Power grab
156 points by rudis
156 points by rudis
Ugh, I didn't know about Digital Ocean donating. Time to move out.
The same Digital Ocean whose CEO tried to tell his employees that ‘my old mentor was in the KKK, so you should bend your principles to accommodate transphobes’?
It’s incredible how morally compromised someone can be and seemingly not realize it.
The Omarchy publicity push has been quite motivating in terms of actually following through on my plans to get off DO this time.
What are the best alternatives if I just need a cheap/reliable VPS? Been with DO for 13 years 🙃
Hetzner, if you can stomach the higher-than-reasonable prices (their service itself is excellent), or Netcup if you want better value for your money; their root servers in particular are competitively priced.
Vultr is plenty cheap and pretty good from experience. I imagine if you're using DO for personal projects it'll work just fine. Can't say for professional projects.
I’m using Vultr professionally and it used to be great but it seems to be having growing pains. I have just finished moving a tonne of stuff off AWS and we’ve had a couple of outages. Not super happy right now but from previous good experience I’m gonna give them a bit of time to sort themselves out.
I swapped my DO personal toys about a year ago to https://colocataires.dev/
I'm sure on any actual metric of cheap or reliable it's nothing special but I deliberately picked a hosting tier that was the same price as my $10 droplet and haven't noticed any issues
The only way for me to change anything about my account is to directly email somebody with the temperament of a nice fediverse user, which is a plus i think
I started moving my stuff to Hetzner, but mostly because I wanted an European company -- now I'm worried that they're also supporting fascists.
One interesting option is sdf.org, it's likely a safe bet from a political perspective.
Submitted because it posits an answer to something I wondered about, viz. “what would this distro even do with that much money?”
Pay social media influencers to promote his collection of scripts and political agenda?
All spice aside, it's a good question, because there's nothing in the current omarchy landscape that would justify that much money. Even paying some full-time engineers, or hosting the website/plugins, or the pipeline, or spending tokens, ...
Sponsor cash-strapped upstream projects in exchange for removing codes of conduct and similar :/
Related post: https://floss.social/@serebit/117242959044264331
it's about promoting and rewarding mediocrity. if you're so toxic people shun you, and therefore your project is at risk then an infusion of cash ensures you can continue to promote your mediocrity.
Some examples, from their web site:
Beauty is truth
Heritage is duty [barely a dogwhistle]
What is it with fascists and meaningless, usually plagiarised idioms? Keats' use of "beauty is truth, truth beauty..." was charming in context - for your manifesto you should try defining what this means.
I agree(edit: with the sentiment of the article), but I am going to add that there are so many other good things in Linux-land happening worth your time and money, so here is a non-exhaustive list:
And even more down there are things like Wayland, Pipewire, AccessKit and all kinds of other underpaid developers that can be shown the spotlight.
There are some common complaints about drivers/DRM stuff, but this is where we can step in by offering help.
Also: Dank Material Shell deserves a shoutout IMO. The project is still young, but it provides a fully featured shell that is window-manager agnostic (I'm using it with Sway, I think most people use it with niri).
Noctalia is a pretty cool DE-lite to go along with Niri
A few months ago funnily enough I was thinking of Dank Material Shell(DMS), also mentioned by @wofo, and Noctalia, and couldn't make up my mind! The distro I ended up with used DMS and I always ment to go try out Noctalia as well.
A cool project that both(well it seems Noctalia moved away from it?) built upon: https://quickshell.org/
A bit disappointed but the fash apologism in this thread
I'm more disappointed in the moderators. Honestly its the second thread this week where there is overt-racism. And bad faith arguing barely masquerading as 'nuanced views'. By the same people. No public action taken.
I'm gonna take a couple of days to cool off, but if the mods don't handing out bans like candy I'm out. I have no interest in participating in a Nazi bar.
And no, the problem is not allowing this kind of stories to be discussed in the site. Discussing 'only tech' with bigots its not an improvement on the current situation.
I really wish people would pour all that energy into building some proper competition to Omarchy on similar ideas.
what could you compete with Omarchy on? I find it completely baffling that Omarchy got all that money. Isn't it just arch with some dotfiles preinstalled? Who wants that?
At least in my case, Omarchy is what got me to finally jump ship from Windows. It's opinionated and has defaults that, for my workflows, make more sense than what other distros are doing. I've since moved on because it's heavily vibecoded and the quality was just not what I'm looking for in an operating system (poor security, stuff breaking across updates, etc).
I ended up moving to Dank Linux, which I'd say is similar in spirit and has better development practices. It can be installed on top of a normal distro (I'm on Fedora), and it gives you a proper shell on top of the tiling window manager of your choice. Also, there is an actual community behind it (I recently submitted my first PR) and they use LLMs without worshipping them.
That is a long way to say: Omarchy is more than just some dotfiles. I'm glad there are alternatives like Dank Linux.
Can you elaborate on what defaults were better and how other popular distros don't measure up?
See my other comment. In summary: as far as I know, there is no distro that comes out of the box with a tiling window manager + a shell that is easy to use. That is what I was referring to, because there are other Omarchy defaults that are acually quite bad (like bundled apps, disabled security settings, etc).
Don’t want to play the grey beard but installing a window manager is litterally one command away in any single linux distribution (apt install sway in Debian/Ubuntu).
You might say that "you don’t know the command but it’s litteraly the first thing one should learn when installing a Linux distribution. (if you are someone wanting to get into tiling manager and shell, I assume learning a command is something you can do)
installing a window manager is litterally one command away in any single linux distribution (apt install sway in Debian/Ubuntu)
Surely one needs to do more than that to make the WM actually do anything useful?
(I've been using a tiling WM for at least a decade on NixOS but never used Debian.)
Plenty of tutorials online for different distros. Plus, you can always go with Fedora i3 or Sway spin or whatever the equivalent is for Ubuntu if that's more your thing.
popos ships with cosmic out of the box. desktop environment with a toggleable autotiling mode. you can also just install cosmic in your existing distro, I've been using it happily for a while now.
And before Cosmic, PopOS had a tiling window manager plugin for Gnome that presumably would work in any distro.
If you install CachyOS (Arch-based) it lets you choose from several desktops, etc. niri+DMS is an option, dead easy to use.
Omarchy has the ambition to make a mainstream curated desktop Linux mainstream operating system. The last time this really happened was with Ubuntu which sadly abandoned the Desktop for the most part.
I suppose this depends on your definition of "curated", but as far as mainstream goes there are already plenty of far more reliable/stable and not problematic options, the most notable one being the Fedora project and maybe the Bluefin/Bazzite spin-offs.
Also let's be real here: the only reason Omarchy took off in the first place is because it's being pushed by DHH. Had literally anybody else done it, people would've just scoffed at it. Any competition wouldn't take off for that same reason.
Mainstream? With a tiling WM? The curation appears to amount to a button that brings up Grok and a button that brings up the X post form window. If someone wants these things, that's fine, but I don't see how this is interesting or important. What does Omarchy even do different? I truly don't get it. It seems to me to be the sort of thing that a relatively inspired teenager could recreate in an afternoon after looking at cool unix screenshots on reddit.
I truly don't get it
There is no intrinsic technical value in Omarchy, it's a very subjective thing "ambition" and thus influence is more important here than the actual experience. You don't have to engage at all with valid alternatives if you have enough influence to redefine what "curated for mainstream" means for a group of people that like you already or heard of you.
Practically speaking, we need to signal better to person that Ubuntu/Fedora is a great choice if you're looking for something that "just works". Heck I'd even recommend Linux Mint to people that use desktops only for emails. For more h4ck3rs stuff there is CachyOS.
Basically there is no "one size fits all solution" for mainstream consumption because then you'd just end up with some weird Windows like vibe imo.
For more h4ck3rs stuff there is CachyOS
I suppose this is the target Omarchy is going for, the person who sees a cool r/unixporn (God I hate this redditism of *porn...) post and wants the same. But I thought the fun was making your own, not downloading someone else's... This is what baffles me. What's the point of a cool hackerman environment that you don't understand?
There is a subsection of tech enjoyers that would like the ricing but without the effort. They might have had a bad experience with Linux several years ago(think an update ruining their dots idk) or they think that they have to go and do like a lot of manual config work for things to work for stuff that just works in Windows/Mac. That is they want keyboard-driven, consistent colorscheme'd apps that works with games and other generally not-FOSS software.
Those people really have great options these days(not-Omarchy!), but those aren't always obvious.
But I thought the fun was making your own, not downloading someone else's... This is what baffles me.
I like ricing, but I'd also want something with good defaults!
I think Omarchy exposes tiling window managers to a new audience, similar to how Rust opened a door for Ruby/JS/etc people to get into systems programming. That was my case: I used to think TWMs were something for folks who spend their lives tweaking their emacs config to perfection. I want to get stuff done, not go hunting for the perfect combination of packages to build up a custom shell. Omarchy showed me I could have a TWM without all the suffering. When I decided to switch away from it, I couldn't go back to plain gnome / KDE. I feel lucky to have found Dank Linux as an alternative, which I mentioned elsewhere in the comments.
I mean, KDE Linux is a good example of what you're asking for, but you're also intentionally playing ignorant. You're not stupid (you're far smarter than me) so don't pretend to be to troll on Lobsters. Just look at Distrowatch, probably 25 of the top 30 distros are trying to be a curated mainstream operating system. Omarchy is actual buggy shit. We all know why Omarchy got $18,000,000 and it's because the project lead hates brown people and trans people, it's a real attempt at a corporate takeover of open source.
ElementaryOS has been working on having a curated desktop experience that just works. They have poured quite a bit of energy into it, even going so far as building their applications so that they align with their HIG. Pretending that better options than Omarchy for the average user don't exist or that no-one else is working towards that goal is disingenuous.
mainstream curated desktop Linux mainstream
I've used openSUSE Tumbleweed for years. It feels pretty "works out of the box" for me. Trying out Fedora, that also seems to have reasonable defaults.
I'd call most distros I've tried lately "good." It feels like choice paralysis and a lack of one ultra-polished standout distro everyone can agree on.
This thread (and) is a decent take at it, but my tl;dr/understanding is that it sells a vision and product (or more cynically put, marketing/branding) out of the Linux parts bin. A lot of is cribbed from making /r/unixporn type hacker-windows-with-tiling-WM, just without the effort. I personally don't think it's worth $12M and especially not giving that to DHH, but there is a market for that sort of product. Now it just needs to be built.
If nothing else, I do appreciate that threads like this produce lists of interesting projects I hadn't heard about (such as @zetashift's https://lobste.rs/s/be7tgu/power_grab#c_kkkkmh).
Is there even anything to compete against? I mean, this Omarchy is essentially an Arch Linux spinoff. It's just DHH's system configuration.
Wish those millions had gone to Arch Linux itself instead.
My proposal is making NixOS easily usable with a GUI, somehow. Make it do what Synaptic did for APT ages ago. Back when I was six years old, I was using this old distro, Pardus, and it had a similar package installer like Synaptic, and even if I had used Windows XP before Pardus was on our home computer, I had no trouble installing games at that age.
In the last six months, I have switched to NixOS and it has never once broken. It truly amazes me. It is such an incredible time saver.
If Nix is easily usable with a mouse and a search bar and other helpful stuff, with an actually robust GUI that will accomodate users who are scared of the terminal, I sincerely think Linux could be unstoppable. Especially when you integrate other stores to it, like Flatpak, and include easy to use Windows compatibility layers, like Bottles or even Boxes.
The plus side of it is, you could offer dotfile stores that would completely destroy Omarchy in every capacity when it comes to choice in aesthetics.
(Why choose NixOS over the amazing efforts of the Guix team? Hardware compatibility.)
IMO that is a hard task, especially if you’re targeting more mainstream technical folks.
After daily driving NixOS for 2 years on multiple systems I can really only recommend it to those that want to take the plunge and try something new. You can do great things with it, but I find it hard to sell somebody on for their whole OS. And I really love NixOS. I’ll gab to anybody who will listen.
Devenv or flakes with devshells are an easier sell since they solve more common problems.
I recently ran into this interaction between DHH and some Nix guy in which DHH expressed interest in moving Omarchy to NixOS and I'm very worried. We already have a problem with right-wingers in the Nix community and we really don't need any more. If this goes to port I might just consider switching to Guix.
Website Formerly Known as Twitter link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eGdDDaSi-sA
Website Formerly Known as Twitter link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eGdDDaSi-sA
I think you got the wrong link there :)
Calling people "fascist" is such an easy copout instead of actually interacting with their position in good faith. Almost everyone believes countries should have immigration laws; it's a question of what the details are and how those laws should be implemented. Most of us believe a country's people should have self-determination on how many immigrants we allow; it's just that DHH seems to believe this should apply to historically-white countries as well as historically-brown ones.
I'm a New Zealander, and believe the Maori in the 1850s should have had a lot more say in how many European immigrants arrived. It wasn't that the Maori didn't want any immigrants or were "fascists"; it was that they didn't realize how many immigrants they were signing up for in a short time. And the European population overtook their numbers in a few decades and really changed the landscape (that and a few greedy, land-grabbing businessmen spoiled it for the good guys).
I wouldn't have written those articles the way DHH did. The one with the wolf analogy is just asking for more heat than light. But it seems to me that people can't read, either that or are intentionally reading in bad faith. In the London one: why shouldn't the British people have self-determination? Aren't the historical "natives" of a region allowed to have opinions (like the Maori)? In the Wolves one: do people not understand analogy? Of course he's not suggesting shooting people; that's an obviously bad faith reading of the analogy. (Listen to his recent interview with Lex.) Cleaning up the parks and tightening immigration policies? That's what he actually says; a good faith reading.
I wouldn't mind having a beer with the author of this article. I wouldn't mind having a beer with DHH. Guess that makes me guilty by association all around! But honestly, let's get back to talking with people we differ with, even if we differ strongly. Maybe we'll find we're not (om)arch-enemies after all.
Powerful people should be held to a higher standard, because their words have more influence. If DHH just wanted to clean up parks and tighten immigration policies, he is presumably intelligent enough to argue for those changes without comparing a group of people to wolves that were culled. Yet, he keeps making inflammatory comments like that. It's a pattern that I've seen enough of (from him specifically), that I have a strongly negative view of his character. And, yes, that means I want to avoid tech projects that he controls, because I don't want him to gain any more power.
This is such a weird comment to me in general. I don't see how people can have such fence-sitting positions about this guy given what's out there, publicly said, and who he associates with.
a country's people
Apparently DHH only cares about Denmark's people if those people are native Danes, and only cares about London's people if those people are "native brits".
What he has been saying doesn't just mean too many "immigrants" (which is weird in and of itself), it implies too many non-white people --- regardless of whether these non-white people are good citizens contributing to the local economy + community --- there's just not enough white people around according to DHH... and that scares him? Weird, honestly. So DHH wants to see more white people when he walks around London. That's really fcking weird, isn't it? It is to me. You'd go for a beer with this guy? I mean hey, that's up to you.
I am brown, so i don't think DHH would want to sit down for a beer with me. Fortunately I don't drink, but regardless, I'd rather not see what DHH's behaviour is when he is drunk and around brown people.
Likening brown people in London to the British colonists of New Zealand is... A choice, I suppose.
Why do you believe that the historical natives of Britain, by which I assume you mean Anglo-Saxons or possibly Normans, do not have self-determination? What external group or entity other than British citizens is overruling the historical natives to increase immigration numbers beyond what would otherwise be allowed?
a country's people
That's what it all boils down to. Who are the people who make up a nation?
There is essentially no way to even debate this question anywhere without making enemies left and right.
I'm a New Zealander, and believe the Maori in the 1850s should have had a lot more say in how many European immigrants arrived. It wasn't that the Maori didn't want any immigrants or were "fascists"; it was that they didn't realize how many immigrants they were signing up for in a short time. And the European population overtook their numbers in a few decades and really changed the landscape (that and a few greedy, land-grabbing businessmen spoiled it for the good guys).
That's a remarkably revisionist look at settler colonialism, and actually goes to show the hypocrisy of racists such as DHH, and such as yourself: when white Europeans immigrate en masse to a land already inhabited (be it New Zealand, Australia, America, Canada, even Palestine), it's just OK, though the indigenous people should have had "more of say" about it. When non-Europeans immigrate to Europe, they're wolves and we white folks are sheep: "Of course I'm not calling for brown people to be shot like wolves, I'm just making an analogy!" "Of course I'm not saying all of them are raping our white daughters, it's just that a lot of them do it!" "Of course I'm not saying all Roma people are shitting in our parks, but they are shitting in our parks". "Of course I'm not saying there should only be white immigration to Denmark, it's just that French people contribute to our economy and Somalis cost our economy." "Of course this could turn into overt racism, I'm just raising valid questions". What a bunch of racist hogwash.
There was this person whose ideas I didn't like. I thought his ideas were toxic and terrible. I banded together with others who knew him to be wrong and me to be right. There were many of us. We gathered together and banished him from our village. Many years later that man came back with a horde of other men who had similarly been banished from their villages and burned our village to the ground.
This parable is too vague. Let's make it specific!
I thought his ideas were toxic and terrible.
Specifically, he's going around saying that your family should be rounded up and shot or expelled. He thinks you're inherently dirty, and that you don't belong in the village. The best thing for the village, in his view, is that you should be exposed to the elements during winter, or at least enslaved.
Do you think this man means well for the village, or do you think he wants to burn it down?
parable
I don't know @kghose or what exactly happened, but I get the impression that people here are just assuming that @kghose is just making up this story of the village being burned down (perhaps because they come from countries where this doesn't happen), which I think seems insensitive.
I do, however, question the applicability of the story. Is there actually reason to think the $18M faction actually wants to attack and destroy other Linux distros?
I really need to stop assuming that I'm good at writing about the bigger picture, so I'm sorry for making you look for a literal meaning in the parable.
I try to see the larger patterns and commonalities in things across the world and across history. I am especially affected by what is happening in the United States. I tried to put all my thoughts together for you, but I didn't come up with something more readable than the parable.
So I'm glad at least you tried to put all the fragments together.
The short of it is that DHH is not your (my) enemy. Even that $18 million dollars is not the enemy. In fact (and this was the hardest thing I had to figure out) even the people who are giving that $18 M dollars aren't the enemy.
You do know what that leaves right? Yes my friend. I have met the enemy and it is us.
You're as naive as a two year old with a four leaf clover if you think fascism isn't at fault and the Linux community is.
I always wonder who gives the facists power? And why. The people who join up with the fascists, why do they do it? Probbaly because they feel powerless with the whatever the alternative is.
So the important question to answer is why are there are so many people who feel they are powerless if they don't join the fascists.
The man made threats against me and my family. If I had known he would grow so powerful I would have tried to understand him better. Instead I imagined I was stronger than him, so I forced ill upon him, believing my strength would always prevail.
If you understand him and empathise with him better, will Putin pull out of Ukraine? Grow up man.
When I convinced people to banish the man who had made threats against my family, I found many supporters. The man had not harmed any of my supporters. I was very happy to receive this support for it made me feel powerful.
Only later, as my village burned, I wondered why so many uninvolved people had been so eager to encourage my vengeance and to join me in punishing that man. I wondered if the people who joined me to harm the man, were, in some way, the same as that man himself.
So banishing someone who would literally round up your family and shoot or expel them is the aggressive act here and that's the hill you want to die on? Weird.
Many years later I learned that the man made threats against my family because his mind had been poisoned against me. There are many things I can not be sure of, but I am sure that because I formed a group to banish him, he found it easier to believe the lies he was told about me because now I had harmed him.
Could you speak in anything other than goofy analogy?
It seems like you think our current political situation is happening is because people were too dang mean to the poor ol’ racists.
In the United States at least I think we got to where we are currently because we were too eager to call each other racists (and many other things, and whatever it is people who are called racists and the other things call the people who are calling them racists) and we were too content to just stop there instead of actually talking and listening to the other person.
We did this for selfish reasons. It is much easier (and satisfying) to unleash anger at someone else than to actually try and understand where they come from.
(As an inadvertent side-effect we gave people making off-hand and provocative comments a lot of power by giving them a lot of attention simply for making those comments, thereby encouraging said people to make even more of such comments.)
This is of course very convenient for people who thirst for power, because a divided polity will not effectively defend their own interests and are ripe for exploitation. But these people are simply exploiting a situation we created for ourselves.
Thank you for the straightforward reply. FWIW, I disagree, I think a lot of the problems are that we were too nice to racists. That in the name of ‘reaching across the isle’ and ‘keeping the peace’ allowed them to build control and power in egregious and harmful ways.
If people like Elon and Thiel and Murdoch were stripped of their power they wouldn’t have the ability to wield it against us like they’re doing now.
I don’t think they are destroying society because they are bitter and being unjustly accused. IMO they were justly accused but we did not stop them when we had the chance
I don't know if Elon and Thiel and Murdoch are racists but I know that they are extremely rich and like thousands of other extremely rich people and organizations in the country, they buy the government so they can have special rules for themselves.
They can buy the government because we are atrociously bad at hiring (electing) people to responsible positions.
We are bad at this because we focus on an adversarial relationship with each other and hire officials who also emphasize this adversarial relationship.
People who want power relish this situation because it's hard work to fix structural issues and much easier to remain in power by prolonging and exacerbating adverserial issues.
I don't know if Elon and Thiel and Murdoch are racists
You don't think that people like Musk, who do Nazi salutes in public are racists. Really?
Or that call for ethnic cleansing through reimigration, which means stripping citizens of their nationality and to [try to] deport them to countries which they likely aren't citizens of. And that calls anyone that is against reimigration a traitor. Non-x secondary source: "Anyone who opposes remigration is a traitor". https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c5y4w5nwk00o
Exactly, you get it. The village was completely right the first time around. The man's actions have proven the village's point. The village's only fault was not defending itself with more vigor.
The village's only fault was not defending itself with more vigor.
Do we know that @kghose's village could have defended itself successfully from this man's "horde"? Or are you saying that, instead of banishing the man, they ought to have killed the man to begin with?
That's where the analogy breaks down. There is no horde. There are just a few fascist symphathizers and corporate funding.
Mark my words, in a few years, no one will be talking about Omarchy. Because to carry a distro, you need to have an actual, quality opinion about computing. And DHH has none. His opinions are about power and who should wield it over whom.
(You might bring up Ruby on Rails, but that ignores the "quality" constraint. Mutable state with OOP? Jesus, how much more basic and short-sighted can you get? At least Java has a quality VM. And what does RoR have? I've yet to see it.)
There is no horde.
Well, I had taken the story about the village being burned down literally, but it does seem I was mistaken.
Because to carry a distro, you need to have an actual, quality opinion about computing.
I don't think I am so optimistic that money can't substitute for "quality opinion[s] about computing" at least for "a few years", but I would agree that this distro seems likely insignificant in the long term (even the short long term of software).
They are going to hunt you down and force you to use fascist software!!1 They are going to make wayland secrety display swastikas and systemd jail left wing processes!
A right wing millionaire got some toy money for their clanky vanity Linux distro. That's it. "Power grab". It can't be that people who we disagree with are using Open Source. That's unacceptable. Give me a break.
What's wrong with anything DHH and Omarchy has said?
The article links https://brennan.day/normalized-fascism-in-open-source-12-million-given-to-dhh/ which I think is a good summary.
As far as I can tell Zamicol just signalled political agreement with DHH, at least some cursory browsing of their website raises a bunch of eyebrows
I had a hunch, but I'm trying to give some benefit of the doubt just in case. I think it's worth it to try to approach things optimistically when you can.
It's empty name calling. "dhh is a fascist!"
This is bad faith, and even worse, reddit like, behavior.
"no longer full of native Brits"—a claim that redefines "native Brit" to mean "white."
Is a bold face lie. The word "white" doesn't even appear in the article.
That's just the tip of the iceberg.
The word "white" doesn't even appear in the article.
I found this article to have a pretty convincing rebuttal:
(Update: for the avoidance of doubt that David is talking about whiteness here, when he makes his claim that London is only a third “native Brit” he references this Wikipedia post on London ethnicity statistics where the most recent census data shows 36.8% of individuals identifying as White British, excluding all those that identify as either Asian or Black British from his made up “native Brit” classification.)
So the actual numbers he cites only match white Brits, not people born in Britain.
Is a bold face lie. The word "white" doesn't even appear in the article.
In that article, DHH claims that in the 2000's sixty percent of London was "native Brits" and in 2024 they are about third. To support that claim, they link to a Wikipedia entry about the Ethnic groups in London. The Wikipedia entry and the census themselves use the term "White British". So it is DHH that is equating "Native Brit" to mean "White British".
If this is just about immigrants of any race, where are the blog posts about, I dunno, Danish software developers who immigrate to the United States then? When's ICE breaking down DHH's door?