It raises the question: what is a distro since many distros are customizations of other distros. What makes Ubuntu a distro and not just a customization of Debian?
The video above is in inline with my opinion. If you ship an ISO (so users can install your distro directly without installing another distro first) and have control over the packages then you are a distro. Apparently, Omarchy has its own ISO and it's own mirror of the arch package repo so it is a distro by that definition.
Steamos is a mirrored snapshot of arch (like omarchy) + bash and python scripts (like omarchy) + their own shell (steam running on top of gamescope for steamos and a custom quickshell based one running on top of hyprland for omarchy) + modified upstream kernel (both steamos and omarchy)
At the time Ubuntu started, Debian's old installer (boot-floppies) was legendary for its unfriendliness, and the new all-singing, all-dancing replacement was a mammoth endeavour and a long way off completion. Ubuntu provided a simple, friendly installer that covered only the limited set of the most common use cases, but was a dramatic improvement for new users.
They also employed a bunch of Debian developers, and gave them space to continue their work for Debian. It wasn't all smooth sailing, but Debian was stronger as a result of their contributions right from the very start.
Now, maybe Omarchy are providing a similarly major contribution to Arch - but, if they are, they've kept quiet about it so far.
Hyperland being funded for 3 years benefits all distros and users that rely on it. The same goes for Quickshell. And my guess is that this is only the beginning. They will support any project that Omarchy is built on. They even reached out to AUR maintainers to support them financially and build better, more stable infrastructure for any distro that depends on AUR, but they refused.
It's especially weird considering DHH is heavily disliked by much of the Linux community for his political beliefs, and association with him is heavily frowned upon.
Over at KDE, we've seen some criticism for taking sponsorship money from Framework laptops because they sent him a laptop once.
I must believe on some level these sponsors are jumping on the bandwagon to show off how in they are with desktop Linux, now that it's slowly arriving in the mainstream, while possibly rather demonstrating their obliviousness.
The really strange thing about the criticism directed towards Framework is they simply sponsored the Hyprland window manager, not the Omarchy OS, but because Omarchy uses Hyprland that got conflated as funding Omarchy.
The power of contacts, and looking at the initial list it seems it’s a bunch of founders whose startups succeed using Ruby on Rails, so I guess yeah… they owe some to DHH
Its for a foundation where the Linux distro is their flagship product. Much like Mozilla or the Wikipedia foundation. It looks like they're also funding artists[1] and downstream projects[2].
Red Hat: billions, Canonical/Ubuntu, SUSE: hundreds of millions, Debian: one million/year. It's not that unusual for a distro to get funding - just a different scale here due to their connections.
Their foundation is now sponsoring Hyprland, mise and quickshell development, probably other projects to come.
There's a distinct difference between the contributions of Debian and that of Omarchy.
Debian is a foundational distro, it's a giant with huge populations standing on its shoulders. It shoulders a large ongoing burden, security guarantees, some of the largest maintained repos of any distro, a large amount of infrastructure.
Omarchy is a script and some dotfiles. Happy for them, of course, but it's odd. Omarchy just isn't doing that much.
Many distros don't bother with any of that. Calamares is a fine off-the-shelf installer. GRUB has fine defaults. Desktops have fine defaults. And many distros use those. Custom dotfiles and a way to apply them to a fresh system doesn't make a distro.
That's, truly, completely fine for a fledgling project, that's how many start before expanding beyond that... But why is Omarchy getting funding that's more in line with a distro that already has its own infrastructure?
You realize Omarchy just started a couple of months ago, right? The founder himself put his money and time where his mouth is.
Most of the thousands of distros are just a collection of config changes in GNOME, etc. There is no fundamental change in 99% of Linux distros. It's just different configurations of different tools, with the main differences being the package manager and window manager they use, plus their configs. Everything else is exactly the same.
That's a very simplistic and end-user-oriented view of what a distro is. Somebody hosts the infrastructure that Omarchy runs on. Somebody maintains the packages and applies specialized patches and communicates upstream. Omarchy doesn't do that. And that's fine.
Plenty of distros start out at that level. But those fledgling distros don't get these kinds of sponsorships. Why Omarchy?
It appears to be an opinionated, batteries included distro/OS using a tiling window manager, and it's targeted at Mac/Windows power users. It's a niche target and time will tell whether it pays off.
There is this movie "Mickey Blue Eyes" where Hugh Grant play an auctioneer whose girlfriend is the daughter of a mafia member.
The boss of the mafia org then forces the auctioneer to offer worthless paintings and forces various people to bid high. The paintings are just required so that something exchanges hands.
This is much of the software industry in a nutshell, except that no coercion is required. Just something needs to exchange hands.
The mafia needs money to change hands to launder it. What money is being laundered in software? Do you think anyone in the ecosystem is sitting on piles of dirty money?
I can't quite put my finger on it but this rush to astroturf Omarchy just has bad vibes all around. DHH has been on a politician-level campaign to fund/promote what seems like a fun nerd project. Call me paranoid but it all just comes across as dubious.
They just founded the Foundation, and the money has not been allocated yet. But Hyperland, Quickshell, and some others already got 3 year sponsorship deals.
The AUR maintainers refused the cooperation and the money. So they will start working on new package management for Omarchy.
My guess, though, is that most of the money will go to DHH's obsession with Macs and anti-Apple stance (porting Linux to work on M architecture), either by directly funding Asahi Linux or by forking it to speed up development.
1Password can't even include ARM builds of their app in their existing packages [1]. I am highly skeptical of anything DHH (David Heinemeier Hansson) is the benevolent dictator of, and for good reason [2]. Perhaps that money would be spent better elsewhere in the ecosystem.
I think that's the main reason why Omarchy gets talked about so much.
In large parts of the internet, open bigotry is thankfully still socially unacceptable. But when bigotry is wrapped up in a software project like this, it gives people posting/upvoting/sharing a level of plausible deniability.
hn crowd has always been favorable to trump because at the end of the day they want lower taxes, but i think a few other ideas have been smuggled along with that
(because you always have to explain the joke on this site, everyone was warned about these fascists before and during their rise to power, and this site supports them because the obvious reason https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00146-026-02862-9)
Do people really think DHH is a white supremacist? I'd love to see a shred of supporting evidence that amounts to more than a disagreement about rapid immigration, integration, and cultural identity.
Didn't John Cleese already explain the difference between a culturalist and a racist?
This is the only thing I've read about DHH's controversial opinions, so take this with a huge grain of salt. Maybe I'll change my mind tomorrow:
Those DHH quotes do not seem nearly as bad as I thought they were going to. In fact, they don't seem bad at all. You may vigorously disagree with them, I just mean that they are not clearly immoral. Of course, that's only if you take them at face value. There could be darker or more crack-pot opinions behind them, but that specter is hard to avoid with this topic.
The author's arguments are weak or tangential, and their conclusion seems overly dramatic. As a first impression, this puts me in the mindset of, "people are overreacting to DHH's opinions because it's related to immigration/race/culture." Again, maybe I'll change my mind, but as a first impression, that's what this article tells me.
Good for the Linux ecosystem. People forget they are not bound to install it, if you are so sore from a blog post just use any of the other hundreds of distros out there.
Hey, 1Password product lead here who worked on this. I thought I'd share some thoughts.
First, I'm pretty excited by Omarchy, and it seems 1Password customers are as well. Omarchy 4 was the first release to identify itself as Omarchy vs. Arch, and in just two short weeks since the launch it's already the #3 most-used Linux distro by active users. Ubuntu is #1 but has a pretty extreme sawtooth pattern where usage collapses on the weekends. This is not true with Omarchy, where we are seeing virtually no drop-off on the weekends yet, and last Saturday it actually surpassed Ubuntu 24.04 as the #1 most-used Linux distro. I suspect it will remain #1 every weekend going forward.
Second, what keeps us up at night is credentials getting into AI inference/context. We are working with everyone we can to stay as close as possible to the tools and OS' that become the canonical ways to use agents, so we can ensure that the humans who pay for 1Password remain in control of their credentials — and ideally, that those credentials never are seen by an AI agent.
What we released about a month ago with Anthropic (security info here: https://support.1password.com/1password-claude-security/) is a glimpse into how we are making that happen architecturally. Being able to work closely with the frontier-model and harness companies and builders is essential to our mission to create a safer, simpler digital future for everyone.
Omarchy and Linux in general are an exciting place for us to dream pretty big about how we solve these problems. This is a very malleable OS, lately it's where the most AI-forward users are, and a place where we can learn together how to create something that's both convenient and safe.
Hope they redirect some of their fundings to them!
https://youtu.be/yIA4idIdY_k
The video above is in inline with my opinion. If you ship an ISO (so users can install your distro directly without installing another distro first) and have control over the packages then you are a distro. Apparently, Omarchy has its own ISO and it's own mirror of the arch package repo so it is a distro by that definition.
At the time Ubuntu started, Debian's old installer (boot-floppies) was legendary for its unfriendliness, and the new all-singing, all-dancing replacement was a mammoth endeavour and a long way off completion. Ubuntu provided a simple, friendly installer that covered only the limited set of the most common use cases, but was a dramatic improvement for new users.
They also employed a bunch of Debian developers, and gave them space to continue their work for Debian. It wasn't all smooth sailing, but Debian was stronger as a result of their contributions right from the very start.
Now, maybe Omarchy are providing a similarly major contribution to Arch - but, if they are, they've kept quiet about it so far.
It's more like a set of dotfiles, but yeah.
I am inclined to believe everyone sane will distance themselves from it. Just like GNOME did.
Over at KDE, we've seen some criticism for taking sponsorship money from Framework laptops because they sent him a laptop once.
I must believe on some level these sponsors are jumping on the bandwagon to show off how in they are with desktop Linux, now that it's slowly arriving in the mainstream, while possibly rather demonstrating their obliviousness.
[1] https://omarchy.org/air/
[2] https://omarchy.org/sponsorships/
Their foundation is now sponsoring Hyprland, mise and quickshell development, probably other projects to come.
Debian is a foundational distro, it's a giant with huge populations standing on its shoulders. It shoulders a large ongoing burden, security guarantees, some of the largest maintained repos of any distro, a large amount of infrastructure.
Omarchy is a script and some dotfiles. Happy for them, of course, but it's odd. Omarchy just isn't doing that much.
I think the "set of dotfiles" was called Omakub. Omarchy is a distro like any other - custom installer, bootloader, desktop and WM setup, etc.
That's, truly, completely fine for a fledgling project, that's how many start before expanding beyond that... But why is Omarchy getting funding that's more in line with a distro that already has its own infrastructure?
Most of the thousands of distros are just a collection of config changes in GNOME, etc. There is no fundamental change in 99% of Linux distros. It's just different configurations of different tools, with the main differences being the package manager and window manager they use, plus their configs. Everything else is exactly the same.
Plenty of distros start out at that level. But those fledgling distros don't get these kinds of sponsorships. Why Omarchy?
The boss of the mafia org then forces the auctioneer to offer worthless paintings and forces various people to bid high. The paintings are just required so that something exchanges hands.
This is much of the software industry in a nutshell, except that no coercion is required. Just something needs to exchange hands.
I'm sure you can come up with scenarios where A wants clean money to go to B but still prefers a pretext.
In this case the now 12M (Brian Armstrong now also "donated") could be for AI and right-wing promotion for example.
The AUR maintainers refused the cooperation and the money. So they will start working on new package management for Omarchy.
My guess, though, is that most of the money will go to DHH's obsession with Macs and anti-Apple stance (porting Linux to work on M architecture), either by directly funding Asahi Linux or by forking it to speed up development.
1. https://support.1password.com/install-linux/#arm-or-other-di... 2. https://thelibre.news/lets-talk-about-dhh/
Beyond my moral objections and public security concerns, I saw more forethought from ClearLinux by Intel around the same maturity point.
Hype doesn't make an OS appealing to me.
In large parts of the internet, open bigotry is thankfully still socially unacceptable. But when bigotry is wrapped up in a software project like this, it gives people posting/upvoting/sharing a level of plausible deniability.
https://www.fastcompany.com/91217605/new-york-times-editoria...
(because you always have to explain the joke on this site, everyone was warned about these fascists before and during their rise to power, and this site supports them because the obvious reason https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00146-026-02862-9)
Didn't John Cleese already explain the difference between a culturalist and a racist?
Edit: I was curious and it was a genuine question, not sure why all the down-votes.
https://jakelazaroff.com/words/dhh-is-way-worse-than-i-thoug...
Those DHH quotes do not seem nearly as bad as I thought they were going to. In fact, they don't seem bad at all. You may vigorously disagree with them, I just mean that they are not clearly immoral. Of course, that's only if you take them at face value. There could be darker or more crack-pot opinions behind them, but that specter is hard to avoid with this topic.
The author's arguments are weak or tangential, and their conclusion seems overly dramatic. As a first impression, this puts me in the mindset of, "people are overreacting to DHH's opinions because it's related to immigration/race/culture." Again, maybe I'll change my mind, but as a first impression, that's what this article tells me.
First, I'm pretty excited by Omarchy, and it seems 1Password customers are as well. Omarchy 4 was the first release to identify itself as Omarchy vs. Arch, and in just two short weeks since the launch it's already the #3 most-used Linux distro by active users. Ubuntu is #1 but has a pretty extreme sawtooth pattern where usage collapses on the weekends. This is not true with Omarchy, where we are seeing virtually no drop-off on the weekends yet, and last Saturday it actually surpassed Ubuntu 24.04 as the #1 most-used Linux distro. I suspect it will remain #1 every weekend going forward.
Second, what keeps us up at night is credentials getting into AI inference/context. We are working with everyone we can to stay as close as possible to the tools and OS' that become the canonical ways to use agents, so we can ensure that the humans who pay for 1Password remain in control of their credentials — and ideally, that those credentials never are seen by an AI agent.
What we released about a month ago with Anthropic (security info here: https://support.1password.com/1password-claude-security/) is a glimpse into how we are making that happen architecturally. Being able to work closely with the frontier-model and harness companies and builders is essential to our mission to create a safer, simpler digital future for everyone.
Omarchy and Linux in general are an exciting place for us to dream pretty big about how we solve these problems. This is a very malleable OS, lately it's where the most AI-forward users are, and a place where we can learn together how to create something that's both convenient and safe.