DHH is way past fuck you money, he does what he wants, you can hate / like it as much as you want, but claiming some grand conspiracy to get people to use more AI??? Just dumb.
If DHH believes so much in his distro, why doesn't he put a few million of his own in it, like Shuttleworth did with Ubuntu? Why does he need a GoFundMe for his hobby?
Omarchy's definitely been polarizing. I've been using it since the first release and its been my daily driver for the last few months. Folks can say what they want about DHH and argue that Omarchy is just dot files... but hot damn if it doesn't give me the breath of fresh air I needed from the Apple ecosystem. I've always loved Linux, but could never stick around. I didn't have the patience for the constant tweaking or trying to figure out how to properly scale display resolution. Omarchy offers some great convention out of the box and is being worked on by a passionate group of people. That's part of what has made the internet great. We're in a new era, why not have a little fun with it?
Having fun alone in your homelab is one thing. But encouraging others to use the thing you made, despite the systematic lack of care to security, is quite another. I don't want YouTube video titles to have arbitrary code execution on my machine and I'm not sure why anyone would.
Though if it really is an OS dedicated to AI, as the article claims, maybe the vibe coded security holes are what give it a reason to exist at all.
Omarchy is interesting, not for tokenmaxxing, but that's it's just easier to work between whatever steps you are working through as a pipeline, whcih can include ai steps, or not one per window.
I realize that's the window manager, but being up and running on a ready to go setup in 10 minutes is something neat too that I hope can become an option for other distors.
Omarchy exists because there's a real demand for a power user OS that's not controlled by Apple and Microsoft. Windows sucks and MacOS now occupies an extra 18GB or something crazy for their internal models that's not an opt-out.
After using omarchy for almost a year, and every time I mentioned it people dogpiling about how it's just a bunch of config files not an OS - I tested that idea. Turns out they're pretty much right. Fedora + hyprland + a little messing around with config files to get the shortcuts I'd become familiar with back = about 95% of omarchy. Glad to be rid of any link to DHH, and happy to have a deeper understanding of what comprises my desktop environment. 10/10 would recommend.
Before i had come across any of the racism and incipient fascism he’s spouted online, I was already kinda annoyed by how AI-forward omarchy is. A huge part of moving to linux from macOS is not wanting ai crap shoved down my throat. Omarchy doesn’t shove, but it sure does offer it up as the default
Lex Fridman is still shilling for AI? I remember his interview with Hassabis where he depicted Hassabis as the good guy and both were very, very concerned. Very concerned indeed.
The DHH episode is literally sponsored by Shopify:
I'm not going to comment on DHH himself here (huge mixed feelings on many levels), but people completely underestimate the power of curated experience.
If there was a piece of software that needed 3 colors set, and there was a choice to set the 3 colors yourself, or pick a color preset that some person spent time combining just right, a lot of people would appreciate the latter.
Sitting and making subjective taste-based considerations is a huge energy and time sink, and takes a certain kind of individual to actually enjoy. Even if you did take time on one thing, you still hope that you don't have to do that on others. Having somebody sweat these details for you, so your baseline is strong, is a lot of value in practice, because we're human and we like nice things, and knowing that even if we don't customize it, somebody already did with great care.
Why even listen to premade music. You can just throw together samples/notes yourself. Why listen to lyrics/poems, you can just put together some words yourself. Why hire an interior designer. You can just make it the way you like yourself. Etc.
Ubuntu was curated by Mark Shuttleworth for years. GNOME OS and KDE Linux are also fairly curated. It's not clear that DHH's curation of Omarchy actually created a better distro.
> Sitting and making subjective taste-based considerations is a huge energy and time sink, and takes a certain kind of individual to actually enjoy.
I would gently disagree. There are hundreds people on reddit who spend inordinate time to rice their desktop and share their dotfiles. They just haven't previously written their name all over a few prominent online projects to then market what they've done as a distro and solicit multimillion dollar donations with a straight face.
Just like you’d be reluctant to pull in any non-trivial dependency that has 2 GitHub stars and barely any activity, or a distro created one time by a reddit guy, there is value in big name and multimillion dollar donations supporting your dependency.
I dont understand the ad nauseam argument of "its just someones .dot files".
1. Omarchy now has its own Kernel now Omarchy 4.0.4-1 - Linux 7.2.5-3-omarchy.
2. Has its own package repository.
3. AUR is not its default repository.
4. Cloudfare as its CDN
5. Solid new team hiring wrt security, infrasturcture and kernel.
It also has people paid to promote it. Despite you being an account that is 1 hour old, I will reply substantively.
Just because you can recompile a kernel following someone else's recipe doesn't mean that you understand how to configure one yourself, much less how it works. Regarding security, just a month ago any Omarchy user who understood how the `docker` group works could escalate to root without a password.
What I'm trying to say is that one cannot buy the technical competence. Working on medium-complexity web apps and doing system development are two very different things. So far, Omarchy has been amateur hour when it comes to the latter.
I find myself in a weird position to defend Omarchy as a person who doesn't use Omarchy and doesn't agree with DHH (including public rebuttals on twitter).
> one cannot buy the technical competence
The most charitable interpretation here is "just by paying for AI tokens, you don't get smarter", with which I would agree. And yet your full comment seems to suggest that there's no way to buy technical competence in general.
But Omarchy is literally buying it[1]. And so does every business that pays tech employees.
> Anyway, is it left wing to be anti-racist these days? Yikes.
Unfortunately, on this site, being against white supremacy is treated as some sort of personality disorder. Yes, it's fucked up. No, it's not representative of the general population (or so I dearly hope).
More like this site has tons of anonymous accounts that are quick to coordinate labelling and cancelling someone for something they didn't say.
Ask your self, how come most of VCs and tech people swung "back to right". Literally all of them have been cancelled by the mob years ago. Even our darling PG has been cancelled despite vehemently protesting right.
If being scolded for things you're not doing by anonymous accounts is enough to make you change your core beliefs, such that you change your political alignment, I don't think they were core beliefs.
> even our darling PG has been cancelled
Please, do tell - in what way has PG been cancelled? Cancellation is when you lose opportunities, funding, jobs, etc. It is not when people online repeatedly bring up something they didn't like that you did or said.
> Cancelling people for merely trying to open conversation
But you must believe there is a line, no? Sure, open conversation is good, but there are things you can say in open conversation that will make people not want to associate with you. Is that unfair? I don’t think so. Cancellation isn’t bad, imo, unless it’s unfair. Words taken out of context, distorted by mob mentality, that kind of thing. Otherwise, to me “cancellation” is just the consequences of your words and actions.
Yes, I'm baffled that more commenters aren't confused by this. Even with the full context of the drama surrounding DHH, I still have no clue what the author is trying to imply, or why they feel the need to imply it instead of stating it.
It's especially bizarre because they start off saying "Thank me, I just listened to a 5 hour interview with DHH so you don’t have to," and then they don't say anything at all.
I agree that the article is quite short, but it is not true that the article said nothing at all.
For instance, the article quite clearly makes a connection between money being pumped into Omarchy, and this, in turn, most likely leading to a linux distributions that would quite possibly be beneficial to various Big Bro agendas (plus, advertisement for AI in general, aka "look ma, AI slop produced this AWESOME distribution"; and by the way, rails marketing was EXACTLY like that in 2007 or 2008 too). This in turn points to the possibility that Omarchy is a Big Bro project. Another connection made is that this will be used to maximize costly token sales. Now - the author does not provide strong statements on the latter, but the former is already known. Look at the "donors" and "sponsors". Tell me this has zero influence? We could already see this before with shopify, and DHH is part of that group. Look how much influence they bought in ruby; see how developers got whacked out of ruby due to that, who then built https://gem.coop/about/faq/. There is definitely an influence via money - there is no denying that.
As for not having much to say about a five hours interview - well. That could be the fault of the author. Or perhaps DHH does not have anything substantially to say for five hours. Who knows. I don't think I can afford 5 hours of my life having to listen to DHH ever since his "I hate wolves and hobos!" entry: https://world.hey.com/dhh/wolves-sheep-and-gypsies-ba44af6a
I tired Omarchy before I judge it. Also listened to the 5 hours podcast in a period of 10 days, consuming it each day on the way to work. Skipped some parts.
So, I installed Omarchy on my Thinkpad T14 T1 Gen 2021 laptop and maaan I love this OS.
I read that article you were mentioning about wolves and hobos! All I understood was this so called guy named DHH loves Copenhagen and wants that city no to smell like shit, and wants homeless guys to go live in a shelters. Whats wrong with that?
Anyway, Omarchy has its own kernel, own repo with Cloudfare CDN, safe from AUR packages and an awesome team around it. More people move to linux better right? Year of the linux desktop, right? All this OS is doing is that. I hope it continues. Please do try it, ignore this man DHHs politics, for example just like I ignored Bill Clintons white house fiasco.
This blog post captures the essence of uneasy feelings I've had about this distro.
It has received a lot of money, way more than necessary to bootstrap development of the actual distro. Making new useful open source tools, hiring developers, engaging in FOSS advocacy are all the things they are not doing nor planning to do.
Instead, they just peddle influence. You pay ~$10k to a popular youtuber to promote your product. Now you can pay more money and your products will be promoted by DHH himself, for longer.
So why does it exist?
What are you trying to conclude? Basically you are saying - "Rich people's passions are always sinister and ulterior motive is to make more money"
Just an opinionated piece by this author. But the difference is I like DHHs opinionated Omarchy and don't like the authors lazy opinionated article. Thats my opinion and you HAVE to respect it!!
I can't help but shake off the feeling that too much about Omarchy is
not from an objective analysis, but promo-bias. I noticed this on
distrowatch recently, but also on the ruby/rails reddit thread here:
Now - personally I have not tried Omarchy, because I have no need for it.
I compile about 99% of what I do from source, via ruby scripts, and if I
need something I add it, if time permits. Most of the time I stay on the
terminal/commandline and just do things there; sometimes I use the browser,
editor, rarely mpv for local stuff, evince for pdf reading. I think that
covers around 90% of the uses I have on linux. I have no need for a special
linux distribution, having first built LFS in around 2006 or so.
With that out of the way ... I don't like the AI slop, so using AI slop
generated distributions, is already an instant nope for me. But even aside
from that, I don't fully understand why Omarchy exists. With all the money
that the big boys inject, I have a slight suspicion that this is a corporate
linux project. I have no interest in that.
Also, aside from this, ever since DHH tried to manipulate readers into
connecting homeless people to shooting down wolves, is the moment I stopped
caring about DHH. The guy is nuts. And if you read the above comment, it seems
he finally decided to abandon ruby and rails - that would be great, but in
reality it is actually not, since ruby already went into extinction decline.
Matz or Hiroshi Shibata only "communicating" with others through AI spam slop,
is also another last-entry into the coffin situation now. It's sad. It seems
as if some folks are so convinced about AI that they don't understand that it
causes a lot of damage and problems. Some noticed this, others did not. And you
can not change anything here either.
As for the linked in webpage:
> For the AI companies, David presents a strong offer: he’s building a distro from the ground up made for token maxxing.
I can't evaluate this, but it would make sense. The Big Bros want money and influence, so their mercenaries will do all they can to further this goal. These are the modern economic hitmen; people such as Sebastian Kurz (suddenly he is a millionaire, one of the top 100 richest folks in Austria, thanks to AI spam slop). I am sorry but I am too old to not call bullshit on any of these. The USA is basically run by a syndicate - Trump is just making this more obvious due to his dementia, but there is so much money behind that sustains criminal energy. By the way, how big was the Epstein network really? Only Ghislaine is in prison. She has organised all of this on her own? Or even with Jeffrey, two people organised all those sexy parties for the superrich? Anyway, we know with Trump in charge, we'll never get any real answers to that.
> I guess there’s usually a reason behind what tech-moguls say and do, even when they’re presenting themselves as the purely passionate guys.
I am glad to not be the only one distrustful about Omarchy. I bet in a few years people will be surprised how their private data "accidentally" leaked to the Big Bros. Thanks to Spymarchy, formerly known as Omarchy.
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[ 0.26 ms ] story [ 36.5 ms ] threadDHH is way past fuck you money, he does what he wants, you can hate / like it as much as you want, but claiming some grand conspiracy to get people to use more AI??? Just dumb.
[1] https://omarchy.org/news/2026/08/omacom-foundation-launches-...
Omarchy is a free OS, and it looks very interesting
I don't think it's wrong to avoid it because of DHH's opinions, but I don't think it's right to either
Though if it really is an OS dedicated to AI, as the article claims, maybe the vibe coded security holes are what give it a reason to exist at all.
I realize that's the window manager, but being up and running on a ready to go setup in 10 minutes is something neat too that I hope can become an option for other distors.
The DHH episode is literally sponsored by Shopify:
https://lexfridman.com/sponsors/ep501-sa
On the bright side, this is the best and most honest sponsor disclosure I have ever seen!
If there was a piece of software that needed 3 colors set, and there was a choice to set the 3 colors yourself, or pick a color preset that some person spent time combining just right, a lot of people would appreciate the latter.
Sitting and making subjective taste-based considerations is a huge energy and time sink, and takes a certain kind of individual to actually enjoy. Even if you did take time on one thing, you still hope that you don't have to do that on others. Having somebody sweat these details for you, so your baseline is strong, is a lot of value in practice, because we're human and we like nice things, and knowing that even if we don't customize it, somebody already did with great care.
Why even listen to premade music. You can just throw together samples/notes yourself. Why listen to lyrics/poems, you can just put together some words yourself. Why hire an interior designer. You can just make it the way you like yourself. Etc.
I would gently disagree. There are hundreds people on reddit who spend inordinate time to rice their desktop and share their dotfiles. They just haven't previously written their name all over a few prominent online projects to then market what they've done as a distro and solicit multimillion dollar donations with a straight face.
compare that to the billions who just use computer
If its not a distribution, what is it then?
Just because you can recompile a kernel following someone else's recipe doesn't mean that you understand how to configure one yourself, much less how it works. Regarding security, just a month ago any Omarchy user who understood how the `docker` group works could escalate to root without a password.
What I'm trying to say is that one cannot buy the technical competence. Working on medium-complexity web apps and doing system development are two very different things. So far, Omarchy has been amateur hour when it comes to the latter.
> one cannot buy the technical competence
The most charitable interpretation here is "just by paying for AI tokens, you don't get smarter", with which I would agree. And yet your full comment seems to suggest that there's no way to buy technical competence in general.
But Omarchy is literally buying it[1]. And so does every business that pays tech employees.
[1]: https://omarchy.org/teams/
p.s. do left not realize how this guilty-by-association public-lynching is damaging their brand?
nobody is guilty for using omarchy, but I guess I don't get why you would want to associate with someone who sucks?
Anyway, is it left wing to be anti-racist these days? Yikes.
Unfortunately, on this site, being against white supremacy is treated as some sort of personality disorder. Yes, it's fucked up. No, it's not representative of the general population (or so I dearly hope).
Ask your self, how come most of VCs and tech people swung "back to right". Literally all of them have been cancelled by the mob years ago. Even our darling PG has been cancelled despite vehemently protesting right.
> even our darling PG has been cancelled
Please, do tell - in what way has PG been cancelled? Cancellation is when you lose opportunities, funding, jobs, etc. It is not when people online repeatedly bring up something they didn't like that you did or said.
Cancelling people for merely trying to open conversation (mind these aren't some extreme ideas either) is just fucked up thing to do.
But you must believe there is a line, no? Sure, open conversation is good, but there are things you can say in open conversation that will make people not want to associate with you. Is that unfair? I don’t think so. Cancellation isn’t bad, imo, unless it’s unfair. Words taken out of context, distorted by mob mentality, that kind of thing. Otherwise, to me “cancellation” is just the consequences of your words and actions.
Just damages their brand.
It's especially bizarre because they start off saying "Thank me, I just listened to a 5 hour interview with DHH so you don’t have to," and then they don't say anything at all.
For instance, the article quite clearly makes a connection between money being pumped into Omarchy, and this, in turn, most likely leading to a linux distributions that would quite possibly be beneficial to various Big Bro agendas (plus, advertisement for AI in general, aka "look ma, AI slop produced this AWESOME distribution"; and by the way, rails marketing was EXACTLY like that in 2007 or 2008 too). This in turn points to the possibility that Omarchy is a Big Bro project. Another connection made is that this will be used to maximize costly token sales. Now - the author does not provide strong statements on the latter, but the former is already known. Look at the "donors" and "sponsors". Tell me this has zero influence? We could already see this before with shopify, and DHH is part of that group. Look how much influence they bought in ruby; see how developers got whacked out of ruby due to that, who then built https://gem.coop/about/faq/. There is definitely an influence via money - there is no denying that.
As for not having much to say about a five hours interview - well. That could be the fault of the author. Or perhaps DHH does not have anything substantially to say for five hours. Who knows. I don't think I can afford 5 hours of my life having to listen to DHH ever since his "I hate wolves and hobos!" entry: https://world.hey.com/dhh/wolves-sheep-and-gypsies-ba44af6a
I do not read in the article how he said all of them are always sinister. Can you quote that part?
As for making more money: I think most rich people would like to make more money, so I don't see the argument.
I guess there’s usually a reason behind what tech-moguls say and do, even when they’re presenting themselves as the purely passionate guys."
Whåt do you think the means by the last 2 sentences of his article? pasted the quote above again for your reference.
It has received a lot of money, way more than necessary to bootstrap development of the actual distro. Making new useful open source tools, hiring developers, engaging in FOSS advocacy are all the things they are not doing nor planning to do.
Instead, they just peddle influence. You pay ~$10k to a popular youtuber to promote your product. Now you can pay more money and your products will be promoted by DHH himself, for longer.
Just an opinionated piece by this author. But the difference is I like DHHs opinionated Omarchy and don't like the authors lazy opinionated article. Thats my opinion and you HAVE to respect it!!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TpQlyUjp3vM
https://www.reddit.com/r/rails/comments/1won8aq/post_dhh_rai...
Some of the pro-Omarchy comments are strange.
Now - personally I have not tried Omarchy, because I have no need for it. I compile about 99% of what I do from source, via ruby scripts, and if I need something I add it, if time permits. Most of the time I stay on the terminal/commandline and just do things there; sometimes I use the browser, editor, rarely mpv for local stuff, evince for pdf reading. I think that covers around 90% of the uses I have on linux. I have no need for a special linux distribution, having first built LFS in around 2006 or so.
With that out of the way ... I don't like the AI slop, so using AI slop generated distributions, is already an instant nope for me. But even aside from that, I don't fully understand why Omarchy exists. With all the money that the big boys inject, I have a slight suspicion that this is a corporate linux project. I have no interest in that.
Also, aside from this, ever since DHH tried to manipulate readers into connecting homeless people to shooting down wolves, is the moment I stopped caring about DHH. The guy is nuts. And if you read the above comment, it seems he finally decided to abandon ruby and rails - that would be great, but in reality it is actually not, since ruby already went into extinction decline. Matz or Hiroshi Shibata only "communicating" with others through AI spam slop, is also another last-entry into the coffin situation now. It's sad. It seems as if some folks are so convinced about AI that they don't understand that it causes a lot of damage and problems. Some noticed this, others did not. And you can not change anything here either.
As for the linked in webpage:
> For the AI companies, David presents a strong offer: he’s building a distro from the ground up made for token maxxing.
I can't evaluate this, but it would make sense. The Big Bros want money and influence, so their mercenaries will do all they can to further this goal. These are the modern economic hitmen; people such as Sebastian Kurz (suddenly he is a millionaire, one of the top 100 richest folks in Austria, thanks to AI spam slop). I am sorry but I am too old to not call bullshit on any of these. The USA is basically run by a syndicate - Trump is just making this more obvious due to his dementia, but there is so much money behind that sustains criminal energy. By the way, how big was the Epstein network really? Only Ghislaine is in prison. She has organised all of this on her own? Or even with Jeffrey, two people organised all those sexy parties for the superrich? Anyway, we know with Trump in charge, we'll never get any real answers to that.
> I guess there’s usually a reason behind what tech-moguls say and do, even when they’re presenting themselves as the purely passionate guys.
I am glad to not be the only one distrustful about Omarchy. I bet in a few years people will be surprised how their private data "accidentally" leaked to the Big Bros. Thanks to Spymarchy, formerly known as Omarchy.