It'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.

It’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.

I'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.

Looks 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.

omarchy 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.

The 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).

A highly motivated, well funded and hence potentially contagious and "blessed" effort in proliferation ... and colonization.

Just billionaires giving money to a friend's project.

it'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.

isn'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.

It'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).

Been 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

1. 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)

Just 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.

It'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).

DHH 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.

That 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”.

It'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/age...

[2] https://omarchyplugins.com/

It'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.

A techbros project that really cares close to nothing about FOSS ideals, apparently sided with far right politics.

It 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.

DHH 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

rich guy has rich friends, cult of personality

Just 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)

it get picked up by Hype because DHH

I 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.

I have been using Fedora for the past few years and all I can say is that the lack of distractive options is a relief. I can focus on work and ignore the wallpaper and the themes.

Between the Windows 3 days and the mid 2000s I've spent countless hours customizing the UI of every tool I used. Now I realize I was paying attention to the wrong thing.

Isn't Omarchy very, very similar to cachyos?

So, a Linux distribution.

People need to read "Blogging, the Nihilist Impulse" by Geert Lovink (2007)

https://www.eurozine.com/blogging-the-nihilist-impulse/

https://web.archive.org/web/20240925180238/http://www.intell...

OTOH, fighting bigotry is something we should never leave behind.

People have taken 'everything is political' to mean 'politics must be discussed for everything'.

I am old enough that I've been burned by both sides of the political aisle, often using the same rhetoric (think of the children, we're fighting for freedom, we're fighting against fascism, no true scoctsman, etc.)

Maybe the day will come when we really will have to pick sides beyond the elections, like it's WWII, but that day isn't today. I just want to be left alone, away from political camps and the ugliness they tolerate because of they're fighting against the greater good.

I just want my tech to focused on the tech.

Isn't the rise of AI basically turning software engineering into tumblr? Thats what I see; soon we'll have a forum that's just filled with roblox-but-for-adults.

A bunch of terminally online people have decided to make stalking DHH into a personality/lifestyle. This blog is incorrectly titled, because it doesn't talk about security holes at all.

edit: I don't care what people decide to do with their linux distro that I'm probably never going to use. I suggest you try Debian.

Probably so people can understand what the post is about and can skip the rage-bait?

It was (my) main takeaway and I wanted it to be evident in the headline. I didn’t want to bury the lede; I’ll uneditorialize it because it seems it’s causing some fighting in the comments and I don’t really want to instigate anything, more just warn people using the distro. I don’t think it’ll reach the people who need to be warned if it’s not evident that there’s an issue from the start.

Great title btw

No offense but your title is not informative at all.

> What kind of blogging is this?

Happy to explain: it's personal blogging, for writing down what's on my mind.

The fact that it was addressed swiftly doesn't affect the claims in the post at all: I'm worried about development practices which produce code like that.

Also, the "full of security holes" is not my framing, someone else choose this submission title.

The problem with those two picked examples is that their nature displays a lack of basic care and due diligence.

Of course, this is a culture war, but the point the blog post is making is that the Omarchy side is not exactly at the forefront of merit.

The same kind as a similar recent post [1] where a person pointed out a bunch of problems with Omarchy's shell scripts as examples of it being terrible.

Open a pull request.

That's how this is supposed to work. Wisdom of the crowd and what not.

1. https://xn--gckvb8fzb.com/a-word-on-omarchy/

Your left side of the curve is missing people like me who use Fedora.

Been using Linux since 1997, it's been my primary OS since ~2003 (except for gaming and Microsoft seem determine to end their streak on that one) and I use Fedora because I really don't care that much, it's a reliable tool, it has recent packages and I like that it's semi-rolling in that it's a straight forward update every 6ish months.

I had my "I must customise and control every single part of my Linux install" phase early (Slackware and Gentoo et al) and then I realised I didn't actually care all that much, give me sane defaults with the ability to tweak if I want to and stability, I'm at the point where "If I have to think much about my OS it's failed in doing what I want" holds.

The right side is Nix

That feels very astroturfed, it’s just too much too fast

They just announced the new "Omacom foundation" last Friday, with $8 million of funding from prominent tech people. That's why it's getting current flurry of attention

It's been showing up all over YT for a while if you do any searches for Linux.

I took a look at it when I kept seeing it, realised what it is and who it's by and carried on moving, putting aside DHH as a person, it doesn't really do anything I want or in a way I'd care about but then I'm also not the target demographic/user, after 30 years of using Linux, I don't need it.

Just hype, it's Kagi all over again. People said the same thing there, we're just too cynical, not used to people getting excited about really cool stuff anymore.

A lot of plugin systems are like that. (See the hyprland, noctalia, or vim/neovim's plugin systems).

More generally, how else would a small project allow plugins that isn't "here is a way to add code" and then anyone can release the code they added? Hell, the linux ecosystem in general is a "free for all", and that is the nature of the platform

Given the choice between a walled garden like Apple's app store or this, give me something open and more risky any day of the week.

It's easy enough for Omarchy folks to add "verified" or "trusted" developers down the line.

Not very? Why would a TOS-violating feature like this be included as a default feature of an OS?

If they're going agentic and using the stack that they're using (qt/shell scripts?) they'll never patch it in full, if ever. The thing is almost certainly full of injection/forgery attacks, on top of being bloated to oblivion.

Arch doesn't market itself as a newbie-friendly opinionated secure-by-default distro.

An Arch package having less-than-ideal default settings is pretty normal: the user is expected to read the manpages and the Arch wiki when making any alterations to their system. They guide you towards making it secure, but if you want to leave it insecure because of reasons then Arch isn't going to stop you from shooting your own foot.

It has nothing special compared to Arch. In fact, I would argue its just dotfiles for Arch.

I suspect his pitch here is that he knows UX and is technical enough to make it happens, rather than that this is a serious server OS.

There's a difference between a few small bugs because software is new and a half dozen eval(untrusted_input) in version 4.0.

Maybe this can get fixed, security teams won't make it worse. I worry they're mopping the floor and not fixing the leak: the development practices which lead to the quantity, seriousness and banality of their security issues is the part which needs fixing.

> Wouldn't the security team and the agents just go and fix the security holes?

Of course they’re going to react to what is reported and fix it. That’s a given.

The concern is the development process that is leading to these types of holes getting shipped. Mainstream Linux distributions have software practices and release cycles designed to be cautious. This project is taking more of a move fast and break things methodology where shipping the vibe coded feature as fast as possible is the priority.

Having a crack team of people responding to reports and fixing things (or prompting their agents to fix things) only solves the issues after they’ve been shipped, discovered, and kindly reported back upstream.

> I don't know, Omarchy's team really don't care if you're complaining.

Controversy is their primary marketing tactic. They prefer that people complain because being divisive and controversial is how DHH has always marketed his products.

Yea, I don’t get the shade. As many have said, it’s just Arch + a very polished UX preconfigured so you can jump right in without a lot of setup overhead.

Why it’s security would be on a different level than any other Linux distro isn’t clear.

No, I don't like the style,but author is right here, you cannot secure insecure design. It needs to be reworked from scratch.

If they are interested in complaints. Probably they do not, so people write blogs on their own. This kind of also happened in the rails world; some people got upset at DHH and then started writing complaints; and many of these complaints are by themselves also total garbage (some are more objective criticism, these tend to be better). It's kind of agenda-based everywhere.

> I don't expect the security to be perfect out of the gate at when Omarchy 4.0 just launched with real backing?

Well, we can note the time and look again in half a year or so. Personally I am in general happy with security in the linux ecosystem. I am more worried about e. g. systemd adding age sniffing as component. In another entry at hackernews, yesterday I think, we learned that Microsoft automatically tags all images with invisible watermarks. One just can not trust companies - they always feel a need to abuse data from the users and tags everyone. Next step will be mandatory chips into the brain.

The artist here being the huge community of linux, arch, hyprland, wayland developers.

They point to two separate issues, what are you about?

"the artist"

the man shat out a collection of half working shell scripts and bad synthwave background images and every wannabe VC bro felt like a haxxor installing it.

Fucking hell, even Hannah Montana Linux is of higher quality than Omarchy, the bar is low.

> Anybody that says this is either joking or has no clue how the real world works.

So the "real world" is that Linux failed on the desktop and it is not worth trying, meaning that raising $10M to do this a joke?

Would you say the same thing if another distro raised that amount of money? Or is it because DHH is the one doing it.

This sort of thinking is why Linux on the Desktop worked for Windows, instead of it becoming mainstream with its own distro.

Yep. Considering LLMs spit out Rust/C++ faster & better than Bash no idea why they went this route.

Which distro is not full of bash scripts?

It's also funny that all the systemd critics call that bash scripts is all you need

Gobolinux was really a missed opportunity!

They are amazingly good at creating hype (non-derogatory) and getting users.

Their docs say "Omarchy takes security very seriously" - I think that's straight up incorrect.

Saying "go and use it, wanting: its prototype quality and likely to have many security bugs" would be fair game.

That's not what they're doing.

> Creating a useful product that people want -- this is the hard part.

When you do that you'll just a bunch of people clowning on the project due to the politics of the founder.

Is it not supposed to be om-archy? (This is the first time I even hear about the project.)

I think it's oh-my-arch, remove h and move y to the end.

this is why i use arch btw

I will be giving all of my future projects names like f4xa74 just for you

Is it pronounced as Omar Chy?