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?
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.
> 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?
Giving away for free things of value, contributing your work without compensation is a political action.
As for your trmnl project - how can you make your own software? Are the specs open? Do you use a free and/or open toolchain?
Is there are risk patents might deny you any of this?
It's easy to think things are "apolitical" when resting on the laurels of the results of political struggles and revolutions that brought us to where we are.
The idea that you should be able to create and own your intellectual efforts, and to do so without coercion.
> political statement?
> If I create my own software stack for the TRMNL display I received as a gift
Should you own what you create? Should you BE able to create? freely?
Should you be able to give and gift freely?
> some days structure
How do you think days are defined? Think "July" is a name that came absent of politics? What about October?
Saturday and Sunday are weekends? Since when did weekends exist as we understand and enjoy them without the action of political actors (union workers striking and other people fighting for labor rights).
What holidays are holidays? Which are national holidays? Those are all political.
Did you consider that your ancestors who went through those struggles fought so that you wouldn't have to? If your Sundays and holidays consist of nothing but self flagellation, guilt and reflection for the privileged life you lead, maybe you ought to chill a little and focus on something more constructive. Believe it or not, but going outside and touching grass can be apolitical.
> 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.
Since I don't really believe in a universal right or wrong sentiment, I'll just say I think it depends on each person's own interpretation/definition of the word politics.
I don't personally care what people define it as to them, but if I were to look in my dictionary, I personally interpret that definition to mean "any time someone tries to influence others."
Now... we could argue that software by definition is trying to force people to only use it in a certain way (the way it's written or how it executes), and that that is by definition, political. We could also argue that bug reports and feature requests are also political because you are trying to influence the developer or community of a project in how they run things.
Not everyone is going to agree with those conclusions, and that's ok, because IMO there isn't a simple "right" or "wrong" answer.
> It's exhausting to go through life if you think every field is a battlefield.
This is really the whole conversation. 'Everything is political' is literally true (they mean downstream of politics, in some sense) but it's really only brought up habitually like this to create a political conflict. Everything is also downstream of water, but it doesn't give me the right to flood your house.
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.
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.
The same people who love to push this "everything is political" drivel will also tell you that there "is no ethical consumption in capitalism". But somehow, in this particular instance, they feel compelled to impose an absolute purity test of your capitalist consumption regardless.
I'm very far from it but I saw many exchanges in my twitter timeline (because now when you click on a tweet to read it or interact, the algorithm thinks it's your only interest in life).
Do basically, they got 8 millions dollars of funding, they bragged and criticized others in linux and said some political stuff, they were also criticized by others including political stuff from the other side (not sure of the order). Finally it became viral enough for people looking at the security of the distro and found many issues.
Personally I like my Linux distro like my coffee: competently managed, with a minimum of drama and with having to hear the less assholes possible.
i doubt you have tried every distribution. at least you haven't tried the one i was part of: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foresight_Linux a small, but independent distribution (not a spin-off of anything). i can assure you, it was drama and asshole free. (maybe it didn't live long enough to develop drama, that would be a fair counterpoint, but other than that, i reject your statement)
Yeah but it was also made to showcase GNOME, which was kind of its own huge drama at that time.
I mean I can't even believe you're seriously posting this. It was created intended to be a marketing tool and for something folks had long already made their decision either way about.
So yeah, I never used your extremely niche distribution and that's some sort of gotcha on my argument. Weirdly, I've used a ton of niche Linux distros even. Even was an early GoboLinux contributor.
If you're a niche distro you don't have the manpower to do anything more than already be downstream of larger communities with their own huge drama. That's kind of the point I'm making. You will not meaningfully find no-drama. This isn't even just a Linux or a FOSS thing -- it's group project dynamics. It's inevitable in any project not run by a benevolent dictator (and even then...).
yeah, but with that you are making the whole argument meaningless, because you are arguing that since you can't have life without drama, asking to minimize drama is useless. that's like saying that reducing pollution is useless because you can't eliminate pollution. yes, we can reduce pollution, and we can minimize drama. we can't entirely avoid it, but that was not being asked for.
But Omarchy has no internal drama. It's entirely external drama around how noninvolved parties feel about DHH. That's way different than internal drama or upstream drama affecting your project.
That's a reputation it had in the 90s to early 00s and has long since lost. Even in recent years the drama within Debian has been incredibly high.
A lot happened in debian-private, despite "We will not hide problems" being part of the project's social contract, and then leaks started happening and all hell broke loose. I didn't even mention the decade-long community censorship campaign yet. Or the Volunteer Day suicide. Or the "Please write a list of 5 Debian Developers you would like to kick out of the project." DPL election question. Or banning Linus from DebConf...
What collective human endeavour is devoid of politics?
Politics is how groups decide things, from what a code of conduct should be to where we should stop for coffee after lunch. It’s easy to not notice it, but we do politics dozens of times every day.
That OSS has become too entangled with political activism and ideological gatekeeping, when it should be about making great software, giving people control over their computers, and rediscovering the joy of computing.
I don't think Omarchy is anti-political so much as an attempt to revive the enthusiast/hacker ethos of the OSS community.
"Freedom to compute" cannot be separated from "Freedom to exist" as it explicitly depends on it. The authors of Omarchy pay lip service to the former while taking a stance against the latter.
Fully agreed. I have yet to encounter someone who is claiming something elss and is not privileged enough to just not need to worry about this. Ignorance doesn't reduce the political tech entanglement, it just... ignores it. Which is fine, do whatever. But don't claim it's not related.
No, it is definitely possible to make great software without inserting messaging on irrelevant issues into it. Whatever the quality of Omarchy, DHH is right about parts of the free software world becoming entangled worth various irrelevant causes.
This equivocation on the word "exist" doesn't work anymore. It's not 2018 anymore. Normal people with common sense understand that keeping politics separate from technology isn't the same thing as existential violence. Nobody, to "exist", needs to make software political.
I'm becoming really upset at people whom I otherwise align with for taking absolute statements that don't make sense.
DHH said some stuff you disagree with, incidentally while I have always identified with strong social systems, welfare, high taxes and things like free healthcare, I can't say I disagree with the core of what he tried to say, because there has been seizemic ethnic change within a single generation - and people not talking about it is actually fuelling the extreme position.
So when you say "has a right to exist", what do you mean exactly? Because if I was to stand in the lobby of a parliamentary building and was forcibly removed, would that mean I don't have the right to exist?
You have a right to exist, just not here, just like how White English people have no right to exist in India, and White Dutch people don't have a right to live in Zimbabwe.
Saying "Hey, this demographic and major cultural change in the last 20 years makes the environment different" is considered racism- which has the obvious consenquence of making the word "racist" have less power.. It's not racism to notice this, it's racist to think anyone else is lesser than natives or to group "them" and treat an ethnic group as a homogenous bloc.
I'm reminded of the phrase "if you don't respect me, I won't respect you" whereby respect can mean as an authority or as a person, and they mean "if you don't respect me as an authority, then I won't respect you as a person".
You're saying "if you don't let me do everything I want then you're denying that I have the right to exist at all" which is a type of hysteric language which permits any atrocity in response it can be framed as an act of self defence.
>Saying "Hey, this demographic and major cultural change in the last 20 years makes the environment different" is considered racism
perhaps if he said it like this, rather than comparing Roma to wolves that should be shot and comparing immigration as something to be survived like a bombing blitz, people wouldnt care as much
>it's racist to think anyone else is lesser than natives or to group "them" and treat an ethnic group as a homogenous bloc.
>there has been seizemic ethnic change within a single generation
There hasn't. Look at actual numbers, and what you see is the same hysteria that was directed against the Jews during the first half of the XXth century: foreign agents, traitors, parasites, nuisance... All for a tiny fraction of the population. All blown up by the same people who are the ones responsible for the misery of the majority of the population - yes, the "whites" are being screwed up by other "whites", not by the "brown" people.
>White English people have no right to exist in India, and White Dutch people don't have a right to live in Zimbabwe.
One: it was English people in Zimbabwe too, and two: they have the right to live there; the problem with them is that they took everything by force and decided the native people where subhuman. Pretending the situation is the same with brown-skinned low-wage immigrants coming in western countries is completely cuckoo crazy.
>it's racist to think anyone else is lesser than natives or to group "them" and treat an ethnic group as a homogenous bloc.
Which is exactly what DHH does. Thank you for agreeing that DHH is a racist.
This is why I don't like getting into online debates... most people seem wholly uninterested in the (seemingly to them) blasphemy that is "other perspectives that aren't mine." To me, continually stroking your confirmation bias just proves you're not really as smart as you think you are. And indeed I think the Dunning-Kruger effect still applies to "smart" people.
You don't stop when you are estimating your ability correctly; as you learn more, you gain more awareness of your ignorance and continue being conservative with your self-estimates.
What this behavior has led me to do is basically only challenge people who are actually asking a question, because then there's a chance they might be willing to entertain other perspectives than their own. But if I say something and get a matter-of-fact response by someone with an obvious god complex... it's like they're not interested in mutual understanding, they just want to "win" the argument by asserting things loud enough until they're believed.
But when I see people being straight up dogmatic and preaching walls of black-and-white opinions as if they're somehow infallible and that there can't be any other perspectives... I just see incompetence. But it is frustrating because you want to set the record straight, because you know others are going to believe the louder person... but there's really nothing you can do about it. One time someone tried to argue with me that "cloud storage does not exist." All I could do in that moment was just ignore them and move on.
"As a rule, strong feelings about issues do not emerge from deep understanding." -Sloman and Fernbach
I'm not seeing anywhere that he actually claims someone doesn't have a right to exist. I see lots of people using colorful, subjective interpretations of other things he said to try and push a narrative, but that's all.
He did. He claimed that the demographic has changed and he advocates for reverting this change. And it turns out that forcibly altering the demographic of an era is the literal definition of ethnic cleansing (and by the way the phrass has historicallt been coined with the specific meaning of removing Muslim people from Serbia, by the people who intended to perform that “cleansing”, so it's particularly apt here).
>> He did not call for forcibly altering the demographic.
> When wolves get out of control, you shoot them. When gypsies take over public spaces, you deport them.
And while I'm quoting:
MerriamWebster: Xenophobe
> one unduly fearful of what is foreign and especially of people of foreign origin
DHH:
> You can rest assured that I'd be in the streets waving a Danish flag if these were my conditions in my native country. I think that's a pretty universal sentiment. There's absolutely nothing racist or xenophobic in saying that Denmark is primarily a country for the Danes, Britain primarily a united kingdom for the Brits, and Japan primarily a set of islands for the Japanese.
I would say saying that is pretty much the definition of xenophobic.
Worse, in the context of DHHs rants, it comes off as racist - I don't get the sense he wants to throw out Norwegians from Denmark, for example.
Although shurly there are Norwegian migrants and foreign workers in Denmark.
> Supporting indigenous people and their rights to their native homelands is not xenophobic.
Xenophobia leads to the belief that white Danes need support for their rights to their native homeland.
It's not like this is some great battle to rise restitution for Native Americans, Maori or Aborigines.
It's about not having to see so many non-white faces in Copenhagen or London.
> Enforcing immigration laws is not ethnic cleansing.
That certainly depends on the law, and the enforcement.
More to the point: trampling nomadic sub- cultures, forcefully denying them access where they have lived for centuries, denying them their way of life - can certainly result in genocide ("the deliberate and systematic destruction of a racial, political, or cultural group").
> Worse, in the context of DHHs rants, it comes off as racist - I don't get the sense he wants to throw out Norwegians from Denmark, for example.
I think "primarily" is doing some lifting in "Denmark is primarily a country for the Danes", along with his vagueness about what it means to be of "the Japanese" (Yamato/Zainichi/Ainu/Ryukyuan/Bonin) or "the Brits" (English/Scots/Welsh/Cornish/Irish/Manx/Jamaican/...).
DHH has the capacity to assess that going full on white supremacist is still relatively frowned upon, so he does only as much as he thinks he can get away with.
Sponsoring his badly made OSS and giving him any type of a limelight will only embolden him and the likes of him. I personally want nothing to do with him and anything he touches.
Take one glance at history, and you'll see that having a sovereign ethnic homeland is crucial to that "freedom to exist". So you're wrong on both counts - they are also taking a stance for the latter, and the two freedoms can be separated. Distributing FOSS does not require one takes a stance on every ethnic and political conflict on Earth. The GNU manifesto never once talks about the occupation of Tibet. This "cannot be separated" is nothing but a cheap attempt to attach your own cause to some other, more widely accepted cause.
FOSS never was about the right of the distributor. It’s been always about protecting the user. The way to do it is to give the users a set of rights that cannot be revoked.
> That OSS has become too entangled with political activism
Wait is that really the spin that DHH is pushing? That'd be insane given he's among the most politically active open sources developers put there by a wiiide margin.
Maybe DHH should live by his own ethos and "shut up and program" rather than continually making divisive political statements that alienate people who might otherwise use and contribute to his distro.
I don’t think he’ll refrain from using the political power he amassed by building a very popular web framework. We gave him a megaphone and a soapbox, and he’ll use it.
The fact that this is up for debate already says all. For anyone passing through, read the blog posts and his social media feeds, make up your own mind.
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.
> 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.
Let me prefix this with that DHH's opinions suck, not sure what he's going through but clearly something, and that blog post you're referencing is terrible in lots of ways. But he's not openly calling for ethnic cleansing, you're doing speaking against him a disservice by not providing an accurate view of what shit thing he said. It's still terrible, the verbatim quotes (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49448148), but deporting isn't the same as "ethnic cleansing". Even people we disagree with vehemently should be disagreed with honestly.
Then that blog post is just one of many where he've essentially gone of the rails in terms of hardline authoritarianism and fascist ideas, which makes it kind of weird he's getting the financial support he's getting. But then some just don't care about what viewpoints others have, I suppose that's a valid stance too even if I disagree with it.
> but deporting isn't the same as "ethnic cleansing".
I’m sorry, but forcibly deporting people because of their ethnic background is the very definition of ethnic cleansing.
In general, if people use violence on the population as a way to either kill or forcibly expel them, there would be a strong case to call it a genocide.
> forcibly deporting people because of their ethnic background is the very definition of ethnic cleansing
I agree, but I think if this is what you think he's arguing for, you either need to re-read the blog post, or you're not discussing that post honestly, which again does us all a disservice, regardless of how much we disagree with him or not.
He uses a word that is a slur for the Romani, an ethnic minority in many European countries. He never discusses nationality.
He also compares deporting them (to where, you might ask) to shooting wolves.
It's also not his only post on the topic. He has previous ones where he complains of how horrible London is because white British people no longer constitute a majority. He calls for not just ends to immigration and closing borders, but "remigration".
It is very clear from these posts that he strongly believes that non white ethnic groups should be removed from European countries.
If that's not ethnic cleansing, I don't know what is.
I'm not just trying to score points about whether he sucks, but specifically point out the types of policies that he advocates for, and there are a number of people in this thread trying to claim somehow that he doesn't advocate for policies that he clearly has been.
So I'm curious, what makes you think that what he calls for isn't ethnic cleansing?
From Wikipedia (and please, fill me in if you have a better definition):
"Ethnic cleansing is the systematic forced removal of ethnic, racial, or religious groups from a given area, with the intent of making the society ethnically homogeneous."
From DHH:
Calling for the deportation (forced removal) of a specific ethnic group (also note the violent analogy to wolves): "When wolves get out of control, you shoot them. When gypsies take over public spaces, you deport them."
Calling for the forced removal of millions of people of various ethnic groups he considers undesirable from Europe: "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. Remigration has gone from a fringe concept to the mainstream discourse in record time on account of that realization. The Overton window is swinging wide open, but the cow is still there."
Talking about how much he wanted to move to London but that he no longer has that desire due to its ethnic diversity: "As soon as I was old enough to travel on my own, London was where I wanted to go.... That was then. Now, I wouldn't dream of it. London is no longer the city I was infatuated with in the late '90s and early 2000s. Chiefly because it's no longer full of native Brits. In 2000, more than sixty percent of the city were native Brits. By 2024, that had dropped to about a third. A statistic as evident as day when you walk the streets of London now.... Recently, a projection that Danes would be a minority in their own country by 2096 caused an enormous stir in Denmark. Politicians across the spectrum decried what a catastrophe that would be for this world's oldest continuous monarchy. But a demographic nightmare worse than that has already enveloped London!"
As you can see, DHH is explicitly calling for the force removal (deportation and "remigration") of ethnic groups, because he is afraid of the results of the population becoming less ethnically homogeneous. I don't know how you could argue that what he's calling for is anything other than ethnic cleansing.
Also, note that none of this is due to any actualy on the ground experience; he lives in LA, he's lived in the US for over 20 years. This is purely an exercise in ideology. In fact, LA has a smaller percentage of the population that is white Anglo-American than London does of white British people.
Anyhow: I have laid out in detail the arugment for calling what he calls for "ethnic cleansing". Do you have any argument that it isn't ethnic cleansing that he's calling for? It seems pretty clear to me, so I'm confused why you have kept on insisting "if this is what you think he's arguing for, you either need to re-read the blog post", because I've read all three of these posts of his and more, and it all points towards him advocating for ethnic cleansing.
Something like "mass expulsion and killing of one ethnic or religious group in an area by another ethnic or religious group in that area" I suppose, but also, I really don't have any energy left to discuss something I don't care about. I don't like that guy, I don't like his views, and I don't want to argue against others who also don't like him.
Hope your text helped someone, enjoy the rest of your day!
Of course it differs by the individual. I think there are three camps: Those who have read DHH's blog posts, and agree with them. Those who have read DHH's blog posts, but think "he couldn't possibly mean that". Those who haven't read DHH's blog posts, but know that he's on "their side" (right-leaning).
What about the people who have no idea who DHH is, what he stands for, and have heard about Omarchy for the first time just now and are trying to figure out what it even is and suddenly people are talking in circles about him being eccentric or problematic.
I switched to Omarchy 4.0 from CachyOS and is having an amazing experience so far, barely know anything about DHH other than that he made Rails, and now everybody is calling me a racist sympathizer.
What about "ignoring him, not knowing him, just using his product" is defending? Are you using Nestle products? Ah you do? You must be all for stealing people's water well and selling them bottled water from it.
Omarchy is just a pile of settings and a branding, you could have configured Cachy similarly and wouldn't have to associate yourself with the racists. Be careful of the company you keep.
Yes, if you're jumping on some hypetrain OSS distro built around a cult of personality and it has very few merits otherwise and that project's creator has racist views, absolutely yes. People's distro alignments are a little bit different than some small utilities or OSS libraries, nobody writes jokes like "how do you know someone uses libxml? They'll tell you" like they do for Gentoo, Arch, etc.
But keep defending it, we can see what you're ok associating with.
Come on, this is so dishonest, his personality has basically nothing to do with Omarchys popularity, and it has loads of merit. It's way more pleasant to use than all other distros I've tried.
To claim that it is super simple for everyone to transform Arch into Omarchy clones without reading the Omarchy repos and that everyone should just do that instead because of politics is beyond absurd.
His personality actually has everything to do with Omarchy’s popularity, because he gets funding based off of it.
Omarchy is a set of dotfiles. That’s it. We all know the only reason you, and everyone else, even knows about it is because DHH is behind it.
There’s, like, a million dot file repos on GitHub. Most probably higher quality than Omarchy. But somehow, Omarchy is popular. The actually dishonest view is to somehow think that DHH being DHH has nothing to do with Omarchy’s popularity.
Barely. Setting up a repo is next to nothing, and I would hardly call what they have "applications".
Omarchy is not an impressive, innovative, or exciting distro. Manjaro did what Omarchy did a decade ago, and better. Providing an out-of-the-box tolerable Arch Linux experience is very par for the course.
This is, at best, a weekend project. Not to mention I can find much more impressive, cohesive, and easier-to-use dotfile repos on GitHub.
I think the only people who think Omarchy is, well, anything, are either new to Linux or just like DHH. Which is fine. But if you're new to Linux, please, browse around. Arch Linux is really not the most cohesive and easy-to-use distro you can find.
You seem to be talking about users. They're talking about creators.
I don't think users know who DHH is, or care who DHH is. Probably like 0.01% of users have read a blog post, let alone a political one. (Maybe they all are, I haven't read any)
Disagree there; anyone who installs Omarchy does it because a social media creator they like suggested it, and there’s only a few degrees of separation between those creators. This isn’t like Slackware’s popularity in the 90s, peer to peer, this all top-down. I’d call it hype-driven, if they didnt have a neat product (which I’m not a customer of).
Also have to disagree with you there... there are other ways to find out about distros besides social media or people suggesting it. Back in the day, one of the only ways people even found out about new distros was through sites like Distrowatch who just reported on the facts of the distros and never tried to market them to people.
Ugh, gosh really? I looked at one of the videos of the... eh excentric developer of the distro where he was presenting 4.0 and I was wondering about that retro neon design of background images he seemed to adore so much. I was wondering why someone would still think this Fashwave design to be cool. It's been what? 10 years when this trope peaked?
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.
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.
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.
“when committed as part of a widespread or systematic attack directed against any civilian population” which I don’t think this really clears, as objectionable as his comments may be
DHH hasn’t committed a crime against humanity. He just said he would not consider one entirely bad if it made him feel safer when walking around his house.
I don’t recall him being specific about which Roma are wolves and which aren’t. Were he talking only about “criminal” migrants, he’d make a point about that distinction.
I don't think he's been literal about ethnic cleansing, even though I strongly disagree with his political views on the matter.
Anyway, he also supports open weights models, which IMO is a good thing.
So maybe separate the artist from the art? He's not running for elections, that's for sure, so as a citizen he can have the political views he likes, doesn't mean the software is bad because of them.
As I've said before, I strongly disagree, but what I read is that he calls for the removal of those behaving in a way that (in his opinion) make the city of Copenhagen less safe, or at least that change the perceived security of the people living there.
Gypsies create issues almost everywhere in Europe, but it's not based on ethnicity, most of the ethnic Roma are fully integrated, some of them are not, in Italy many Sinte families are linked to mob and criminality in general.
Do they deserve special treatment because of their ethnicity?
And what if they are not regular citizens?
It's an open problem, DHH's solutions it's absolutely not my solution, but there's a still a difference between what he said and calling for ethnic cleansing.
No one will reply to you because it requires thinking through this problem with the same nuance they accuse DHH of not appreciating. I'm right there with you.
Remigration is a far-right concept referring to the ethnic cleansing via
mass deportation of non-white minority populations, especially immigrants
and sometimes including native-born citizens, to their place of racial ancestry.
I'm not interested in having "nuanced discussions" about whether the Roma people have some kind of Nuisance Gene that makes discussion of extermination valid
If you'd like to make an argument that isn't just "ethnic cleansing is okay sometimes if the ethnicity is REALLY annoying" go ahead
I'm guessing taking a stance like the one below kind of does put you in the direction of more hardline perspectives:
> You have to act. You have to protect the sheep. Standing idly by while your livestock is devoured by predators or your neighborhood is taken over by migrants is a pathetic abdication of any functioning society's most basic duty to its citizens.
> When wolves get out of control, you shoot them. When gypsies take over public spaces, you deport them. This isn't hard, it isn't cruel. It's the basic logic of self-preservation.
"When wolves get out of control, you shoot them. When gypsies take over public spaces you deport them" is how his last post ends. It's not even a dogwhistle anymore.
Mostly because HN is full of two kinds of things: tech bros that think that "everything shouldn't be political durr" and actual literal fascists that think that palantir is a good thing.
I'm not fully surprised by it. Pissing in their cornflakes and reminding everyone what they are is what matters, not points.
It's disappointing more than anything, I never agreed with him on everything but he was at least somewhat interesting/relevant to listen to at the peak of the RoR days and mostly harmless.
I mean, we can also expand with him being a xenophobic, great replacement conspiracy theorist, actively supporting racial hatred and violence dickwad if you want.
The "smear" you're mentioning is actually him smearing his shit all over the walls on his personal blog, and indeed, it reeks of fascism.
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.
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.
What do personal blogs and tweets have to do with Omarchy? I guess DHH is just bad and tainted from a far left point of view. I regard that kind of thinking as totalitarian.
Yea, what a great point! It's totalitarian for a bunch of individuals to call out someone for their bad ideas. And it's definitely not totalitarian for someone to encourage governments to carry out textbook ethnic cleansing. You're a true thought-leader!
No. I believe, for example, that singling out legal immigrants from Haiti, revoking their legal status, and deporting them back to Haiti, where the current state department's website says of Haiti: "Do not travel to Haiti due to the risk of crime, kidnapping, terrorism, unrest, and limited health care" [1], is an example of ethnic cleansing. To suggest this is just good ol' fashioned law enforcement is absurd.
Ethnic cleansing is when immigrants have to return to their home countries after the lawful suspension of a temporary program? That, frankly, is preposterous.
Also worth pointing out, apparently, “lawful” does not mean ethical. Owning slaves was lawful during much of U.S. history. Gassing Jews was lawful in Nazi Germany. The President, after spending years demonizing and lying about Haitians going on to unilaterally terminate Haitians’ legal standing in the country in order to “legally” deport them to their home country—a country we fully acknowledge is completely unsafe—is unjustifiable on any level. Do better.
DHH has repeatedly advocated for remigration. Wikipedia defines remigration as: a far-right concept referring to the ethnic cleansing via mass deportation of non-white minority populations, especially immigrants and sometimes including native-born citizens, to their place of racial ancestry.
Also: "Omarchy is not just a distribution, but it's also a counterweight to all the nonsense that has plagued Linux for far too long. It's a refuge from the clowns and the circus that has been Linux politics since the old institutions got infiltrated." (https://bsky.app/profile/steveklabnik.com/post/3mtrdmfttak2s)
Appeal to the "Golden Age" is just built into the way they do propaganda, it's particularly popular if that Golden Age is long enough ago that everyone around during it is dead and can't ask awkward questions like "Golden for who though?".
The appeal to "Halycon Days" is strong but then I'm aware that based on the city I was born and the socio-economic group I was born into I'd statistically already be dead (average life expectancy was lower than my current age) and historically aware enough to know that when my country was "Great" exactly who it was "Great" for.
I'll take 2026 Britain over 1926 Britain and especially 1826 Britain.
Sadly true. I just felt the person I was quoting was waving it away as if it was a harmless irrelevance. But you’re right, appalling views have become mainstream.
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.
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.
"Proofs" in this sense of the word are things that apply to mathematics and formal systems. Language is squishy. A minimal counterexample is potentially squishy enough to be meaningless.
The definition of political is irrelevant. The result is supertrue. "If even one example of software is not political, then 'all software is political' is false" is true under all admissible values of "political." This is simple logic.
All assertoric claims about the world are either true or false. If they are false they should be rejected. If they are true they should be spoken. Treating factual claims about the world as a partisan psychological litmus test is, in my judgment, morally repugnant. There are four lights.
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.
> Closest thing to the “it just works” experience that Mac was always known for
I see this repeated a lot, but the people I know who tried Omarchy were always fixing something or dealing with breakage from an update.
The best argument I’ve heard for Omarchy that is actually consistent with what I’ve observed is that it ships with cool looking default configs for everything that make it feel fun to use.
The belief that everything just works seems more like a belief perpetuated by the messaging push behind it. Every time real issues pop up they get explained away as being due to someone’s local config changes or forgiven because it’s a young project. Even in this thread there are dozens of comments downplaying security issues as not a problem because they will get fixed, which is a symptom of a project where the messaging has gotten ahead of the facts.
The main case for Omarchy to me is the OOTB experience, which is more "good to go" than pretty much any other distro, also the hotkeys and config setup are both power user friendly. You are correct that updates have had brick-risk, though I think they've gotten better. I prefer some elements of plasma to the hyprland setup, but agents are very good at making config changes, it's much faster than navigating menus or finding lines in a config file (human work time, maybe not wall clock time).
More stuff people actually use is installed by default with Omarchy, whereas Ubuntu packages a lot of stuff I don't think people use to try and come to checkbox parity to windows, while missing useful commercial software. Omarchy comes with vscode, 1password, obsidian, chromium, discord, docker, OBS, zoom, signal/whatsapp, etc pre rolled and configured.
It's not difficult to figure out, it's just friction, and there's a difference between preinstalling malware, sports tickers, etc and preinstalling stuff I would have installed anyhow, and taking the time to configure it nicely.
1. These are trivial to install on any other mainstream distro. I’m talking one-click through discover or Gnome software.
2. Most of these are not even desirable for most people. Obsidian? 1password? Come on, these have vanishingly small amounts of users. It’s not chromium.
3. Any hand-rolled arch based distro is going to be more maintenance and higher friction than fedora, Debian et al. That’s just the name of the game. It’s what makes arch desirable, too, so no, it won’t change.
4. WMs are much higher friction than full service desktops like KDE and GNOME. Again, name of the game. And it also won’t change, because that’s what makes WMs desirable.
I think people who think Omarchy “just works” have not used enough Linux distros. Which is fine, not everyone is a Linux veteran. But then don’t go around claiming it’s sooo much better than other distros. It’s not. Give Debian, fedora, even Ubuntu a shot if you want something that works OOTB.
And based on just on the list above that'd be at least 11 clicks (a lot more since you'd need to find the app in the software manager first before you can click install"
I guess we can compromise and say two clicks and some key presses.
On KDE: Press meta, type "discover", type "discord", click "install". Or, if you use KRUnner, press alt-space, type "discord", click "Get Discord", click "install"
Bear in mind this is how it works for all software in a proper desktop environment. Steam works the same way, or Zed, or whatever VPN you use.
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.
> 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.
He would have had better success by literally prompting his agents to copy Apples desktop environment.
Are all the updates still handled by clobbering bash scripts?
Last time I looked into it, the technical approach was equivalent to throwing a bunch of things at a gas fire. It's just a pre-configured arch install that introduces a metric ton of tech debt.
First time huh? They already have investors (called "patrons" so far). OpenAI shown the non-profit status can be used to jump start for-profit ventures, I'm sure everyone involved here studied closely exactly how Altman pulled it off.
Without a profit motive huh? Let's examine that... From Omarchy's website: "Incubated at 37signals (makers of Basecamp and HEY)." For those unfamiliar with 37signals, here's their take on the profit motive:
> 04. Profit motive
>
> The tech industry is especially good at losing money. Growth is electric, but profits are elusive. We take an old school, economics 101 approach: Make more than you spend. That’s why we’ve been profitable every year we’ve been in business. It’s the responsible way to be reliable and take care of customers over the long haul.
Oof, they explicitly say they want the opposite of what you claim.
I mean it should be pretty obvious, when an open source project kind of comes out of nowhere like this and suddenly everybody's talking about it, it's not organic growth. It's an incredibly transparent marketing campaign designed to trick people into joining the cargo cult. You need to learn to recognize these things.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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".
It's a verb, "to rice" means to deeply customize your system to suite your needs and/or preferences. Install a desktop environment, setup it however you like it, add panels with system information, etc etc.
The more h4xx0r-like and minimalistic, the more street cred you get.
Cosmetic improvements. Term originates from observations of asian-associated car decorations, which based on context is either a bigoted pejorative or an ironic compliment.
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.
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.
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).
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.
I have trouble imagining it. The early rails community was very welcoming at the time. The things he now openly states were simply not welcome in most polite society at the time.
I'm not sure DHH really held the same views back then, either. The "Overton Window" has moved over the last 20 years so openly bigoted and racist views are accepted in the discourse now.
Marc Andreessen helped establish the modern web browser, he has always been an Ayn Rand fan for example. But politics wasn't that important back then, I guess? And I just think there simply were not a lot of opportunities to gain some political and financial capital from voicing their fringe believes for people like them back in the day. They were busy building systems and software, now they are busy building or changing political systems.
Libertarian views have always been relatively commonplace in the tech scene. Being a fan of Ayn Rand probably put you in the majority, but left-libertarian views were commonplace, too.
Calling for ethnic cleansing is not a libertarian belief. It is a fascist belief. "Privately owned roads are a good idea" and "Let's round up all the gypsies" are not equivalently debatable ideas.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.)
> Remigration is a far-right concept referring to the ethnic cleansing[1] via mass deportation of non-white minority populations, especially immigrants and sometimes including native-born citizens, to their place of racial ancestry.
I wonder if that will change now he's gone from edgy opinions that rile up woke people (e.g. immigration is too high in the UK) to actually advocating ethnic cleansing (not the murdery kind but still...).
It's always the same give these people enough prestige and power that they feel untouchable and their true nature comes to the surface. No more dogwhistling needed he thinks, I have powerful wealthy backers and their lawyers now.
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).
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.
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.
Well - yes - I have. And the test came back positive.
But it's always possible I'm just being naive in some way. An external challenge makes it more robust.
I don't think I'd want to do an entire linux distro - it's needlessly large to test the hypothesis - but perhaps there's a part that you think would be an interesting challenge?
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
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)
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”.
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
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
The two linked issues are for the same bug report.
A friend has been urging me to install Omarchy for months. I’ve finally caved in after a horrible experience with highly-praised CachyOS.
All I can say is, I understand the hype. It works. The install is uncomplicated, no selecting from five legacy bootloaders, choosing versions or selecting a window manager. The tiled window manager works pretty much how I already use Mac. I like the terminal-focused system tools. Installing software is easy and lightning-fast.
I have been using Fedora for the past few years and all I can say is that the lack of distractive options is a relief. I can focus on work and ignore the wallpaper and the themes.
Between the Windows 3 days and the mid 2000s I've spent countless hours customizing the UI of every tool I used. Now I realize I was paying attention to the wrong thing.
Not at all. Pretty much the only thing they have in common is that they're based on Arch, but that's where the distinction ends.
Omarchy is focused mainly on ease of use/installation and is built exclusively around Hyperland. CachyOS on the other hand doesn't default to any particular WM/DE - in fact there are a dozen or so options when you install, so you need to be at least a little bit familiar with them and the pros/cons. Same with the package selection, the CachyOS installer ticks a lot of boxes which may not be relevant to you, so you need to take the time to review the selection and untick ones that you don't need. Some package names may not be obvious to you, so you'd need to google it and see if that's something you want. So there's a bit of a technical barrier there.
Also, CachyOS is focused mostly on performance - providing a highly optimised kernel (ThinLTO/AutoFDO etc), with a custom scheduler (BORE), and CPU-family specific binaries targetting x86-64-v3, v4, and znver4+ families, which are served from their own repos. They also often include upcoming patches into their kernel and other programs if they think it brings in worthy new features/performance benefits. Like how they included support for the new ntfsplus driver before it was mainlined. Overall, it is generally considered to be the fastest performing distro on modern hardware, even more so if you've got AMD (thanks to the znver4+ support).
So the two are very different, with different goals and different approaches, and even differences to the packages, configs and tweaks they serve.
CachyOS team has very openly pushed its politics and believes that parents should have the right to transition the gender of their children and if you disagree you get permanently banned from their forums.
DHH said he think that too many projects are spewing their politics all over their projects and its gross and they should focus on their code.
Ok, but he said a lot more than that too. In particular he published his own manifesto/communique about what he thinks about certain political questions.
“Full of security holes" - and two examples in the article have been swiftly addressed, ignoring that there is a whole dedicated security team https://omarchy.org/teams/
Happy to explain: it's personal blogging, for writing down what's on my mind.
The fact that it was addressed swiftly doesn't affect the claims in the post at all: I'm worried about development practices which produce code like that.
Also, the "full of security holes" is not my framing, someone else choose this submission title.
They move fast, that's for sure. But it also means they explore and fix problems fast. I don't think there is only "slow and careful" way to create things.
The same kind as a similar recent post [1] where a person pointed out a bunch of problems with Omarchy's shell scripts as examples of it being terrible.
Open a pull request.
That's how this is supposed to work. Wisdom of the crowd and what not.
My opinion is that the way Omarchy is developed leads to gigantic security holes. I wanted people to be aware of it.
In my opinion, there are much better choices both for me and I'd imagine for other people as well. I don't want to help Omarchy succeed, I don't care about them.
Because you could make the world a better place instead of just complaining about it? I don't understand the "all I wanna do is complain" process at all.
Fix it. If you see a problem in the world, fix it.
I dont just complain. I making the world a better place in ways which I believe are worth it.
Improving Omarchy seems like a waste of time to me. Letting people know how insecure it likely is, given how little time it took, is much better bang for buck.
Or, in colourful analogy: if people on the streets are hitting themselves on the head with frying pans repeatedly, I want them to stop, not to help them recover from the pain quicker so that they can hit themselves more.
> My opinion is that the way Omarchy is developed leads to gigantic security holes
>> Fix it. If you see a problem in the world, fix it.
You can't "open a pull request" to fix a projects development process. The point of the article isn't about any specific security issue, it's that these vulnerabilities will keep getting introduced due to the lax attitude the project takes towards security.
Thanks for sharing the link. I think it provides a lot of reasons why installing Omarchy or opening a pull request would be a waste of time. I can’t fix fundamental design flaws in a PR. I don’t want to try to fix apps written in Bash and QML & vanilla JavaScript. There are other ecosystems out there that are built on stronger foundations I can (and do) contribute my time to.
Well, as far as I know, the internal config systems of most popular distros like Debian, Arch, even NixOS are all Bash. There is nothing that makes Omarchy fundamentally bad design; it's pretty average.
The bar is a lot higher when you're empowered and capable.
Like a lot a lot a lot.
And that's before we had LLMs writing code. So really it's basically orbital now.
The fractional pennies in tokens it could have taken to fix this would cost less than their web traffic bill. But alas, if you fix it and put in a PR, that doesn't get you the eyeballs and social good-boy points that a blog post appealing to correct politics does.
As I've gotten older and more experienced, I've really embraced the "just shut up and fix it" mentality. If you're empowered to do something, any time you spend complaining about it not being done is adding to the noise and a negative contribution.
This applies in life and in work. Especially in work. I straight up just shift the discussion or leave meetings if people start complaining about problems that are within their abilities to fix. It happens so much and I don't have time for it anymore.
And if you can fix it and you don't want to, just stfu and move on with your life. For the sake of all of us.
Isn't the rise of AI basically turning software engineering into tumblr? Thats what I see; soon we'll have a forum that's just filled with roblox-but-for-adults.
People have taken 'everything is political' to mean 'politics must be discussed for everything'.
I am old enough that I've been burned by both sides of the political aisle, often using the same rhetoric (think of the children, we're fighting for freedom, we're fighting against fascism, no true scoctsman, etc.)
Maybe the day will come when we really will have to pick sides beyond the elections, like it's WWII, but that day isn't today. I just want to be left alone, away from political camps and the ugliness they tolerate because of they're fighting against the greater good.
There is a false equivalence happening. In this case, both sides are the people who just want to exist without being attacked for being themselves and the people who say they are wolves and that wolves need to be shot to protect the sheep.
I want people like DHH and his supporters out of the tech I use. I don't trust them, nor do I trust their judgment.
>> OTOH, fighting bigotry is something we should never leave behind.
> [we] just want to exist without being attacked for being themselves and [they say we're] wolves who need to be shot to protect the sheep.
Weird, you're the author of both of the above quotes but "just wanting to exist" is very different from "a never ending war on bigotry". It's either one or the other, can't be both because war begets war.
I think I would argue that linking to the security problem(s) and then writing about their style and how they probably came to be counts as discussion, but to each their own.
> aka A person should be able to espouse xenophobic and bigoted remarks without worrying about being criticized for it.
People on the political right keep confusing freedom to say whatever you think with saying whatever you think with not having to deal with the consequences of speaking whatever you think.
DHH is free to blog about his racist beliefs and we are free to call him a racist.
I have no clue what "shut the internet down" is supposed to mean.
How come it's never righteous when the trillionaire or Ruby guy spilled thousands of words a day on social media about immigrants but calling it out is?
I mean your article is pretty bad. You posted two promptly patched security vulnerabilities and then essentially just wrote the same thing over and over and over again about how it's a sign of the whole project without really building up a case showing consistent negligence.
It was (my) main takeaway and I wanted it to be evident in the headline. I didn’t want to bury the lede; I’ll uneditorialize it because it seems it’s causing some fighting in the comments and I don’t really want to instigate anything, more just warn people using the distro. I don’t think it’ll reach the people who need to be warned if it’s not evident that there’s an issue from the start.
Appreciate it! Editorialised is fine but the post is mostly about the development practices leading to bugs & the lack of awareness of how dangerous that is, not about the current absolute number of security holes if that makes sense.
There is this meme of a bell curve where the left side is some newbie trying to do something obvious, the right side is a "pro" trying to do the same obvious thing, and the middle is a someone trying to do cool/new/trendy stuff.
The left side us Ubuntu/Fedora. The right side is Arch. The middle is all these tech-fluencer-wanna-bes custom-made-ai-enhanced distros.
Your left side of the curve is missing people like me who use Fedora.
Been using Linux since 1997, it's been my primary OS since ~2003 (except for gaming and Microsoft seem determine to end their streak on that one) and I use Fedora because I really don't care that much, it's a reliable tool, it has recent packages and I like that it's semi-rolling in that it's a straight forward update every 6ish months.
I had my "I must customise and control every single part of my Linux install" phase early (Slackware and Gentoo et al) and then I realised I didn't actually care all that much, give me sane defaults with the ability to tweak if I want to and stability, I'm at the point where "If I have to think much about my OS it's failed in doing what I want" holds.
DHH has a large following, so do many people in this network. His blog posts are often discussed here, it's not really surprising that it gets attention and you don't need secret astroturfing or sneaky marketing if people just share / interact with it themselves organically.
They just announced the new "Omacom foundation" last Friday, with $8 million of funding from prominent tech people. That's why it's getting current flurry of attention
Just hype, it's Kagi all over again. People said the same thing there, we're just too cynical, not used to people getting excited about really cool stuff anymore.
It's been showing up all over YT for a while if you do any searches for Linux.
I took a look at it when I kept seeing it, realised what it is and who it's by and carried on moving, putting aside DHH as a person, it doesn't really do anything I want or in a way I'd care about but then I'm also not the target demographic/user, after 30 years of using Linux, I don't need it.
Apparently the Omarchy plugin ecosystem is also a free for all like the Arch AUR, except the audience includes people who are new to Linux and less likely to understand the risks.
A lot of plugin systems are like that. (See the hyprland, noctalia, or vim/neovim's plugin systems).
More generally, how else would a small project allow plugins that isn't "here is a way to add code" and then anyone can release the code they added? Hell, the linux ecosystem in general is a "free for all", and that is the nature of the platform
Okay, but how cool is that this feature (hotkey to pass a video, that is open in the browser, to yt-dlp) exists and works out of the box?
It's unfortunate, that it was developed in a weird, insecure way, but I think that the fact that it exists is very cool.
I've heard about Omarchy long time ago, but didn't switch, because at some point in my life I started to prefer something that is rock solid and well supported (currently on Fedora Atomic with KDE) to new/shiny/bleeding edge. But still. I think that an overall good UX out of the box is composed of little things like this.
It's really incredible how so many of the people that in one thread will talk about workers rights will also come out to bat for some tech company's TOS.
Whatever your worldview is it's definitely not about freedom over authoritarianism.
Isn't most of the security holes still there if used arch and installed the packages yourself. A lot of people complained ssh had security issues in omarchy because it used the default settings. That would still be the same on arch?
Arch doesn't market itself as a newbie-friendly opinionated secure-by-default distro.
An Arch package having less-than-ideal default settings is pretty normal: the user is expected to read the manpages and the Arch wiki when making any alterations to their system. They guide you towards making it secure, but if you want to leave it insecure because of reasons then Arch isn't going to stop you from shooting your own foot.
If they're going agentic and using the stack that they're using (qt/shell scripts?) they'll never patch it in full, if ever. The thing is almost certainly full of injection/forgery attacks, on top of being bloated to oblivion.
> ... collection of security issues which I can only describe as regrettable (because I promised my mum I would swear less). There are bangers like video title bash injection or all notifications being able to run arbitrary bash on your machine.
Bash injection using video... Titles !? Moterfucking shit (mom's not there anymore to ask me to swear less, RIP)
Reminds me of the bit about security in Steve Yegge's Google Platforms rant:
> But I'll argue that Accessibility is actually more important than Security because dialing Accessibility to zero means you have no product at all, whereas dialing Security to zero can still get you a reasonably successful product such as the Playstation Network.
heh... i still remember the very first time when it came out with it's opinionated branding and all that, looked good and went ahead to try it out but was so annoyed with all the bloats and promoting their software's in it which made me their intentions already clear. I got to know that recently they've added option to remove all the bloats but IDC anymore. not gonna try that ever. Not to mention it was just dotfiles painted on top of arch iso and documentation itself included archinstall guides - if that's a distro then my system with dotfiles are a distro in itself lol... though it looks like they've changed things up now, it looks like it has a iso's and all the stuffs to be called a distro now.
The article seem biased against Linux. All major OS had a history of weird security issues. Ubuntu, the most popular Linux distro for desktop, had a lot too: CVE-2019-11482 CVE-2019-11483 CVE-2020-8831 all look like repeating the same mistakes over and over. And if you start digging you'll come over to really strange and bizzare ones like obvious attempts to sneak in exploits into popular libraries like openssl.
There's a difference between a few small bugs because software is new and a half dozen eval(untrusted_input) in version 4.0.
Maybe this can get fixed, security teams won't make it worse. I worry they're mopping the floor and not fixing the leak: the development practices which lead to the quantity, seriousness and banality of their security issues is the part which needs fixing.
> Wouldn't the security team and the agents just go and fix the security holes?
Of course they’re going to react to what is reported and fix it. That’s a given.
The concern is the development process that is leading to these types of holes getting shipped. Mainstream Linux distributions have software practices and release cycles designed to be cautious. This project is taking more of a move fast and break things methodology where shipping the vibe coded feature as fast as possible is the priority.
Having a crack team of people responding to reports and fixing things (or prompting their agents to fix things) only solves the issues after they’ve been shipped, discovered, and kindly reported back upstream.
> I don't know, Omarchy's team really don't care if you're complaining.
Controversy is their primary marketing tactic. They prefer that people complain because being divisive and controversial is how DHH has always marketed his products.
Yea, I don’t get the shade. As many have said, it’s just Arch + a very polished UX preconfigured so you can jump right in without a lot of setup overhead.
Why it’s security would be on a different level than any other Linux distro isn’t clear.
It’s a bit more than Arch. There are a bunch of programs written in shell and QML/JavaScript. I guess at least they are using memory-safe languages, but shell scripts make it easier to write the type of shell-injection bug mentioned in the article. Personally if I started a new project in 2026, I would not choose bash and vanilla JavaScript as the languages to write it in.
If they are interested in complaints. Probably they do not, so people write blogs on their own. This kind of also happened in the rails world; some people got upset at DHH and then started writing complaints; and many of these complaints are by themselves also total garbage (some are more objective criticism, these tend to be better). It's kind of agenda-based everywhere.
> I don't expect the security to be perfect out of the gate at when Omarchy 4.0 just launched with real backing?
Well, we can note the time and look again in half a year or so. Personally I am in general happy with security in the linux ecosystem. I am more worried about e. g. systemd adding age sniffing as component. In another entry at hackernews, yesterday I think, we learned that Microsoft automatically tags all images with invisible watermarks. One just can not trust companies - they always feel a need to abuse data from the users and tags everyone. Next step will be mandatory chips into the brain.
Using bash for all this stuff is like trying to wash your car with sandpaper instead of soap and water. Yes it can work if you're really careful with it, but in practice no
I would love for the omarchy shell to be distro-agnostic, just some dotfiles and binaries you can copy to whatever distro if you have all of the required software
Obviously every single loaded take on this distro has already been taken, on this thread alone. So there is little anybody can add to it... all I would say is that no publicity is bad publicity and if that's the intention, then well done.
I am happy that the Linux ecosystem is getting attention, traction and funding. People that dont like and want to choose to go die on another hill, so be it, their prerogative.
Just read DHH's blog and then you may quickly realise that
other distributions may be a better choice. There is a
difference between "opinionated" and ... whatever the content
criteria is for DHH nowadays to write stuff on his blog.
Younger DHH was more impressive than the TechBro aged later
variant, in my personal opinion.
Arch is in general a good base though - I mostly use Manjaro
as base, then customize it via a ton of scripts and compile
about 99% from source anyway, using an extended set of ruby
scripts (a bit similar to homebrew, but one big difference is
that I wanted versioned AppDirs like in GoboLinux; my scripts
originated from GoboLinux's philosophy since I did not want
to use shell scripts but retain versioned AppDirs. Manjaro
is in some ways a bit similar to oldschool slackware, which
unfortunately kind of died - it is not really fully dead,
but look at the homepage and then tell me how many years
past the last .iso release still counts as alive. So to me
it is dead, despite the changelogs still being updated or
others, such as alienbob, pushing out new releases.)
Hey and Basecamp suck. Basic features like search barely work, the iOS and Android apps are embarrassingly bad, and the UI looks like it was designed for Netscape Navigator 4. With Rails, dhh spent years trying to work around JavaScript , leaving the framework increasingly difficult to recommend in 2026. Why on earth would you trust him with your OS ? Even if you share his politics, you deserve better software.
Not following Omarchy, not even sure what it is trying to be compared to existing distros (other than an incredibly hyped up product). Not hating on DHH. But hasn't he become famous for developing a web framework (20 years ago), rather than for his technical prowess as a systems-level engineer? Seeing these kinds of bugs is not exactly unexpected.
Just install a solid modern distro (OpenSUSE, Fedora, Mint, etc.) and use an LLM to help you set it up the way you want. It will take you an hour, then you will have a clean system that is yours, and not whatever this is...
Seriously, watch this recent interview with DHH about Omarchy https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MWvH7BRgwL8 and then tell me you want to buy in to this guy vibe coding your entire OS for you. There's all sorts of strong manic/amphetamine vibes oozing off of him.
At this point, it looks like some here in the Linux community have a new found hobby of actually liking to get angry at things instead of building, now that AI took away their identity.
This is just a person having fun building their own distro. If you don't like it why are you giving them so much attention even though you will never use it?
The "real world" is long term results. Yes, this is a joke amount of money for building an OS if the goal is conquering desktops and holding the territory. It is obvious to everyone the "Year of the Linux Desktop" attitude with only $10M in funding isn't going to end the way they want.
It is probably true that it has a big attack surface. But omarchy is no doubt a huge driving force. A few days ago I listened to a podcast dhh talking about the latest major release and its huge donation. I believe it’s now 10m usd or something. I am hopeful that dhh is serious enough to address the security issues plus a lot of ux improvement on linux.
In the episode he emphasized 17 layers of security layers where I remember the number solely because I found hard to believe to be honest.
Look - I'm am the opposite of DHH fan -- that said -- they could fix all these bugs/security issues that same way they created them. It makes sense to some extent to create a product that emphasized what is different about it from a feature/UX perspective so people can consider if it would even be useful to them at all. If they can prove that they have created something useful - then they can fix all these issues. Fixing these issues is not hard. Creating a useful product that people want -- this is the hard part.
Yes, 37Signals DHH have an amazing gift for taking something that is old and not interesting and getting a lot of attention for making it seem new and innovative. That is a gift!
the man shat out a collection of half working shell scripts and bad synthwave background images and every wannabe VC bro felt like a haxxor installing it.
Fucking hell, even Hannah Montana Linux is of higher quality than Omarchy, the bar is low.
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