Omarchy development practices lead to predictable security issues
blog.happyfellow.devI'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?
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.
> which itself is fine, all software is political
I don't mean to get distracted from the topic at hand, but is that really true? If I create my own software stack for the TRMNL display I received as a gift because I think it's fun and interesting, is that a political statement? What politics does that involve? If someone makes a small Rust library that implements some days structure and a few hundred people find it useful, what political stance is intrinsically baked in by the author?
It's exhausting to go through life if you think every field is a battlefield.
> If someone makes a small Rust library that implements some days structure and a few hundred people find it useful, what political stance is intrinsically baked in by the author?
Giving away for free things of value, contributing your work without compensation is a political action.
As for your trmnl project - how can you make your own software? Are the specs open? Do you use a free and/or open toolchain?
Is there are risk patents might deny you any of this?
Whole world is political.
It's easy to think things are "apolitical" when resting on the laurels of the results of political struggles and revolutions that brought us to where we are.
The idea that you should be able to create and own your intellectual efforts, and to do so without coercion.
> political statement?
> If I create my own software stack for the TRMNL display I received as a gift
Should you own what you create? Should you BE able to create? freely?
Should you be able to give and gift freely?
> some days structure
How do you think days are defined? Think "July" is a name that came absent of politics? What about October?
Saturday and Sunday are weekends? Since when did weekends exist as we understand and enjoy them without the action of political actors (union workers striking and other people fighting for labor rights).
What holidays are holidays? Which are national holidays? Those are all political.
Did you consider that your ancestors who went through those struggles fought so that you wouldn't have to? If your Sundays and holidays consist of nothing but self flagellation, guilt and reflection for the privileged life you lead, maybe you ought to chill a little and focus on something more constructive. Believe it or not, but going outside and touching grass can be apolitical.
Having green spaces in cities, with grass to touch, is also political
> It's exhausting to go through life if you think every field is a battlefield.
You don't have to think every field as a battlefield, but your choices are affected by and are about your beliefs and stance.
For example, some people believe that going all SaaS for everything in their life is not bad, and they can afford that, so they do that.
I personally don't trust companies much, and value my freedom a lot. So I self host the things I can and find valuable. I have my small infra which is not accessible from open internet, and I install services there if I want them to be unavailable to the public.
I mean, nobody will try to get my mundane code from my hands, but having it in a box in front of me makes me happier and feel better, so I do it.
Also, stances doesn't have to be loud/violent/up to the nose. You can be yourself with your own stance, and build it calmly and slowly. You can be just happy about achieving what you wanted to achieve.
On the other hand, software licenses are of course political and the issue can get heated and gets heated semi-regularly. We're humans and being opposed to each other in various forms is our base nature.
So, don't stay at DEFCON 1 all the time, but aware that range from 1 to 5 is always a possibility.
> is that really true?
Since I don't really believe in a universal right or wrong sentiment, I'll just say I think it depends on each person's own interpretation/definition of the word politics.
I don't personally care what people define it as to them, but if I were to look in my dictionary, I personally interpret that definition to mean "any time someone tries to influence others."
Now... we could argue that software by definition is trying to force people to only use it in a certain way (the way it's written or how it executes), and that that is by definition, political. We could also argue that bug reports and feature requests are also political because you are trying to influence the developer or community of a project in how they run things.
Not everyone is going to agree with those conclusions, and that's ok, because IMO there isn't a simple "right" or "wrong" answer.
Politics is how we decide things as groups. It’s not something to fear, hate, or despise, but something to be aware of.
> It's exhausting to go through life if you think every field is a battlefield.
This is really the whole conversation. 'Everything is political' is literally true (they mean downstream of politics, in some sense) but it's really only brought up habitually like this to create a political conflict. Everything is also downstream of water, but it doesn't give me the right to flood your house.
Isn't there always a political angle in the act of creating software?
In essence the human right and ability to learn and change and wield computers at an unlocked and low level is a policy decision.
What if governments said programs must be from companies and users should not be allowed to write their own programs, operating systems must be locked down to keep users safe or some bs 'think of the children' excuse.
Especially Linux and OSS is a political manifesto design specifically to stop this kind of government overreach from taking root. It would certainly benefit shareholders of large computer companies to the detriment of the individual user's freedoms.
It's easy to see a perspective like that where software is political. Politics is not a battlefield, that's an American two party system trick.
Seeing the word politics doesn't immediately mean bad or divisive.
I mean, yeah, you can't have politics in a vacuum. But any software that does anything interesting interfaces with the outside world at some point (via human proxy or otherwise).
That your TRMNL even allows you to write software for it is a choice (a cool one at that), and contributing to their ecosystem supports that choice.
The same people who love to push this "everything is political" drivel will also tell you that there "is no ethical consumption in capitalism". But somehow, in this particular instance, they feel compelled to impose an absolute purity test of your capitalist consumption regardless.
Is it? What's the statement?
I'm very far from it but I saw many exchanges in my twitter timeline (because now when you click on a tweet to read it or interact, the algorithm thinks it's your only interest in life).
Do basically, they got 8 millions dollars of funding, they bragged and criticized others in linux and said some political stuff, they were also criticized by others including political stuff from the other side (not sure of the order). Finally it became viral enough for people looking at the security of the distro and found many issues.
Personally I like my Linux distro like my coffee: competently managed, with a minimum of drama and with having to hear the less assholes possible.
> Personally I like my Linux distro like my coffee: competently managed, with a minimum of drama and with having to hear the less assholes possible.
I've been using Linux since 1993 and at various points every distro under the sun and that perfectly describes exactly zero Linux distributions.
i doubt you have tried every distribution. at least you haven't tried the one i was part of: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foresight_Linux a small, but independent distribution (not a spin-off of anything). i can assure you, it was drama and asshole free. (maybe it didn't live long enough to develop drama, that would be a fair counterpoint, but other than that, i reject your statement)
Yeah but it was also made to showcase GNOME, which was kind of its own huge drama at that time.
I mean I can't even believe you're seriously posting this. It was created intended to be a marketing tool and for something folks had long already made their decision either way about.
So yeah, I never used your extremely niche distribution and that's some sort of gotcha on my argument. Weirdly, I've used a ton of niche Linux distros even. Even was an early GoboLinux contributor.
If you're a niche distro you don't have the manpower to do anything more than already be downstream of larger communities with their own huge drama. That's kind of the point I'm making. You will not meaningfully find no-drama. This isn't even just a Linux or a FOSS thing -- it's group project dynamics. It's inevitable in any project not run by a benevolent dictator (and even then...).
yeah, but with that you are making the whole argument meaningless, because you are arguing that since you can't have life without drama, asking to minimize drama is useless. that's like saying that reducing pollution is useless because you can't eliminate pollution. yes, we can reduce pollution, and we can minimize drama. we can't entirely avoid it, but that was not being asked for.
But Omarchy has no internal drama. It's entirely external drama around how noninvolved parties feel about DHH. That's way different than internal drama or upstream drama affecting your project.
what i meant here is people are criticizing the project or the project leader. that brings drama into the project.
It doesn't though because absolutely zero people working on Omarchy give a single f because they already know who DHH is and decided to contribute.
I mean, I feel like Debian has come pretty close to that for the last decade or two.
That's a reputation it had in the 90s to early 00s and has long since lost. Even in recent years the drama within Debian has been incredibly high.
A lot happened in debian-private, despite "We will not hide problems" being part of the project's social contract, and then leaks started happening and all hell broke loose. I didn't even mention the decade-long community censorship campaign yet. Or the Volunteer Day suicide. Or the "Please write a list of 5 Debian Developers you would like to kick out of the project." DPL election question. Or banning Linus from DebConf...
And which distro is like that?
What collective human endeavour is devoid of politics?
Politics is how groups decide things, from what a code of conduct should be to where we should stop for coffee after lunch. It’s easy to not notice it, but we do politics dozens of times every day.
poulpy123 claimed that they use such distro
As any distro is a significant group effort, I would say this is impossible and that they might not have realised how group decisions are made.
That OSS has become too entangled with political activism and ideological gatekeeping, when it should be about making great software, giving people control over their computers, and rediscovering the joy of computing.
I don't think Omarchy is anti-political so much as an attempt to revive the enthusiast/hacker ethos of the OSS community.
"Freedom to compute" cannot be separated from "Freedom to exist" as it explicitly depends on it. The authors of Omarchy pay lip service to the former while taking a stance against the latter.
Fully agreed. I have yet to encounter someone who is claiming something elss and is not privileged enough to just not need to worry about this. Ignorance doesn't reduce the political tech entanglement, it just... ignores it. Which is fine, do whatever. But don't claim it's not related.
> I have yet to encounter someone who is claiming something elss and is not privileged enough to just not need to worry about this
1000x this
People who say they don’t need their rights guaranteed do that because they never realised they were protected their whole lives.
No, it is definitely possible to make great software without inserting messaging on irrelevant issues into it. Whatever the quality of Omarchy, DHH is right about parts of the free software world becoming entangled worth various irrelevant causes.
I have a feeling the right to exist might be something very relevant to a lot of people.
This equivocation on the word "exist" doesn't work anymore. It's not 2018 anymore. Normal people with common sense understand that keeping politics separate from technology isn't the same thing as existential violence. Nobody, to "exist", needs to make software political.
I feel like ironically their whole thing is doing exactly that, except in the other direction…
Take one glance at history, and you'll see that having a sovereign ethnic homeland is crucial to that "freedom to exist". So you're wrong on both counts - they are also taking a stance for the latter, and the two freedoms can be separated. Distributing FOSS does not require one takes a stance on every ethnic and political conflict on Earth. The GNU manifesto never once talks about the occupation of Tibet. This "cannot be separated" is nothing but a cheap attempt to attach your own cause to some other, more widely accepted cause.
> Take one glance at history, and you'll see that having a sovereign ethnic homeland is crucial to that "freedom to exist".
United States disproves this harebrained theory.
Like climbing free solo once disproves the need for a safety rope.
> Distributing FOSS
FOSS never was about the right of the distributor. It’s been always about protecting the user. The way to do it is to give the users a set of rights that cannot be revoked.
Maybe DHH should live by his own ethos and "shut up and program" rather than continually making divisive political statements that alienate people who might otherwise use and contribute to his distro.
I don’t think he’ll refrain from using the political power he amassed by building a very popular web framework. We gave him a megaphone and a soapbox, and he’ll use it.
We probably should have known better.
Is that not what he's doing? Where on any Omarchy page have you seen "divisive political statements that alienate people"?
> That OSS has become too entangled with political activism
Wait is that really the spin that DHH is pushing? That'd be insane given he's among the most politically active open sources developers put there by a wiiide margin.
Oh, but you see, when it’s their own points of view, it’s never politics.
'OSS "became" too entangled with political activism'
Statements dreamed up by people who get gilliganed by a coconut every morning.
> Omarchy is...an attempt to revive the enthusiast/hacker ethos of the OSS community.
...By injecting it with big money and pushing more AI slop?
It's quite a loud one, but it's broadcast above 25KHz or so
wut? haha
Beyond human hearing for a whistle but within the frequency a dog can hear a whistle, i.e. a slightly tongue in cheek way to call it a dog whistle.
Just to explain because not everyone is necessarily a native English speaker or gets the reference.
This is a reference to a dog whistle. Above 25kHz are sounds that dogs can hear but humans generally can't.
The term dog whistle is used to refer to phrases that racists use to indicate their racism, while sounding plausibly deniable. The idea is that it's a phrase that will make other racists realize that you are one of them, while not sounding openly racist to others.
DHH himself has gone beyond dog whistles. He's directly compared what he considers undesirable ehtnic populations to wolves who need to be shot. He's just openly calling for ethnic cleansing by now.
But support for Omarchy itself can be seen as a dog whistle. It's widely known that DHH is a fascist, but you have some plausible deniability by donating to Omarchy because you're just politically neutral and think it's cool tech, or something like that.
> DHH himself has gone beyond dog whistles. He's directly compared what he considers undesirable ehtnic populations to wolves who need to be shot. He's just openly calling for ethnic cleansing by now.
Let me prefix this with that DHH's opinions suck, not sure what he's going through but clearly something, and that blog post you're referencing is terrible in lots of ways. But he's not openly calling for ethnic cleansing, you're doing speaking against him a disservice by not providing an accurate view of what shit thing he said. It's still terrible, the verbatim quotes (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49448148), but deporting isn't the same as "ethnic cleansing". Even people we disagree with vehemently should be disagreed with honestly.
Then that blog post is just one of many where he've essentially gone of the rails in terms of hardline authoritarianism and fascist ideas, which makes it kind of weird he's getting the financial support he's getting. But then some just don't care about what viewpoints others have, I suppose that's a valid stance too even if I disagree with it.
> but deporting isn't the same as "ethnic cleansing".
I’m sorry, but forcibly deporting people because of their ethnic background is the very definition of ethnic cleansing.
In general, if people use violence on the population as a way to either kill or forcibly expel them, there would be a strong case to call it a genocide.
> forcibly deporting people because of their ethnic background is the very definition of ethnic cleansing
I agree, but I think if this is what you think he's arguing for, you either need to re-read the blog post, or you're not discussing that post honestly, which again does us all a disservice, regardless of how much we disagree with him or not.
He uses a word that is a slur for the Romani, an ethnic minority in many European countries. He never discusses nationality.
He also compares deporting them (to where, you might ask) to shooting wolves.
It's also not his only post on the topic. He has previous ones where he complains of how horrible London is because white British people no longer constitute a majority. He calls for not just ends to immigration and closing borders, but "remigration".
It is very clear from these posts that he strongly believes that non white ethnic groups should be removed from European countries.
If that's not ethnic cleansing, I don't know what is.
Yes, DHH sucks, we agree about this, for multiple reasons.
I'm not just trying to score points about whether he sucks, but specifically point out the types of policies that he advocates for, and there are a number of people in this thread trying to claim somehow that he doesn't advocate for policies that he clearly has been.
So I'm curious, what makes you think that what he calls for isn't ethnic cleansing?
From Wikipedia (and please, fill me in if you have a better definition):
"Ethnic cleansing is the systematic forced removal of ethnic, racial, or religious groups from a given area, with the intent of making the society ethnically homogeneous."
From DHH:
Calling for the deportation (forced removal) of a specific ethnic group (also note the violent analogy to wolves): "When wolves get out of control, you shoot them. When gypsies take over public spaces, you deport them."
Calling for the forced removal of millions of people of various ethnic groups he considers undesirable from Europe: "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. Remigration has gone from a fringe concept to the mainstream discourse in record time on account of that realization. The Overton window is swinging wide open, but the cow is still there."
Talking about how much he wanted to move to London but that he no longer has that desire due to its ethnic diversity: "As soon as I was old enough to travel on my own, London was where I wanted to go.... That was then. Now, I wouldn't dream of it. London is no longer the city I was infatuated with in the late '90s and early 2000s. Chiefly because it's no longer full of native Brits. In 2000, more than sixty percent of the city were native Brits. By 2024, that had dropped to about a third. A statistic as evident as day when you walk the streets of London now.... Recently, a projection that Danes would be a minority in their own country by 2096 caused an enormous stir in Denmark. Politicians across the spectrum decried what a catastrophe that would be for this world's oldest continuous monarchy. But a demographic nightmare worse than that has already enveloped London!"
As you can see, DHH is explicitly calling for the force removal (deportation and "remigration") of ethnic groups, because he is afraid of the results of the population becoming less ethnically homogeneous. I don't know how you could argue that what he's calling for is anything other than ethnic cleansing.
Also, note that none of this is due to any actualy on the ground experience; he lives in LA, he's lived in the US for over 20 years. This is purely an exercise in ideology. In fact, LA has a smaller percentage of the population that is white Anglo-American than London does of white British people.
Anyhow: I have laid out in detail the arugment for calling what he calls for "ethnic cleansing". Do you have any argument that it isn't ethnic cleansing that he's calling for? It seems pretty clear to me, so I'm confused why you have kept on insisting "if this is what you think he's arguing for, you either need to re-read the blog post", because I've read all three of these posts of his and more, and it all points towards him advocating for ethnic cleansing.
Something like "mass expulsion and killing of one ethnic or religious group in an area by another ethnic or religious group in that area" I suppose, but also, I really don't have any energy left to discuss something I don't care about. I don't like that guy, I don't like his views, and I don't want to argue against others who also don't like him.
Hope your text helped someone, enjoy the rest of your day!
Of course it differs by the individual. I think there are three camps: Those who have read DHH's blog posts, and agree with them. Those who have read DHH's blog posts, but think "he couldn't possibly mean that". Those who haven't read DHH's blog posts, but know that he's on "their side" (right-leaning).
What about the people who have no idea who DHH is, what he stands for, and have heard about Omarchy for the first time just now and are trying to figure out what it even is and suddenly people are talking in circles about him being eccentric or problematic.
Yeah, this is so annoying.
I switched to Omarchy 4.0 from CachyOS and is having an amazing experience so far, barely know anything about DHH other than that he made Rails, and now everybody is calling me a racist sympathizer.
Well, you should probably look into the open and loud politics of DHH before defending him.
What about "ignoring him, not knowing him, just using his product" is defending? Are you using Nestle products? Ah you do? You must be all for stealing people's water well and selling them bottled water from it.
"You use a computer? and a phone? Clearly you have no problem with forced child labor mining raw materials to make electronics and batteries!" /s
Omarchy is just a pile of settings and a branding, you could have configured Cachy similarly and wouldn't have to associate yourself with the racists. Be careful of the company you keep.
"The company you keep." Ah that's what we're calling using someone's FOSS nowadays?
Yes, if you're jumping on some hypetrain OSS distro built around a cult of personality and it has very few merits otherwise and that project's creator has racist views, absolutely yes. People's distro alignments are a little bit different than some small utilities or OSS libraries, nobody writes jokes like "how do you know someone uses libxml? They'll tell you" like they do for Gentoo, Arch, etc.
But keep defending it, we can see what you're ok associating with.
Come on, this is so dishonest, his personality has basically nothing to do with Omarchys popularity, and it has loads of merit. It's way more pleasant to use than all other distros I've tried.
To claim that it is super simple for everyone to transform Arch into Omarchy clones without reading the Omarchy repos and that everyone should just do that instead because of politics is beyond absurd.
His personality actually has everything to do with Omarchy’s popularity, because he gets funding based off of it.
Omarchy is a set of dotfiles. That’s it. We all know the only reason you, and everyone else, even knows about it is because DHH is behind it.
There’s, like, a million dot file repos on GitHub. Most probably higher quality than Omarchy. But somehow, Omarchy is popular. The actually dishonest view is to somehow think that DHH being DHH has nothing to do with Omarchy’s popularity.
They have their own apps and repos. By your standard Ubuntu is a bunch of dotfiles on top of Debian
Barely. Setting up a repo is next to nothing, and I would hardly call what they have "applications".
Omarchy is not an impressive, innovative, or exciting distro. Manjaro did what Omarchy did a decade ago, and better. Providing an out-of-the-box tolerable Arch Linux experience is very par for the course.
This is, at best, a weekend project. Not to mention I can find much more impressive, cohesive, and easier-to-use dotfile repos on GitHub.
I think the only people who think Omarchy is, well, anything, are either new to Linux or just like DHH. Which is fine. But if you're new to Linux, please, browse around. Arch Linux is really not the most cohesive and easy-to-use distro you can find.
You seem to be talking about users. They're talking about creators.
I don't think users know who DHH is, or care who DHH is. Probably like 0.01% of users have read a blog post, let alone a political one. (Maybe they all are, I haven't read any)
Disagree there; anyone who installs Omarchy does it because a social media creator they like suggested it, and there’s only a few degrees of separation between those creators. This isn’t like Slackware’s popularity in the 90s, peer to peer, this all top-down. I’d call it hype-driven, if they didnt have a neat product (which I’m not a customer of).
Also have to disagree with you there... there are other ways to find out about distros besides social media or people suggesting it. Back in the day, one of the only ways people even found out about new distros was through sites like Distrowatch who just reported on the facts of the distros and never tried to market them to people.
Exactly. I mostly read about distros right here in the comments.
I had no idea DHH was political. I don't follow Linux YouTubers, why would I?
It still feels like they are supporting a notorious neofascist.
"Linux has been infected by le woke mob and we're making it Great Again"
Ugh, gosh really? I looked at one of the videos of the... eh excentric developer of the distro where he was presenting 4.0 and I was wondering about that retro neon design of background images he seemed to adore so much. I was wondering why someone would still think this Fashwave design to be cool. It's been what? 10 years when this trope peaked?
It's 14 words long.
The author seems in his blog posts to advocate for mass deportation of recent immigrants to Europe.
This is an inflammatory enough position to make any of his output into a de facto political statement.
I think a better fitting definition of what it is – notably absent from this entire comment section – is virtue, or rather vice, signaling.
> The funders are not funding the development of a Linux distro, they are co-signing the political statement.
It's not even a Linux distro. It's an Arch respin with tweaks that DHH likes.
This is for people who want to work like DHH.
Right; it's not political in the sense of "vote for candidate/party/policy XYZ", it's political in the sense that Omarchy is distinguished by being a vehicle for DHH's opinions, and by promoting Omarchy one can promote the general idea that DHH is a respectable guy with good opinions while still remaining firmly situated in "technical" subject matter.
It wasn’t that long ago that omarchy got started. As far as I could tell it was a direct response to DHH giving up on Apple. He was in a dispute with them in regards to App Store publishing and sales. He seems to have since made it his personal mission to move off of the Apple ecosystem.
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.
> Closest thing to the “it just works” experience that Mac was always known for
I see this repeated a lot, but the people I know who tried Omarchy were always fixing something or dealing with breakage from an update.
The best argument I’ve heard for Omarchy that is actually consistent with what I’ve observed is that it ships with cool looking default configs for everything that make it feel fun to use.
The belief that everything just works seems more like a belief perpetuated by the messaging push behind it. Every time real issues pop up they get explained away as being due to someone’s local config changes or forgiven because it’s a young project. Even in this thread there are dozens of comments downplaying security issues as not a problem because they will get fixed, which is a symptom of a project where the messaging has gotten ahead of the facts.
The main case for Omarchy to me is the OOTB experience, which is more "good to go" than pretty much any other distro, also the hotkeys and config setup are both power user friendly. You are correct that updates have had brick-risk, though I think they've gotten better. I prefer some elements of plasma to the hyprland setup, but agents are very good at making config changes, it's much faster than navigating menus or finding lines in a config file (human work time, maybe not wall clock time).
Hmm ... but take any mainstream desktop Linux. Let's say Ubuntu or one of its official flavors, or Linux Mint. What about them is less 'good to go'?
More stuff people actually use is installed by default with Omarchy, whereas Ubuntu packages a lot of stuff I don't think people use to try and come to checkbox parity to windows, while missing useful commercial software. Omarchy comes with vscode, 1password, obsidian, chromium, discord, docker, OBS, zoom, signal/whatsapp, etc pre rolled and configured.
So in other words... it preinstalls a bunch of proprietary bloatware like an HP laptop or a Samsung phone?
If you're running Linux and you need vscode you're obviously a developer. Is installing vscode really such a difficult task to figure out?
It's not difficult to figure out, it's just friction, and there's a difference between preinstalling malware, sports tickers, etc and preinstalling stuff I would have installed anyhow, and taking the time to configure it nicely.
1. These are trivial to install on any other mainstream distro. I’m talking one-click through discover or Gnome software.
2. Most of these are not even desirable for most people. Obsidian? 1password? Come on, these have vanishingly small amounts of users. It’s not chromium.
3. Any hand-rolled arch based distro is going to be more maintenance and higher friction than fedora, Debian et al. That’s just the name of the game. It’s what makes arch desirable, too, so no, it won’t change.
4. WMs are much higher friction than full service desktops like KDE and GNOME. Again, name of the game. And it also won’t change, because that’s what makes WMs desirable.
I think people who think Omarchy “just works” have not used enough Linux distros. Which is fine, not everyone is a Linux veteran. But then don’t go around claiming it’s sooo much better than other distros. It’s not. Give Debian, fedora, even Ubuntu a shot if you want something that works OOTB.
And based on just on the list above that'd be at least 11 clicks (a lot more since you'd need to find the app in the software manager first before you can click install"
I guess we can compromise and say two clicks and some key presses.
On KDE: Press meta, type "discover", type "discord", click "install". Or, if you use KRUnner, press alt-space, type "discord", click "Get Discord", click "install"
Bear in mind this is how it works for all software in a proper desktop environment. Steam works the same way, or Zed, or whatever VPN you use.
> always fixing something or dealing with breakage from an update.
literally the experience that Mac was always known for
TBH, MacOS 8 and 9 were not that well regarded.
I 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.
I haven’t tried installing games on Linux in years, so that’s a gap for my experience.
Mostly you install steam, install game from inside steam, and it just works with nothing further.
A far cry from 15 years ago.
I've run it since launch without issue. That is: to each their own really
Not really: as far as we know, you use it for nothing; the person you replied to gave examples.
> It’s a really strong UX that’s rapidly improving without a profit motive and people are excited about it.
/r/unixporn is all about that. They don't get a $10 million fund though.
> Closest thing to the “it just works” experience that Mac was always known for and it runs great on older hardware.
Ubuntu. Debian. Fedora especiall via Bazzite. Arch via CachyOS.
> Small example, running Zoom on i3 caused a tile cascade every time I turned on my Bluetooth
Small example: many Steam games were dog slow or unplayable in Omarchy. I switched to CachyOS, all issues were gone.
> It’s nice to see excitement around Linux because nothing from the big names was really creating it.
None of the big names are creating anything in Omarchy. It's a bunch of vibe-coded dotfiles and shell scripts. It's hype around ricing.
> 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.
He would have had better success by literally prompting his agents to copy Apples desktop environment.
Are all the updates still handled by clobbering bash scripts?
Last time I looked into it, the technical approach was equivalent to throwing a bunch of things at a gas fire. It's just a pre-configured arch install that introduces a metric ton of tech debt.
It's a slop-linux with a racism-linux hat on.
> without a profit motive
First time huh? They already have investors (called "patrons" so far). OpenAI shown the non-profit status can be used to jump start for-profit ventures, I'm sure everyone involved here studied closely exactly how Altman pulled it off.
Without a profit motive huh? Let's examine that... From Omarchy's website: "Incubated at 37signals (makers of Basecamp and HEY)." For those unfamiliar with 37signals, here's their take on the profit motive:
> 04. Profit motive > > The tech industry is especially good at losing money. Growth is electric, but profits are elusive. We take an old school, economics 101 approach: Make more than you spend. That’s why we’ve been profitable every year we’ve been in business. It’s the responsible way to be reliable and take care of customers over the long haul.
Oof, they explicitly say they want the opposite of what you claim.
I mean it should be pretty obvious, when an open source project kind of comes out of nowhere like this and suddenly everybody's talking about it, it's not organic growth. It's an incredibly transparent marketing campaign designed to trick people into joining the cargo cult. You need to learn to recognize these things.
Comparing Wayland anything to OSX-like "it just works" is bizzaro-world-tier delusion.
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.
And Dropbox is just rsync and cron =)
Packaging and marketing matters.
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.
> 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.
im pretty sure arch users dont want to associate with ormachy :))
I 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?
Then 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.
I wasn't making a value judgement on who should respond to the offer, just commenting on who the offer was probably aimed at. Though I do think the sudden spike in investment and the little foundation around it now means probably more than "just one guy".
What mean rice in this context ?
It's a verb, "to rice" means to deeply customize your system to suite your needs and/or preferences. Install a desktop environment, setup it however you like it, add panels with system information, etc etc.
The more h4xx0r-like and minimalistic, the more street cred you get.
See https://old.reddit.com/r/unixporn (or https://reddit.com/r/unixporn without an account).
Cosmetic improvements. Term originates from observations of asian-associated car decorations, which based on context is either a bigoted pejorative or an ironic compliment.
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...
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.
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).
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.
Would have rails taken off if he was equally open about his politics back then?
Yes, people were more mentally resilient and mature then and it was pre Reddit, which has completely broken and warped many people’s minds.
As Gen X, I think they were already softies back then.
It's impossible to know what his politics was back then in fairness.
People's politics do often (but not always) change as they age.
Well, there were some tells... [0]
[0] https://www.vice.com/en/article/basecamp-didnt-just-ban-poli...
10 years ago Joe Rogan was basically a stereotypical Bernie bro.
10 years ago Joe Rogan was a well known douchebag far-right conspiracy theorist, what are you talking about?
I'm guessing that GP needs to update their mental timeline of how far back 10 years ago was.
Not a Joe fan but his arc started at socially liberal/economically libertarian.
I have trouble imagining it. The early rails community was very welcoming at the time. The things he now openly states were simply not welcome in most polite society at the time.
I'm not sure DHH really held the same views back then, either. The "Overton Window" has moved over the last 20 years so openly bigoted and racist views are accepted in the discourse now.
In Portugal we have a saying, April never more, exactly because the outcome of such ideas should not be forgotten.
Marc Andreessen helped establish the modern web browser, he has always been an Ayn Rand fan for example. But politics wasn't that important back then, I guess? And I just think there simply were not a lot of opportunities to gain some political and financial capital from voicing their fringe believes for people like them back in the day. They were busy building systems and software, now they are busy building or changing political systems.
Libertarian views have always been relatively commonplace in the tech scene. Being a fan of Ayn Rand probably put you in the majority, but left-libertarian views were commonplace, too.
Calling for ethnic cleansing is not a libertarian belief. It is a fascist belief. "Privately owned roads are a good idea" and "Let's round up all the gypsies" are not equivalently debatable ideas.
It started in the early 2000s. Politics hadn't shifted left enough to make him right-wing back then.
Just billionaires giving money to a friend's project.
A highly motivated, well funded and hence potentially contagious and "blessed" effort in proliferation ... and colonization.
"free" software funded by 8 million dollars in concentrated wealth. The guy is a self aggrandizing moron that a child could see through.
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.
Among some, for others (including me) him been attached to it is very much a counter signal.
Why? 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.
I 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...
> 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.)
That is exactly what it means.
You'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-pro...
I wonder if that will change now he's gone from edgy opinions that rile up woke people (e.g. immigration is too high in the UK) to actually advocating ethnic cleansing (not the murdery kind but still...).
https://world.hey.com/dhh/three-sacred-cows-that-must-die-so...
I think that crosses a line for even normal politically centrist (by European standards at least).
His rhetoric has crossed into the murdery kind, actually:
> When wolves get out of control, you shoot them. When gypsies take over public spaces, you deport them.
You don't get to make this contrast and pretend you didn't. The only way his rhetoric could be more clear is if he bought a gun and shot them himself.
It's always the same give these people enough prestige and power that they feel untouchable and their true nature comes to the surface. No more dogwhistling needed he thinks, I have powerful wealthy backers and their lawyers now.
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).
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 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).
Yes he could have, if agents were capable of it. Why didn’t he? Why didn’t you?
Oh, 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.
Go 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.
Come come, let's spec something real. You seem extremely doubtful, why don't you let me show you?
In 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.
Well - yes - I have. And the test came back positive.
But it's always possible I'm just being naive in some way. An external challenge makes it more robust.
I don't think I'd want to do an entire linux distro - it's needlessly large to test the hypothesis - but perhaps there's a part that you think would be an interesting challenge?
I am curious why you list custom renderer as the first requirement? Must a distribution have a custom one?
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)
Both of the people you mention are political activists with problematic views, that's why their politics get brought up all the time.
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”.
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
A techbros project that really cares close to nothing about FOSS ideals, apparently sided with far right politics.
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.
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.
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.
dhh is very strongly associated with identity politics, though? (as in, "western"/white identity)
This. 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.
Are 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.
The two linked issues are for the same bug report.
A friend has been urging me to install Omarchy for months. I’ve finally caved in after a horrible experience with highly-praised CachyOS.
All I can say is, I understand the hype. It works. The install is uncomplicated, no selecting from five legacy bootloaders, choosing versions or selecting a window manager. The tiled window manager works pretty much how I already use Mac. I like the terminal-focused system tools. Installing software is easy and lightning-fast.
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.
So, a Linux distribution.
It's a bash script over a distribution.
Isn't Omarchy very, very similar to cachyos?
Not at all. Pretty much the only thing they have in common is that they're based on Arch, but that's where the distinction ends.
Omarchy is focused mainly on ease of use/installation and is built exclusively around Hyperland. CachyOS on the other hand doesn't default to any particular WM/DE - in fact there are a dozen or so options when you install, so you need to be at least a little bit familiar with them and the pros/cons. Same with the package selection, the CachyOS installer ticks a lot of boxes which may not be relevant to you, so you need to take the time to review the selection and untick ones that you don't need. Some package names may not be obvious to you, so you'd need to google it and see if that's something you want. So there's a bit of a technical barrier there.
Also, CachyOS is focused mostly on performance - providing a highly optimised kernel (ThinLTO/AutoFDO etc), with a custom scheduler (BORE), and CPU-family specific binaries targetting x86-64-v3, v4, and znver4+ families, which are served from their own repos. They also often include upcoming patches into their kernel and other programs if they think it brings in worthy new features/performance benefits. Like how they included support for the new ntfsplus driver before it was mainlined. Overall, it is generally considered to be the fastest performing distro on modern hardware, even more so if you've got AMD (thanks to the znver4+ support).
So the two are very different, with different goals and different approaches, and even differences to the packages, configs and tweaks they serve.
CachyOS has a choice of 3 bootloaders and 17 desktop environments
On omarchy it's one and one
Both are arched-based. CachyOS is not made by a fascist.
> Guy says he doesn't want peoples political beliefs barfed all over his project.
HE'S A FASCIST.
Yeah that's not what he said.
CachyOS team has very openly pushed its politics and believes that parents should have the right to transition the gender of their children and if you disagree you get permanently banned from their forums.
DHH said he think that too many projects are spewing their politics all over their projects and its gross and they should focus on their code.
Ok, but he said a lot more than that too. In particular he published his own manifesto/communique about what he thinks about certain political questions.
“Full of security holes" - and two examples in the article have been swiftly addressed, ignoring that there is a whole dedicated security team https://omarchy.org/teams/
What kind of blogging is this?
> 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.
They move fast, that's for sure. But it also means they explore and fix problems fast. I don't think there is only "slow and careful" way to create things.
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.
Why would I do that? It's a crazy non-sequitur.
My opinion is that the way Omarchy is developed leads to gigantic security holes. I wanted people to be aware of it.
In my opinion, there are much better choices both for me and I'd imagine for other people as well. I don't want to help Omarchy succeed, I don't care about them.
Because you could make the world a better place instead of just complaining about it? I don't understand the "all I wanna do is complain" process at all.
Fix it. If you see a problem in the world, fix it.
If they reject the fix, that's when you complain.
I dont just complain. I making the world a better place in ways which I believe are worth it.
Improving Omarchy seems like a waste of time to me. Letting people know how insecure it likely is, given how little time it took, is much better bang for buck.
Or, in colourful analogy: if people on the streets are hitting themselves on the head with frying pans repeatedly, I want them to stop, not to help them recover from the pain quicker so that they can hit themselves more.
> My opinion is that the way Omarchy is developed leads to gigantic security holes
>> Fix it. If you see a problem in the world, fix it.
You can't "open a pull request" to fix a projects development process. The point of the article isn't about any specific security issue, it's that these vulnerabilities will keep getting introduced due to the lax attitude the project takes towards security.
Thanks for sharing the link. I think it provides a lot of reasons why installing Omarchy or opening a pull request would be a waste of time. I can’t fix fundamental design flaws in a PR. I don’t want to try to fix apps written in Bash and QML & vanilla JavaScript. There are other ecosystems out there that are built on stronger foundations I can (and do) contribute my time to.
Well, as far as I know, the internal config systems of most popular distros like Debian, Arch, even NixOS are all Bash. There is nothing that makes Omarchy fundamentally bad design; it's pretty average.
You're not suggesting that you can't criticize something unless you're willing to fix it yourself, are you?
The bar is a lot higher when you're empowered and capable.
Like a lot a lot a lot.
And that's before we had LLMs writing code. So really it's basically orbital now.
The fractional pennies in tokens it could have taken to fix this would cost less than their web traffic bill. But alas, if you fix it and put in a PR, that doesn't get you the eyeballs and social good-boy points that a blog post appealing to correct politics does.
Why fix when you can farm?
> Open a pull request.
As I've gotten older and more experienced, I've really embraced the "just shut up and fix it" mentality. If you're empowered to do something, any time you spend complaining about it not being done is adding to the noise and a negative contribution.
This applies in life and in work. Especially in work. I straight up just shift the discussion or leave meetings if people start complaining about problems that are within their abilities to fix. It happens so much and I don't have time for it anymore.
And if you can fix it and you don't want to, just stfu and move on with your life. For the sake of all of us.
It's simple: They're coping and seething[0] due to Omarchy recently getting all that money. "It should have been me!"[1].
The kind where the author hates the omarchy creator, so every issue is a world-ending issue.
This tumblr level of discourse is precisely what the Linux community needs to leave behind.
OTOH, fighting bigotry is something we should never leave behind.
If this comment is at all relevant to the post under discussion then we should all be championing OpenBSD as the premier Anti-Racist® OS of our time.
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...
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.
Seems to be the “dream” the AI leaders want to sell at least
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.
> both sides of the political aisle
There is a false equivalence happening. In this case, both sides are the people who just want to exist without being attacked for being themselves and the people who say they are wolves and that wolves need to be shot to protect the sheep.
I want people like DHH and his supporters out of the tech I use. I don't trust them, nor do I trust their judgment.
>> OTOH, fighting bigotry is something we should never leave behind.
> [we] just want to exist without being attacked for being themselves and [they say we're] wolves who need to be shot to protect the sheep.
Weird, you're the author of both of the above quotes but "just wanting to exist" is very different from "a never ending war on bigotry". It's either one or the other, can't be both because war begets war.
Yo, why is my blog post title editorialised? It should've said "Merchants of Insecurity". Rude!
Probably so people can understand what the post is about and can skip the rage-bait?
How is my title a rage bait?
The current submission title is terrible, "Omarchy development practices lead to predictable security issues" would be much closer.
So be it!
Why not just use the original title of the blog post? It's "Merchants of Insecurity".
Because on a general purpose tech forum, that title tells the reader absolutely nothing about the content of the post.
I mean your article is pretty bad. You posted two promptly patched security vulnerabilities and then essentially just wrote the same thing over and over and over again about how it's a sign of the whole project without really building up a case showing consistent negligence.
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.
Appreciate it! Editorialised is fine but the post is mostly about the development practices leading to bugs & the lack of awareness of how dangerous that is, not about the current absolute number of security holes if that makes sense.
Agreed! It’s a good post.
Great title btw
Aww, thank you!
No offense but your title is not informative at all.
It wasn't supposed to be, I found it amusing. Also, the current title is not what I wanted people to take away from the post.
There is this meme of a bell curve where the left side is some newbie trying to do something obvious, the right side is a "pro" trying to do the same obvious thing, and the middle is a someone trying to do cool/new/trendy stuff.
The left side us Ubuntu/Fedora. The right side is Arch. The middle is all these tech-fluencer-wanna-bes custom-made-ai-enhanced distros.
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.
I completely agree, except you've mirrored the X axis. Ubuntu/Fedora are on the right side; Arch is on the left.
The right side is Nix
That's the midwit meme.
I have been seeing so many podcasts and YouTube videos about Omarchy in the past week or so. Must be a massive marketing push or just hype.
That feels very astroturfed, it’s just too much too fast
DHH has a large following, so do many people in this network. His blog posts are often discussed here, it's not really surprising that it gets attention and you don't need secret astroturfing or sneaky marketing if people just share / interact with it themselves organically.
Literally funded by Michael Dell and Jack Dorsey. And DHH is just coasting on his ruby on rails clout.
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
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.
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.
Apparently the Omarchy plugin ecosystem is also a free for all like the Arch AUR, except the audience includes people who are new to Linux and less likely to understand the risks.
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.
Okay, but how cool is that this feature (hotkey to pass a video, that is open in the browser, to yt-dlp) exists and works out of the box?
It's unfortunate, that it was developed in a weird, insecure way, but I think that the fact that it exists is very cool.
I've heard about Omarchy long time ago, but didn't switch, because at some point in my life I started to prefer something that is rock solid and well supported (currently on Fedora Atomic with KDE) to new/shiny/bleeding edge. But still. I think that an overall good UX out of the box is composed of little things like this.
Not very? Why would a TOS-violating feature like this be included as a default feature of an OS?
It's really incredible how so many of the people that in one thread will talk about workers rights will also come out to bat for some tech company's TOS.
Whatever your worldview is it's definitely not about freedom over authoritarianism.
God forbid an operating system existed for its users, not the system.
Isn't most of the security holes still there if used arch and installed the packages yourself. A lot of people complained ssh had security issues in omarchy because it used the default settings. That would still be the same on arch?
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.
Pretty embarrassing, but its nice to see them actually putting effort into security. https://omarchy.org/security/
Too few upstarts realize that proper security is core to a good experience.
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.
"In full" is a tall order that no other OS or distro claims.
No reason Qt or quickshell is any different from any other software.
Bash is... harder, not impossible. I wouldn't rely on it.
> ... collection of security issues which I can only describe as regrettable (because I promised my mum I would swear less). There are bangers like video title bash injection or all notifications being able to run arbitrary bash on your machine.
Bash injection using video... Titles !? Moterfucking shit (mom's not there anymore to ask me to swear less, RIP)
Reminds me of the bit about security in Steve Yegge's Google Platforms rant:
> But I'll argue that Accessibility is actually more important than Security because dialing Accessibility to zero means you have no product at all, whereas dialing Security to zero can still get you a reasonably successful product such as the Playstation Network.
heh... i still remember the very first time when it came out with it's opinionated branding and all that, looked good and went ahead to try it out but was so annoyed with all the bloats and promoting their software's in it which made me their intentions already clear. I got to know that recently they've added option to remove all the bloats but IDC anymore. not gonna try that ever. Not to mention it was just dotfiles painted on top of arch iso and documentation itself included archinstall guides - if that's a distro then my system with dotfiles are a distro in itself lol... though it looks like they've changed things up now, it looks like it has a iso's and all the stuffs to be called a distro now.
I don't know, Omarchy's team really don't care if you're complaining.
Wouldn't the security team and the agents just go and fix the security holes?
They have a dedicated security team now that is being paid for this:
But having a dedicated security team is marketing?
I'm sure with the $10M cash chest the security will just improve over time and this blog post will be irrelevant.
I don't expect the security to be perfect out of the gate at when Omarchy 4.0 just launched with real backing?
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.
It’s a bit more than Arch. There are a bunch of programs written in shell and QML/JavaScript. I guess at least they are using memory-safe languages, but shell scripts make it easier to write the type of shell-injection bug mentioned in the article. Personally if I started a new project in 2026, I would not choose bash and vanilla JavaScript as the languages to write it in.
The repo for reference:
Because the "polish" is done in an insecure way?
No, I don't like the style,but author is right here, you cannot secure insecure design. It needs to be reworked from scratch.
I'll take that.
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 article seem biased against Linux. All major OS had a history of weird security issues. Ubuntu, the most popular Linux distro for desktop, had a lot too: CVE-2019-11482 CVE-2019-11483 CVE-2020-8831 all look like repeating the same mistakes over and over. And if you start digging you'll come over to really strange and bizzare ones like obvious attempts to sneak in exploits into popular libraries like openssl.
I am just worried about the amount of vulnerabilities this development practices introduce
Ok I think I see the issue
It's lines, lines and more lines of bash script
sigh
big sigh
Using bash for all this stuff is like trying to wash your car with sandpaper instead of soap and water. Yes it can work if you're really careful with it, but in practice no
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
Not in the amount I see there
And yes while I got more favourable to Systemd I cannot say bash is all you need, no
I would love for the omarchy shell to be distro-agnostic, just some dotfiles and binaries you can copy to whatever distro if you have all of the required software
Surely those won't ever get fixed...
Obviously every single loaded take on this distro has already been taken, on this thread alone. So there is little anybody can add to it... all I would say is that no publicity is bad publicity and if that's the intention, then well done.
I am happy that the Linux ecosystem is getting attention, traction and funding. People that dont like and want to choose to go die on another hill, so be it, their prerogative.
one cherry on top is that all the agent harnesses installed with omarchy have the “yolo” mode on by default
Just read DHH's blog and then you may quickly realise that other distributions may be a better choice. There is a difference between "opinionated" and ... whatever the content criteria is for DHH nowadays to write stuff on his blog.
Younger DHH was more impressive than the TechBro aged later variant, in my personal opinion.
Arch is in general a good base though - I mostly use Manjaro as base, then customize it via a ton of scripts and compile about 99% from source anyway, using an extended set of ruby scripts (a bit similar to homebrew, but one big difference is that I wanted versioned AppDirs like in GoboLinux; my scripts originated from GoboLinux's philosophy since I did not want to use shell scripts but retain versioned AppDirs. Manjaro is in some ways a bit similar to oldschool slackware, which unfortunately kind of died - it is not really fully dead, but look at the homepage and then tell me how many years past the last .iso release still counts as alive. So to me it is dead, despite the changelogs still being updated or others, such as alienbob, pushing out new releases.)
Gobolinux was really a missed opportunity!
this is not what they say https://github.com/basecamp/omarchy/blob/quattro/manual/48-s...
You can submit a PR to fix security issues.
Hey and Basecamp suck. Basic features like search barely work, the iOS and Android apps are embarrassingly bad, and the UI looks like it was designed for Netscape Navigator 4. With Rails, dhh spent years trying to work around JavaScript , leaving the framework increasingly difficult to recommend in 2026. Why on earth would you trust him with your OS ? Even if you share his politics, you deserve better software.
Not following Omarchy, not even sure what it is trying to be compared to existing distros (other than an incredibly hyped up product). Not hating on DHH. But hasn't he become famous for developing a web framework (20 years ago), rather than for his technical prowess as a systems-level engineer? Seeing these kinds of bugs is not exactly unexpected.
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.
At this point, it looks like some here in the Linux community have a new found hobby of actually liking to get angry at things instead of building, now that AI took away their identity.
This is just a person having fun building their own distro. If you don't like it why are you giving them so much attention even though you will never use it?
>DHH loves to say he's making the year of Linux on desktop happen.
I'd stay away just for this reason alone. Anybody that says this is either joking or has no clue how the real world works.
> 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.
The "real world" is long term results. Yes, this is a joke amount of money for building an OS if the goal is conquering desktops and holding the territory. It is obvious to everyone the "Year of the Linux Desktop" attitude with only $10M in funding isn't going to end the way they want.
It is probably true that it has a big attack surface. But omarchy is no doubt a huge driving force. A few days ago I listened to a podcast dhh talking about the latest major release and its huge donation. I believe it’s now 10m usd or something. I am hopeful that dhh is serious enough to address the security issues plus a lot of ux improvement on linux.
In the episode he emphasized 17 layers of security layers where I remember the number solely because I found hard to believe to be honest.
You can find the podcast episode in this one https://thestanduppod.com/
Look - I'm am the opposite of DHH fan -- that said -- they could fix all these bugs/security issues that same way they created them. It makes sense to some extent to create a product that emphasized what is different about it from a feature/UX perspective so people can consider if it would even be useful to them at all. If they can prove that they have created something useful - then they can fix all these issues. Fixing these issues is not hard. Creating a useful product that people want -- this is the hard part.
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.
Yes, 37Signals DHH have an amazing gift for taking something that is old and not interesting and getting a lot of attention for making it seem new and innovative. That is a gift!
> 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.
Lol.
Just install a solid modern distro (OpenSUSE, Fedora, Mint, etc.) and use an LLM to help you set it up the way you want. It will take you an hour, then you will have a clean system that is yours, and not whatever this is...
Seriously, watch this recent interview with DHH about Omarchy https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MWvH7BRgwL8 and then tell me you want to buy in to this guy vibe coding your entire OS for you. There's all sorts of strong manic/amphetamine vibes oozing off of him.
Many of the hot takes on why Omarchy is bad based on the opinions of the creator are coming from those who ironically use JavaScript.
"full of security holes" but the author could only name one (the two links in the opening paragraph are the same issue).
Some people just hate DHH and can't separate the art from the artist
"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.
The artist here being the huge community of linux, arch, hyprland, wayland developers.
They point to two separate issues, what are you about?
They're both the same root cause. Command injection in notifications
It's a relatively new distro. They'll figure it out.
I like what DHH is doing in this space even if I don't plan to use it.
effects of vibe coding + the zealotry like passion of DHH & this is the result.
larp discovered to be a larp more news at 11.
The "distribution" made by... DHH. No, I can't, thanks.
For people who don't know, just read "As I Remember London" by this person.
Sure, arguments can be made in favor of being "above all these things," but profound moral disgust can also be a legitimate argument.
Rich tech bros midlife crisis
When I was a kid my mom had a daycare and had access to a program where she could buy older and used desktops at a discount.
I loved installing different operating systems on them and try to customize it. Better window management, better animations, nicer colours etc.
Of course, the results were always marginally better or worse than the stock version of that distribution.
Seems as this is the case for Omarchy here as well.