The funders are not funding the development of a Linux distro, they are co-signing the political statement.
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.
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?
Whole world is political.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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've been using Linux since 1993 and at various points every distro under the sun and that perfectly describes exactly zero Linux distributions.
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...).
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...
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.
I don't think Omarchy is anti-political so much as an attempt to revive the enthusiast/hacker ethos of the OSS community.
1000x this
People who say they don’t need their rights guaranteed do that because they never realised they were protected their whole lives.
United States disproves this harebrained theory.
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.
We probably should have known better.
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.
Statements dreamed up by people who get gilliganed by a coconut every morning.
...By injecting it with big money and pushing more AI slop?
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
Hope your text helped someone, enjoy the rest of your day!
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.
But keep defending it, we can see what you're ok associating with.
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.
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.
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.
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)
I had no idea DHH was political. I don't follow Linux YouTubers, why would I?
This is an inflammatory enough position to make any of his output into a de facto political statement.
It's not even a Linux distro. It's an Arch respin with tweaks that DHH likes.
This is for people who want to work like DHH.
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.
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.
If you're running Linux and you need vscode you're obviously a developer. Is installing vscode really such a difficult task to figure out?
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.
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.
literally the experience that Mac was always known for
A far cry from 15 years ago.
/r/unixporn is all about that. They don't get a $10 million fund though.
> Closest thing to the “it just works” experience that Mac was always known for and it runs great on older hardware.
Ubuntu. Debian. Fedora especiall via Bazzite. Arch via CachyOS.
> Small example, running Zoom on i3 caused a tile cascade every time I turned on my Bluetooth
Small example: many Steam games were dog slow or unplayable in Omarchy. I switched to CachyOS, all issues were gone.
> It’s nice to see excitement around Linux because nothing from the big names was really creating it.
None of the big names are creating anything in Omarchy. It's a bunch of vibe-coded dotfiles and shell scripts. It's hype around ricing.
He would have had better success by literally prompting his agents to copy Apples desktop environment.
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.
It's a slop-linux with a racism-linux hat on.
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.
> 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.
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.
My guess is relationships and fame went a long way towards getting those funds.
Packaging and marketing matters.
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.
More like “I'm a white suppremacist, btw” though.
Quite unfortunate that it became acceptable enough to brag about that in public.
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.
The more h4xx0r-like and minimalistic, the more street cred you get.
See https://old.reddit.com/r/unixporn (or https://reddit.com/r/unixporn without an account).
Something crashes? Click the notification and your agent solves the bug.
It also has a very standardized UI library and a good plugin system.
Due to those things the list of plugins is increasing by hundreds a day [2], I made one that adds Exposé like for macOS myself a few days ago.
Most of them are actually good, and unlike other distros they look visually consistent. Customizing your system and participating in the community has never been this easy. Incredibly fun, feels like being a kid in a candyshop.
[1] https://github.com/basecamp/omarchy/blob/quattro/default/age...
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).
He is the author of rails and there are so many founders who were inspired by 37 signals and their takes on things back in the day.
The golden years of HN.
People's politics do often (but not always) change as they age.
[0] https://www.vice.com/en/article/basecamp-didnt-just-ban-poli...
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.
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.
“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.
https://world.hey.com/dhh/three-sacred-cows-that-must-die-so...
> Because the sacred cow here is not just that mass migration must stop going forward. It's also that millions who are already in Europe must go.
He's suggesting we round up all the brown people and deport them... (He's smart enough to not put it in those words but I don't see what else it could mean.)
https://world.hey.com/dhh/three-sacred-cows-that-must-die-so...
I think that crosses a line for even normal politically centrist (by European standards at least).
> When wolves get out of control, you shoot them. When gypsies take over public spaces, you deport them.
You don't get to make this contrast and pretend you didn't. The only way his rhetoric could be more clear is if he bought a gun and shot them himself.
- 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.
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?
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)
This is the main difference between sharing one’s cool config files and shipping a “distro”.
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.
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.