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I'm somewhat out of the loop, and it's not really mentioned in the article, but what's with Omarchy getting this crazy amount of financial support from this lis
by Hugsbox 22d ago
I'm somewhat out of the loop, and it's not really mentioned in the article, but what's with Omarchy getting this crazy amount of financial support from this list of fairly prominent individuals? Until a few weeks ago I'd never heard of it, then what I did hear is that it's being made by a very... uhh, eccentric(?) individual, and now it's suddenly got a crazy amount of funding. What am I missing?
- throwaway613746 21d ago[dead]
- tonyhart7 22d agoit get picked up by Hype because DHH
- barkerja 22d agoIt's being largely driven by DHH (creator of Rails, and co-founder of 37signals). He has a massive following and a lot of influence (and money).
- cogman10 22d agoLooks like nothing. It's arch with a bunch of pre installed apps and a few goodies on top. My guess is relationships and fame went a long way towards getting those funds.
- theshrike79 20d agoAnd Dropbox is just rsync and cron =) Packaging and marketing matters.
- Retr0id 22d agoIt's a political statement disguised as a FOSS project (which itself is fine, all software is political). The funders are not funding the development of a Linux distro, they are co-signing the political statement.
- ngcazz 22d ago[flagged]
- dgellow 22d agoFinanced by controversial figures too
- rbanffy 21d agoYou misspelled "fascist".
- panzi 21d agoI'm so disappointed that The Standup was platforming him.
- ilogik 21d agothat's when I unsubscribed
- totalperspectiv 21d agoFinally got me to unsubscribe. I'm surprised that the whole crew of them were cool with reposting the snippet of DHH calling linux maintainers "clowns and goblins" amongst other things. https://x.com/thestanduppod/status/2091511392717213707?s=20 https://x.com/thestanduppod/status/2091511392717213707?s=20
- vends 22d agoDHH effect. He has a very strong following, and there's a certain amount of trust/prestige attached to his name in the tech/startup world. For a lot of these people, DHH building something is probably enough to get them interested and willing to throw money at it.
- noir_lord 22d agoAmong some, for others (including me) him been attached to it is very much a counter signal.
- brightball 22d agoWhy? I watched all of the supposed controversies around him happen in real time and they were all non stories. “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.
- tao_oat 22d agoYou're skipping his recent blog posts; I think that's where the bulk of people's complaints come from. See for example https://tekin.co.uk/2025/09/the-ruby-community-has-a-dhh-problem https://tekin.co.uk/2025/09/the-ruby-community-has-a-dhh-pro...
- IshKebab 21d agoI agree about most of what he's said (e.g. "The London I remember" is totally inaccurate but not actually offensive), but did you see this? https://world.hey.com/dhh/three-sacred-cows-that-must-die-so-europe-can-live-1afb203d 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.)
- mdotmertens 22d agoomarchy is the new "i use arch, btw". I'm too altruistic (or dumb) to understand why you would pump money into a riced arch install. 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.
- stymaar 22d ago> omarchy is the new "i use arch, btw" More like “I'm a white suppremacist, btw” though. Quite unfortunate that it became acceptable enough to brag about that in public.
- tuananh 22d agoim pretty sure arch users dont want to associate with ormachy :))
- krisroadruck 22d agoI don't think it's aimed at them. I think it's mostly aimed at windows and mac users who are computer enthusiasts but never really made the jump to Linux as a desktop daily driver. Just supposed to be a cool on-ramp - basically mint but different and with some marketing behind it?
- emsign 21d agoThen why chose a distro that is being maintained by one person. I would NEVER recommend a Windows/Mac and first time Linux user to switch to such a distro. Not just his political views no quite practical implications are key here: what if this guy has a heart-attack? The distro will be abandoned. What if his development PC gets compromised? The distro is fried in both cases. The more developers are on the team holding the credentials and responsibilities the better, the safer a distro is. Omarchy is nothing more than an experimental distro and shouldn't be used productively or as your main OS. Simply because it's run by one guy, one single point of failure. 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.
- rfgplk 22d agoIt's a shame because DHH seems to be going fully agentic (or at least that's his public stance), so no idea why he isn't rolling a proper distro. Looking at his repo it's just pure shell scripts (why?) and using prebuilt software. He could have rolled a custom renderer + pipeline + other software needed to make a distro work (ie a modern KDE).
- grey-area 22d agoYes he could have, if agents were capable of it. Why didn’t he? Why didn’t you?
- qarl2 21d agoOh, I believe agents are fully capable of it. Would you like to issue a challenge like that? I'd love to demonstrate their capabilities to you.
- grey-area 21d agoGo ahead and do it. Would love to see an improved Linux rewritten with agents. My personal belief is it would take a long time, lots of money and much human intervention/guidance but if you think they’re capable alone just do it this afternoon and see how it goes.
- qarl2 21d agoCome come, let's spec something real. You seem extremely doubtful, why don't you let me show you?
- grey-area 21d agoIn all seriousness, if you have the time the money and the inclination, you should give yourself a challenge like this, and try to complete it. It would be an interesting exploration of the limits of current agents. You don't need someone else to do that for you.
- dgellow 22d agoJust DHH being loud about it, getting his billionaire friends to join, and their usual tech-bro following astroturfing it (they somehow see it as a culture war thing to fight against the oppression from other distros and FLOSS projects that have code of conducts and don’t want to work with racists)
- brightball 22d agoIt’s a really strong UX that’s rapidly improving without a profit motive and people are excited about it. 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.
- mdotmertens 22d agoI ran it daily like up to 4 months ago. Updates would regularly break hyprland and most games I wanted to play needed much more tinkering than on vanilla arch with the same dependencies installed.
- brightball 22d agoI haven’t tried installing games on Linux in years, so that’s a gap for my experience.
- qup 21d agoMostly you install steam, install game from inside steam, and it just works with nothing further. A far cry from 15 years ago.
- hokumguru 21d agoI've run it since launch without issue. That is: to each their own really
- gilrain 21d agoNot really: as far as we know, you use it for nothing; the person you replied to gave examples.
- krisroadruck 22d agoI think there is a pretty decent swath of people willing to rally behind someone who says they are trying to make a cool project specifically for people who want to be away from the "insufferable injection of identity politics". How large that swath is relative to the other is up for debate but it doesn't have to be particularly large. You'll get funding from people who are both interested in the actual product AND the posture, some from people who are just into the posture, and some who are just into the product. Ditto with interest from people to try it and or contribute time to it's development.
- tao_oat 22d agodhh is very strongly associated with identity politics, though? (as in, "western"/white identity)
- krisroadruck 21d ago[dead]
- emsign 21d agoThis. The alt right in German speaking countries are calling themselves "Identitäre", which was inspired by French Les Identitaires. For all their criticism of what once was just a niche and fringe academic leftist movement, they are hypocritically are mirroring at least mirroring it if not more so. I believe they have actually helped progressive identity politics become mainstream as a reaction to their attacks on minorities, as a reaction to their hatred the mainstream has signaled their solidarity with minority identities, this is the main reason for Rainbow flags, to show solidarity against hatred.
- ed_voc 21d agoAre there any examples of identity politics influencing the Omarchy product? 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.
- novafunc 22d agoJust billionaires giving money to a friend's project.
- dathinab 22d agoisn't it a typical SV investor money hype train situation: - 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.
- arnorhs 22d agoit's amazing from a historical perspective that there are HNers around now who don't know who DHH is, when he was such a prevailing voice in the HN scene back in the day. 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.
- pjmlp 22d agoWould have rails taken off if he was equally open about his politics back then?
- cpursley 21d agoYes, people were more mentally resilient and mature then and it was pre Reddit, which has completely broken and warped many people’s minds.
- pjmlp 21d agoAs Gen X, I think they were already softies back then.
- noir_lord 21d agoIt's impossible to know what his politics was back then in fairness. People's politics do often (but not always) change as they age.
- CuriouslyC 21d ago10 years ago Joe Rogan was basically a stereotypical Bernie bro.
- thesuitonym 21d ago10 years ago Joe Rogan was a well known douchebag far-right conspiracy theorist, what are you talking about?
- pjmlp 22d agoA techbros project that really cares close to nothing about FOSS ideals, apparently sided with far right politics.
- HumansEatHumans 22d ago[dead]
- micromacrofoot 21d agorich guy has rich friends, cult of personality
- Your_ID_Collect 21d agoIt is going to be marketed to the AI bros. Possibly to Shopify customers as an "advanced AI distro" to create shops with. The openclaw guy just sponsored Omarchy. 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.
- slome 21d agoI'm surprised HN failed to mention the real reason in this thread. It's AI. The goal of the project is to have users build (fix, maintain, expand etc) the distro themselves through AI generated (bug) reports which are then picked up by AI, solved, tested and published in a new release. A full AI loop. 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.
- kristofferR 21d agoIt's AI and dev forward in a brilliant way. It ships with its own skill [1], so agents actually work way better out of the box than on other distros. 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/agents/skills/omarchy/SKILL.md https://github.com/basecamp/omarchy/blob/quattro/default/age... [2] https://omarchyplugins.com/ https://omarchyplugins.com/
- tamimio 21d agoJust like anything in tech recently, make a halo effect around whatever, over sell it, try to make a fanbase, and some connections here and there, and you got your meme product into a multi million product. It’s sad, there are dozens of better distributions out there and been in the game for years that deserve more exposure, but oh well.
- rodolphoarruda 21d agoThe promise of the so-called ‘malleable computer’: 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).
- freehorse 21d agoThat the future is (by some) considered to be about “personal branding” rather than actual engineering. Build a cult of followers and ship them whatever. This is the main difference between sharing one’s cool config files and shipping a “distro”.
- asimovDev 21d agoBeen hearing about Omarchy for a while (past half a year if not more), but pretty much exclusively on LinkedIn. I don't remember if I follow DHH but I suppose enough of my connections do either way that I often get recommended posts about Omarchy. But I barely hear about it on reddit and I probably saw it mentioned a couple times here on HN
- nomilk 21d ago1. To help linux take over desktop (vs macOS and windows) 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)
- Kudos 21d agoBoth of the people you mention are political activists with problematic views, that's why their politics get brought up all the time.
- poisonwomb 21d agoDHH is a massive racist who thinks immigrants are diluting the national character of the UK. DHH himself is danish and hasn’t been to the UK in like 10 years. Maybe he should look in the mirror sometime
- grim_io 21d agoIt's apple-centric tech bros discovering linux. If apple gets their shit together on the OS again, they'll be back in an instant. Until then, it's probably a good thing for the linux desktop overall.
- musha68k 21d agoA highly motivated, well funded and hence potentially contagious and "blessed" effort in proliferation ... and colonization.
- zilfedie 20d ago"free" software funded by 8 million dollars in concentrated wealth. The guy is a self aggrandizing moron that a child could see through.