omarchy is not a distro
109 points by j3s
109 points by j3s
See also “A Word on Omarchy”, discussed on Lobsters 7 months ago with 156 comments. That article called Omarchy “not an actual Linux distribution”, among other things, and a few Lobsters commenters agreed.
Some folks arguing the definition of “distro”, but I think we’re all forgetting something important.
DHH is known to be a fascist. Like, has spouted conspiracy theories publicly fascist.
And Framework gave him free stuff and publicity. There’s gotta be some kind of capital G Grift going on here.
On X he alternates between promoting Omarchy and promoting a book he's recently read and fell in love with called The Camp of the Saints.
“The Camp of the Saints” is popular among white nationalists and neo-Nazis because of the degree to which it fictionalizes the “white genocide” or “great replacement” myth into a violent and sexualized story about refugees.
The novel’s apocalyptic plot centers on a flotilla of Indian people who invade France, led by a nonwhite Indian-born antagonist referred to as the “turd eater” – a character who literally eats human feces. In one section, a white woman is raped to death by brown-skinned refugees. In another, a nationalist character shoots and kills a pro-refugee leftist over his support of race mixing. The white nationalist Social Contract Press plucked the 1973 book from relative obscurity and distributed it in the United States.
Man has repeatedly tweeted his praise for this book. He's so far gone it's not even fucking funny.
I hate this line.
Label someone a fascist and now nothing they touch can be good. Defend something they say and now you are a fascist too.
This approach is itself evil and opposed to freedom of expression. Please stop it.
” Label someone a fascist”
I mean the one who did the fascism was DHH, if you want to be upset at anyone, aim at the source.
DHH labeled himself a fascist with this blog post.
He said:
I thought I might move there one day.
That was then. Now, I wouldn't dream of it. London is no longer the city I was infatuated with in the late '90s and early 2000s. Chiefly because it's no longer full of native Brits. In 2000, more than sixty percent of the city were native Brits. By 2024, that had dropped to about a third. A statistic as evident as day when you walk the streets of London now.
(If you don't want to go look up the stat, he's explicitly excluding anyone who's not ethnically English from "native Brits", even though they are, by any reasonable definition, native.)
while also endorsing a fascist in the same post. This is self-labeling.
Is it possible for fascists to make things untainted by fascism? Eh. Maybe theoretically.
But as OP mentions, Omarchy literally has a default keybind to open the intentionally fascist LLM, so…yeah there’s not much grey area here.
I was wondering if I'd see this mentioned here. I wanted a Framework but I refuse to touch anything DHH is connected with unless I've got to use Rails for a project. F that fascist
I don’t particularly disagree with anything stated here.
I think that if anything Omarchy proves that marketing, not technical purity, gets eyes.
More eyes on Linux, for me personally, is a better thing.
Canonical, for example, is arguably harming the ecosystem in a more fundamental way than a bunch of shitty dotfiles slapped onto Arch.
In order to convince me that Omarchy is a net negative, you’d first have to prove:
that it is harmful to the ecosystem (theoretically easy, bad reputation is harmful for example).
that it is not rising the tide of linux adoption.
If it is growing the pie of Linux users, and they’re having a good time, and it doesn’t “infect” the way open source works w.r.t. Linux- then I struggle to see the grievance.
“Not liking it” is why we have distros in the first place, and I agree in principle about the dotfiles being opinionated and that this is the only compelling thing… but, sometimes that really is all a distro is. They nearly always stand on the back of giants. (Manjaro for Arch, early Ubuntu with Debian, etc).
I’m not sure where you draw the line but I remember when people said Ubuntu wasn’t a distribution because it was just Debian rehosted.
Also in Ubuntu: there used to be the Amazon button, which feels similar to the complaint about Omarchy pushing bloatware and commercial businesses.
(I still think Ubuntu is a distro, though.)
Is the definition of "distro" meaningful?
They have an ISO, and it's a package of Linux + other software. Isn't that pretty much what a distro is?
I don't get why it's less of a distro because it has a key binding to open Hey.com and a script to install NordVPN. Nor why having a conference and merchandise makes it less a distro.
Ubuntu comes with AppArmor, Snap and a default wallpaper image depicting an African animal. Aren't those things also somebody's opinion? In other words: opinionated.
Whenever somebody has had an opinion in a decision in their Linux bundle, does it stop being a distro then suddenly?
The bar for "distro" is extremely low; which is to say: it's just any preconfigured distribution of Linux software. What the author meant is it's not a meaningful distro, such that it barely qualifies as one anyone should even consider.
It's so incredibly meaningless, that it really beggars belief to see so much financial support for a multi-millionaire's pet Arch configuration that he announced to the world in the usual narcissistic acclaim -- with worship from his sycophantic tech bro followers.
Like why is Cloudflare sponsoring a rich dude's pet project? Why not just Arch, which is the actual foundation? Why, specifically, is anyone okay with DHH, who has voiced white supremacist opinions? How and why does an already rich guy get even more financial support and acclaim, but the distro he is basing his "distro" on, is not getting similar or greater support? What maintenance does his little preconfigured setup require? Why not fund and support the Arch devs that do 99.99% of the effort to make his "distro" exist? Astonishing, really.
I think it's a meaningless distinction to draw.
Are you downloading an Linux install ISO from a website? Congratz. It's a distribution.
Holding the concept of "Linux distribution" to any high regard seems pointless, especially when FashOS is just technically bad in its own right.
there are degrees to it, most distros either fully host their entire pipeline or provide a partial setup based on an existing system, Omarchy does nothing and only fulfills the lowest form of "distro"
I don't get why it's less of a distro because it has a key binding to open Hey.com and a script to install NordVPN.
Dunno about being a distro or not, but it does make it hot garbage.
Well, who maintains the distro? Fundamentally we're talking about a reskin of Arch, not a meaningfully independent project which stands on its own merits and has its own maintainers. I don't see a single kernel patch in their tree and I doubt that they actually dogfood their homelabs and businesses on it. Meanwhile, Ubuntu's maintained by Canonical, and you previously mentioned Fedora, maintained by Red Hat. This is relevant for extending the distro; if I want to fork it, where should I start my fork and who should I want as my upstream maintainers? Even if DHH were not a white supremacist, I'd still prefer Arch's maintainers as my upstream!
I think the title misses the point. I don't think whether it's a distro matters. Is my NixOS configuration that manages ~5 computers for 2 people a distro? Maybe. Who cares. Is it bad that a Linux "distro" includes proprietary software by default and makes it easy to use a racist LLM? Maybe. IMO it does more good than harm; I think having control over your hardware is more valuable than not using proprietary software and services, though the racist LLM part is particularly distasteful.
This is the most important point:
and why does it have a conference, sponsors, and merchandise?
especially when longstanding distros like Debian have struggled with funding and sponsorship for decades?
Is it bad that a rich fascist techbro's collection of dotfiles slapped over an established distro is getting more funding than the distro it builds upon just because the techbro has clout? Yes, in all its facets.
attention economy at it's best. so predictable and boring. can't wait for the "let's make money" spin.
It is very confusing why anybody who used it or knew much about it would promote it. I’m not ready to accept that it’s just people who fall in the same social circle or have similar politics trying to promote one of their own yet, but the longer it is taking for interest in Omarchy to naturally fade away, the less tenable that is.