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74% Positive
Analyzed from 7107 words in the discussion.
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#omarchy#dhh#security#linux#don#political#distro#more#arch#politics
Discussion Sentiment
Analyzed from 7107 words in the discussion.
Trending Topics
Discussion (321 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
The funders are not funding the development of a Linux distro, they are co-signing the political statement.
I don't mean to get distracted from the topic at hand, but is that really true? If I create my own software stack for the TRMNL display I received as a gift because I think it's fun and interesting, is that a political statement? What politics does that involve? If someone makes a small Rust library that implements some days structure and a few hundred people find it useful, what political stance is intrinsically baked in by the author?
It's exhausting to go through life if you think every field is a battlefield.
That your TRMNL even allows you to write software for it is a choice (a cool one at that), and contributing to their ecosystem supports that choice.
In essence the human right and ability to learn and change and wield computers at an unlocked and low level is a policy decision.
What if governments said programs must be from companies and users should not be allowed to write their own programs, operating systems must be locked down to keep users safe or some bs 'think of the children' excuse.
Especially Linux and OSS is a political manifesto design specifically to stop this kind of government overreach from taking root. It would certainly benefit shareholders of large computer companies to the detriment of the individual user's freedoms.
It's easy to see a perspective like that where software is political. Politics is not a battlefield, that's an American two party system trick.
Seeing the word politics doesn't immediately mean bad or divisive.
I don't think Omarchy is anti-political so much as an attempt to revive the enthusiast/hacker ethos of the OSS community.
Do basically, they got 8 millions dollars of funding, they bragged and criticized others in linux and said some political stuff, they were also criticized by others including political stuff from the other side (not sure of the order). Finally it became viral enough for people looking at the security of the distro and found many issues.
Personally I like my Linux distro like my coffee: competently managed, with a minimum of drama and with having to hear the less assholes possible.
Yes, DHH has conservative political leanings, but the vast majority of people who have tried out Omarchy either don't know or don't care. The project is in no way consumed by politics. The commenter's brain obviously is, and they are seeing everything through that lens.
HN is better when the discourse doesn't revolve around reactionary political extremism. 99% of the energy going into the distro has always been people who liked to "rice" their Linux (make it look cool). If the project has a "soul" it's that. It's also a classic "hacker" thing to rice out your desktop. It's like the modern version of the demoscene. It's fine. It's cool. Sorry if someone hurt you. Now let's move past the political histrionics.
I.e., when Omarchy is reported on in my country (on local blogs) nobody ever replies with anything political, it's just about the tech. But in some circles this is very different, somehow.
Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan were conservatives.
DHH is at best an apologist for convicted criminal fascists like Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, and at worst is potentially a fascist himself.
There is a reason why some people have decided to give this distribution $8m, and not another distribution. That reason is political alignment.
Pretending it isn't, is just putting your head in the sand.
to be clear to those readers seeking balance, this is putting it mildly.
It's not even a Linux distro. It's an Arch respin with tweaks that DHH likes.
This is for people who want to work like DHH.
Closest thing to the āit just worksā experience that Mac was always known for and it runs great on older hardware. Even goes so far as to optimize the install time down to about 1 minute.
I was running i3 when an Ubuntu update borked my entire setup so I made the switch. The difference is night and day in the level of polish.
Small example, running Zoom on i3 caused a tile cascade every time I turned on my Bluetooth headset because Zoom bypassed the main notification system. Issue resolved here.
One of many little quirks that no longer happen.
Itās nice to see excitement around Linux because nothing from the big names was really creating it.
I see this repeated a lot, but the people I know who tried Omarchy were always fixing something or dealing with breakage from an update.
The best argument Iāve heard for Omarchy that is actually consistent with what Iāve observed is that it ships with cool looking default configs for everything that make it feel fun to use.
The belief that everything just works seems more like a belief perpetuated by the messaging push behind it. Every time real issues pop up they get explained away as being due to someoneās local config changes or forgiven because itās a young project. Even in this thread there are dozens of comments downplaying security issues as not a problem because they will get fixed, which is a symptom of a project where the messaging has gotten ahead of the facts.
literally the experience that Mac was always known for
> 04. Profit motive > > The tech industry is especially good at losing money. Growth is electric, but profits are elusive. We take an old school, economics 101 approach: Make more than you spend. Thatās why weāve been profitable every year weāve been in business. Itās the responsible way to be reliable and take care of customers over the long haul.
Oof, they explicitly say they want the opposite of what you claim.
I mean it should be pretty obvious, when an open source project kind of comes out of nowhere like this and suddenly everybody's talking about it, it's not organic growth. It's an incredibly transparent marketing campaign designed to trick people into joining the cargo cult. You need to learn to recognize these things.
He would have had better success by literally prompting his agents to copy Apples desktop environment.
Last time I looked into it, the technical approach was equivalent to throwing a bunch of things at a gas fire. It's just a pre-configured arch install that introduces a metric ton of tech debt.
It's a slop-linux with a racism-linux hat on.
First time huh? They already have investors (called "patrons" so far). OpenAI shown the non-profit status can be used to jump start for-profit ventures, I'm sure everyone involved here studied closely exactly how Altman pulled it off.
/r/unixporn is all about that. They don't get a $10 million fund though.
> Closest thing to the āit just worksā experience that Mac was always known for and it runs great on older hardware.
Ubuntu. Debian. Fedora especiall via Bazzite. Arch via CachyOS.
> Small example, running Zoom on i3 caused a tile cascade every time I turned on my Bluetooth
Small example: many Steam games were dog slow or unplayable in Omarchy. I switched to CachyOS, all issues were gone.
> Itās nice to see excitement around Linux because nothing from the big names was really creating it.
None of the big names are creating anything in Omarchy. It's a bunch of vibe-coded dotfiles and shell scripts. It's hype around ricing.
AI sells, this should be obvious by now. The guy behind the project talks about this in more detail, for instance during the interview he recently did with Network Chuck on youtube.
My guess is relationships and fame went a long way towards getting those funds.
In some way I feel people just try to buy into "street cred" on the other hand omarchy could be a great launchpad for a distro that is customizable, easy enough to use and may provide a great MDM solution at some point.
More like āI'm a white suppremacist, btwā though.
Quite unfortunate that it became acceptable enough to brag about that in public.
The more h4xx0r-like and minimalistic, the more street cred you get.
See https://old.reddit.com/r/unixporn (or https://reddit.com/r/unixporn without an account).
a machine whose hardware parts you could change, as well as bigger chunks of its software, above and beyond end-user apps. That is possible via the integration of the OS with AI agents that do the heavy lifting for you in adapting the OS to your āneeds.ā Users of the Pi coding agent get a better feeling for this because the tool is, by design, built to respond and adapt to user-commanded changes. This is the kind of capability the typical user wonāt see in private-source OSes like Windows and iOS, especially because they have security as a concern (thus the OPās motivation for the heads-up on security in Omarchy).
- project overpromise to a point of absurdity (e.g. Tesla (still has questionable full self driving), SpaceX (in recent times there had been absurd differences between claimed rocket load and what we then find out the rocket actually could load, like 100 Tons being only 15 Tons IRL level of differences), etc. etc.)
- project jumps on some hype train (e.g. AI)
- project has some eccentric owner which is good at selling it, even if it doesn't do what is sold
- owner also goes with the "move fast break things"
- owner acts widely (likely actually criminally) negligent in "safety" topics, shipping something is more important then the damage the negligence will causes, in some such such cases even if it's close to guaranteed that the negligence will kill people. Another way to phrase this point is they follow the "move at ANY cost so fast that competition can't keep up until you win by default" motto.
- owner has some "Vitamine B" connections to rich risk friendly investors (aka. the "friends help friends", "cartel-like", "kinda looks like corruption" structures we have been seen from time to time in the background of SV-related startup investments)
So I don't think you are missing anything about Omarchy, it's more like the whole investor culture around SV is severely broken, unhealthy and in their recklessness IMHO more damaging to society then its helpful. Not speaking about how this background structures twist the founding/startup marked in a way which may look to the outside to be "fair and open" but in fact isn't, if you don't "bow" to the right people and their ideology you aren't getting anywhere.
He is the author of rails and there are so many founders who were inspired by 37 signals and their takes on things back in the day.
The golden years of HN.
People's politics do often (but not always) change as they age.
I'm not sure DHH really held the same views back then, either. The "Overton Window" has moved over the last 20 years so openly bigoted and racist views are accepted in the discourse now.
This is the main difference between sharing oneās cool config files and shipping a ādistroā.
2. As an apolitical refuge, since contributors like DHH and Tobi LĆ¼tke [along with possibly the silent majority], want to focus on commonalities (love of hacking and computing) rather than the things that drive us apart (political views)
https://world.hey.com/dhh/three-sacred-cows-that-must-die-so...
I think that crosses a line for even normal politically centrist (by European standards at least).
> When wolves get out of control, you shoot them. When gypsies take over public spaces, you deport them.
You don't get to make this contrast and pretend you didn't. The only way his rhetoric could be more clear is if he bought a gun and shot them himself.
Something crashes? Click the notification and your agent solves the bug.
It also has a very standardized UI library and a good plugin system.
Due to those things the list of plugins is increasing by hundreds a day [2], I made one that adds ExposƩ like for macOS myself a few days ago.
Most of them are actually good, and unlike other distros they look visually consistent. Customizing your system and participating in the community has never been this easy. Incredibly fun, feels like being a kid in a candyshop.
[1] https://github.com/basecamp/omarchy/blob/quattro/default/age...
[2] https://omarchyplugins.com/
It's a vibe coding distro, so of course there is no security to begin with.
DHH is also on the Slopify board, so AI is mandatory.
I think the comment is more about how identity politics kept infecting products through 'woke 1.0'. donglegate, language policing, default branch names, speaker progressive stacks, diversity hiring practices and blacklisting. I don't think I've seen these political issues influence DHH products the same way.
A friend has been urging me to install Omarchy for months. Iāve finally caved in after a horrible experience with highly-praised CachyOS.
All I can say is, I understand the hype. It works. The install is uncomplicated, no selecting from five legacy bootloaders, choosing versions or selecting a window manager. The tiled window manager works pretty much how I already use Mac. I like the terminal-focused system tools. Installing software is easy and lightning-fast.
Between the Windows 3 days and the mid 2000s I've spent countless hours customizing the UI of every tool I used. Now I realize I was paying attention to the wrong thing.
On omarchy it's one and one
https://www.eurozine.com/blogging-the-nihilist-impulse/
https://web.archive.org/web/20240925180238/http://www.intell...
I am old enough that I've been burned by both sides of the political aisle, often using the same rhetoric (think of the children, we're fighting for freedom, we're fighting against fascism, no true scoctsman, etc.)
Maybe the day will come when we really will have to pick sides beyond the elections, like it's WWII, but that day isn't today. I just want to be left alone, away from political camps and the ugliness they tolerate because of they're fighting against the greater good.
I just want my tech to focused on the tech.
There is a false equivalence happening. In this case, both sides are the people who just want to exist without being attacked for being themselves and the people who say they are wolves and that wolves need to be shot to protect the sheep.
I want people like DHH and his supporters out of the tech I use. I don't trust them, nor do I trust their judgment.
edit: I don't care what people decide to do with their linux distro that I'm probably never going to use. I suggest you try Debian.
The blog is titled "Merchants of Insecurity". The word "hole" does not exist anywhere on the page, the HTML, or the HTTP headers.
Yesterday's submission used the correct title: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49433378
Literally the first sentence in the post has links to two security holes lol
aka A person should be able to espouse xenophobic and bigoted remarks without worrying about being criticized for it.
"But won't someone think of the tech bro who incessantly talks out of his ass and punches down!!!!!"
> When wolves get out of control, you shoot them. When gypsies take over public spaces, you deport them.
An intellectually honest guy like you is probably so furious that DHH makes a personality out of stalking entire peoples. Pathetic++, right? :^:
The current submission title is terrible, "Omarchy development practices lead to predictable security issues" would be much closer.
What kind of blogging is this?
Happy to explain: it's personal blogging, for writing down what's on my mind.
The fact that it was addressed swiftly doesn't affect the claims in the post at all: I'm worried about development practices which produce code like that.
Also, the "full of security holes" is not my framing, someone else choose this submission title.
Of course, this is a culture war, but the point the blog post is making is that the Omarchy side is not exactly at the forefront of merit.
Open a pull request.
That's how this is supposed to work. Wisdom of the crowd and what not.
1. https://xn--gckvb8fzb.com/a-word-on-omarchy/
My opinion is that the way Omarchy is developed leads to gigantic security holes. I wanted people to be aware of it.
In my opinion, there are much better choices both for me and I'd imagine for other people as well. I don't want to help Omarchy succeed, I don't care about them.
Fix it. If you see a problem in the world, fix it.
If they reject the fix, that's when you complain.
As I've gotten older and more experienced, I've really embraced the "just shut up and fix it" mentality. If you're empowered to do something, any time you spend complaining about it not being done is adding to the noise and a negative contribution.
This applies in life and in work. Especially in work. I straight up just shift the discussion or leave meetings if people start complaining about problems that are within their abilities to fix. It happens so much and I don't have time for it anymore.
And if you can fix it and you don't want to, just stfu and move on with your life. For the sake of all of us.
Like a lot a lot a lot.
And that's before we had LLMs writing code. So really it's basically orbital now.
The fractional pennies in tokens it could have taken to fix this would cost less than their web traffic bill. But alas, if you fix it and put in a PR, that doesn't get you the eyeballs and social good-boy points that a blog post appealing to correct politics does.
Why fix when you can farm?
The left side us Ubuntu/Fedora. The right side is Arch. The middle is all these tech-fluencer-wanna-bes custom-made-ai-enhanced distros.
Been using Linux since 1997, it's been my primary OS since ~2003 (except for gaming and Microsoft seem determine to end their streak on that one) and I use Fedora because I really don't care that much, it's a reliable tool, it has recent packages and I like that it's semi-rolling in that it's a straight forward update every 6ish months.
I had my "I must customise and control every single part of my Linux install" phase early (Slackware and Gentoo et al) and then I realised I didn't actually care all that much, give me sane defaults with the ability to tweak if I want to and stability, I'm at the point where "If I have to think much about my OS it's failed in doing what I want" holds.
More generally, how else would a small project allow plugins that isn't "here is a way to add code" and then anyone can release the code they added? Hell, the linux ecosystem in general is a "free for all", and that is the nature of the platform
I took a look at it when I kept seeing it, realised what it is and who it's by and carried on moving, putting aside DHH as a person, it doesn't really do anything I want or in a way I'd care about but then I'm also not the target demographic/user, after 30 years of using Linux, I don't need it.
It's unfortunate, that it was developed in a weird, insecure way, but I think that the fact that it exists is very cool.
I've heard about Omarchy long time ago, but didn't switch, because at some point in my life I started to prefer something that is rock solid and well supported (currently on Fedora Atomic with KDE) to new/shiny/bleeding edge. But still. I think that an overall good UX out of the box is composed of little things like this.
> But I'll argue that Accessibility is actually more important than Security because dialing Accessibility to zero means you have no product at all, whereas dialing Security to zero can still get you a reasonably successful product such as the Playstation Network.
Too few upstarts realize that proper security is core to a good experience.
No reason Qt or quickshell is any different from any other software.
Bash is... harder, not impossible. I wouldn't rely on it.
I want to like / use Omarchy it needs to be more stripped down for me personally.
I am happy that the Linux ecosystem is getting attention, traction and funding. People that dont like and want to choose to go die on another hill, so be it, their prerogative.
An Arch package having less-than-ideal default settings is pretty normal: the user is expected to read the manpages and the Arch wiki when making any alterations to their system. They guide you towards making it secure, but if you want to leave it insecure because of reasons then Arch isn't going to stop you from shooting your own foot.
Some people just hate DHH and can't separate the art from the artist
I like what DHH is doing in this space even if I don't plan to use it.
Wouldn't the security team and the agents just go and fix the security holes?
They have a dedicated security team now that is being paid for this:
https://omarchy.org/security/
But having a dedicated security team is marketing?
I'm sure with the $10M cash chest the security will just improve over time and this blog post will be irrelevant.
I don't expect the security to be perfect out of the gate at when Omarchy 4.0 just launched with real backing?
Maybe this can get fixed, security teams won't make it worse. I worry they're mopping the floor and not fixing the leak: the development practices which lead to the quantity, seriousness and banality of their security issues is the part which needs fixing.
Of course theyāre going to react to what is reported and fix it. Thatās a given.
The concern is the development process that is leading to these types of holes getting shipped. Mainstream Linux distributions have software practices and release cycles designed to be cautious. This project is taking more of a move fast and break things methodology where shipping the vibe coded feature as fast as possible is the priority.
Having a crack team of people responding to reports and fixing things (or prompting their agents to fix things) only solves the issues after theyāve been shipped, discovered, and kindly reported back upstream.
> I don't know, Omarchy's team really don't care if you're complaining.
Controversy is their primary marketing tactic. They prefer that people complain because being divisive and controversial is how DHH has always marketed his products.
Why itās security would be on a different level than any other Linux distro isnāt clear.
The repo for reference:
https://github.com/basecamp/omarchy
> I don't expect the security to be perfect out of the gate at when Omarchy 4.0 just launched with real backing?
Well, we can note the time and look again in half a year or so. Personally I am in general happy with security in the linux ecosystem. I am more worried about e. g. systemd adding age sniffing as component. In another entry at hackernews, yesterday I think, we learned that Microsoft automatically tags all images with invisible watermarks. One just can not trust companies - they always feel a need to abuse data from the users and tags everyone. Next step will be mandatory chips into the brain.
Bash injection using video... Titles !? Moterfucking shit (mom's not there anymore to ask me to swear less, RIP)
In the episode he emphasized 17 layers of security layers where I remember the number solely because I found hard to believe to be honest.
You can find the podcast episode in this one https://thestanduppod.com/
I'd stay away just for this reason alone. Anybody that says this is either joking or has no clue how the real world works.
So the "real world" is that Linux failed on the desktop and it is not worth trying, meaning that raising $10M to do this a joke?
Would you say the same thing if another distro raised that amount of money? Or is it because DHH is the one doing it.
This sort of thinking is why Linux on the Desktop worked for Windows, instead of it becoming mainstream with its own distro.
This is just a person having fun building their own distro. If you don't like it why are you giving them so much attention even though you will never use it?
Their docs say "Omarchy takes security very seriously" - I think that's straight up incorrect.
Saying "go and use it, wanting: its prototype quality and likely to have many security bugs" would be fair game.
That's not what they're doing.
When you do that you'll just a bunch of people clowning on the project due to the politics of the founder.
It's lines, lines and more lines of bash script
sigh
big sigh
Using bash for all this stuff is like trying to wash your car with sandpaper instead of soap and water. Yes it can work if you're really careful with it, but in practice no
It's also funny that all the systemd critics call that bash scripts is all you need
And yes while I got more favourable to Systemd I cannot say bash is all you need, no
For people who don't know, just read "As I Remember London" by this person.
Sure, arguments can be made in favor of being "above all these things," but profound moral disgust can also be a legitimate argument.
Younger DHH was more impressive than the TechBro aged later variant, in my personal opinion.
Arch is in general a good base though - I mostly use Manjaro as base, then customize it via a ton of scripts and compile about 99% from source anyway, using an extended set of ruby scripts (a bit similar to homebrew, but one big difference is that I wanted versioned AppDirs like in GoboLinux; my scripts originated from GoboLinux's philosophy since I did not want to use shell scripts but retain versioned AppDirs. Manjaro is in some ways a bit similar to oldschool slackware, which unfortunately kind of died - it is not really fully dead, but look at the homepage and then tell me how many years past the last .iso release still counts as alive. So to me it is dead, despite the changelogs still being updated or others, such as alienbob, pushing out new releases.)
I loved installing different operating systems on them and try to customize it. Better window management, better animations, nicer colours etc.
Of course, the results were always marginally better or worse than the stock version of that distribution.
Seems as this is the case for Omarchy here as well.