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mdrzn

$12.6 millions for a Linux distro?

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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.

> distro

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

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.

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.

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...

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

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.

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/

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