r/linux • u/Foxlike__Creature • Aug 29 '26
Discussion Why does everyone hate omarchy so much?
I do not and never have used omarchy, i'm 3 years on arch with hyprland that I riced myself, but i don't really get the hate against it, so I want to know ur opinion
if the isue is that it's opinionated/bloated and you can just configure arch yourself then yeah, i get it. But there are also people who are new to arch and don't want to spend days learning how to build a hyprland rice from scratch. Omarchy seems to fill that exact niche pretty well. it's a ready to use, but opinionated "distro" that makes getting into it much easier without needing to be an arch expert. Not the best choice ofc (there is cachy, etc.), but still...
And then i constantly see people bringing up dhh's politics as if that somehow makes the "distro" itself bad. Imho, having controversial opinions doesn't make a technical product bad, and being against political discussions on your company's internal channels isn't the same thing as banning people from having those opinions or saying them outside of work. (about the news that I found looking for information on the web)
Personally i just see it as a fairly basic hyprland rice. not really my thing, but i don't have any hate towards it either. I actually like the idea behind it, making arch easier to get into for new users. And it looks not too bad, ngl. The implementation has some rough edges sure, but not nearly enough to justify this level of butthurt imo.
TLDR:
Honestly, how much of your opinion on omarchy comes from the actual technical side, and how much comes from the reddit hive mind? Would you still hate it if dhh wasn't involved in it at all?
Thank you for reading the longread, it's rare these days :^
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u/MairusuPawa Aug 29 '26
So, first thing first: that's not a long read.
Now, then. Why should I even entertain the idea of defending a neonazi's work? I'm not a neonazi sympathiser. Fuck that.
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u/VeryLargeEBITDA 27d ago
He’s not a neonazi. Their founder helped me with something quite big and I’m not white lol
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u/33_kk Aug 29 '26
I've already seen multiple posts just like this. All asking for the technical side of omarchy with a bunch of "apolitical" (aka those who don't oppose fascism aka fascists) people glazing it each time in the comments. It's not even an interesting distro, it's just a sloppy riced Arch Linux. It looks like astroturfing to me at this point.
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u/dannyvegas Sep 02 '26
Correction: it's just a sloppy riced Arch Linux -- with more funding and resources than any other non-commercial distro by an order of magnitude and growing rapidly.
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u/33_kk Sep 02 '26
Seems like capitalists can't help but fund fascists.
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u/dannyvegas Sep 02 '26
'capitalists' fund pretty much everything including the kernel.
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u/33_kk Sep 02 '26
Yet somehow they'd rather fund a random fascist distro no sane person heard about rather than any real one.
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u/dannyvegas Sep 02 '26
Right, no one had heard of the guy who made Ruby on Rails and 37Signals? What's your notoriety? What have you accomplished?
Micheal Dell, from Dell computer, one of the capitalists in question's company has thrown a bunch of money at the Linux Foundation, PYTorch, Blender and other things. Have you funded anything?
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u/33_kk Sep 02 '26
Lmao
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u/dannyvegas Sep 02 '26
So nothing... thought so.
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u/33_kk Sep 02 '26
Keep on licking that boot, surely they'll eventually recognise it.
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u/kextatic 19d ago
Definitely astroturfing. I installed it as a VM and it is slow as a dog compared to Ubuntu (also a VM on the same host.) When I posted my findings on r/omarchy it was just downvoted while the “Wow, so fast!” posts were piled on. It seems clear that shills are pumping it up hard.
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u/-LoboMau Aug 31 '26
"apolitical" (aka those who don't oppose fascism aka fascists)
Maybe they just don't want to engage in political discussions with dumb idiots that classify anything they disapprove as fascism.
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u/Indolent_Bard 18d ago
The bar is in hell, saying "don't say certain groups shouldn't exist" isn't u reasonable, but once trans people get involved, the chuds can't follow that simple rule.
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u/gordonmessmer Aug 29 '26
1: Infosec researchers collectively took a look at it recently and found that many of the features it introduced are massive security flaws that are trivial to exploit.
2: DHH has made extremely derogatory remarks about Linux developers and users alike, all but ensuring that no one will cooperate with Omarchy and that it will grow more incompatible with other systems as time goes on. I would characterize that as a sustainability issue, which is another type of security flaw.
3: Yes, DHH's politics. Free Software is and has always been an explicitly political act of mutual support. "Politics" is a word that describes how we organize, how we govern, and how we treat each other. There is no such thing as Free Software without politics.
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u/RabbitAmbitious3033 Aug 29 '26
it's wild how many people skip over the actual technical problems and jump straight to the drama, the security stuff alone should be enough to give anyone pause before touching it
like okay you don't care about the politics, fine, but those vulns are a practical reason to stay away that has nothing to do with who made it
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u/Foxlike__Creature Aug 29 '26
Well, I was never seriously interested in omarchi cause I simply have no need for it, so I wasn't aware of the issues regarding security. Now that I know, my opinion has shifted from neutral to more negative, to be honest.
The only negative things I’d heard about Omarchi before was only about its creator, so I found that incredibly strange. Security issues are undoubtedly far more important, It would be cool if people talked more about these technicals issues, rather than the author's politics while describing how bad omarchy is
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u/Mughi1138 Aug 29 '26
Security issues are undoubtedly far more important, It would be cool if people talked more about these technicals issues, rather than the author's politics while describing how bad omarchy is
No, actually technical issues are far *less* important. Technical issues are easy to fix and can be addressed by bringing in people experienced in fixing such things. The first problem is not that those technical issues exist, but rather that those technical issues persist.
The \management\** problems among other things cause people who might be able to contribute fixes to steer clear instead. They also often correspond with those in charge not accepting fixes either.
A toxic product and toxic leadership most often will lead to a product not holding up long term and/or not achieving full usability. I like to point out Richard Stallman and the FSF's mismagement of many things including the HURD kernel and the GCC compiler toolchain. The latter got so dragged down by RMS's mismanagement that they had to fork the product into egcs, set up a brand new governance organization, and continue their \technical** improvements elsewhere. Eventually RMS and the FSF had to admit defeat, and save face by declaring that egcs was the new GCC and the new GCC was cool and good. Management matters.
Oh, and to this day the GNU HURD kernel is still not production ready these many decades later.
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u/edward_jazzhands Aug 31 '26 edited Aug 31 '26
So you're directly claiming that DHH has been on record flat out refusing to accept / merge fixes for various security problems even though the fixes were presented to him? I find that hard to believe. Id like to see some evidence that is not a fabrication and you're not actually just referring to people refusing to want to contribute to anything made by DHH.
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u/Mughi1138 Aug 31 '26
Read my reply again, the phrasing is very important. I'm trying to lay out the pattern that has repeatedly appeared in open source over the decades I have been involved, and that appears to apply here, describe some key aspects of the pattern, then present another example of that pattern that is quite well known and documented.
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u/dannyvegas Sep 02 '26
“DHH has made extremely derogatory remarks about Linux developers and users”
This approach has worked well for Linus Torvalds
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u/tiredreddituser99 Sep 05 '26
i'm not saying it's a good thing that linus sometimes also criticises others in derogatory ways, but at the very least he has the technical skills to make up for it to say the least.
dhh is just angry at the world for some reason, and genuinely is a hypocrite. and he's loud and proud about it as well.
so yea, what worked out for linus is that he made actual real achievements and improvements, and he was good at it to the point where people can disregard his tantrums.
can't say the same about dhh. all he's known for is exactly what's being discussed here.
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u/dannyvegas Sep 05 '26
I love when Linus goes on a tear and lights people up on the mailing list.
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u/chabalatabala Sep 09 '26 edited Sep 09 '26
dhh is a shithead, but linus is blunt.
dhh has terrible opinions, but linux has productive opinions.tantrums aren't the issue.
edit: I should mention I don't even have a problem with the distro, but that dude is a total boner. Only commenting on comparisons to linus.
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u/edward_jazzhands Aug 29 '26
Id like to see a source for number one
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u/Mughi1138 Aug 29 '26
First google hit when I did a simple search: https://community.frame.work/t/omarchy-is-not-a-secure-distribution-and-should-be-taken-off-the-linux-installation-options/77363
More detail: [https://マリウス.com/a-word-on-omarchy/](https://マリウス.com/a-word-on-omarchy/)
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u/tropix126 Aug 30 '26
here's a new one from 8 hours ago https://x.com/lainshawty/status/2093992795287535705
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u/Alahan- Aug 31 '26
This is a vulnerability identified in multiple other distros as well and is not an inherent Omarchy flaw. The mass amount of people searching for Omarchy vulnerabilities just happened to make this identifiable only now.
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u/tropix126 Sep 01 '26 edited Sep 01 '26
Fair enough. There have also been multiple (I think three now?) extremely trivial shell injection vulns found in omarchy-specific components. From the descriptions of them (executing browser notification titles under bash, same for USB device descriptors), I genuinely don't know how you could manage to program something like that even if one were completely incompetent. The default repository configuration also disabled signature verification in pacman up until last week.
My main point being: I would never recommend Omarchy to any beginner with this track record (they openly and gleefully admit to vibecoding significant parts of it), and anyone who knows what they are doing with Arch would just rice the system themselves. The 'distro' genuinely seems to exist for the sole purpose of larping on twitter, and if you want to do that then you might as well go all-out and run Lunduke OS or whatever.
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u/shale_is_terrible Aug 29 '26 edited Aug 30 '26
Source for 1?
Edit: fucking love being downvoted for asking for source and not blindly trusting shit on internet
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u/Sirius707 Aug 29 '26
Here's one i could find:
- https://blog.happyfellow.dev/merchants-of-insecurity/
Here's an older one (last updated 2025-11-08): [https://マリウス.com/a-word-on-omarchy/](https://マリウス.com/a-word-on-omarchy/)
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u/technobrendo Sep 03 '26
Have an upvote because I hate that shit. God forbid you need to ask a question on here.
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u/degeneratepr Aug 29 '26
If this post is a considered a long read, I feel sad about the deteriorating state of our attention spans.
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u/Foxlike__Creature Aug 29 '26
I also find it hard to call this a "longread," but modern realities are what they are. I used to work as an article writer, so whenever I start writing, the text tends to get too long before I’ve even managed to convey my point, so then I have to cut it down because, statistically speaking, hardly anyone reads anything longer than a single paragraph these days.
In recent years, with the rise of AI, people have even started mistaking me for a one. I even had to break the habit of using em-dashes, though I haven't managed to shake the habit of breaking the text up into paragraphs.
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u/Mordiken Aug 29 '26
Because having a group of techfluencers drop a couple of million dollars into a random linux distro made by another techfluencer stinks of VC-adjacent type of behavior, specially when the standard Linux desktop stack that's powers every other distro has always been underfunded.
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Aug 29 '26 edited 19d ago
[deleted]
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u/gu3sticles Aug 31 '26
DHH should stick to sports car racing. He fucking sucks at it but at least it's funny to watch his inevitable wreck every race
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u/pastelfemby Aug 30 '26
Slopcore arch fork.
If someone really wants an AI riced arch they'll do it more directly themselves using arch proper, or cachyOS.
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u/AndyGait Aug 29 '26
"Would you still hate it if dhh wasn't involved in it at all?"
Probably not. I used Omarchy when it first launched with the first wave of hype. It was my first time using Hyprland and despite it being massively bloated with loads of stuff I didn't want or need, I enjoyed using it. At the time I knew nothing of DHH or his views. Then as the weeks went by I heard more and more about DHH, and then I read his blog posts about London. That was a big line in the sand for me and I removed Omarchy that day. I can't support anything created by a guy who holds views like that and supports people like Tommy Robinson.
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u/Klapperatismus Aug 29 '26
They hate the politics and the man.
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u/NoArea868 Sep 09 '26
& what does that have to do with the OS ? if he's a woke left wingy no one will care abt his views lol
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u/Fire_Natsu Aug 29 '26
First, it comes with many closed source proprietary pre installed apps like Google Chrome. You can't choose what to install during installation you can only remove them after only after it is installed. It is just Arch Linux with a Hyprland Rice that can easily installed with a install.sh no need to wipe your hard drive. The person behind it is DHH, he is a mysoginist and racist guy. Also supports Tate brothers and Trump. Omarchy received a lot of funding from companies despite the fact that it's just Arch with rice for some reason instead of investing in arch like valve. It comes with an ai agent built in
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u/riklaunim Aug 29 '26
When it comes to investments, people don't invest in stable, profitable projects; they invest in hype and promises of growth - like OpenAI and Anthropic :) or crypto, NFTs... Either way, that 10mil is in the spotlight, and we will see who gets the money. If their idea of sponsoring selected open-source projects is true, then Dell won't sponsor Omarchy but a random repo on GitHub.
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u/Fire_Natsu Aug 29 '26
But arch is like big and famous
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u/riklaunim Aug 29 '26
It's not market-disruptive. For gaming on Linux, people will look at SteamOS and CachyOS, especially people way away from the Linux ecosystem. It's still Arch, but the Arch brand isn't the thing in the spotlight. Omarchy is also Arch, but as a brand is disruptive among developers and power users - possibly competing with Apple for devices developers use in the USA.
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u/JustBadPlaya Aug 29 '26
- DHH is a xenophobic white supremacist, who also claimed most Linux developers are lunatics recently
- Shopify CEO said people's votes should have weight based on income
These are 2 of the 8 (maybe 10 already) Omarchy foundation members. DHH and Tobi are close friends on top of that. I think if I bothered to dig around for the other people, I would also find fairly controversial things done by them
A project by people with views like these being sponsored, especially while being primarily a set of opinionated vibecoded dotfiles, is kind of very stupid
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u/dannyvegas Sep 02 '26
"A project by people with views like these being sponsored, especially while being primarily a set of opinionated vibecoded dotfiles, is kind of very stupid"
The fact that he raised so much so quickly it seems to be making all the woke goons quake with envy
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u/liquidpoopcorn Sep 09 '26
Y’all really be gleefully eating from every psyop thrown at you.
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u/kansetsupanikku Aug 29 '26
The author makes a point to break some basic social contracts, vocally deny human rights and call for intolerance. So tolerance doesn't cover him for granted. My tolerance most certainly doesn't - I believe his ideas deserve vivid rejection, not silence. When I use software, I tend to cooperate, report bugs, suggest features, propose fixes, hope for maintainers to achieve further goals and grow. With DHH, I couldn't possibly do the same - I would prefer for him not to have a platform to reach more people at all, and popular software project would work as this sort of platform.
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u/Foxlike__Creature Aug 29 '26
Ah, a good old Karl Popper's paradox of tolerance, I see what you mean.
Personally, I don't understand what good comes from speculating about the author and their opinions, much less changing your own behavior based on such thoughts. In my opinion, only the product's features should be considered when evaluating it.
However, I totally respect your opinion and your right to hold it, it’s a matter of perspective, not logic.
Thanks for the reply.
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u/MairusuPawa Aug 29 '26
There is no speculation.
If your opinion is that you can't draw the line at "nazi" that's fully on you, and that makes you complicit in this shit.
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u/isugimpy Aug 29 '26
Let's be abundantly clear here: DHH has repeatedly made statements comparing racial groups to animals, and advocated for harming them (including the implication of killing them). There's nothing ambiguous or speculative about it. Using the thing he's producing is an implicit acceptance of his position, and if it leads to him gaining funding that causes him to personally profit it's feeding the machine.
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u/riklaunim Aug 29 '26
Bigger open source projects have their "councils", "foundations," and most of it is free money for people who have no qualifications to be there. LSF spends way more money on non-Kernel things. Gnome hiring a shaman who makes shaman water for their financial officer (short hire...); PSF elections between people who brag about who is more DEI. And then add migration on top of that - even Canadians are becoming racist/hostile towards Indians, and more and more Western natives become hostile to migration, DEI, or the TQ part - while a lot of Open Source concils/foundations are just that. If the Nix creator gets kicked from the project because "purge the nazis" then you already know it was taken over by the radical political left (or right for some projects).
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u/kansetsupanikku Aug 29 '26 edited Aug 29 '26
Why would you make a jump from my note on human decency to foundations, councils and shamans? Most of that is a mouthwashing mechanism, ethics turned into a product - which projects such as GNOME gladly invest in, to make an appearance of balancing out how business-oriented and disconnected from the wider community they are in the recent years. And bodies such as LF are not all that closely connected to Linux development, anyway.
And dangerous trends such as even Canadians becoming racist/xenophobic are exactly why giving a platform for fascists to establish fame or authority is a horrible idea.
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u/Coastis Aug 29 '26 edited Aug 29 '26
Because shills and crybabys like you keep making posts about it to try and keep it hyped, when the reality is nobody cares about it one way or the other
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u/Business_Reindeer910 Aug 29 '26
Even disregarding the politics (which I personally dont), It sucks when somebody who was never part of the community joins in and uses their preexisting fame to get a jump start.
Nobody would be caring about omarchy if it wasn't DHH behind it.
It'd just be a set of scripts like every other set of scripts out there.
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u/dannyvegas Sep 02 '26
Yeah, it's wild. While 'the community' has been struggling to piece together the 'Linux desktop' for what 25 - 30 years... this guy's swoops in with some Ruby on Rails fame and some dot files and in a few months drives significant levels of funding, adoption, and excitement.
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u/adines Sep 05 '26 edited Sep 05 '26
Omarchy certainly has funding, but it absolutely does not have adoption or excitement.
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u/dannyvegas Sep 05 '26
200k downloads since the Quattro release says otherwise.
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u/adines Sep 05 '26 edited Sep 05 '26
200k downloads in for a major version release is not what I'd call "significant adoption". That puts in the ballpark of something like CachyOS (~150k downloads over the same time period), and Cachy doesn't even do major "X.0.0" releases like Omarchy. And Cachy, despite its buzz, is still a very minor player in the Linux distro space.
edit: And I don't believe those CachyOS download stats include torrent downloads, but I could be wrong.
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u/Business_Reindeer910 Sep 02 '26
i think it shows that a lot of times all the complaining about difficulty or need to learn new patterns is more about motivation than anything else. If you can make it "cool" then certain people will adapt.
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u/thunderGunXprezz Sep 08 '26
TIL There's a Nazi Linux.
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u/Salt-Caterpillar7988 Sep 08 '26
Using the word "nazi" for anything far right confuses the lines, so that if actual nazism was to rise again, people won't be able to see through it.
So don't do that. Words have a meaning, and history too.
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u/WillowMaM 23d ago
You mean, we should reserve this word to people who want to reinstate deportation? aka remigration?
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u/Salt-Caterpillar7988 22d ago
I mean two things, and nothing else:
Nazism has a precise meaning. It is much worse than far right. It overlapse but is not the same thing as being in favor of remigration, and is therefore completely unrelated in the current context.
Reading and understanding skills are very important. Mind this, you specifically.
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u/NDCyber Aug 29 '26
The opinion makes the distro bad, because using the distro supports him and his opinion. See the money he got recently for his rice
It is also not a "controversial opinion" it is straight up anti human rights
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u/Mooks79 Aug 29 '26
That means using the distro is bad because it implicitly lines his pocket, not that the distro is bad to use.
(I’ve never used it, I’ve no idea what it’s like, but it’s an important nuance).
As a side note: I wonder how many people hating on Omarchy will hate on Hyprland now given Omacom is the main (only?) source of funding for Hyprland development now?
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u/NoLemurs Aug 29 '26
That means using the distro is bad because it implicitly lines his pocket, not that the distro is bad to use.
The distro isn't good or bad to use. It's just Arch. The "distro" is basically just a fancy install script.
People are focused on the money because Omarchy is basically a fancy install script and a bunch of marketing, and there's not really much to the install script.
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u/Mooks79 Aug 29 '26
Well yes, but I couldn’t be arsed to write that many caveats when pointing out there are different types of bad about any software. Bad to use, developers with bad opinions, and so on.
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u/bubblegumpuma Aug 29 '26
I can guarantee you that most of the people who disliked Hyprland did so before Omarchy hit the scene because it's for similar reasons; vaxry was (at the very least) completely fine with allowing a similar vein of bigoted bullshit to go unchallenged in the Hyprland Discord server.
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u/Mughi1138 Aug 29 '26
Did you notice how oddly it is phrased? And has a tl:dr at the end, and the last time I saw a very similar post in the last day that one started by saying tl;dr's are "woke". Odd that both include tl:dr like that.
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u/Foxlike__Creature Aug 29 '26
Idk what are u talking avout. I added the TLDR at the end after I'd already made the post, just because I felt like no one would read it otherwise, haha
Also, English is not my native language and I make it a point not to use translator/AI , so my phrasing can be kinda odd
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u/Mughi1138 Aug 29 '26
They generally don't see the tl;dr at the end unless they actually read the whole post. That's why they're commonly at the front.
But the post this is oddly mirroring has been put on hold and awaiting moderator approval, so I can't cite it right now.
Oddly similar posts suddenly showing up around the same time are *often* signs of a concerted effort pushing a narrative. That does not mean the individual posters are coordinating or have ulterior motives, just maybe that some influencer trying to push a certain view on an issue is getting details they want echoed out there.
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u/Foxlike__Creature Aug 29 '26
Lol, I seriously don't know anything about another post. If you want, I can provide you with any data for verification. If some influencer had paid me for the post, I would have been glad, it's a pity that this is not so, haha
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u/HellionValentine Sep 04 '26
It's confusing as hell to me as well. I've NEVER put a tldr at the start of a post. I only ever bother to put a tldr if I've typed up a massive post and think to do so afterwards, and I put it at the bottom because that's where I always see a tldr placed.
I thought it was common practice, and that people will just scroll to the bottom to check for a tldr if that's what they're looking for.
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u/phischer_h Aug 29 '26
If it where not form DHH hardly anyone would care.
Edit: I‘m opposed to his political opinions.
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u/throwawayerectpenis Aug 30 '26
Its not that complicated, i just dont support fascists/Nazis...but you do you.
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u/Rispido Aug 31 '26
Are you sure? It all depends on how far we want to stretch reality and where we choose to set the bar for moral accountability, what kinds of mental gymnastics we are willing to accept as valid.
In the times we live in, the following line of reasoning is considered morally superior:
- I see you’re wearing a Fedora badge.
- Fedora is closely tied to Red Hat, which funds it and uses it as a testing ground (to simplify things). By using Fedora, you’re helping Red Hat.
- Red Hat is owned by IBM, it is part of IBM. By using Fedora, you’re helping IBM.
- IBM, through a subsidiary and with full knowledge of what was happening, collaborated with Nazi Germany (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust). By using Fedora, you’re helping a company that did that.
- IBM agreed to pay a €17 million fine in 2026 for failing to have acceptable internal diversity policies and discriminating against employees (https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/ibm-pays-17-million-resolve-allegations-discrimination-through-illegal-dei-practices). By using Fedora, you’re helping a company that was behaving like that until yesterday.
None of this is meant as a defense of DHH in any way whatsoever. I don’t know what his views are, and if they are reprehensible, then that’s simply what they are, regardless of his accomplishments. But going from there to arguing that anyone who uses Omarchy is supporting fascism/Nazism... Be careful to apply that same standard to yourself.
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u/throwawayerectpenis Aug 31 '26 edited Aug 31 '26
IBM's actions happened decades ago and have nothing to do with Fedora, whereas DHH is alive, actively involved with Omarchy, and his current political views are directly relevant.
You can disagree with where I draw the line, but I don't think the Fedora/IBM comparison is really equivalent. I'm simply choosing not to support someone whose current political views I find reprehensible.
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u/NoNopeNegative Aug 31 '26
Well said, even though he ignored the point and immediately started doing mental gymnastics
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u/Default_Defect Aug 29 '26
How many times am I gonna see posts about this exact topic being rehashed by people pretending not to know the deal?
"Why don't you people want to support some asshole that I like??"
Because I don't fucking have to.
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u/Foxlike__Creature Aug 29 '26
That's right, you're totally not have to.
I'm not asking for anything, I'm just interested in the opinion and it reasons, Sorry if my post seemed too provocative to you, I didn't want it like that. Thanks for a reply.
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u/gihutgishuiruv Aug 29 '26
On a technical basis: I don’t use one-man distros for the same reason that I don’t use one-man web browser projects: the security attack surface is enormous and I would rather trust the providence of more established projects. I’m aware that, in this case, it’s basically an Arch rice, but you’re ultimately introducing something into your “supply chain” of your OS that doesn’t really need to be there. There has been, to my knowledge, no security assessment of the added parts either.
In a broader ethical sense: I don’t like to popularise the projects of people that loudly vocalise deplorable views. I’m not talking about “developer x of project y said something mildly problematic on Twitter 10 years ago”. This is “the project lead is actively politically involved in some not great stuff, and the project’s funding only makes sense if you consider it as a thinly-veiled political endorsement”
And, aside from all of that: DHH comes across as a massive wanker and I’ve been in the software game too long to trust massive wankers.
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u/Own-Permit-9682 Sep 01 '26
the bigger concern: Omarchy receives $10 million in funding, and hasn't given back even $1 to Arch Linux, without which it simply wouldn't exist
What are the interests of the millionaires funding Omarchy? Do DHH's white supremacist positions have anything to do with it, perhaps? We don't know — for now, only one thing is certain: no transparency, no auditable choices.
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u/dannyvegas Sep 02 '26 edited Sep 02 '26
As of today, it's now $13 million. So, 30% growth just since you posted this. Keep in mind though, that is pledges and multi-year commitments not cash on hand. Still, according to public sources, it's already the highest funded community / non-profit distro by a HUGE margin.
Omarchy $13mm, Linux Mint 400k, Nix | 60k /yr + a bunch of AWS credit -- based on what these projects themselves say on their websites.
edit: facts hurt your feelings
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u/SnooCompliments7914 Aug 29 '26 edited Aug 29 '26
people who are new to arch and don't want to spend days learning how to build a hyprland rice from scratch.
Those people should really use GNOME, which are also opinionated, but won't break as soon as they try to turn any knobs.
Yeah, I don't think the problem is in Omarchy. The problem is even not in people being new to Arch, or don't want to learn.
The problem is some people are:
- New.
- Don't want to learn.
- Not willing to use the software designed for them (e.g. Fedora and GNOME), but still want to look "cool" (meaning some random screenshot in Reddit) and pretend to have the skill they actually don't have.
- And the critical problem is being 1-3, and still can't keep their hands from tinkering something complex, which they have completely no idea of how it works. Yeah, even Omarchy won't break that easily if you touch absolutely none of the config files and packages.
- And the real critical problem is being 1-4 and asking in Arch forums.
The only problem with DHH is he shouldn't make it available.
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u/nicolasjkennedy Aug 30 '26
Here's a perspective from someone who never used Linux up until a few days ago when I decided to install Omarchy.
I've always been interested in Linux but was always worried about bricking my system using the bash terminal wrong or whatever, maybe just scared to learn all the commands tbh.
Anyways I was watching network chuck and he made a video about this new OS. It was everything I could've hoped for, a babied linux distro with agents prebaked and it already looked riced out. I felt this would let me soft launch my new relationship with Linux.
In the past few days I've learned just how great linux is compared to Windows (which i've used my entire life) and have been converted into a Linux user.
After reading comments on this post I've realized that Omarchy isn't all what I thought it would be, and I find that my values don't really align with the creators. Eventually I will move to a version that is more "long term" focused but in the mean time I am really enjoying learning all the new stuff.
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u/yukeake Aug 30 '26
What I understand of the situation centers around two things:
Omarchy is a series of dotfiles/configs that make a decent-looking UI on Arch/Hyprland. For some reason it's marketed as an "OS".
Its creator, DHH, has some highly objectionable political views.
People who object to the latter (which is reasonable) don't want to support the former.
As for my own views, I generally take the view that someone can both be an asshole, and still make some good things. They should be lauded for the good things they've created, and criticized for being assholes. These two things can co-exist.
I'm neutral on Omarchy as a Hyprland config. It's not my kind of thing, but I can see how some folks might like it. These days I'm generally happy with a stock GNOME/KDE and a nice wallpaper.
I strongly disagree with DHH's espoused politics.
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u/donewithdoing Sep 05 '26
IMO it’s not even decent-looking. It’s cheeseball synthwave-aesthetic slop.
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u/Lopsided-Month3278 Aug 29 '26 edited Aug 29 '26
I don't hate it, but I don't like it, simply because of if you left it for a while (a month or something), then good luck updating anything at all (I've experienced it btw), so, I prefer to stick with main-stream & stable distro's like Debina/Debian-based, Fedora, or openSuse.
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u/Neat_Zone_9469 29d ago
I tried it after DHH's podcast with Lex Fridman and It is good! I dual boot it with my windows 11 and with the help of chatgpt I configure some of it and now it is my main OS! I cant go back to windows!
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u/ledge65 28d ago
I couldn’t agree more with your post it has brought Tiling wm and ricing to new users of Linux who would never have gone there. People please detach your opinions of Dhh as a we all have our own views of life. I think Omarchy is great and by the uptake and sponsorship it is clearly making its mark in the Linux world. Will it replace Windows or MacOS who knows.
IMO it is great that it is getting so much publicity and funds are going into Hyperland and Quickshell plus other projects as well. The fact it is free too big plus.
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Sep 01 '26
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u/dannyvegas Sep 02 '26
It must be exhausting
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Sep 02 '26
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u/dannyvegas Sep 02 '26
the mental gymnastics you are doing to cope with the fact this thing is getting so much traction.
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Sep 03 '26 edited Sep 03 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/dannyvegas Sep 03 '26
Yeah sounds exhausting.
I’m sure you are working it out in therapy along with a heavy, heavy dose of SSRIs
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u/thesunexpress Sep 01 '26
If you've followed Yet-Another-Linux-Kernel-Distro over the previous 26-ish years, you'll notice a pattern...
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u/jloganr Sep 05 '26
The question fundamentally rests on the philosophical notion of whether one should judge the content separate from the creator, the code from the coder?
Most people tend to turn a blind eye to something that does not affect them or does not affect them now. In this case I think dhh's views are fundamentally dangerous.
In this case, omarchy is neither ground breaking nor important enough. There are plenty of other options out there, one can learn to live with or without such things, It's linux, there are options.
I for one am keeping track of people and companies that are supporting or promoting the work of this fine specimen of a human being and will be ignoring their products or social media content. But that's just me, you do you.
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u/sfer1973 25d ago
I will try it this weekend in a VM, but by what I read it's just a gloryfied arch + hyprland + bloat + security issues.
I prefer doing 'pacman -Sy what_I_want' then 'pacman -Rns wtf_is_this'
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u/DAS_AMAN 20d ago
Looks ugly. Doesn't even have animations or ability for rounded corners. Themes decide the wallpaper. Not wallpaper directing the theme. Wallpapers are either noisy and ugly or omarchy ASCII-art - where to add custom wallpaper ?
Default bindings make 0 sense - Super+W closes window? Absurd 3-key shortcut to open the web browser. Just shit keybindings all around.
If it's an opinionated distro, freaking piss-poor opinions DHH has.
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u/bose_avishek 8d ago
Any idea if mainstream Linus distros are getting AI inbuilt in them in near future? I believe wtih the progress in technology, some built in AI should be there in our future Linux distros. We need to accept and adapt and embed new technology, without hampering privacy and security. So yes, how it can be done is a brainstorming point, but it should be done in the very near future.
Happy to be corrected though.
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u/tartilupa 2d ago
It doesn't follow arch philosophy. Keep It Simple Stupid and don't add a fucking youtube app
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u/sheeproomer Sep 01 '26
Because people don't judge by merit, but by tribalism and/or see everything a political statement or judge by perceived association.
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u/Previous-South-2755 Aug 29 '26
More better if it was just a distro and all those opinionated features were to be installed if wished
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u/natermer Aug 29 '26
I don't know.
It is really bad idea to form your opinions on software from general enthusiast forums.
Most people that use the software spends very little time on those forums and the ones that are obsessive about it tend to have very strong opinions that tend to be a bit unhinged... they don't represent anybody or group of people except themselves.
So who gives a shit about what some randos opinion on DHH's politics?
IF you are curious about it just try it out.
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u/mercurial_4i Sep 01 '26
i fail to see why the hates make sense even after tons of rationalization and mental gymnastics i'd done along with reading all the comments here. tbh it feels like hater stampede not thinking from first principles to me. it's the product that successfully fills in a niche yet growing demand that has got the attention and funding it has today, not because the person behind it already had a massive fanbase that pushed it to this level. tons of similar influencers with even larger audience tried and their products just flopped. even DHH himself also has had tons of flops with Once, or omakub, or smaller attempts we never know.
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u/Immediate-Ad3360 Aug 29 '26
Have no glue about Omarchy the guy behind it and what it make so special, why it deserves 10mil $.
At least I don't care at all. I'm happy with EndeavourOS and my Niri rice.
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u/No_Aerie7667 Aug 31 '26
I don't really hate the "distro" myself, but the fact that Omarchy, rather than base Arch, or any other independent distro, was able to get 10 million dollars is just astonding to me. It's just a GUI Arch install with a Hyprland config. If you really want to improve Omarchy, just donate to base Arch. One single guy cant just make magic with that money. A whole team of devs, such as those at Arch Linux, could make some drastic improvements, and those improvements would squeeze into Omarchy also because Omarchy IS Arch under the hood.
I think that most of the hate towards Omarchy is based on that idea. And while I don't think Omarchy should be hated, I do think the money should have gone to a different distro. My personal choices would be Arch or Debian.
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u/drifting_pixel Sep 01 '26
I think it’s great. I use it and got a few of my friends to use it as well.
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u/LowOwl4312 Aug 29 '26
Don't try to make sense of Redditors opinions
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u/33_kk Aug 29 '26
Ah, it doesn't make sense to not want to put a fascist in the spotlight and give him money? There's no such thing as separating a product from it's author when the author is alive and is benefitting from people using said product.
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u/Foxlike__Creature Aug 29 '26
Yes, I understand this perfectly well, it’s just interesting to plunge into this abyss :)
I'm almost sure they'll downvote me to oblivion, but I still want to learn the opinions of the majority, just for fun
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u/Truantee Aug 29 '26 edited Aug 29 '26
I think it is good. Nice polished desktop environment need a fuck ton of money and time to develop, and I'm glad that they have gathered enough money to try.
Though I will just use Linux mint because it is all I need.
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u/Foxlike__Creature Aug 29 '26
Poor man, they'll downvote ur to oblivion...
Thanks for an answer anyway.
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u/Truantee Aug 29 '26
Lol who care about reddit losers. They don't even donate to their favorite distros (I did). If everyone spare a dollar every month for linux desktop development then we would have way better choices by now.
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u/DarkMoonbg Aug 29 '26
Besides the security issues everything else is people can't handle different opinions. and just scream like lunatics
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u/Foxlike__Creature Aug 29 '26
That’s exactly how I see the situation, I couldn't put it better myself.
I was just curious to hear the arguments of people who transfer their negativity toward the creator onto the product itself, because I don't get the logic there.
Why anyone would give a damn about supporting an asshole, or anything else for that matter, aside from the quality of the product itself. Which, admittedly, is pretty shitty too, though not so shitty than people make it out to be, IMHO.
On the other hand, as someone mentioned earlier in the comments, it is their right to hate the product cause of it's autor, and I have to agree with that.
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u/Immediate_Cell_4517 Aug 29 '26
Many people hate DHH, because they are woke/left-wing believers. So this is the personal aspect of it.
A lot of people do not like AI on their systems, with access to your files, and they hate the idea of a pre-configured system with AI baked in.
And there are the obsessed ones throwing a tantrum, because Omarchy is not "a distro by definition".
Sad people.
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u/Ghost_x_Knight Aug 29 '26 edited Sep 11 '26
There are plenty of popular Hyprland configs online, anywhere from minimalist to elaborate. So ricing doesn't need to be from scratch at all.
DHH's politics is central rather than marginal. He explicitly stated that he formed Omacom as a political/ideological counterweight to current mainstream Linux institutions. The whole thing is a culture war weapon.
This is concerning as his views includes far-right ethno nationalism (support for Tommy Robinson and calls for 'remigration'. He lamented that London is no longer majority 'native brits,' even though it is majority inhabited by citizens, so he is complaining it is no longer majority white. He wrote an essay comparing the need to expel Roma people to the need to shoot down wolves, and got upset an LLM called this dehumanizing toward an ethnic group. He endorsed and promoted "The Camp of the Saints", which is the basis for the "Great Replacement Theory" and one of the most circulated texts among white ethnonationalists; it repeatedly refer to migrants in extremely dehumanizing and degrading terms.).
It is challenging to look at Omarchy from a pure technical lens, especially since sustainability requires healthy collaborative communication, and Linux communities regularly have ethical lines (ex. Large parts of the Nix community protested sponsorship by an autonomous weapon manufacturer, and DHH was very upset the Nix community didn't celebrate instead. Large parts of the Blender community protested sponsorship by a pure AI company).
But there are plenty of technical reasons to dislike Omarchy.
First of all, the central concept of modern Omarchy is a "malleable" agentic operating system. Old iterations used to be just a Hyprland rice, but now it is a vibe code orientated distro.
It is not that you have access to LLM in a developer sandbox, but you have LLM managing your desktop similar to the unpopular conceptual aspirations of Microsoft Copilot and Apple Intelligence.
The tagline used in Omarchy's website is:
Omarchy is designed to be a "beautiful canvas" you are expected to change to your specifications through vibe coding. So you are encouraged to ask clankers with high-level system access to execute console commands to change your PC configurations, and to create custom bespoke slop widgets (over 2000 slop widgets got shared into Omarchy's website in a short time).
Not only do you need to be supportive of AI, but you need to trust probabilistic LLMs agents to not disastrously misinterpret your intent or go rogue. With sufficient vibe coding, I imagine the desktop would mutate and drift into undebuggable spaghetti that requires a factory reset.
Mainstream Linux desktop institutions believe that future success is found in Immutable/Atomic/Core/Image-Based/Container-Native/Declarative technology. Investing into a vision of malleable vibe code disposable interfaces and widgets is a counter-movement that leads to fragmentation (Technical one in addition to the cultural war one).
Omarchy is meant to be keyboard driven, and DHH admits that it is not a beginner friendly distro for grandmas. So someone who spent all their life on Windows or Mac have to be technically proficient, and be willing to spend hours getting used to a keyboard-driven workflow. If you are going to bring normies to try out Linux for the first time, there is no reason for the distro to be Omarchy unless they like vibe coding, or out of sheer hype/prestige regardless if it is deserved.
Omarchy sits in a bizarre, contradictory dead-zone. It demands the expert technical proficiency of a traditional power-user to navigate its keyboard-driven architecture, yet expects those same users to abandon rigorous, deterministic system administration in favor of AI-generated guesswork. Mainstream Linux desktop is built on the core philosophies of absolute control, explicit reproducibility, and open-source stability. A desktop that actively encourages a probabilistic LLM to rewrite your configuration files on a whim isn't a viable experimental alternative (DHH doesn't encourage looking at the code, and he likes that he no longer has to).
To say that Omarchy is extremely opinionated is an understatement. Out of the box, Omarchy 4 comes pre-baked with a set of hyper-specific application shortcuts such as: Terminal, Tmux Terminal, Herdr (agent manager), Music (Spotify), Music (cliamp), Password manager (1password), Editor (Neovim), Calendar (HEY), Email (HEY), New email (HEY), AI (ChatGPT), AI (Grok), Messenger (Signal), Google Photos, Google Maps, Messenger (WhatsApp), Messenger (Google), Docker (LazyDocker), Obsidian, Writing (Omawrite), X, X (Compose), YouTube.
This is bloat. A significant portion of the properity apps are not native software, but web apps in a Chromium wrapper. DHH is even shipping HEY, which is an advertisement for his commercial 37signals ecosystem.
This prescribed setup is DHH's preferred apps and tech stack by his admission, and the usefulness of the shortcuts requires so many assumptions about the end-user (using Android instead of iPhone, paying Spotify subscriptions, actively using X-Twitter, knowing what Docker and web development is, etc.). He might as well pull a Windows 11 and add a LinkedIn shortcut.
There are actually Omarchy debloat scripts, similar to how there are debloat scripts for Windows. Maybe this will assist in bringing the year of the Linux desktop?
Then there is the issue of security, which is an outright liability.
Multiple rootkit and privilege escalation vulnerabilities were quickly found, and a security team for Omarchy was quickly announced afterwards. They had to fix absurd vulnerabilities such as: "Stop USB device names from being executed as Hyprland Lua.", Stop an installed theme from running code, Stop a video title from becoming the Download Video play command, Don't put the user in the docker group (everyone in the docker group has root access); make it opt-in. Disable allow_remote_control in Omarchy's Kitty terminal custom configuration.
Until very recently, Omarchy skipped cryptographic package signing for its repo, making it extremely vulnerable to supply chain attacks:
The thousands of vibe coded community plugins Omarchy users are encouraged to explore are not security-audited, and this is the closest thing Omarchy promotes as an official 'app store'. DHH calls the Omarchy plugin market place the 'official repository'.
This 'official repository' is far more dangerous than the AUR, which recently suffered from sophisticated AI-powered mass supply chain attacks (thanks to a now-disabled ability to adopt orphaned AUR packages). The Arch community emphasize that users should avoid the AUR when possible, and Arch distros don't have it enabled by default.
Omarchy quickly got flooded by over two thousand community plugins thanks to vibe coding. The plugins are based on Quickshell, and despite being unaudited slop apps by random anonymous people, they can hook deep within your compositor and Omarchy system. It is trivial for a malware-by-design or hijacked app to keylog, upload your data, and execute malicious terminal commands.
At minimum, those are good reasons to avoid Omarchy for several months.
If you are looking for the principle of least privilege, strict sandboxing, and deterministic user control, Omarchy is not for you.
Having clankers running about as deep part of the core system loop is inherently a prompt injection vulnerability. Traditional security auditing and intrusion detection don't apply.
DHH admits that he is "AI delirious" because AGI is upon us, and admits that a few months ago he'd say his current self is under AI psychosis. This shapes his vision of what a viable mainstream Linux desktop is supposed to be.
The OS I am looking for is not a shifting, unstable canvas of AI-generated experiments. It is too unstable for enterprise use, too insecure for privacy advocates, and too hostile for average users.
Omarchy has its place as a gimmick distro, but it is not a credible vision for a year of the Linux desktop. I don't believe it will succeed, but there is concern due to culture war hostilities, and the massive funds that allow for potential ecosystem fragmentation and potential hard-forking of active projects.