Omarchy: 1Password and 37signals become Distinguished Corporate Patrons | Hacker News Reader

Omarchy: 1Password and 37signals become Distinguished Corporate Patrons

omarchy.org

87 pointstosh135 comments

I can't even believe this. What an extraordinarily stupid decision.

This is a betrayal of trust by 1Password. Their customers didn't choose to pay thinking that their money would go to a tech right grifter's fund that exploits the work of others for marketing.

How much money is going upstream? Like hyprland and arch? Omarchy is basically just a script all the work is being done by otherpeople.

That describes most distributions, even the base ones like Debian and Fedora.

...by other people and by AI, so by other people indirectly.

They just founded the Foundation, and the money has not been allocated yet. But Hyperland, Quickshell, and some others already got 3 year sponsorship deals.

The AUR maintainers refused the cooperation and the money. So they will start working on new package management for Omarchy.

My guess, though, is that most of the money will go to DHH's obsession with Macs and anti-Apple stance (porting Linux to work on M architecture), either by directly funding Asahi Linux or by forking it to speed up development.

I highly doubt the current crop of Asahi people would take money from DHH.

Yup, that's why I think they will fork it.

So much money to spend and no one will take it...

Omarchy ISO is downloaded 20000 times A DAY. It's in the top 3 distros now. Only very sad and delusional people hate its success. I pity them, but I don’t want them anywhere near me.

it also seems highly unlikely that dhh would even reach out to asahi to ask

They've already said that they refuse to work with DHH, which is fine, but the Asahi Devs and Arch Linux Devs have let politics overtake their entire existance and I'm happy someone is finally changing the status quo and shaking things up.

Let money actually go to competant people and not leftists that will ban you from their entire ecosystem if you even slightly disagree with their politics.

DHH is bringing more politics, and mostly hate at that, into this space than any other person.

What politics is he bringing?

White nationalism: I highly recommend reading these posts by people in the Rails community:

https://davidcel.is/articles/rails-needs-new-governance

https://tekin.co.uk/2025/09/the-ruby-community-has-a-dhh-pro...

These are some examples from the source:

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

https://world.hey.com/dhh/wolves-sheep-and-gypsies-ba44af6a

Omarchy means Hitler in Danish.

Could you explain where this comes from? I dislike DHH as much as the rest, but I thought Hitler was just referred to as Hitler in danish?

That was a joke.

Kinda like saying that in modern feminese, "man" means "rapist".

I won’t repeat the numerous political blog posts he’s constantly posting these days for a so-called “tech only” guy.

Instead I’ll say that he’s currently doing a big podcast tour where he explicitly whines about how his employees pushed him to (he elides this part) remove a “funny list of customer names” on the grounds of said list being racially charged. And since he was “bullied” into doing that, he’s been on a tear lately declaring tech to be filled to the brim with political lunatics who just want to inject politics into everything. The precise thing that he’s still doing, years later.

Arch refused any money

Good they don't deserve it, they will just use it to spout their politics and ban individuals for their political views from the repos and wikis. Just look at their petty little meltdown over X-Libre

To my knowledge, there is no discrimination on donations, anyone can contribute, including DHH: https://archlinux.org/donate/

https://x.com/dhh/status/2092620969122664793

"Update: I heard back! The team was not interested in any direct collaboration with Omarchy or the Omacom Foundation. Message received "

Notice how they didn't donate the money, but explicitly wanted collaboration. Such careful phrasing, methinks.

A script that gets 10 million dollars. That's some amazing marketing.

Obama giving himself medal dot jpeg

> There’s no quid pro quo here.

This actually sounds like the literal definition of quid pro quo.

Why such a dislike towards DHH? More people using Linux surely is a good thing.

Edit: I was curious and it was a genuine question, not sure why all the down-votes.

The extremely valid criticism is not hard to find.

https://jakelazaroff.com/words/dhh-is-way-worse-than-i-thoug...

Since then, he also called for a pogrom against Romani people, in language that explicitly mirrored that which the Nazis used when calling for ethnic cleansing against the same group of people.

What a horrible man.

It is a valid question, and the many, many answers to it are worth reading.

In short: he's made it very clear that he's a racist who doesn't like that there are non-white people living in London, doesn't like Roma, and seems to have a problem with non-white people in general.

Disliking most of the world is a good way to get most of the world to dislike you.

Here are a few good points: https://www.alilleybrinker.com/blog/1password-funds-ethnic-c...

Always follow the money. tweet by their VP of Product:

https://x.com/jmeller/status/1971530423030387081?s=46

I can't quite put my finger on it but this rush to astroturf Omarchy just has bad vibes all around. DHH has been on a politician-level campaign to fund/promote what seems like a fun nerd project. Call me paranoid but it all just comes across as dubious.

At a minimum its DHH trying to launder his reputation

It doesn't seem to be working. I've never seen this many people spread the word about what he really thinks.

It’s definitely noticeable and he has ties to politically-aligned tech billionaires - for example, when about a third of Basecamp employees resigned, Marc Andressen kept them solvent:

https://x.com/davidsenra/status/2081956616963006913

https://www.theverge.com/2021/4/30/22412714/basecamp-employe...

it feels super weird, suddenly everyone on x uses omarchy and talks about how it "revolutionized personal computing". guess 37signals started losing money after dhh's white nationalist tirades.

I know people don't like his politics, but the bigger issue to me is that 37signals removes manager titles from the low level people but not the high level people, yet they get the same work and duties. It's insulting.

Why is this succeeding while other OSS funding initiatives have failed? These companies were just waiting to be sure their money would go to a confirmed Nazi?

It's vice-signaling. They want to make sure that the industry knows that calling for a pogrom against the Romani people is the kind of malevolence that will be rewarded.

I think Wilhoit’s law[1] is also a major factor: these guys appear to have taken things like codes of conduct as a personal affront because in many cases it was the first time penalties started being applied to people they identified with as fellow in-group members. You can see this in lots of cases - e.g. compare SV elite reactions to the alleged shoplifting epidemic to the way the same people feel about cheating on taxes or misleading investors for orders of magnitude more money.

1. “Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition … There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect”

1Password can't even include ARM builds of their app in their existing packages [1]. I am highly skeptical of anything DHH (David Heinemeier Hansson) is the benevolent dictator of, and for good reason [2]. Perhaps that money would be spent better elsewhere in the ecosystem.

1. https://support.1password.com/install-linux/#arm-or-other-di... 2. https://thelibre.news/lets-talk-about-dhh/

$12.6 millions for a Linux distro?

The random selection of people chipping in for this is so weird. Do they owe DHH a favor or something?

It's especially weird considering DHH is heavily disliked by much of the Linux community for his political beliefs, and association with him is heavily frowned upon.

Over at KDE, we've seen some criticism for taking sponsorship money from Framework laptops because they sent him a laptop once.

I must believe on some level these sponsors are jumping on the bandwagon to show off how in they are with desktop Linux, now that it's slowly arriving in the mainstream, while possibly rather demonstrating their obliviousness.

The really strange thing about the criticism directed towards Framework is they simply sponsored the Hyprland window manager, not the Omarchy OS, but because Omarchy uses Hyprland that got conflated as funding Omarchy.

They keep sending DHH hardware and at one point they were sponsoring his Rails conference too. People backed off on the Hyprland sponsorship but Framework doubled down on DHH.

The power of contacts, and looking at the initial list it seems it’s a bunch of founders whose startups succeed using Ruby on Rails, so I guess yeah… they owe some to DHH

Most likely also technofascists and other oddballs helping out their technofascist buddies. One of the other big sponsors:

In July 2026, Lütke expressed support for setting voting rights proportional to the level of income tax paid by a citizen, with those paying no income tax being stripped of their voting rights and others gaining one additional vote for each $100,000 paid in income tax up to five votes per person.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tobias_L%C3%BCtke#Voting_right...

> distro

It's more like a set of dotfiles, but yeah.

Not even a distro, it’s a customization of Arch and Hyoerland.

Hope they redirect some of their fundings to them!

So like SteamOS?

SteamOS runs its own infrastructure and is more than a static set of scripts and dotfiles on top of an existing distro.

Steamos is a mirrored snapshot of arch (like omarchy) + bash and python scripts (like omarchy) + their own shell (steam running on top of gamescope for steamos and a custom quickshell based one running on top of hyprland for omarchy) + modified upstream kernel (both steamos and omarchy)

Yeah and Ubuntu just started as customized Debian

That's... not true.

At the time Ubuntu started, Debian's old installer (boot-floppies) was legendary for its unfriendliness, and the new all-singing, all-dancing replacement was a mammoth endeavour and a long way off completion. Ubuntu provided a simple, friendly installer that covered only the limited set of the most common use cases, but was a dramatic improvement for new users.

They also employed a bunch of Debian developers, and gave them space to continue their work for Debian. It wasn't all smooth sailing, but Debian was stronger as a result of their contributions right from the very start.

Now, maybe Omarchy are providing a similarly major contribution to Arch - but, if they are, they've kept quiet about it so far.

It raises the question: what is a distro since many distros are customizations of other distros. What makes Ubuntu a distro and not just a customization of Debian?

https://youtu.be/yIA4idIdY_k

The video above is in inline with my opinion. If you ship an ISO (so users can install your distro directly without installing another distro first) and have control over the packages then you are a distro. Apparently, Omarchy has its own ISO and it's own mirror of the arch package repo so it is a distro by that definition.

I'm not sure if this is joking/sarcastic.

They are fully funding the author of Hyprland for 3 years.

DDH offered to work with Arch and they refused.

Why are people complaining about money going into FOSS?

It’s who the money is going to in FOSS.

Because it doesn't seem to be actually going to FOSS

You're going to have to clarify that rather bold statement.

You see

https://git.outfoxxed.me/quickshell/quickshell (GNU LGPL 3)

https://github.com/hyprwm/Hyprland (BSD)

https://github.com/jdx/mise (MIT)

are not really foss

I believe it's more about money ending up in an overhyped vibecoded Bash mess maintained by a very controversial figure. And that's putting it mildly.

Hyperland being funded for 3 years benefits all distros and users that rely on it. The same goes for Quickshell. And my guess is that this is only the beginning. They will support any project that Omarchy is built on. They even reached out to AUR maintainers to support them financially and build better, more stable infrastructure for any distro that depends on AUR, but they refused.

One controversial project supporting another controversial project. Wonder how and why that happened.

I am inclined to believe everyone sane will distance themselves from it. Just like GNOME did.

Red Hat: billions, Canonical/Ubuntu, SUSE: hundreds of millions, Debian: one million/year. It's not that unusual for a distro to get funding - just a different scale here due to their connections.

Their foundation is now sponsoring Hyprland, mise and quickshell development, probably other projects to come.

What services does Omarchy provide?

It appears to be an opinionated, batteries included distro/OS using a tiling window manager, and it's targeted at Mac/Windows power users. It's a niche target and time will tell whether it pays off.

I'm asking about professional services. The thing people pay all those companies they listed for.

I don't know what professional services they plan on offering. Does Debian actually offer any? I know the others do.

There's a distinct difference between the contributions of Debian and that of Omarchy.

Debian is a foundational distro, it's a giant with huge populations standing on its shoulders. It shoulders a large ongoing burden, security guarantees, some of the largest maintained repos of any distro, a large amount of infrastructure.

Omarchy is a script and some dotfiles. Happy for them, of course, but it's odd. Omarchy just isn't doing that much.

I was not comparing them.

I think the "set of dotfiles" was called Omakub. Omarchy is a distro like any other - custom installer, bootloader, desktop and WM setup, etc.

Many distros don't bother with any of that. Calamares is a fine off-the-shelf installer. GRUB has fine defaults. Desktops have fine defaults. And many distros use those. Custom dotfiles and a way to apply them to a fresh system doesn't make a distro.

That's, truly, completely fine for a fledgling project, that's how many start before expanding beyond that... But why is Omarchy getting funding that's more in line with a distro that already has its own infrastructure?

>why is Omarchy getting funding that's more in line with a distro that already has its own infrastructure?

A few reasons spring to mind but I'll focus on the one I care about: It's damn good.

I've used Linux for over 20 years and it really stands out. Nothing has ever been as easy and fast to install and dropped me into a more polished, simple yet productive environment immediately.

I think the tiling VM will limit its appeal, and hope to see projects inspired by Omarchy put the same level of detail, pruning, curation and polish to Gnome and KDE-based distros.

> 'custom dotfiles and a way to apply them to a fresh system'

Latest Omarchy 4 is a full ISO installer, with a quickshell-based desktop - not scripts, their own system apps, taskbar, notifications, etc. I'm failing to see how it is less of a distro than most, and the fact it doesn't try to customize the kernel or filesystem is a plus for me. May be time to take another look at it.

They do ship custom kernels, actually. A normal one, and ones for M-series Macs and one for new XPSes.

You realize Omarchy just started a couple of months ago, right? The founder himself put his money and time where his mouth is.

Most of the thousands of distros are just a collection of config changes in GNOME, etc. There is no fundamental change in 99% of Linux distros. It's just different configurations of different tools, with the main differences being the package manager and window manager they use, plus their configs. Everything else is exactly the same.

That's a very simplistic and end-user-oriented view of what a distro is. Somebody hosts the infrastructure that Omarchy runs on. Somebody maintains the packages and applies specialized patches and communicates upstream. Omarchy doesn't do that. And that's fine.

Plenty of distros start out at that level. But those fledgling distros don't get these kinds of sponsorships. Why Omarchy?

Ubuntu wouldn't be Ubuntu we know today if Mark hadn't put his own money into it ($10m initially, oh, the irony); the same goes for Omarchy.

Omarchy does do that. They host their own packaging servers, which they keep intentionally a month behind Arch's to catch broken packages. They ship a custom kernel. They have a small AUR-like extra repository as well.

> Why Omarchy?

Because DHH has friends. It's not anything more special than that.

DHH has certainly put a lot of tokens in. It's not clear that he's put much thought into it.

but, but, the people who get a residency receive 2.5k per month!

Its for a foundation where the Linux distro is their flagship product. Much like Mozilla or the Wikipedia foundation. It looks like they're also funding artists[1] and downstream projects[2].

[1] https://omarchy.org/air/

[2] https://omarchy.org/sponsorships/

What exactly is the Mozilla Foundation developing these days? What is their budget?

You'd think a foundation raking in half a billion per year could accomplish more.

They tanking FF markeshare and nuking any chances on mobile is the accomplishment, and that's what they are getting paid for.

I wish DHH even had pretended a solidified use of the funds.

Beyond my moral objections and public security concerns, I saw more forethought from ClearLinux by Intel around the same maturity point.

Hype doesn't make an OS appealing to me.

I don't really understand how a "Linux but for vibecoding" would even be that generally appealing.

Love how all the submissions of this get flagged right away. Lots of DDH fanboys here?

I don’t know why we see Omarchy almost every day on the front page. Do people really want to use a distro from a white supremacist?

Twitter's still pretty popular.

Linux embraces diversity. A vibecoded Nazi distro is just another Linux flavor. There's some irony in all this.

Yet here they don't spend that much time talking about the other gazillion distros out there this days...

Which part of omarchy the distro is nazi?

The author.

HN is generally attracted to "success", not integrity.

I think that's the main reason why Omarchy gets talked about so much.

In large parts of the internet, open bigotry is thankfully still socially unacceptable. But when bigotry is wrapped up in a software project like this, it gives people posting/upvoting/sharing a level of plausible deniability.

hn crowd has always been favorable to trump because at the end of the day they want lower taxes, but i think a few other ideas have been smuggled along with that

"smuggled"

https://www.fastcompany.com/91217605/new-york-times-editoria...

(because you always have to explain the joke on this site, everyone was warned about these fascists before and during their rise to power, and this site supports them because the obvious reason https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00146-026-02862-9)

I raised my eyebrows at this statement, but I had forgotten that blog post where he griped about the UK becoming less white.

Or I'm sorry Dave where he talks about being mad the LLM won't translate murderous genocidal screeds to Italian for him.

Yes. For some reason they really really do.

And companies clearly want that as well.

Yes is the only valid answer. The reason is that there's nothing remarkable about Omarchy for it to deserve a fraction of the hype it gets.

Even calling Omarchy a distro seems to be a stretch. The best description I're read is that it is a Hyprland setup for Arch. As far as what a Linux distro can be, this is pretty mediocre. The sort of thing that would get an HN thread, see minor traction, and take the backseat.

But, quite a lot of people seem interested in hyping it. I suspect the reason is just because the dude behind it is not shy about being an ethnonationalist, "great replacement theory" asshole, etc.

Quite a few people here are very fond of those talking points. Thinking about brown people being ethnically cleansed makes them all tingly inside. So, they really want to talk about Omarchy as a proxy.

They ship a custom kernel, have their own packaging servers, ship their own installer, an installable ISO, and ship a bunch of custom UI. That's a distro, all right. Not a foundational one a la Debian or Arch, but that's never been a requirement seeing how things like Ubuntu, Cachy etc. exist and are called distros without issue.

Omarchy started as a pile of dotfiles a year ago. It isn't that anymore, and DHH's intended direction is towards a fully independent foundation distro.

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