- cross-posted to:
- archlinux@lemmy.ml
- cross-posted to:
- archlinux@lemmy.ml
Protest against the Omarchy/Omacom Foundation and the tech companies and executives funding far-right open source.
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All I see here is major butt hurt
disroot.org is a worthy mention. From their faq: What services can I use with my Disroot account? Your account allows you to use the following services with the same username and password:
Email Cloud Akkoma Chat The rest of the services (Pads, PasteBin, Upload, Search, Audio, Calls, Translate) don’t require any registration. Some need the creation of a specific account (Forgejo, Cryptpad, Scribe).
Protest if you like, but I’m going to say: Stop talking about Omarchy if you want to hurt it.
The people who like it are going to like it, the ones who don’t won’t, and screaming about it just brings it to the attention of more people who never would have heard about it.
This is such a wildly stupid take. If you have reasons something should be known to be bad, you should tell those reasons to people. You may sway existing users that were native, or people who don’t use it and wouldn’t, after hearing your reasons.
I don’t understand your logic of “if I don’t say anything, people will course-correct” at all.
Disagree on that. Those 18 million are in big parts going to go into marketing and reputation washing, specifically to people that might not be tuned into the broader Linux or even tech ecosystem. Those will not by themselves start looking up the background of a shiny Linux distro that is being hailed by everyone as a super nice and easy way to get into Linux. Some education can go a long way there.
If people “get into” Linux via Omarchy - then decide its roots are distateful, distro hopping is very easy for them to do. Similarly, if Linux experimenters give Omarchy a try ignorant of the politics behind it - I doubt very many will remain “locked in” for long. If you 18 million number refers to Omarchy’s own download count, please try to keep in perspective just how over-inflated and easily gamed those counts always are.
I find it a stretch to think that Omarchy will be whitewashing brownshirt politics sufficiently to win converts because “hey, these guys are alright, look at what a nifty distro they made…”
If people “get into” Linux via Omarchy - then decide its roots are distateful, distro hopping is very easy for them to do.
My point is that they might not ever get to the point of noticing the rot at its roots. Sure, if they notice it’s easy, but they need to even get to that point. Also, even if we know it’s easy, it might still be intimidating. They may remember how much work the jump from Windows/Apple to Omarchy was and assume it’s gonna be similar from one Linux distro to another.
If you 18 million number refers to Omarchy’s own download count
I was referring to donation amounts. 18 million dollars. That’s the most recent number I’ve seen that has been donated or promised to Omarchy, and that kind of money can do a whole lot when it’s pumped into reputation building.
I find it a stretch to think that Omarchy will be whitewashing brownshirt politics sufficiently to win converts because “hey, these guys are alright, look at what a nifty distro they made…”
Then you’re more optimistic than me. Those politics are not advertised on the frontpage*, and most people who are not already tuned into that are not gonna go hunting for it. For most it’s not gonna go further than “Oh my favorite tech influencer is rocking this awesome looking setup, gonna try that”, and from there on why would they look at anything other than the docs.
* They do have that “Backed by the oligarchy” section, and I immediately wanted to vomit when seeing that, but colleagues of mine didn’t see the issue with that until I explicitly spelled it out. We very much do live in a bubble.
I still think that giving it oxygen is a mistake, but if you insist on making that mistake, I’d go for “coloring the air” around it in an easily recognized shade and odor:
Omarchy: the new Linux distro labeled “Goose-steppy” by the community, is being developed based on donations from X, Y and Z… At present, it offers nothing of value vs these established distros: ____, _____, _____. The community is relatively un-knowledgeable and un-helpful, and the technical aspects are less well refined than the established competition. Etc. etc. etc.
Remind the world that the trains don’t actually run on-time any better under Fascists in practice. They have too many conflicting priorities, and ultimately those lead to the trains not running at all.
I don’t think that’s true. I’ve been bombarded with omarchy ads for months. I had no idea what is was about but it just kept popping up on my feeds. It’s good to talk about it because until now I just thought it was a new popular arch based distro.
My point is that I think a ton of the money is spent on spreading the word about the new and cool thing. It’s important to counter that campaign
Personally, I like the short - punchy approach: Omarchy, the distro also known as Goose-steppy.
It’s kinda hilarious that omarchy is just another cringey right wing safe space. As usual it’s a small group of individuals with a ton of dirty cash. The linux community is notoriously socialist in leanings. Any right wing linux users would feel isolated, because theyre fringe, they spend as much money as they want for advertising they still be alone.
Echo chambers work best in isolation…
The people who’ll like it can be educated to do better. 40s Nazi Germany got better. Do a favour to yourself and learn about things that matter.
Denazification was never really followed through, they went after the high ranking/infamous ones. But lots of Nazi judges, civil servants, and military officers got off without punishment.
I mean did they? They just voted the AFD in.
The ironic thing there is that AfD supporters come overwhelmingly from the former East Germany… you would think they’d had enough, but apparently somehow it’s their comfort zone.
Decades of brainwashing after the wall fell
As opposed to the period before the wall fell, when it was all rainbows and butterflies and intellectual honesty.
Honestly, I think it’s a lot of Stockholm Syndrome. I spent a couple of weeks on the recently opened East side in the summer of 1990… the locals’ concepts of economics were - alien - like discussing a summer breeze with an octopus.
Bonn was thirsty for that juicy commie industry, don’t think for one second it was all rainbows and butterflies on your side. Only a sucker of NATO, the CIA, the MI6 and the Mossad would think so.
It could be worse, imagine if they were still in power since the 40s instead of the watered down SocDem they had
True, true. The US took all the remaining ones into NATO leadership though so that’s always something to remember.
Donate to KDE and Gnome and your favorite linux programs!
Removed by mod
They are, but for some reason their only hobbies are contributing just to hide rainbow in the about. We can live with that 😄
I will continue never using it
And I salute your action of inaction! 🫡
I even ask myself if ignoring them and leaving them to the irrelevance they deserve would be a better move than giving them the free “advertising” and probably even boosting their ego.
I would agree if they did not have that much oil money backing them this kinda needs to be talked about imo
I’m right there with you. If anyone asks me about it, my response is “imagine that Arch Linux and OpenAI were going to have a child, but they were both doing too many drugs and alcohol, smoking 3 packs of camels per day each and lived near a garbage burning field in a Saharan country, Omarchy is the material resulting from that miscarriage”.
There’s just too many good Linux distros out there for me to even entertain the idea of ever giving that shit a chance.
“That sounds…dramatic! I may have to check it out, just for the train wreck!”
“Pre-configured Arch with agentic AI baked in.”
People use Brave even though Peter Thiel is one of its main investors. People use Brave even though it was created by Brendan Eich, a homophobe and Trump supporter
Most people using Brave have no idea of those facts I’d bet.
I had the sense that the general consensus in the inner tech circles is that Brave is bad and Firefox is good.
Its the outer ring of the tech circles still privvy to Brave.
Brendan Eich, a homophobe and Trump supporter
Even worse, the creator of JavaScript
</s>Even worse, he has ties to the Dark Enlightenment.
Nope, not everyone uses Brave
Yeah but is it a reason not to do anything? Some people don’t care, some are unaware. For the last ones we should keep pushing for making tech landscape a betted place for everyone
The vast majority of people don’t know that or couldn’t care less about it, who’s behind it isn’t even a thing worthy of thought for many. It’s sad and sucks but it’s the truth.
More interesting example: people use Firefox despite Google being main donator. I know it’s more complicated, but yeah, Mozilla wouldn’t survive otherwise.
I am not trying to argue this, but some people will say “It just looks like a linux distro that is designed to be more agentic friendly, even if some of its backers have unscrupulous pasts.” What is the response to this? Because I’m sure it’s vibe-coded and insecure, but there aren’t really linux distros that are agentic first distros and some computer enthusiasts really like AI. And yes, people can just install Jan or LM Studio on their own in another distro, but some people may want open source code and linux designed for AI. I know people on Lemmy often hate AI, so please don’t hate me for writing this. I just don’t totally get the reasoning aside from some people involved in the project seem to be assholes… or is that the reasoning?
To be honest, if not for security concerns I’d probably try this distro if it weren’t somehow linked to anti-trans things, which makes anything completely toxic. But I looked at the Omarchy page just to see what it looked like and conceptually for people interested in agentic stuff, it didn’t look that bad, it seemed sort of interesting.
Trans people are some of the best network engineers and coders out there and greatly help the open source community. Any open source project that isn’t kind to trans people should be ignored. Maybe that’s the point? That normally a project like this linked to anything anti-trans would be rejected by the open source community and it’s only through soulless corporations and right wing tech bros that this is existing?
This isn’t just a case of some abrasive people involved. The guy who runs the project, DHH, is an open and proud racist. He posts his very straightforward racist beliefs on his blog. He made ruby on rails, and after being rejected from the ruby community he’s now trying to insert himself into the Linux/open source community. On top of that, the “distro” is Arch + some dot files. Despite that, he’s managed to raise millions of dollars in outside funding, which is insane for open source project. Either his industry connections are willing to look past the racism and hand him a bunch of money anyway, or they actively agree with him and want to build a space for racists in the open source community.
Add in the AI stuff and people have plenty of reason to boycott this project.
Is he actually racist? I’ve read he wrote about remigration, but that’s about uncontrolled immigration, nothing to do with hatred for races
He wrote on his blog “The last loonies on tech’s woke island”… (https://world.hey.com/dhh/calling-someone-a-nazi-is-a-permission-slip-for-violence-4bfbbb82)
Ironically, he’s using it in the context of saying slandering someone as an actual Nazi is unfair to people with more conservative views. But what he’s missing is it takes place in a context where trans people are often killed, subject to discrimination, and often commit suicide due to harassment and discrimination. So the “loonies” and “woke” being juxtaposed so closely together let me understand that he’s on the side of being unkind to trans people, who already have hard lives.
Usually when people write “woke” and “crazy” or “lunatic,” what it really refers to is “It’s crazy that some people born one gender want to be another gender and have different pronouns.” Usually it’s not just welcoming all races at work is “crazy” and “woke.” I’ve never seen someone write “crazy woke radical left” or something like that without also hating trans people. It’s just faster to dog whistle than explicating hate.
I have a better understanding now. Okay, so Omarchy looks interesting, but going to pass on trying it out.
Well, the AI (LLM stuff) is right wing. It makes the last thing neoliberalism didn’t make obsolete useless. Who cares if you actually understand what you’re doing and are able to do it way better than a LLM. “You are now useless. Fuck you.”
The neoliberal ideology now made everyone useless. How can a person still be a neoliberal when you can see none of us really have any value (intellectual or otherwise), we never did. The only thing humans had was pretending to be useful (or competent in any way) and they are taking it away from us little by little.
That’s why I’m a leftist, I’ve seen basic human dignity being taken away from people since my childhood and experienced repression (as much as a minority in a non third world country can) and I know many people have it worse.
Same. Capitalism will kill us all if we don’t do something, that’s why I’m a social distributist.
I don’t know if I agree with you because someone still needs to tell an LLM what the project is for it to work and a normal person who has no science or computer science background can’t do that efficiently or check the technical aspects of a project to make sure the AI isn’t doing something incorrectly (and eventually the AI will do something incorrectly usually). I think we need UBI sooner rather than later because so many jobs will be obsolete, but if I’m chatting with an LLM or you are and we say “is the docker container up?” or “you built a page and there’s no clear way to navigate it” or “test for what would be exposed data in the case of a breach” the AI can do that, but a normal person doesn’t even understand any of that stuff to chat with an AI about that. I know it’s awful right now for coders who are getting paid less or are underemployed, but that seems to be more of a UBI problem instead of an LLM problem. There are legitimate environmental fears however, but LLMs and data centers seem to be a cherry on top of egregious environmental policy. Environmental catastrophe is headed this way with or without the cherry and it’s not clear to me if we had good universal public transportation and banned gasoline that somehow data centers would still be an existential human risk.
I think the problem is that decision makers /people in power often don’t understand the technical jargon either. All that matters is, “is it working?” So once they see that they can get it “working” without paying for the expertise, they will take it.
The thing is also - the LLM will eventually get it wrong, but the frontier models are pretty good at fixing it if you can articulate the problem. Even non technically.
Under the hood? Impossible to understand. But it works!
Counterpoint - system architecture is really built around helping humans to build mental models of systems. If your plan is to have LLMs to all the work in the future, those mental models no longer matter the way they did in the past.
Probably, systems will break, and LLM costs will rise, and the arithmetic will shift - but that isn’t happening fast enough to stop the brain drain and negative pressure on employment and compensation.
I agree about the risk of brain drain with fewer people learning to code.
The biggest issue for me is its ties to the Dark Enlightenment movement, which is much more scary than any -phobia or -ism.
This is a really interesting comment. I’d like to know more about your views on this.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Enlightenment
They want to overthrow democracy and turn it into some authoritarian techno-capitalist hellscape.
Eich, Yarvin, and peter thiel have ties to it, along with many others.
Am I crazy for saying that DHH is a far-right plant and Omarchy is a plot to destroy FOSS from the inside?
DHH is far right, clearly, I’m not sure they have a plan for destroying FOSS, they seem to be trying to normalize their worldview (which is bad enough)
Yes. You are. You people are acting like Omanchy existing will bring down democracy as we know it. Its just a project. Sure its got some weird backing and DHH is a scumbag, but y’all need to calm the fuck down. Just ignore it. It will go away.
It’s not just a program it’s a movement. It has budget of 13m usd that comes from corporations who have maybe 0.01% of their user base on linux. Why do you think that is? Why would 1Password and friends do this?
They won’t listen… here’s a response to a similar comment I saw in another thread:
Ignoring fascists and hoping they go away is one reason why fascism is having a resurgence right now
You can’t reason with unreasonable people.
How’s that unreasonable, fascism did a comeback because it wasn’t completely kept at bay.
Just because their goal may not be explicitly pushing far right nationalism doesn’t mean it’s ok to ignore. They must be shunned. Their political messaging is hate and none of us should support or condone that.
But we aren’t supporting or condoning it. We also aren’t shunning them. We are signal boosting this nonsense “distro” into the stratosphere. I am extremely online when it comes to tech and Linux. The first I heard of Omarchy is complaints on Lemmy. I’ve seen like three total people talk about it outside of lemmy. All of them were easy to skip ads. The actions here instead flood the feed with news about it over and over and over.
Normally the impact of a small group of people wouldnt matter but we are the exact demographic that they want reach with this. and y’all are doing the work for them.
If you want to point at those trying to destroy FOSS from within, point at Microsoft & Apple.
And GNOME developers 😂
I’d say he wants to purge the “woke” in FOSS
I’m center-right, but purging “woke” will only divide FOSS, there is a reason tech-billionaires also want to purge “woke” from FOSS.
Aside from this dickhead and his shitty worldview, the OS is nothing more than a curated experience with what could be some fucking awful and dangerous AI implementations. I don’t understand how people with any modicum of tech literacy wouldn’t pass on this fucking thing INSTANTLY. I have always had mixed views on networkchuck, but to see him pumping this fucking thing up was pretty much my tipping point to writing him off completely.
And regarding DHH… I don’t know how you could listen to this guy talk, and not get the Euroid sociopath vibes. Plus his little harem of fanboys are presumably gonna be jumping in at this point. It’s just fucking gross. I passed on this months ago, and I will continue to pass.
I believe the ones pumping it up are the “AI bros” and “tech bros” AKA non-technical folks. These types don’t actually have the skills or knowledge to put together something like this themselves so they rally around Omarchy because that work has already been done for them.
Yeah and sprinkle the whole thing with agentic AI that can have root access for these people… It’s pretty damn yikesy lol I think a lot of people are gonna get hurt, unfortunately.
Just thinking of the poor bastard with the giant obsidian brain that has been the pride of his life for the past 5 years.
Network chuck is someone I really liked when his channel was small, but once I realized he was posting videos that were 5 minutes long with a 1.5 minute ad plug, I was done. He always posts software that is just a free tier of something when there is probably a free and good option instead.
Yeah, I’m on the same boat. Shit, I would even drink coffee at his pace when watching his videos. He’s dropped real low in the lat year or 2.
Then there’s Tom Lawrence for networking. Objective, each tool has it use case and he will push nothing, basically just voice hos opinions and why. Like if Louis Rossmann was all about networking and way less angry 🤣. Full disclosure, I fucking love Rossmann, my wife hates him.
In this chapter of American deregulation, Rossmann is truly doing the fucking Lord’s work.
How is this not straight up FUD? DHH is a very good developer, better than 90% of his detractors. Omarchy is popular for the same fucking reason that Linux was never the desktop of choice until Windows literally forced people to use it. It’s a good default configuration of a collection of applications, put together in a cohesive, but opinionated way, by a person actually using the product AND wanting to be productive with it.
It’s just a hyprland arch config bundle exactly the way Ubuntu is just a GNU Linux bundle. Sane people don’t want to spend weeks configuring the most basic shit.
Sane people don’t want to spend weeks configuring the most basic shit.
theres plenty of distributions and flavours they can choose from, having a long history of being well maintained and without core maintainers and supporters having hostile views on the world.
DHH is a very good developer
Yeah Omarchy is clearly high quality code written by a smart guy
DHH is a very good developer
He has good qualities, or he’d have never become where he is today, but in case you haven’t been around Rubyists much, most of us follow MINASWAN, and he clearly doesn’t. More importantly, he’s also shown support for Tommy Robinson in his own blog. It doesn’t take a genius to see what he’s doing.
Linux was never the desktop of choice until Windows literally forced people to use it.
Think of it as DHH forcing people to look elsewhere, then. There are plenty of excellent distros out there that aren’t controlled by terrible people and work just fine.
I am all on board with letting people know when open source is a bit too aligned with major companies or is somehow compromised.
I have no intent or need to use Omarchy.
This sites list of YouTubers to shun however is a bit too “purity test” for me. The reasons listed are, let’s say extremely tepid in many cases.
I’ve never heard Jeff Geerling talk about any issue other than homelab stuff like hardware pricing and availability. His religious and personal views were not apparent to me at all.
I watched the Louis Rossmann video mentioned with the CO State Rep, and Louis was respectful and platformed this individuals commentary on the subject of privacy issues for a long time in the video. Generally Rossmann seems to criticize the living hell out of politicians left, right, and center.
I guess all I am saying is… Use whatever products you do or don’t want to for your own reasons but, I disagree with the concept that I should brigade specific creators because they support Open Source but not 100% of my particular basket of other issues. We need Open Source to grow and need to reach out to diverse groups who can find value in it.
I will continue to listen to both Craft Computing Jeff (as far left as it is possible to be on social and gender issues) and Jeff Geerling (who is apparently conservative on these same issues) because I’m listening to them talk about homelab stuff, not telling me who to vote for etc.
Sadly, this whole scheme has been resumed into “Don’t use Omarchy because they are nazis!” – “Oh? And where you got that idea from?” – “B-b-because It’s what they are!”. It’s nothing else than a shit-flinging contest, with no logical/coherent reasoning other than typical emotional/impulse-driven reactions for the sake of “feeling included”.
Also, it’s sad to see at how this community went downhill fast because of politics, and on how the mods shrug at these posts – we are, indeed… reddit now.
Did you even look at the evidence people always provide when talking about DHH? Or are you saying advocating for ethnic cleansing isn’t nazi? Ime people love to pretend that leftists are just making shit up when most of the time we show the receipts, which are even in the link in the original post here.
child didnt even look at ANY of the evidence . AND THEN when they want to criticize the evidence presented , doesnt link ANY counter evidence .
ENLIGHTENED CENTRISM©®™ strikes again. BOTH sides are evil Mmmkay!? Mmmmkay! Ignorance Is Bliss©®™
No idea why you’re negative on the votes, the centrism reeks of deceit.
At this point, Every time I hear someone say something about Reddit it’s in the same breath as something hate-crime-y or something smallminded like complaining of politics in their hobby.
Like, “Bitch, please… Reddit is just a room of people, our communities are what we make of them, if you’re complaining about the room then you’re either in the wrong room or you’re actively trying to make discourse worse.”
I’m in here for a chance at descentalized community, and for salon, but I keep bumping into these side-shaved specimen masquerading as techies, trying to make space for the loudest white supremacists in any scene. It’s fucking exhausting.
blah blah blah I don’t like politics
It’s 2026 and there still are bozos feigning to be apolitical. Incredible. Literally, because the same phenomenon is happening for example among farmers who voted Republican and had their faces eaten.
Also
mods shrug at these posts
You’re on lemmy.ML How clueless you are?
The President of the USA is a known pedophile who is murdering and kidnapping foreign heads of state and attempting to force the governments of other countries to do what he says.
Being apolitical has always been somewhat shortsighted, but now is definitely not the time.
The most privileged response I’ve ever read. Good for you for having no one in your inner circle that is affected by fascism but it really sucks for the rest of us.
You’re listing some liberal identitarians as leftists here… 🤦♂️
Literally don’t care what they are. Not relevant to their FOSS or general technology content.
“If 9 people sit down at a table with 1 Nazi without protest, there are 10 Nazis at the table.”
“Congrats”, I guess. 🤦♂️ Is it comfortable there? 🙄 Technology isn’t apolitical: atomic bombs weren’t, AI isn’t, and centainly it’s the same for that pos.
There’s still a difference between someone who holds regressive views privately and someone advocating for ethnic cleansing.
First case I can just stop engaging with them, the other we need to push back publicly
This is good messaging. I’m glad someone is making it explicit. I’ll bookmark this page and share it.
I clicked the first referenced article just out of curiosity, and the guy is like ‘The Brits are pissed because of the erosion of their national identity and that’s understandable’!
Dude. You’re talking about the biggest colonial empire in history…yet people like you actually love to complain about migrants and praise those who do the same…? Self-awareness of a rainworm.
Oh Omarchy is “agentic” now? Is there a change they can point to that made it so?
Also the phrase “agentic Linux for the age of agents” makes my brain bleed.
agentic Linux for the age of agents” makes my brain bleed.
It makes your brain bleed, but apparently it also makes money flow
It comes with claude.md and some skills. Basically nothing you can’t setup in 15 minutes and a claude prompt on any linux distribution yourself. They claim “because omarchy is just text configs llms understand it very well” when all linux and all distributions are configured through text.
Agentic linux is awesome though but you’d bave to be brain damaged to do it on mutable distro.
So you’re saying atomic fedora linux and just giving an agent lots of access is safer than omarchy?
Yes, immutable linux can be made much safer. With overlays none of the projects compete for config so agents are much less likely to introduce bugs and access important context by accident basically just by reading explicit immutable configs. We’re rolling everything on nixos now and it’s really good. Immutable linux has basically won imo.
Omarchy is a distro in the same way that I’m a fighter pilot because I stayed at a Holiday Inn last night.
Great allegory! It’s a distro in the same way that Bob was done with his homework by having handed in Alice’s copy of it and called it a day.
I have to ask: How exactly would someone support the fascist people just by using Omarchy? It costs nothing, there’s no data collection, no subscription, nothing. It seems like a fucking purity test to not touch anything any possible fascist has ever touched.
This money is going into marketing and reputation-washing to make far-right politics look like normal open-source community building as well as attempts at centralization in FOSS.[24]
You’re giving those fuckers mindshare. Just DON’T.
Attention is currency
🤫
