Protest against the Omarchy/Omacom Foundation and the tech companies and executives funding far-right open source.
I clicked the first referenced article just out of curiosity, and the guy is like ‘The Brits are pissed because of the erosion of their national identity and that’s understandable’!
Dude. You’re talking about the biggest colonial empire in history…yet people like you actually love to complain about migrants and praise those who do the same…? Self-awareness of a rainworm.
From the article:
The Omarchy Doctrine is a public, fascist creed: heritage as duty, hold the line, the will to power. It matches Roger Griffin’s palingenetic populist ultranationalism and Robert Paxton’s first stage of fascism: a creed, a leader, followers. And there’s $18.5 million already pledged for the next stage.
Despite this, more than a dozen top tech executives and corporations have pledged millions to the Omarchy / Omacom Foundation. They include the CEOs of Shopify, Stripe, Dell, Cloudflare, Block, Dropbox, Coinbase, and others, as listed on Omarchy’s patrons page.
I think it is not despite, but precisely because of it that these people are funding it.
I thought that distro was just AI Slop? People are actually using it?
Yes. Mostly people who are too lazy to install Arch and also want a preset hyprland config provided by the distro (instead of just taking one from github)
Dafuq? It takes like no time to install arch lol. Dotfiles I guess takes a bit but anybody could just AI Slop something if they wanted…
Good to know what to omit, also:
Use and fund open alternatives to the boycotted tools: Bitwarden instead of 1Password, Nextcloud or Co-op Cloud instead of Dropbox or AWS, WooCommerce or Openfront instead of Shopify, Signal, Matrix, XMPP, or Delta Chat instead of Slack. Sourcehut, Gitea, or Forgejo instead of GitHub.
I bet here’s a typo, because I can’t believe Matrix is also bad
“signal, matrix, xmpp, or delta” instead of slack
Astonishing that Free and Open Source Software with little to no employees cannot compete exactly 1:1 with a VC funded company with a hundred full-time employees.
edit: 2.545 employees as of 2021. I even have to wonder how do they need so many, what for?
I was responding to the poster’s suggestion that there was a typo, I think there isn’t but it’s just a bit hard to read, and all those I quoted are in the “better options” column.
Not gonna lie, the whole text confused me at first
Bitwarden instead of “1Password”,
Nextcloud or Co-op Cloud instead of “Dropbox or AWS”,
WooCommerce or Openfront instead of Shopify,
Signal, Matrix, XMPP, or Delta Chat instead of Slack.
Sourcehut, Gitea, or Forgejo instead of GitHub.
I don’t know why they didn’t use the dots, but it doesn’t really matter, the message is almost clear after all
I think the best way to counter this is to fix Ubuntu. It has what it needs to work as an introductory distro. I don’t know what made Ubuntu so bloated and buggy but I bet it’s salvageable. I’m not saying Ubuntu was ever the greatest but it was one of the first distro to be simple to use.
When I first came over from windows in 2013 Ubuntu detected all of my hardware and would install drivers by clicking a button. That seems like not a big deal now but then it felt like a miracle, it gave me a chance to learn about Linux while it was also functional.
If omarchy takes that new user crowd it might actually be a problem. Omarchy might fail if they don’t keep stealing from Arch development.
Maybe I’m out of touch because I have no idea what new linux users go to today. Steamos? What are the usual hurdles that new users face in 2026?
I think the main problem of Ubuntu is GNOME. After version 2 it became useless, like a kid’s toy.
While I personally can’t stand GNOME these days, it’s not the problem here. It’s Canonical’s desire for Snaps, a notoriously less standardized (and mature) packaging format, to be used for literally everything in Ubuntu; they’re aiming for system components to use it in the nebulous ‘future’.
Totally agree. Snap is scary!
Fedora is the introductory distro now.
I forgot about fedora. It runs really well. I forget that’s what I would use if Arch wasn’t around. I actually loved slackware, I just need them to update their kernel more than once a decade. When I was running old hardware it was fun. I don’t know why it’s so satisfying. I think it just feels like home…
Snaps ruined Ubuntu.
if Ubuntu can finally ditch the snaps and just use flatpak, we could recommend it again.
Nothing will stop them at this point. They’re our masters. The only thing that might make any difference is a general strike. We tried that. Most workers are too afraid.
I am not trying to argue this, but some people will say “It just looks like a linux distro that is designed to be more agentic friendly, even if some of its backers have unscrupulous pasts.” What is the response to this? Because I’m sure it’s vibe-coded and insecure, but there aren’t really linux distros that are agentic first distros and some computer enthusiasts really like AI. And yes, people can just install Jan or LM Studio on their own in another distro, but some people may want open source code and linux designed for AI. I know people on Lemmy often hate AI, so please don’t hate me for writing this. I just don’t totally get the reasoning aside from some people involved in the project seem to be assholes… or is that the reasoning?
To be honest, if not for security concerns I’d probably try this distro if it weren’t somehow linked to anti-trans things, which makes anything completely toxic. But I looked at the Omarchy page just to see what it looked like and conceptually for people interested in agentic stuff, it didn’t look that bad, it seemed sort of interesting.
Trans people are some of the best network engineers and coders out there and greatly help the open source community. Any open source project that isn’t kind to trans people should be ignored. Maybe that’s the point? That normally a project like this linked to anything anti-trans would be rejected by the open source community and it’s only through soulless corporations and right wing tech bros that this is existing?
The biggest issue for me is its ties to the Dark Enlightenment movement, which is much more scary than any -phobia or -ism.
This is a really interesting comment. I’d like to know more about your views on this.
This isn’t just a case of some abrasive people involved. The guy who runs the project, DHH, is an open and proud racist. He posts his very straightforward racist beliefs on his blog. He made ruby on rails, and after being rejected from the ruby community he’s now trying to insert himself into the Linux/open source community. On top of that, the “distro” is Arch + some dot files. Despite that, he’s managed to raise millions of dollars in outside funding, which is insane for open source project. Either his industry connections are willing to look past the racism and hand him a bunch of money anyway, or they actively agree with him and want to build a space for racists in the open source community.
Add in the AI stuff and people have plenty of reason to boycott this project.
Is he actually racist? I’ve read he wrote about remigration, but that’s about uncontrolled immigration, nothing to do with hatred for races
Well, the AI (LLM stuff) is right wing. It makes the last thing neoliberalism didn’t make obsolete useless. Who cares if you actually understand what you’re doing and are able to do it way better than a LLM. “You are now useless. Fuck you.”
The neoliberal ideology now made everyone useless. How can a person still be a neoliberal when you can see none of us really have any value (intellectual or otherwise), we never did. The only thing humans had was pretending to be useful (or competent in any way) and they are taking it away from us little by little.
That’s why I’m a leftist, I’ve seen basic human dignity being taken away from people since my childhood and experienced repression (as much as a minority in a non third world country can) and I know many people have it worse.
Same. Capitalism will kill us all if we don’t do something, that’s why I’m a social distributist.
I don’t know if I agree with you because someone still needs to tell an LLM what the project is for it to work and a normal person who has no science or computer science background can’t do that efficiently or check the technical aspects of a project to make sure the AI isn’t doing something incorrectly (and eventually the AI will do something incorrectly usually). I think we need UBI sooner rather than later because so many jobs will be obsolete, but if I’m chatting with an LLM or you are and we say “is the docker container up?” or “you built a page and there’s no clear way to navigate it” or “test for what would be exposed data in the case of a breach” the AI can do that, but a normal person doesn’t even understand any of that stuff to chat with an AI about that. I know it’s awful right now for coders who are getting paid less or are underemployed, but that seems to be more of a UBI problem instead of an LLM problem. There are legitimate environmental fears however, but LLMs and data centers seem to be a cherry on top of egregious environmental policy. Environmental catastrophe is headed this way with or without the cherry and it’s not clear to me if we had good universal public transportation and banned gasoline that somehow data centers would still be an existential human risk.
I think the problem is that decision makers /people in power often don’t understand the technical jargon either. All that matters is, “is it working?” So once they see that they can get it “working” without paying for the expertise, they will take it.
The thing is also - the LLM will eventually get it wrong, but the frontier models are pretty good at fixing it if you can articulate the problem. Even non technically.
Under the hood? Impossible to understand. But it works!
Counterpoint - system architecture is really built around helping humans to build mental models of systems. If your plan is to have LLMs to all the work in the future, those mental models no longer matter the way they did in the past.
Probably, systems will break, and LLM costs will rise, and the arithmetic will shift - but that isn’t happening fast enough to stop the brain drain and negative pressure on employment and compensation.
I agree about the risk of brain drain with fewer people learning to code.
ugh… politics. wake me up when there is a technical controversy to talk about
People who don’t do politics are confusing to me.
i watched the video. my answer is simple, maybe even to a stupid degree: i don’t like to take heart medications
I mean, I’m pretty sure this excuse for a distro shipped with multiple critical bugs lol.
It really should not be receiving funding when compared to the handful of other arch packs thst actually have a functioning security model.
i agree with this. OP should have started with that
+1 from me. People are so happy to boycott projects that are presenting different political views while they don’t bat an eye when other projects they back up are similarly political but on the other side of the spectrum.
I agree it’d be best to have apolitical tech initiatives but since people won’t be able to have their beliefs to themselves then we just have to agree everyone has the right to have their political opinion tied to the projects that they develop. Sad, but at least honest.
I don’t think anyone wants apolitical tech except for a few people like you, who haven’t thought about it very much.
I want liberationary tech. The entire reason I got interested in FOSS in the first place was because it forms a natural extension of the liberationary political work that I do in other fields. If you want apolitical software, then why are you interested in linux, which inherently challenges traditional notions of copyright? No tech is apolitical.
Uh yeah, projects on the side of the political spectrum which hurts people and acts in bad faith are not worth supporting, and projects on the side which protects and helps people are worth supporting, no shit dumbass.
Are atomic bombs only technical to you? No tech is apolitical. Wake up.
you are making an unfair comparison here by comparing apples to oranges. atomic bombs kill people, linux distros dont. and if you are still upset just a reminder that many defense, air craft, and MILITARY missile launching systems …use linux
It’s not unfair. Giving mindshare to those fuckers helps to kill people in the end. And don’t be disingenuous, linux is in military systems, yes -that’s bad- just like the good guys must have atomic bombs as a deterrent of Imperial greed (hopefully the Iranian people are making theirs right now 🇮🇷✊🇵🇸✊)
Were all Arch Linux users always THIS insufferably apolitical? Mein Gott. That’s why the far-right has them by the balls.
Such as the multiple input sanitation issues, allowing for direct shell excecution of arbitrary code?
Donate to KDE and Gnome and your favorite linux programs!
Aren’t they gay furries?
They are, but for some reason their only hobbies are contributing just to hide rainbow in the about. We can live with that 😄
This is good messaging. I’m glad someone is making it explicit. I’ll bookmark this page and share it.
Oh Omarchy is “agentic” now? Is there a change they can point to that made it so?
Also the phrase “agentic Linux for the age of agents” makes my brain bleed.
It comes with claude.md and some skills. Basically nothing you can’t setup in 15 minutes and a claude prompt on any linux distribution yourself. They claim “because omarchy is just text configs llms understand it very well” when all linux and all distributions are configured through text.
Agentic linux is awesome though but you’d bave to be brain damaged to do it on mutable distro.
So you’re saying atomic fedora linux and just giving an agent lots of access is safer than omarchy?
Am I crazy for saying that DHH is a far-right plant and Omarchy is a plot to destroy FOSS from the inside?
I’d say he wants to purge the “woke” in FOSS
If you want to point at those trying to destroy FOSS from within, point at Microsoft & Apple.
DHH is far right, clearly, I’m not sure they have a plan for destroying FOSS, they seem to be trying to normalize their worldview (which is bad enough)
Yes. You are. You people are acting like Omanchy existing will bring down democracy as we know it. Its just a project. Sure its got some weird backing and DHH is a scumbag, but y’all need to calm the fuck down. Just ignore it. It will go away.
It’s not just a program it’s a movement. It has budget of 13m usd that comes from corporations who have maybe 0.01% of their user base on linux. Why do you think that is? Why would 1Password and friends do this?
They won’t listen… here’s a response to a similar comment I saw in another thread:
Ignoring fascists and hoping they go away is one reason why fascism is having a resurgence right now
You can’t reason with unreasonable people.
How’s that unreasonable, fascism did a comeback because it wasn’t completely kept at bay.
Just because their goal may not be explicitly pushing far right nationalism doesn’t mean it’s ok to ignore. They must be shunned. Their political messaging is hate and none of us should support or condone that.
But we aren’t supporting or condoning it. We also aren’t shunning them. We are signal boosting this nonsense “distro” into the stratosphere. I am extremely online when it comes to tech and Linux. The first I heard of Omarchy is complaints on Lemmy. I’ve seen like three total people talk about it outside of lemmy. All of them were easy to skip ads. The actions here instead flood the feed with news about it over and over and over.
Normally the impact of a small group of people wouldnt matter but we are the exact demographic that they want reach with this. and y’all are doing the work for them.
Omarchy is a distro in the same way that I’m a fighter pilot because I stayed at a Holiday Inn last night.
Great allegory! It’s a distro in the same way that Bob was done with his homework by having handed in Alice’s copy of it and called it a day.
I have to ask: How exactly would someone support the fascist people just by using Omarchy? It costs nothing, there’s no data collection, no subscription, nothing. It seems like a fucking purity test to not touch anything any possible fascist has ever touched.
Attention is currency
You’re giving that fuckers mindshare. Just DON’T.
This money is going into marketing and reputation-washing to make far-right politics look like normal open-source community building as well as attempts at centralization in FOSS.[24]
🤫
OK so this is a legit weakness of mine and it has to do with too many options. Creator aside what makes this distribution interesting and what other flavors resemble it? I’ve been trying for years to find the right flavor for me, I want something I update minimally and when I do update it doesn’t break. I’m using lmde note but I’ve had to wrangle it in and all I’m running on it is steam Nvidia gpu, yams, plex. I want to self host other apps but I’m terrified of the base install becoming unmanageable. I want this server to run games also.
Bread on Penguins has a focus on minimalism and might have some interesting videos, though she herself uses dwm.
Nix as a system is meant to be highly replicable.
Me, I just try to make a flashback point before doing anything funky, but that’s nothing remarkable to aspire to.
Omarchy is a essentially an Arch setup with Hyprland.
However, if you don’t want frequent and possibly unstable updates, I’d suggest staying away from Arch in it’s entirety and trying Fedora instead. It’s got plenty of OoTB setups to choose from without having to mannualy install and configure them.
Rolling releases as a whole are a lot better these days, but I agree Fedora is excellent (and it helps to not need the AUR at all)
