He's exploiting the AI craze. And is himself a wealthy and connected individual. Also he's including essentially ads in the OS. Which is exactly the type of thing people leave Windows for.
working toward full integration with the Chinese services people depend on
I really wish I was spineless enough to just start throwing around half arsed projects and beg for millions of funding whenever a craze comes around… fuck I’d be a millionaire by now. easy peasy.
Even more sadness for me, I actually liked Omarchy when I first learned about it as a Linux noob. But I hear there's other ways of achieving the same functionalities, so I'll be looking into that once I find time.
Nothing against Hyperland, but be advised that iirc, there are currently working on things that break config files (what omarchy sums up to be)
If you want something quick-ish, KDE could work as a replacement, granted you use the keyboard shortcuts.
Yes I know, I've recieved some notices that I expertly ignored. Doesn't sound like too much of a problem, just convert the old format config files to new format config files.
He appeals to the worst in some very influential people, basically "Get in the car losers, we're going Naziing". And all these rich people just happen to have a deep seated urge to go Naziing that societal ethics hasn't allowed them to explore before, so they just give him all their money.
That, and in a quid pro quo for their investment they'll obviously expect DHH to be even more of a Nazi than he has previously been. There, that's his "masterclass". Still impressed?
If you Heil Hitler a lot, you get part of the riches they hid in Switzerland I guess.
He uses the word Agentic
Linux land has been inhabited by big dogs like Canonical and Red Hat for a while, and it probably wouldn't have picked up the enthusiasm it has from companies over the years without the likes of them. So agree that corps like the safety provided by other corps, but it's not like this new one is the only offering.
DHH is not a corporation, and he seems to be making Omarchy for free and fun
Over 80% of Linux kernel developers are employed by corporations. 2024 Open Source Software Funding Report estimated a $7.7 billion funding per year by organizations, with 86% of that being the salary or contract payments of developers
Not only that, but there are some glaring security mistakes in the configuration. There is a deep dive from last year: https://xn--gckvb8fzb.com/a-word-on-omarchy (I hope they fixed some of this stuff)
But the core of this "distro" is a bunch of bash scripts that do a curl to somewhere instead of proper packaging.
It is a 101 on how not to install Arch linux.
Sure, but this is not such an example.
omfg this cannot be happening.. how is this happening? Are they all getting fomo from not giving money or something?
Put AI in the name and the wealthy throw money at it. That's all that's happening here.
Omarchy probably will be abandoned and forgotten in 5 years
probably because he’s deeply networked and invented a popular programming language :/
He didn't invent a programming language. He designed a framework for a programming language. I assure you the second one is a lot easier. It's like a library of functions and class suites that make programming quicker and easier as the boilerplate code you'd have to write is done already.
AI + Nazi = huge funding
...Let's play devil's advocate.
Isn't it a terrible architecture for agents?
The ideal distro would be:
A strictly immutable base configuration.
"Rings" of access privilege everywhere, enforced across the whole OS. Something like Qubes OS.
Top tier, security audited, prepackaged setups for vllm, llama.cpp, various agenic frameworks and such, something better than a massive docker install for every one.
Multiple versions of patched/optimized Python akin to Clear Linux or CachyOS.
A kernel/scheduler tuned for compute and low IO latency.
Good Nvidia/rocm/Intel support, which Arch does provide, admittedly.
Simple, minimalistic desktop UI that is easy for an agent to interpret in a screenshot, and easy for it to operate. Ideally with integrated hooks.
And an “easy” headless mode for less overhead
Prepackaged, open source agenic browsers and embeddings servers.
Links and guides for more niche machine learning/data processing projects, instead of to the most popular ones that already have official guides.
Omarchy has... precisely none of that? Except for what in inherits from Arch.
Lack of any containerization in particular is one reason OpenClaw (the previous Twitter AI fad) was such a flaming mess.
Seems like their AIs had some of the same ideas you're having here, since about a week or two ago they had an issue open about moving the basis of Omarchy over to Nix.
That got buried somehow, cannot find it in Github anymore.
Wouldn’t switching to Nix nuke existing Omarchy installs?
This is a microcosm of why this is so perplexing to me. If Alibaba really wants an agenic OS, there are far better starting points than Omarchy.
I wouldn't trust an agent outside of a capabilities-based OS, like if Genode was ready for production. I don't even use AI at all, but if I was actually using agents, I'd want guarantees that not only do you not have access to certain things, you cannot properly conceive of how to access them, it is utterly beyond the agent.
Well, yes, exactly! You shouldn’t trust it.
If this was any other computer program that could execute arbitrary system commands unreliably, standard procedure would be to sandbox the living snot out of it.
It’s baffling to me that “AI” is somehow an excuse to ignore this. Hence that’s exactly what I mean: I’d want rock solid guarantees of containerization, and granular scoping.
It can't not have containers, right? Or an I missing something?
Honestly I've not delved much into this distro, I only hear bad things about the author and a lot of companies throw money at it
Well, as we saw with OpenClaw, 95% of users won’t set up containers and scopes if it isn’t a preconfigured default.
So yeah, Arch can do containers just fine. But if this is an “agenic” OS preconfigured to use agents, it better do that by default, out of the box, and MAKE the user scope its access.
This is all good and well, but does it matter? Are people switching to a distro because it is well funded? And even if they do, will they stick around? To me, this looks like a little money furnace that will shut down the moment the cash stops coming in.
I know one person - the one who recommended it to me.
The premise was interesting. The execution? As you’ve said, slop.
You could get the same done by installing Arch, Claude Code or Codex, and a $20 subscription, plus about a day’s worth of tinkering- which you’d still do on Omarchy to get it working as you want it to…
They claim to have had 150k installations 11 months ago. Probably millions now, who knows how many stuck with it. Judging by comments on that one social media everybody loves here, everyone is using it.
Steam still counts them as Arch Linux so cannot use that to get more accurate info. https://github.com/...
Hopefully this all keeps being open source so the leftovers could be reused, for the benefit of other projects.
They've got to pay their leadership a "fair" salary
No, but such companies see it as a pocket change and if it does get popular, they'll benefit immensely from all these people buying AI tokens.
They could go and put all this money into any other distro (like Linux Mint, which is incredibly popular and takes a lot of work to make, yet runs on ~$10k a month), they just don't see what's in it for themselves.
yeah, don't. I tried it again last week after I saw they have their own "kernel" now. It's an absolute mess of a "distro".
The launcher is a cluster fuck of vibe coded slop prompted by someone who was coked out of their mind. it doesn't work and is incredibly poorly designed.
Normally if you want to configure Hyprland you do so via one LUA config file. Claude Code decided that cutting said config up into 6 LUAs that are ALL commented out would be a better approach. It uses neovim as it's default editor. note the VIM part. so logically to navigate a TILING WINDOW MANAGER whose default editor is neoVIM you'd use VIM style navigation right? nope not on omarchy. it's arrow keys. want to actually have vim nav for your vim based WM? ok find the correct hyprland lua config and then UNBIND all the existing configs to then REBIND them to what you want. Normally you'd just literally swap out the keybinds in one lua config. nope on omarchy you gotta make sure you're in the right lua config file and then try to find out which keys are bound, unbind them, then rebind them to what you want. This is just the primary example of how this "distro" operates.
for something that claims it will speed up dev time for users it sure as fuck prides itself on slowing you down as much as possible and forcing the user to pay for an LLM subscription. THIS is why companies are dumping money into the thing. unlike say Windows where you can easily use the OS without an AI agent Omarchy is designed to force you to use one if you want to get anything done. you have no choice. the configurations are so ass backwards that only an AI can configure them in a timely manner.
[…] It uses neovim as it’s default editor. note the VIM part. so logically to navigate a TILING WINDOW MANAGER whose default editor is neoVIM you’d use VIM style navigation right? nope not on omarchy. […]
This is one of the things - like setting super + F11 for fullscreen -
that I thought was such poor design that let me immediately know that
everything else was going to be shit. The navigations and tiling are the
core of functionality, so if the core is bad then the shell must be bad as
well. Not to mention that instead of using Hyprland's Lua configuration to
extend actions like closing all windows in the current workspace they use
bash scripts calling hyprctl and jq.
Also, marketing it like a beginner friendly distro while shipping Hyprland with Neovim is just imbecile behaviour. Finally what really pissed me off is how little to no acknowledgement they give to the tools they are using and pretending they did all the hard work.
Real piece of shit "distribution".
yeah the script thing is just hilarious to me. it shows that no one actually touched any code building this thing because LLMs are NOTORIOUS for insisting on using scripts.
So many open exploits with this "distro" and don't get me started on the "plugin store".
You mean the malware store.
Alright this is getting out of hand.
But money is just money?
Arch is already pretty well funded
Fascists helping a fascist. What a shock
Hmm, I disagree, somebody could inherit that money and they don't necessarily have to share the political opinions of their parents. Famously Elongated Musketeer's children all hate him.
But also what about the non billionaires?
Why don't all the billions of left leaning people worldwide donate 1$ each to a fund that serves their agenda in politics and tech?
I know it's happening on a smaller scale, but why can it not be a strong and concentrated push like what is happening with the fascists?
If there was a push of all of us doing it, I would eagerly donate hundreds of $ per month to a left leaning, anti AI linux distro and the same amount for an organization like "WEF but not fascist".
But every time I donate to something like that it has no tangible effect, because the couple of people that do it with me are not enough.
This was not on my bingo card
So what are they actually doing with all this money they’ve raised?
Like, why all the sponsors? We can look at Mitchell Hashimoto and Ghostty to see that these rich CEOs can retire and build freely. I don’t get it.
Damn didn't know Alibaba was fascist
How is it that nobody understands that NixOS is the ideal agentic OS.
It's declarative. It can become whatever you want just by tacking an include to a minimal configuration.nix.
I have a laptop set up right now that is headless until you tell an agent what kind of computer it should be.
Elaborate please on the nix setup you have
Edit I wasn't joking, I am interested since I just switched to nix and am wondering about your workflow
Wouldn't an ideal agentic OS be entirely CLI? Or MCP based interface? With a fucking chat like? What?
@lemmy.world
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@lemmy.world
Welcome to c/linux!
Welcome to our thriving Linux community! Whether you're a seasoned Linux enthusiast or just starting your journey, we're excited to have you here. Explore, learn, and collaborate with like-minded individuals who share a passion for open-source software and the endless possibilities it offers. Together, let's dive into the world of Linux and embrace the power of freedom, customization, and innovation. Enjoy your stay and feel free to join the vibrant discussions that await you!
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Regardless of everyone's opinions, myself included... One thing's for certain: this is a masterclass in fund raising. How the hell is he pulling it off ?
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