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Comment by ricardobeat | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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