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$12.6 millions for a Linux distro?
by mdrzn 26d ago
$12.6 millions for a Linux distro?
- fwip 26d agoThe random selection of people chipping in for this is so weird. Do they owe DHH a favor or something?
- sho_hn 26d agoIt's especially weird considering DHH is heavily disliked by much of the Linux community for his political beliefs, and association with him is heavily frowned upon. Over at KDE, we've seen some criticism for taking sponsorship money from Framework laptops because they sent him a laptop once. I must believe on some level these sponsors are jumping on the bandwagon to show off how in they are with desktop Linux, now that it's slowly arriving in the mainstream, while possibly rather demonstrating their obliviousness.
- cpburns2009 26d agoThe really strange thing about the criticism directed towards Framework is they simply sponsored the Hyprland window manager, not the Omarchy OS, but because Omarchy uses Hyprland that got conflated as funding Omarchy.
- wrl 26d agoThey keep sending DHH hardware and at one point they were sponsoring his Rails conference too. People backed off on the Hyprland sponsorship but Framework doubled down on DHH.
- edu 26d agoThe power of contacts, and looking at the initial list it seems it’s a bunch of founders whose startups succeed using Ruby on Rails, so I guess yeah… they owe some to DHH
- microtonal 25d agoMost likely also technofascists and other oddballs helping out their technofascist buddies. One of the other big sponsors: In July 2026, Lütke expressed support for setting voting rights proportional to the level of income tax paid by a citizen, with those paying no income tax being stripped of their voting rights and others gaining one additional vote for each $100,000 paid in income tax up to five votes per person. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tobias_L%C3%BCtke#Voting_rights_controversy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tobias_L%C3%BCtke#Voting_right...
- StrLght 26d ago> distro It's more like a set of dotfiles, but yeah.
- deleted 26d ago[deleted]
- deleted 26d ago[deleted]
- edu 26d agoNot even a distro, it’s a customization of Arch and Hyoerland. Hope they redirect some of their fundings to them!
- theshrike79 26d agoSo like SteamOS?
- jdiff 26d agoSteamOS runs its own infrastructure and is more than a static set of scripts and dotfiles on top of an existing distro.
- TiredOfLife 26d agoSteamos is a mirrored snapshot of arch (like omarchy) + bash and python scripts (like omarchy) + their own shell (steam running on top of gamescope for steamos and a custom quickshell based one running on top of hyprland for omarchy) + modified upstream kernel (both steamos and omarchy)
- gclawes 26d agoYeah and Ubuntu just started as customized Debian
- roryirvine 26d agoThat's... not true. At the time Ubuntu started, Debian's old installer (boot-floppies) was legendary for its unfriendliness, and the new all-singing, all-dancing replacement was a mammoth endeavour and a long way off completion. Ubuntu provided a simple, friendly installer that covered only the limited set of the most common use cases, but was a dramatic improvement for new users. They also employed a bunch of Debian developers, and gave them space to continue their work for Debian. It wasn't all smooth sailing, but Debian was stronger as a result of their contributions right from the very start. Now, maybe Omarchy are providing a similarly major contribution to Arch - but, if they are, they've kept quiet about it so far.
- fourseventy 26d agoWhy are people complaining about money going into FOSS?
- sdcfgy 26d agoIt’s who the money is going to in FOSS.
- Avshalom 26d agoBecause it doesn't seem to be actually going to FOSS
- bbg2401 26d agoYou're going to have to clarify that rather bold statement.
- TiredOfLife 26d agoYou see https://git.outfoxxed.me/quickshell/quickshell https://git.outfoxxed.me/quickshell/quickshell (GNU LGPL 3) https://github.com/hyprwm/Hyprland https://github.com/hyprwm/Hyprland (BSD) https://github.com/jdx/mise https://github.com/jdx/mise (MIT) are not really foss
- StrLght 26d agoI believe it's more about money ending up in an overhyped vibecoded Bash mess maintained by a very controversial figure. And that's putting it mildly.
- mirzap 26d agoHyperland being funded for 3 years benefits all distros and users that rely on it. The same goes for Quickshell. And my guess is that this is only the beginning. They will support any project that Omarchy is built on. They even reached out to AUR maintainers to support them financially and build better, more stable infrastructure for any distro that depends on AUR, but they refused.
- ricardobeat 26d agoRed Hat: billions, Canonical/Ubuntu, SUSE: hundreds of millions, Debian: one million/year. It's not that unusual for a distro to get funding - just a different scale here due to their connections. Their foundation is now sponsoring Hyprland, mise and quickshell development, probably other projects to come.
- Zambyte 26d agoWhat services does Omarchy provide?
- cpburns2009 26d agoIt appears to be an opinionated, batteries included distro/OS using a tiling window manager, and it's targeted at Mac/Windows power users. It's a niche target and time will tell whether it pays off.
- Zambyte 26d agoI'm asking about professional services. The thing people pay all those companies they listed for.
- cpburns2009 26d agoI don't know what professional services they plan on offering. Does Debian actually offer any? I know the others do.
- jdiff 26d agoThere's a distinct difference between the contributions of Debian and that of Omarchy. Debian is a foundational distro, it's a giant with huge populations standing on its shoulders. It shoulders a large ongoing burden, security guarantees, some of the largest maintained repos of any distro, a large amount of infrastructure. Omarchy is a script and some dotfiles. Happy for them, of course, but it's odd. Omarchy just isn't doing that much.
- Lalabadie 26d agobut, but, the people who get a residency receive 2.5k per month!
- deleted 26d ago[deleted]
- weberer 26d agoIts for a foundation where the Linux distro is their flagship product. Much like Mozilla or the Wikipedia foundation. It looks like they're also funding artists[1] and downstream projects[2]. [1] https://omarchy.org/air/ https://omarchy.org/air/ [2] https://omarchy.org/sponsorships/ https://omarchy.org/sponsorships/
- ok123456 26d agoWhat exactly is the Mozilla Foundation developing these days? What is their budget?
- cpburns2009 26d agoYou'd think a foundation raking in half a billion per year could accomplish more.
- slig 24d agoThey tanking FF markeshare and nuking any chances on mobile is the accomplishment, and that's what they are getting paid for.