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Comment by ForHackernews | Hacker News Reader

Ladybird is great, but Omarchy is a weird choice. Why can't DHH / Basecamp sponsor David's hobby distro if he wants?

The browser ecosystem is dangerously centralized and another independent rendering engine would be welcome. In contrast, I don't see the value in yet another flavor-of-the-week Linux distro. Even sponsoring Arch directly would make more sense here.

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Also isn't it just a script to install some stuff and customize

I think the last mile polish has always been a big weakness of the oss ecosystem (on average), so this kind of integration into a nice package is important work, I think. Personally, I’m really enjoying Omarchy.

omakub (https://omakub.org/) is/was (for Ubuntu), this looks more like a "real" Arch derivative.

That's what I thought but I just checked and 3.0.0 was released 5 days ago and it has an ISO.

Like Dropbox was "just an sftp server"

Managing servers that store terabytes of data for you isn't exactly the same as configuring and stitching Linux programs together.

My point is that it’s not about what work is done, but about what users get from that work.

Everyone could, in theory, learn how to configure Arch and Hyprland, but most of us don’t have the time or interest to do it.

So Omarchy is to Arch something similar of what Ubuntu was to Debian 15 years ago.

It's not, though, Ubuntu worked out a lot of UI/UX that is just not there in Debian.

Omarchy is mostly a custom configuration of the same OS, nothing more ...

I agree that they should have sponsored Arch directly instead but nepos gonna nepo.

Omarchy will still have to distribute its image, so lots of bandwidth since they do not want to rely on the AUR during the install process (since AUR has been targeted by DDOSS attacks recently). Perhaps Cloudflare will provide that and not a dollar amount?

I have to say, a single announcement that Cloudflare is sponsoring specifically these two projects does start to look a bit like an attempt to curry favour with the grassroots part of the tech right: give “their guys” some money and praise and maybe they’ll stay off Cloudflare’s back for a bit. And to be clear, that’s not to say that it’s bad to sponsor Ladybird, or maybe even Omarchy.

Is Ladybird a tech right thing?

I wouldn't describe it as such, but that's not what matters here. Andreas Kling has been out championing the anti-anti-Charlie-Kirk cause on Twitter, so it's a safe bet that the Lundukish grassroots anti-wokes see him as one of theirs. Whether he has any juice with the right-wing VC set I don't know.

Kling's politics aside, he's also had a history of abandoning projects after hyping them up on social media and attracting contributors. Here is what happened to SerenityOS and jakt, for example:

https://github.com/SerenityOS/serenity/graphs/commit-activit... https://github.com/SerenityOS/jakt/graphs/commit-activity

If Cloudflare wants to defend the future of the web, maybe they could also throw a few dollars towards projects with better governance and aren't helmed by a BFDL with a spotty record and are written in a more future-proof language than C++ [0]. (For example, Servo.)

[0]: In Kling's own words! https://web.archive.org/web/20250819053816/https://awesomekl...

Isn't Ladybird (now) supposed to be moving to Swift, though?

(I think that investment in Servo is also likely to be an excellent idea. Sponsoring Igalia's Servo work is an obvious starting place for any European institutions which are actually serious about "tech sovereignty", just to start with.)

>Kling's politics aside, he's also had a history of abandoning projects after hyping them up on social media and attracting contributors. Here is what happened to SerenityOS and jakt, for example:

He published free, open-source software. He's not obligated to work on a particular project forever. This is a particularly strange critique given that he shifted focus away from those projects to focus on other open-source work.

If anyone else wants to take over the work Andreas was doing on old projects, all his code is there for them to use.

It would be a bad look if he took the money and quit.

This is a very strange take. SerenityOS is a hobby project, from which both Jakt and Ladybird were born. Jakt never took off even within the Serenity community. Ladybird is where most of us were spending our time, and its departure from Serenity was a pretty natural evolution.

Ladybird is now a legally established nonprofit, with a board of directors and several full-time employees. Not a hobby.

Someone should do some digging into GamerGate…

It kind of is, though not explicitly. If you follow Andreas on X you will see a lot of his comments and replies are either a) posting about being aggrieved about users who are mean and rude on BlueSky or b) Amplifying traditional family values, right wing beliefs, etc, in a somewhat indirect way. He seems to be too cautious to outright say anything, but it’s obvious by the company he keeps.

Somewhat - Kling is explicitly 'apolitical' and this always attracts a certain ilk of people.

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And - maybe this is a stretch, but you also have to consider that the competing product (Servo) is written in Rust, while Ladybird is C++.

From what you read on hn, I think Rusts community being very liberal sort of resulted in memory safety being perceived as a culture war thing by some; ("authoritarian big compiler is forcing you to not free this memory" vs "the handmade c programmer with his artisanal allocations"). So Ladybird not being written in a safe language might be part of the appeal.

And I know that Ladybird is supposed to adopt Swift, but I don't think any single LOC has been written yet?

I'm not sure how true that is when half the Rust job postings are cryptocurrency related.

In Rust communities, like the official Discord server, there tend to be more left type people. Furthermore, if you go to left leaning communities that aren't related to programming the few programmers who are there are almost always Rust enjoyers. The cryptocurrency use also exists, of course. I suspect that the common thread in both cases is idealism -- leftists want what they see as an ideal economic system while crypto bros, when they aren't scamming, want an ideal financial system. Rust in many ways is closer to an ideal language in a way that feels to me to be similar to those other idealist arguments

Openly aligning with DHH is certainly a choice. After all being created by DHH is the only feature they list on their website.

Didn't care for the DHH controversies for a long time but if you start writing white national blog posts[1] I don't know what to say anymore.

[1] https://world.hey.com/dhh/as-i-remember-london-e7d38e64

Yup, and just to add, for those not in the UK, or particularly connected to London, etc. - this take is utter garbage. The UK certainly has a variety of challenges, but they are not what the far right (and that's what the people he's talking about absolutely are) make them out to be. London is not what it's painted to be by external rabble-rousers and populists, and this mania/delusion that's being pushed (sometimes by the very wealthy who are often much closer to the problem than immigrants are) is a significant problem.

DHH is (or should be) pretty close to a toxic brand right now, and for someone who published various edicts on "don't talk about politics at work", it would be lovely if he followed his own advice a little more.

Sad you have to come to the bottom of the comment section to find any criticism of DHH. I wouldn't do business with the guy, nor use his OS.

DHH very keen to demonstrate to all Londoners that he’s not been to London

edit: and also is a tool

Damn that's worse than I thought it would be. Citing non white-british ethnic groups as non-native is worrying. Especially to try use it as an anti-immigrant statement, when plenty of those are going to be third generation at the least. In fact why isn't anyone who is born here classed as native by DHH. Troublesome.

Especially when the main reason for a lot of the problems with the country is rich white men, notably the Tories and their failed governance over the past 14 years.

omarchy has brought in thousands of new linux users that previously had no interest in desktop linux. its one of the best things that has happened to desktop linux in recent memory. most everythign else in linux is incestuous self referential stuff for people who already use linux. that is why it is different.

I'd like to see a citation on that. I don't think I've ever encountered Omarchy outside the pages of this website. SteamOS seems far more consequential to me in terms of end-user Linux adoption.

Something like https://www.anduinos.com/ is far friendlier and more approachable for folks new to Linux. Why not sponsor that? I cannot imagine who the target audience is going from MacOS straight to TUIs on Arch.

Why not sponsor something that is already gaining traction? Lots of posts on Omakub/Omarchy on X and reddit, so they're clearly doing something right.

Linux didn't need only polish and money, it needed an evangelist with a story of dumping and supposedly fighting against Apple. This might put off people that obviously never needed any help in using or customizing Linux, but not those looking to switch over.

I guess the only real data of non-linux users switching to omarchy as of today, are the 37signals employees (including those that will be forced to use it)

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