Why Omarchy Exists
mikael.pika.page
mikael.pika.page
It's especially bizarre because they start off saying "Thank me, I just listened to a 5 hour interview with DHH so you don’t have to," and then they don't say anything at all.
For instance, the article quite clearly makes a connection between money being pumped into Omarchy, and this, in turn, most likely leading to a linux distributions that would quite possibly be beneficial to various Big Bro agendas (plus, advertisement for AI in general, aka "look ma, AI slop produced this AWESOME distribution"; and by the way, rails marketing was EXACTLY like that in 2007 or 2008 too). This in turn points to the possibility that Omarchy is a Big Bro project. Another connection made is that this will be used to maximize costly token sales. Now - the author does not provide strong statements on the latter, but the former is already known. Look at the "donors" and "sponsors". Tell me this has zero influence? We could already see this before with shopify, and DHH is part of that group. Look how much influence they bought in ruby; see how developers got whacked out of ruby due to that, who then built https://gem.coop/about/faq/. There is definitely an influence via money - there is no denying that.
As for not having much to say about a five hours interview - well. That could be the fault of the author. Or perhaps DHH does not have anything substantially to say for five hours. Who knows. I don't think I can afford 5 hours of my life having to listen to DHH ever since his "I hate wolves and hobos!" entry: https://world.hey.com/dhh/wolves-sheep-and-gypsies-ba44af6a
That's not all it does. It pumps a lot of money to distort the OSS ecosystem, but most of it will never get to people actually building things. So far, users got an unfinished fork of Arch and hysterical astroturfing of Hacker News and Youtube just like your posts.
This is not a great start. In a year or two, what will remain of all of it? DHH drops the act and starts calling for ethnic cleansings even more openly? Omacom drops the charade and converts into a proper for-profit entity?
I do not read in the article how he said all of them are always sinister. Can you quote that part?
As for making more money: I think most rich people would like to make more money, so I don't see the argument.
I guess there’s usually a reason behind what tech-moguls say and do, even when they’re presenting themselves as the purely passionate guys."
Whåt do you think the means by the last 2 sentences of his article? pasted the quote above again for your reference.
My point being, ending an article with that last sentence for a topic "Why Omarchy Exists", says that the author hates DHH more than Omarchy's existence. These authors always wanted the year of the Linux Desktop to be 2026, but it should not be from someone like DHH. All the author is trying to convey is that. Nothing about the OS itself. Just a bad faith title plus irrational hatred towards a person who is trying to evangalize Linux more. The author probably hates DHH's personal opinions and projects the same on a opinionated Linux OS called Omarchy.
It's very simple actually. When someone comes out, repeatedly, as not having moral scruples, people stop trusting him.
DHH being nothing more than an indefatigable hype man at this point only makes this situation more distasteful. "But I, the DhH slop coded this distro, why do people hate on it?" There are layers.
p.s. do left not realize how this guilty-by-association public-lynching is damaging their brand?
nobody is guilty for using omarchy, but I guess I don't get why you would want to associate with someone who sucks?
Anyway, is it left wing to be anti-racist these days? Yikes.
Unfortunately, on this site, being against white supremacy is treated as some sort of personality disorder. Yes, it's fucked up. No, it's not representative of the general population (or so I dearly hope).
Ask your self, how come most of VCs and tech people swung "back to right". Literally all of them have been cancelled by the mob years ago. Even our darling PG has been cancelled despite vehemently protesting right.
> even our darling PG has been cancelled
Please, do tell - in what way has PG been cancelled? Cancellation is when you lose opportunities, funding, jobs, etc. It is not when people online repeatedly bring up something they didn't like that you did or said.
Cancelling people for merely trying to open conversation (mind these aren't some extreme ideas either) is just fucked up thing to do.
But you must believe there is a line, no? Sure, open conversation is good, but there are things you can say in open conversation that will make people not want to associate with you. Is that unfair? I don’t think so. Cancellation isn’t bad, imo, unless it’s unfair. Words taken out of context, distorted by mob mentality, that kind of thing. Otherwise, to me “cancellation” is just the consequences of your words and actions.
Just damages their brand.
I realize that's the window manager, but being up and running on a ready to go setup in 10 minutes is something neat too that I hope can become an option for other distors.
If there was a piece of software that needed 3 colors set, and there was a choice to set the 3 colors yourself, or pick a color preset that some person spent time combining just right, a lot of people would appreciate the latter.
Sitting and making subjective taste-based considerations is a huge energy and time sink, and takes a certain kind of individual to actually enjoy. Even if you did take time on one thing, you still hope that you don't have to do that on others. Having somebody sweat these details for you, so your baseline is strong, is a lot of value in practice, because we're human and we like nice things, and knowing that even if we don't customize it, somebody already did with great care.
Why even listen to premade music. You can just throw together samples/notes yourself. Why listen to lyrics/poems, you can just put together some words yourself. Why hire an interior designer. You can just make it the way you like yourself. Etc.
I would gently disagree. There are hundreds people on reddit who spend inordinate time to rice their desktop and share their dotfiles. They just haven't previously written their name all over a few prominent online projects to then market what they've done as a distro and solicit multimillion dollar donations with a straight face.
If its not a distribution, what is it then?
Just because you can recompile a kernel following someone else's recipe doesn't mean that you understand how to configure one yourself, much less how it works. Regarding security, just a month ago any Omarchy user who understood how the `docker` group works could escalate to root without a password.
What I'm trying to say is that one cannot buy the technical competence. Working on medium-complexity web apps and doing system development are two very different things. So far, Omarchy has been amateur hour when it comes to the latter.
> one cannot buy the technical competence
The most charitable interpretation here is "just by paying for AI tokens, you don't get smarter", with which I would agree. And yet your full comment seems to suggest that there's no way to buy technical competence in general.
But Omarchy is literally buying it[1]. And so does every business that pays tech employees.
compare that to the billions who just use computer
Though if it really is an OS dedicated to AI, as the article says, maybe the vibe coded security holes are what give it a reason to exist at all.
I tried it out and it has some interesting perks, but will ultimately suffer from a smaller community.
We know how much rails suffered before it had to grow up and scale, instead of "just buy more servers". This doesn't mean it's wrong, or right, only that it's not universal.
My guess is omarchy outright, or some of it's experience will transfer to other distros.
And I finally got an intro to ArchLinux where I got to spend more time using instead of tinkering. I value building more than tinkering or sys admining even if I know how to do it.
Edit:
Not fishing for upvotes.
It's ok to realize something you liked using might come from something that's not good and working through that.
Other people who are willing to overlook it: https://omarchy.org/patrons/
But I'm going to guess that means you haven't actually looked into it deeply.
Omarchy is a free OS, and it looks very interesting
I don't think it's wrong to avoid it because of DHH's opinions, but I don't think it's right to either
It has received a lot of money, way more than necessary to bootstrap development of the actual distro. Making new useful open source tools, hiring developers, engaging in FOSS advocacy are all the things they are not doing nor planning to do.
Instead, they just peddle influence. You pay ~$10k to a popular youtuber to promote your product. Now you can pay more money and your products will be promoted by DHH himself, for longer.
It’s clear from their repos that lots of work goes into omarchy, it just turns out that’s not work that i need - or it’s work that’s already part of a more batteries-included distro like fedora.
> The vagrants are literally shitting in the bushes
This is a simple failure of civics. If you have people somewhere, you provide them toilets or you get shit on the ground. Cities do it when festivals and street parties happen - but they don't do it when homeless poeple show up, and then they spin it as disgusting behaviour on the part of the people. Everybody shits. If you had no access to a toilet, or place to dispose of your shit, you would shit on the street or in the bushes too. Fixating on shit is also an attempt to rile up your disgust reaction, and link it to a group of people.
> Partly because it didn't tolerate vagrants and homeless people taking over public spaces (as has happened in so many American cities)
A leading lie. American cities have problems with public homelessness because they have no social safety net, and an economy that drives up homelessness. Crackdowns, like my city has done, only spreads the problem out and makes providing services like toilets impossible. It wasn't as bad before not because it "wasn't tolerated" but because the economic conditions were less harsh in the postwar era.
> You have to act. You have to protect the sheep. Standing idly by while your livestock is devoured by predators or your neighborhood is taken over by migrants is a pathetic abdication of any functioning society's most basic duty to its citizens.
This is a straight up fascist mentality. Us vs them. Protect our weak from their strong. It leads VERY dark places. Ask yourself this - why are the wolves the migrants? Could you not just as easily frame them as the sheep in need of protecting? Have they not been abandoned and pushed out by society? Without a barn to sleep in, the sheep will wander where they aren't welcome - is that the sheep's fault, or the shepherd's?
I have no idea if you've traveled much, but this has not been my experience traveling throughout major cities in Europe.
There's often NOT public bathrooms ANYWHERE yet streets are much cleaner than somewhere like San Francisco, where there actually are some public bathrooms.
Essentially I feel the same way as him (I wouldn't write about it in the same menacing way, but I feel the same way). There are multiple catastrophic culture clashes going on across the western world. It's a real, serious, hysterical crisis. We need to address it as humanely as possible.
As long as the suggestions remain similar to things like "enable them to stop the disruption on their own", "forcefully but lawfully stop the behavior", or "move them", then I have a hard time not at least sympathizing, even if I don't agree with the letter of the suggestion. Until the suggestions escalate to "kill them" or "imprison them indefinitely or in cruel conditions", then I don't believe we have crossed the line into absolutely indefensible territory.
It's tempting to portray what he is saying as "kill them" (since that's the obvious analogy with wolves), but it's simply not the case in reality. He is using a dramatic analogy, but not suggesting genocide.
I also don't believe in rhetorical analogies. They are a distraction. I'm not interested in extrapolating the wolf analogy from his post, to your post, and beyond. It's dumb, frankly (not on your part - on his).
Just an opinionated piece by this author. But the difference is I like DHHs opinionated Omarchy and don't like the authors lazy opinionated article. Thats my opinion and you HAVE to respect it!!
The DHH episode is literally sponsored by Shopify:
https://lexfridman.com/sponsors/ep501-sa
On the bright side, this is the best and most honest sponsor disclosure I have ever seen!
DHH is way past fuck you money, he does what he wants, you can hate / like it as much as you want, but claiming some grand conspiracy to get people to use more AI??? Just dumb.
[1] https://omarchy.org/news/2026/08/omacom-foundation-launches-...
https://www.reddit.com/r/rails/comments/1won8aq/post_dhh_rai...
Some of the pro-Omarchy comments are strange.
Now - personally I have not tried Omarchy, because I have no need for it. I compile about 99% of what I do from source, via ruby scripts, and if I need something I add it, if time permits. Most of the time I stay on the terminal/commandline and just do things there; sometimes I use the browser, editor, rarely mpv for local stuff, evince for pdf reading. I think that covers around 90% of the uses I have on linux. I have no need for a special linux distribution, having first built LFS in around 2006 or so.
With that out of the way ... I don't like the AI slop, so using AI slop generated distributions, is already an instant nope for me. But even aside from that, I don't fully understand why Omarchy exists. With all the money that the big boys inject, I have a slight suspicion that this is a corporate linux project. I have no interest in that.
Also, aside from this, ever since DHH tried to manipulate readers into connecting homeless people to shooting down wolves, is the moment I stopped caring about DHH. The guy is nuts. And if you read the above comment, it seems he finally decided to abandon ruby and rails - that would be great, but in reality it is actually not, since ruby already went into extinction decline. Matz or Hiroshi Shibata only "communicating" with others through AI spam slop, is also another last-entry into the coffin situation now. It's sad. It seems as if some folks are so convinced about AI that they don't understand that it causes a lot of damage and problems. Some noticed this, others did not. And you can not change anything here either.
As for the linked in webpage:
> For the AI companies, David presents a strong offer: he’s building a distro from the ground up made for token maxxing.
I can't evaluate this, but it would make sense. The Big Bros want money and influence, so their mercenaries will do all they can to further this goal. These are the modern economic hitmen; people such as Sebastian Kurz (suddenly he is a millionaire, one of the top 100 richest folks in Austria, thanks to AI spam slop). I am sorry but I am too old to not call bullshit on any of these. The USA is basically run by a syndicate - Trump is just making this more obvious due to his dementia, but there is so much money behind that sustains criminal energy. By the way, how big was the Epstein network really? Only Ghislaine is in prison. She has organised all of this on her own? Or even with Jeffrey, two people organised all those sexy parties for the superrich? Anyway, we know with Trump in charge, we'll never get any real answers to that.
> I guess there’s usually a reason behind what tech-moguls say and do, even when they’re presenting themselves as the purely passionate guys.
I am glad to not be the only one distrustful about Omarchy. I bet in a few years people will be surprised how their private data "accidentally" leaked to the Big Bros. Thanks to Spymarchy, formerly known as Omarchy.