which are then picked up by AI, solved, tested and published in a new release. A full AI loop. AI sells, this should be obvious by now. The guy behind the project talks about this in more detail, for instance during the interview he recently did with Network Chuck on youtube.
kristofferR 1mo ago
It's AI and dev forward in a brilliant way. It ships with its own skill [1], so agents actually work way better out of the box than on other distros. Something crashes? Click the notification and your agent solves the bug. It also has a very standardized UI library and a good plugin system. Due to those things the list of plugins is increasing by hundreds a day [2], I made one that adds Exposé like for macOS myself a few days ago. Most of them are actually good, and unlike other distros they look visually consistent. Customizing your system and participating in the community has never been this easy. Incredibly fun, feels like being a kid in a candyshop. [1] https://github.com/basecamp/omarchy/blob/quattro/default/agents/skills/omarchy/SKILL.md https://github.com/basecamp/omarchy/blob/quattro/default/age... [2] https://omarchyplugins.com/ https://omarchyplugins.com/
tamimio 1mo ago
Just like anything in tech recently, make a halo effect around whatever, over sell it, try to make a fanbase, and some connections here and there, and you got your meme product into a multi million product. It’s sad, there are dozens of better distributions out there and been in the game for years that deserve more exposure, but oh well.
rodolphoarruda 1mo ago
The promise of the so-called ‘malleable computer’: a machine whose hardware parts you could change, as well as bigger chunks of its software, above and beyond end-user apps. That is possible via the integration of the OS with AI agents that do the heavy lifting for you in adapting the OS to your ‘needs.’ Users of the Pi coding agent get a better feeling for this because the tool is, by design, built to respond and adapt to user-commanded changes. This is the kind of capability the typical user won’t see in private-source OSes like Windows and iOS, especially because they have security as a concern (thus the OP’s motivation for the heads-up on security in Omarchy).
freehorse 1mo ago
That the future is (by some) considered to be about “personal branding” rather than actual engineering. Build a cult of followers and ship them whatever. This is the main difference between sharing one’s cool config files and shipping a “distro”.
asimovDev 1mo ago
Been hearing about Omarchy for a while (past half a year if not more), but pretty much exclusively on LinkedIn. I don't remember if I follow DHH but I suppose enough of my connections do either way that I often get recommended posts about Omarchy. But I barely hear about it on reddit and I probably saw it mentioned a couple times here on HN
nomilk 1mo ago
1. To help linux take over desktop (vs macOS and windows) 2. As an apolitical refuge, since contributors like DHH and Tobi Lütke [along with possibly the silent majority], want to focus on commonalities (love of hacking and computing) rather than the things that drive us apart (political views)
- Kudos 1mo ago
  Both of the people you mention are political activists with problematic views, that's why their politics get brought up all the time.
poisonwomb 1mo ago
DHH is a massive racist who thinks immigrants are diluting the national character of the UK. DHH himself is danish and hasn’t been to the UK in like 10 years. Maybe he should look in the mirror sometime
grim_io 1mo ago
It's apple-centric tech bros discovering linux. If apple gets their shit together on the OS again, they'll be back in an instant. Until then, it's probably a good thing for the linux desktop overall.
musha68k 1mo ago
A highly motivated, well funded and hence potentially contagious and "blessed" effort in proliferation ... and colonization.
zilfedie 1mo ago
"free" software funded by 8 million dollars in concentrated wealth. The guy is a self aggrandizing moron that a child could see through.

by Hugsbox 1mo ago

tonyhart7 1mo ago

it get picked up by Hype because DHH

barkerja 1mo ago

It's being largely driven by DHH (creator of Rails, and co-founder of 37signals). He has a massive following and a lot of influence (and money).

cogman10 1mo ago

Looks like nothing. It's arch with a bunch of pre installed apps and a few goodies on top. My guess is relationships and fame went a long way towards getting those funds.

theshrike79 29d ago
And Dropbox is just rsync and cron =) Packaging and marketing matters.

Retr0id 1mo ago

It's a political statement disguised as a FOSS project (which itself is fine, all software is political). The funders are not funding the development of a Linux distro, they are co-signing the political statement.

ngcazz 1mo ago
[flagged]
- dgellow 1mo ago
  Financed by controversial figures too
  - panzi 1mo ago
    I'm so disappointed that The Standup was platforming him.
    - ilogik 1mo ago
      that's when I unsubscribed
    - totalperspectiv 1mo ago
      Finally got me to unsubscribe. I'm surprised that the whole crew of them were cool with reposting the snippet of DHH calling linux maintainers "clowns and goblins" amongst other things. https://x.com/thestanduppod/status/2091511392717213707?s=20 https://x.com/thestanduppod/status/2091511392717213707?s=20
      - dgellow 1mo ago
        Yeah that video is disgusting. He’s completely unhinged
    - ngcazz 1mo ago
      Pragmatic Engineer too
  - rbanffy 1mo ago
    You misspelled "fascist".
    - dgellow 1mo ago
jeffnv 1mo ago
Is it? What's the statement?
- Retr0id 1mo ago
  It's quite a loud one, but it's broadcast above 25KHz or so
  - iamnotamouse 1mo ago
    [flagged]
    - Retr0id 1mo ago
      U+1F921
    - hananova 1mo ago
      Yes that is one part of how dog whistles work. Disguise it well enough to get rubes to run interference for you. You’re doing that very well.
      - iamnotamouse 1mo ago
        [flagged]
  - jordanf 1mo ago
    wut? haha
    - lambda 1mo ago
      Just to explain because not everyone is necessarily a native English speaker or gets the reference. This is a reference to a dog whistle. Above 25kHz are sounds that dogs can hear but humans generally can't. The term dog whistle is used to refer to phrases that racists use to indicate their racism, while sounding plausibly deniable. The idea is that it's a phrase that will make other racists realize that you are one of them, while not sounding openly racist to others. DHH himself has gone beyond dog whistles. He's directly compared what he considers undesirable ehtnic populations to wolves who need to be shot. He's just openly calling for ethnic cleansing by now. But support for Omarchy itself can be seen as a dog whistle. It's widely known that DHH is a fascist, but you have some plausible deniability by donating to Omarchy because you're just politically neutral and think it's cool tech, or something like that.
rvz 1mo ago
[flagged]
- nisegami 1mo ago
  >So a "hello world" program is now political? There's an implicit political statement in being able to write a simple one line hello world program and run it, using free software and information. Consider the counterfactual world where to even begin programming you have to pay for certification and training or specialized equipment/software. I know paid compilers, proprietary languages and closed specifications exist, but we can still just save print('hello world') to a file and run it using python which is freely available, or even better we can open devtools in our browser and jump into the console and run console.log('hello world') without even installing anything.
  - 0xcde4c3db 1mo ago
    Also, the book that popularized "hello world" was very consciously advancing a programming-first pedagogical agenda, as opposed to building up a theoretical foundation first: > The only way to learn a new programming language is by writing programs in it.
- hananova 1mo ago
  You’re deliberately bringing up irrelevant minimal counter examples in bad faith.
  - sophrosyne42 1mo ago
    Then you should be able to say where the political statement in omarchy resides, and what it is
    - c-hendricks 1mo ago
      It's right there, it's the guy who started it and can't help but share his politics unprompted
  - 1mo ago
safety1st 1mo ago
[flagged]
- Philpax 1mo ago
  "political histrionics" is an interesting way to refer to calling for ethnic cleansing
- teekert 1mo ago
  Thank you, this is exactly my experience with reporting on Omarchy. There is a small vocal group that is very determined to pull politics into it somehow, but to most (a more silent, big majority) this is not even known. I.e., when Omarchy is reported on in my country (on local blogs) nobody ever replies with anything political, it's just about the tech. But in some circles this is very different, somehow.
  - nixosbestos 1mo ago
    > There is a small vocal group that is very determined to pull politics into it somehow I'd suggest you go look at DHH's own account, own tweets and then delete this embarrassing comment.
    - teekert 1mo ago
      Do you have examples? With Nitter and Xcancel down I can't even access twitter anymore, and it's not my habit to looking into the political views of developers. I don't really care. I liked FOSS because it was apolitical. Imagine Linus taking a political stance against all parties he doesn't agree with that use Linux. Imho this obsession with people's politics just has to stop. Omarchy. NixOS, LLMs. All interesting tech, and then a lot of shouting parties around it, sometimes both sides call each other nazis. I try to ignore them.
      - randomgermanguy 1mo ago
        When was FOSS apolitical ?
JeremyNT 1mo ago
> The funders are not funding the development of a Linux distro, they are co-signing the political statement. It's not even a Linux distro. It's an Arch respin with tweaks that DHH likes. This is for people who want to work like DHH.
- 0xcde4c3db 1mo ago
  Right; it's not political in the sense of "vote for candidate/party/policy XYZ", it's political in the sense that Omarchy is distinguished by being a vehicle for DHH's opinions, and by promoting Omarchy one can promote the general idea that DHH is a respectable guy with good opinions while still remaining firmly situated in "technical" subject matter.
mattstir 1mo ago
> which itself is fine, all software is political I don't mean to get distracted from the topic at hand, but is that really true? If I create my own software stack for the TRMNL display I received as a gift because I think it's fun and interesting, is that a political statement? What politics does that involve? If someone makes a small Rust library that implements some days structure and a few hundred people find it useful, what political stance is intrinsically baked in by the author? It's exhausting to go through life if you think every field is a battlefield.
- kingkongjaffa 1mo ago
  Isn't there always a political angle in the act of creating software? In essence the human right and ability to learn and change and wield computers at an unlocked and low level is a policy decision. What if governments said programs must be from companies and users should not be allowed to write their own programs, operating systems must be locked down to keep users safe or some bs 'think of the children' excuse. Especially Linux and OSS is a political manifesto design specifically to stop this kind of government overreach from taking root. It would certainly benefit shareholders of large computer companies to the detriment of the individual user's freedoms. It's easy to see a perspective like that where software is political. Politics is not a battlefield, that's an American two party system trick. Seeing the word politics doesn't immediately mean bad or divisive.
- Retr0id 1mo ago
  I mean, yeah, you can't have politics in a vacuum. But any software that does anything interesting interfaces with the outside world at some point (via human proxy or otherwise). That your TRMNL even allows you to write software for it is a choice (a cool one at that), and contributing to their ecosystem supports that choice.
- bayindirh 1mo ago
  > It's exhausting to go through life if you think every field is a battlefield. You don't have to think every field as a battlefield, but your choices are affected by and are about your beliefs and stance. For example, some people believe that going all SaaS for everything in their life is not bad, and they can afford that, so they do that. I personally don't trust companies much, and value my freedom a lot. So I self host the things I can and find valuable. I have my small infra which is not accessible from open internet, and I install services there if I want them to be unavailable to the public. I mean, nobody will try to get my mundane code from my hands, but having it in a box in front of me makes me happier and feel better, so I do it. Also, stances doesn't have to be loud/violent/up to the nose. You can be yourself with your own stance, and build it calmly and slowly. You can be just happy about achieving what you wanted to achieve. On the other hand, software licenses are of course political and the issue can get heated and gets heated semi-regularly. We're humans and being opposed to each other in various forms is our base nature. So, don't stay at DEFCON 1 all the time, but aware that range from 1 to 5 is always a possibility.
mylidlpony 1mo ago
I think a better fitting definition of what it is – notably absent from this entire comment section – is virtue, or rather vice, signaling.
s__s 1mo ago
It wasn’t that long ago that omarchy got started. As far as I could tell it was a direct response to DHH giving up on Apple. He was in a dispute with them in regards to App Store publishing and sales. He seems to have since made it his personal mission to move off of the Apple ecosystem.

vends 1mo ago

DHH effect. He has a very strong following, and there's a certain amount of trust/prestige attached to his name in the tech/startup world. For a lot of these people, DHH building something is probably enough to get them interested and willing to throw money at it.

noir_lord 1mo ago
Among some, for others (including me) him been attached to it is very much a counter signal.
- brightball 1mo ago
  Why? I watched all of the supposed controversies around him happen in real time and they were all non stories. “Hey, you can be political on social media but don’t bring it into our work chats. We are here to do a job. If that is a problem, here’s a generous 6 month severance package.” That was what politically blew him up and he was unwilling to apologize for a completely reasonable take. Now he’s giving his time and money freely to make a great Linux distro. It says more about the anti-DHH crowd than it does about him.
  - tao_oat 1mo ago
    You're skipping his recent blog posts; I think that's where the bulk of people's complaints come from. See for example https://tekin.co.uk/2025/09/the-ruby-community-has-a-dhh-problem https://tekin.co.uk/2025/09/the-ruby-community-has-a-dhh-pro...
  - IshKebab 1mo ago
    I agree about most of what he's said (e.g. "The London I remember" is totally inaccurate but not actually offensive), but did you see this? https://world.hey.com/dhh/three-sacred-cows-that-must-die-so-europe-can-live-1afb203d https://world.hey.com/dhh/three-sacred-cows-that-must-die-so... > Because the sacred cow here is not just that mass migration must stop going forward. It's also that millions who are already in Europe must go. He's suggesting we round up all the brown people and deport them... (He's smart enough to not put it in those words but I don't see what else it could mean.)

mdotmertens 1mo ago

omarchy is the new "i use arch, btw". I'm too altruistic (or dumb) to understand why you would pump money into a riced arch install. In some way I feel people just try to buy into "street cred" on the other hand omarchy could be a great launchpad for a distro that is customizable, easy enough to use and may provide a great MDM solution at some point.

tuananh 1mo ago
im pretty sure arch users dont want to associate with ormachy :))
- krisroadruck 1mo ago
  I don't think it's aimed at them. I think it's mostly aimed at windows and mac users who are computer enthusiasts but never really made the jump to Linux as a desktop daily driver. Just supposed to be a cool on-ramp - basically mint but different and with some marketing behind it?
  - emsign 1mo ago
    Then why chose a distro that is being maintained by one person. I would NEVER recommend a Windows/Mac and first time Linux user to switch to such a distro. Not just his political views no quite practical implications are key here: what if this guy has a heart-attack? The distro will be abandoned. What if his development PC gets compromised? The distro is fried in both cases. The more developers are on the team holding the credentials and responsibilities the better, the safer a distro is. Omarchy is nothing more than an experimental distro and shouldn't be used productively or as your main OS. Simply because it's run by one guy, one single point of failure. It's the same reason why you mustn't recommend CachyOS to newcomers either, they're still just two people running the show, although they're aware of the risks that comes with it and trying to expand their core team.
    - krisroadruck 1mo ago
      I wasn't making a value judgement on who should respond to the offer, just commenting on who the offer was probably aimed at. Though I do think the sudden spike in investment and the little foundation around it now means probably more than "just one guy".

rfgplk 1mo ago

It's a shame because DHH seems to be going fully agentic (or at least that's his public stance), so no idea why he isn't rolling a proper distro. Looking at his repo it's just pure shell scripts (why?) and using prebuilt software. He could have rolled a custom renderer + pipeline + other software needed to make a distro work (ie a modern KDE).

grey-area 1mo ago
Yes he could have, if agents were capable of it. Why didn’t he? Why didn’t you?
- qarl2 1mo ago
  Oh, I believe agents are fully capable of it. Would you like to issue a challenge like that? I'd love to demonstrate their capabilities to you.
  - grey-area 1mo ago
    Go ahead and do it. Would love to see an improved Linux rewritten with agents. My personal belief is it would take a long time, lots of money and much human intervention/guidance but if you think they’re capable alone just do it this afternoon and see how it goes.
    - qarl2 1mo ago
      Come come, let's spec something real. You seem extremely doubtful, why don't you let me show you?
      - grey-area 1mo ago
        In all seriousness, if you have the time the money and the inclination, you should give yourself a challenge like this, and try to complete it. It would be an interesting exploration of the limits of current agents. You don't need someone else to do that for you.

dgellow 1mo ago

Just DHH being loud about it, getting his billionaire friends to join, and their usual tech-bro following astroturfing it (they somehow see it as a culture war thing to fight against the oppression from other distros and FLOSS projects that have code of conducts and don’t want to work with racists)

brightball 1mo ago

It’s a really strong UX that’s rapidly improving without a profit motive and people are excited about it. Closest thing to the “it just works” experience that Mac was always known for and it runs great on older hardware. Even goes so far as to optimize the install time down to about 1 minute. I was running i3 when an Ubuntu update borked my entire setup so I made the switch. The difference is night and day in the level of polish. Small example, running Zoom on i3 caused a tile cascade every time I turned on my Bluetooth headset because Zoom bypassed the main notification system. Issue resolved here. One of many little quirks that no longer happen. It’s nice to see excitement around Linux because nothing from the big names was really creating it.

mdotmertens 1mo ago
I ran it daily like up to 4 months ago. Updates would regularly break hyprland and most games I wanted to play needed much more tinkering than on vanilla arch with the same dependencies installed.
- brightball 1mo ago
  I haven’t tried installing games on Linux in years, so that’s a gap for my experience.
  - qup 1mo ago
    Mostly you install steam, install game from inside steam, and it just works with nothing further. A far cry from 15 years ago.
- hokumguru 1mo ago
  I've run it since launch without issue. That is: to each their own really
  - gilrain 1mo ago
    Not really: as far as we know, you use it for nothing; the person you replied to gave examples.

krisroadruck 1mo ago

I think there is a pretty decent swath of people willing to rally behind someone who says they are trying to make a cool project specifically for people who want to be away from the "insufferable injection of identity politics". How large that swath is relative to the other is up for debate but it doesn't have to be particularly large. You'll get funding from people who are both interested in the actual product AND the posture, some from people who are just into the posture, and some who are just into the product. Ditto with interest from people to try it and or contribute time to it's development.

tao_oat 1mo ago
dhh is very strongly associated with identity politics, though? (as in, "western"/white identity)
- krisroadruck 1mo ago
  [dead]
- emsign 1mo ago
  This. The alt right in German speaking countries are calling themselves "Identitäre", which was inspired by French Les Identitaires. For all their criticism of what once was just a niche and fringe academic leftist movement, they are hypocritically are mirroring at least mirroring it if not more so. I believe they have actually helped progressive identity politics become mainstream as a reaction to their attacks on minorities, as a reaction to their hatred the mainstream has signaled their solidarity with minority identities, this is the main reason for Rainbow flags, to show solidarity against hatred.
- ed_voc 1mo ago
  Are there any examples of identity politics influencing the Omarchy product? I think the comment is more about how identity politics kept infecting products through 'woke 1.0'. donglegate, language policing, default branch names, speaker progressive stacks, diversity hiring practices and blacklisting. I don't think I've seen these political issues influence DHH products the same way.

novafunc 1mo ago

Just billionaires giving money to a friend's project.

dathinab 1mo ago

isn't it a typical SV investor money hype train situation: - project overpromise to a point of absurdity (e.g. Tesla (still has questionable full self driving), SpaceX (in recent times there had been absurd differences between claimed rocket load and what we then find out the rocket actually could load, like 100 Tons being only 15 Tons IRL level of differences), etc. etc.) - project jumps on some hype train (e.g. AI) - project has some eccentric owner which is good at selling it, even if it doesn't do what is sold - owner also goes with the "move fast break things" - owner acts widely (likely actually criminally) negligent in "safety" topics, shipping something is more important then the damage the negligence will causes, in some such such cases even if it's close to guaranteed that the negligence will kill people. Another way to phrase this point is they follow the "move at ANY cost so fast that competition can't keep up until you win by default" motto. - owner has some "Vitamine B" connections to rich risk friendly investors (aka. the "friends help friends", "cartel-like", "kinda looks like corruption" structures we have been seen from time to time in the background of SV-related startup investments) So I don't think you are missing anything about Omarchy, it's more like the whole investor culture around SV is severely broken, unhealthy and in their recklessness IMHO more damaging to society then its helpful. Not speaking about how this background structures twist the founding/startup marked in a way which may look to the outside to be "fair and open" but in fact isn't, if you don't "bow" to the right people and their ideology you aren't getting anywhere.

arnorhs 1mo ago

it's amazing from a historical perspective that there are HNers around now who don't know who DHH is, when he was such a prevailing voice in the HN scene back in the day. He is the author of rails and there are so many founders who were inspired by 37 signals and their takes on things back in the day. The golden years of HN.

pjmlp 1mo ago
Would have rails taken off if he was equally open about his politics back then?
- cpursley 1mo ago
  Yes, people were more mentally resilient and mature then and it was pre Reddit, which has completely broken and warped many people’s minds.
  - pjmlp 1mo ago
    As Gen X, I think they were already softies back then.
- noir_lord 1mo ago
  It's impossible to know what his politics was back then in fairness. People's politics do often (but not always) change as they age.
  - CuriouslyC 1mo ago
    10 years ago Joe Rogan was basically a stereotypical Bernie bro.
    - thesuitonym 1mo ago
      10 years ago Joe Rogan was a well known douchebag far-right conspiracy theorist, what are you talking about?

pjmlp 1mo ago

A techbros project that really cares close to nothing about FOSS ideals, apparently sided with far right politics.

HumansEatHumans 1mo ago

[dead]

throwaway613746 1mo ago

[dead]

micromacrofoot 1mo ago

rich guy has rich friends, cult of personality

Your_ID_Collect 1mo ago

It is going to be marketed to the AI bros. Possibly to Shopify customers as an "advanced AI distro" to create shops with. The openclaw guy just sponsored Omarchy. It's a vibe coding distro, so of course there is no security to begin with. DHH is also on the Slopify board, so AI is mandatory.

slome 1mo ago

I'm surprised HN failed to mention the real reason in this thread. It's AI. The goal of the project is to have users build (fix, maintain, expand etc) the distro themselves through AI generated (bug) reports which are then picked up by AI, solved, tested and published in a new release. A full AI loop. AI sells, this should be obvious by now. The guy behind the project talks about this in more detail, for instance during the interview he recently did with Network Chuck on youtube.

kristofferR 1mo ago

It's AI and dev forward in a brilliant way. It ships with its own skill [1], so agents actually work way better out of the box than on other distros. Something crashes? Click the notification and your agent solves the bug. It also has a very standardized UI library and a good plugin system. Due to those things the list of plugins is increasing by hundreds a day [2], I made one that adds Exposé like for macOS myself a few days ago. Most of them are actually good, and unlike other distros they look visually consistent. Customizing your system and participating in the community has never been this easy. Incredibly fun, feels like being a kid in a candyshop. [1] https://github.com/basecamp/omarchy/blob/quattro/default/agents/skills/omarchy/SKILL.md https://github.com/basecamp/omarchy/blob/quattro/default/age... [2] https://omarchyplugins.com/ https://omarchyplugins.com/

tamimio 1mo ago

Just like anything in tech recently, make a halo effect around whatever, over sell it, try to make a fanbase, and some connections here and there, and you got your meme product into a multi million product. It’s sad, there are dozens of better distributions out there and been in the game for years that deserve more exposure, but oh well.

rodolphoarruda 1mo ago

The promise of the so-called ‘malleable computer’: a machine whose hardware parts you could change, as well as bigger chunks of its software, above and beyond end-user apps. That is possible via the integration of the OS with AI agents that do the heavy lifting for you in adapting the OS to your ‘needs.’ Users of the Pi coding agent get a better feeling for this because the tool is, by design, built to respond and adapt to user-commanded changes. This is the kind of capability the typical user won’t see in private-source OSes like Windows and iOS, especially because they have security as a concern (thus the OP’s motivation for the heads-up on security in Omarchy).

freehorse 1mo ago

That the future is (by some) considered to be about “personal branding” rather than actual engineering. Build a cult of followers and ship them whatever. This is the main difference between sharing one’s cool config files and shipping a “distro”.

asimovDev 1mo ago

Been hearing about Omarchy for a while (past half a year if not more), but pretty much exclusively on LinkedIn. I don't remember if I follow DHH but I suppose enough of my connections do either way that I often get recommended posts about Omarchy. But I barely hear about it on reddit and I probably saw it mentioned a couple times here on HN

nomilk 1mo ago

1. To help linux take over desktop (vs macOS and windows) 2. As an apolitical refuge, since contributors like DHH and Tobi Lütke [along with possibly the silent majority], want to focus on commonalities (love of hacking and computing) rather than the things that drive us apart (political views)

Kudos 1mo ago
Both of the people you mention are political activists with problematic views, that's why their politics get brought up all the time.

poisonwomb 1mo ago

DHH is a massive racist who thinks immigrants are diluting the national character of the UK. DHH himself is danish and hasn’t been to the UK in like 10 years. Maybe he should look in the mirror sometime

grim_io 1mo ago

It's apple-centric tech bros discovering linux. If apple gets their shit together on the OS again, they'll be back in an instant. Until then, it's probably a good thing for the linux desktop overall.

musha68k 1mo ago

A highly motivated, well funded and hence potentially contagious and "blessed" effort in proliferation ... and colonization.

zilfedie 1mo ago

"free" software funded by 8 million dollars in concentrated wealth. The guy is a self aggrandizing moron that a child could see through.