Thoughts on Omarchy
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The article discusses Omarchy, a Linux distro created by DHH, and sparks debate about the ethics of supporting software created by individuals with controversial views. The discussion revolves around the distro's technical merits, the controversy surrounding DHH, and the ethics of boycotting software based on the creator's personal beliefs.
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Oct 13, 2025 at 4:54 PM EDT
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Much like LARBS, if I ever see you using Omarchy I just have to assume you don't know what you're doing. You can install Arch and rice i3wm in literally 10 minutes if your SSD and WiFi is fast enough.
I'm conflicted about the drama and still learning more about it, so not ready to draw a conclusion yet. But Omarchy is definitely a very, very fun experience for me.
Granted, I've heavily customized it and am using hy3 for i3-like capabilities, so whatever path out of this for me is likely to i3wm or sway.
And, fwiw, I've been running linux since the late 90s, and most of that as my primary OS (with a decade-ish period of macOS I'd rather forget). I know what I'm doing.
Geeks are the type of people to install Omarchy or LARBS or disable their Mac's SIP for i3wm eye candy. The biggest change a geek makes to their system is changing the wallpaper to Tony Stark.
So using a distribution is for nerds but using something like Omarchy is for lower class geeks? What was the difference again? Can you elaborate on that? It feels like rage baiting but that wouldn't be constructive so I assume that you're acting in good faith and that you explain this line of thinking in more detail.
So someone who uses someone's zsh config and adapts it to their liking is a geek as well because someone else (a nerd) did the heavy lifting already?
Who even says that everyone installing Omarchy doesn't bend it to their will afterwards? Is everyone using the same tools and web apps as DHH? Then why should something like Omarchy even provide writable configs to customize it?
I'm confused.
Personally, I don't feel any moral obligation to investigate the personal views of people who write the software I use. Using software, especially free software, doesn't constitute an endorsement of the authors' views. Before this thread, I was blissfully unaware of this entire silly controversy, since Omarchy doesn't mention any politics anywhere as far as I can tell. If that ever changes, I'll delete it in a heartbeat (regardless of the kind of politics it happens to be), but so far the only people politicizing the issue seem to be its detractors.
If you search the web for "Manjaro broken update" or "LARBS error" you're just flooded with myriad tech issues that don't exist on normal systems. It's a genuine handicap to rely on someone else's opinionated dotfiles when you don't understand why they made each decision. I think people using Omarchy long-term will end up fighting the distro more than they fight Linux.
I don't mean this to come across as snarky, but before you spread misinformation, you might want to inform yourself.
They really don't know what they're doing, which isn't going to help you get things done on Linux. I empathize completely with people who want a one-and-done gorgeous r/unixporn desktop, but they should also know that those distros are a deal with the devil.
and even on a basic level, do you not think open source/free software is about the ethics?
It's not about trying to interfere with projects because you don't like the author's beliefs.
> 5. No Discrimination Against Persons or Groups
> The license must not discriminate against any person or group of persons.
> 6. No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor
> The license must not restrict anyone from making use of the program in a specific field of endeavor. For example, it may not restrict the program from being used in a business, or from being used for genetic research.
This includes persons and fields that the author considers harmful or distasteful. And forking and redistributing are core rights granted by the license.
Same thing with XLibre.
There are, apparently, people out there who think that their decision to use something that was provided et gratis et libre should depend on the beliefs of the thing's creator, as if doing so should somehow endorse those beliefs or cause them to rub off on the user. I can't understand this line of thought, however. Quite frankly I don't think that even applies to paid proprietary software. My moral intuition doesn't allow for that kind of transfer of guilt, which seems to be what people mean nowadays when they talk about "complicity".
How would you feel about a project with an official policy that pull requests from people with a certain skin color will not be accepted - is that still in the spirit of F/LOSS? If a specific maintainer in an otherwise friendly community refuses to merge pull requests from developers with a certain skin color, how should the community handle that?
If the other maintainers fork the project and continue without that one toxic maintainer, are they following the spirit of F/LOSS, or are they suddenly "needlessly introducing politics" and "distracting from development"? If the latter, why would the actions of that one toxic maintainer not fall under the same?
If you notice that your community is rapidly losing core members because they keep getting insulted by that one toxic maintainer, what do you propose one should do? Do you take action, or do you let the project die?
No, but this is irrelevant to any of the currently discussed situations.
> If the other maintainers fork the project and continue without that one toxic maintainer, are they following the spirit of F/LOSS
To have this argument requires accepting your framing around "toxic maintainers" which is probably not very productive. But of course forking projects to do your own thing is entirely in the spirit.
Regardless, though, that is not what people are objecting to. For example, an XLibre project wiki was defaced with disparaging comments, including by Jordan Petridis (deeply involved with both GNOME and Xorg) (https://github.com/X11Libre/xserver/issues/346#issuecomment-...). This was highly unprofessional and XLibre should not have to deal with it regardless of what you think about the politics of anyone involved.
It's somehow always relevant, because they all pretend to be speaking for black people, or that their situation is exactly as if they were black people. It's unbelievably grating to actual black people. And when black people say it to them, how they feel about actual black people comes out instantly. You see, we're symbols. We represent unfair suffering.
Just like their parents who were trying to be rappers, their grandparents were trying to be "white n-----s" (because having to go to Vietnam made them black, you see), and their great-grandparents were talking in jazz talk (like Biden.) It did nothing for black people.
What does that have to do with the fancifully hypothetical "project with an official policy that pull requests from people with a certain skin color will not be accepted"?
I legitimately can't understand what you're railing against. Who are "they" in this sentence? Why should I consider that "they" are doing what you describe? Give concrete examples, please.
His views are not just differences in tax policy, I find them grotesque, and I am glad people are aware of who is behind Omarchy and Hyprland so they can make informed decisions about whether to use them or not.
It's gonna be a waste of time for anyone who doesn't already agree with this statement to continue past this first sentence.
You may notice that your sibling replies treat the "alternative viewpoint" in question as if it were objective fact, and show the same unwillingness. It's prudent to understand whose minds can actually be changed on issues like this.
The "unwillingness" in question is the decision not to read and engage with another's perspective. The replies calling this a fact are actually engaging with the points being made. Whether or not American politics is becoming more fascist isn't really a matter of debate unless one simply doesn't know what the word "fascist" is referring to.
You seem, er, "unwilling" to engage with an objective definition of fascism. It's in another comment in this thread if you want to discuss it in good faith. What do you think? (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45575415) Personally, it seems kinda obvious that the phrase "Make America Great Again" was chosen specifically for how it evokes palingenetic ultranationalism.
> It's prudent to understand whose minds can actually be changed on issues like this.
It's prudent to say what you believe. Whether or not someone is willing to engage with your beliefs in good faith is on them.
This doesn't seem to be relevant. They didn't dismiss Mein Kampf as a waste of time.
I actually read a lot of history books, but I’m not limiting myself to WW2 material. I can see how someone who only reads about that could assume that WW2 is the only thing that happened — but also the only thing that is happening, and the only thing that could ever happen. For these, it’s always 1939 somewhere, and the only question that remains is where.
I never said I take issue with that claim, nor that I agree with it, nor that I disagree with it. I just pointed out that there are two groups of people: those who agree with it and those who don't; for the latter group, reading the article that starts by stating that claim is going to be a waste of their time, as the article is built upon that foundation.
> I don't see the point in bringing up other time periods
You must be then using history the way a drunkard uses a lamppost: for support rather than illumination.
Why would I be interested in other time periods when talking about the similarities between our time, and a phenomenon that did not exist in those other time periods?
If I state that someone on the street looks like Bill Murray, would you pull up pictures of John Cleese on your phone to refute my claim?
Would you mind explaining why you think it is subjectively wrong to call the MAGA movement fascist? There's a definition of fascism in this thread which is my working definition. Could you read it and provide your perspective on why you think it does not apply in this case? Or perhaps you'd be willing to explain why you think it is a false definition?
The reason I ask is that, by that definition, it seems rather obvious that it is a matter of fact, not opinion, that "US politics has been pretty fascist lately" but you seem to believe it's the other way around.
This is an undeniable fact about American politics. I was never happy with the 14-layer bean dip definitions floating around (they seem to also try to include the definition of "authoritarian") but this one is reasonably concise and accurate to the ideologies of historically fascist movements.
The bar of "populist palingenetic ultranationalism" is fairly objective, and seems to make it clear that this is the ideology behind the "Make America Great Again" movement. By this definition, American politics has been fascist since a President was elected on a fascist-by-definition campaign.
A certain book by Franz Kafka comes to mind…
The guy's giving away tons of work freely, and people are whining about his views. Instead of complaining about the free download, maybe they should stop paying for his real products? (But that won't happen because they haven't bought anything off him.)
That has nothing to do with bittorrent vs http; use a download manager instead of a browser.
In the meantime, wget -C works to resume a download without a fancy program or browser extension.
When it is etymologically derived from the greek arkhein (“to rule”) like all of your examples (but unlike, say, “starchy”, which also ends with -archy but has an unrelated etymology), yes, the “ch” sounds like “k”.
But the “-archy” in “omarchy” doesn't come from arkhein, in comes from Arch Linux, so...
Try out Hyprland yourself, it's fun and simpler to customize than its i3 ancestor.
I'm currently dual booting Windows & CachyOS with Niri and installation was incredibly smooth, including setting up secure boot or playing Windows games.
https://cachyos.org/
It came off as xenophobic and racist, so sponsors pulled funding while others (some quite high profile) refuse to work with DHH. There's a non-zero amount of reading between the lines, so here's the blog post so everyone can decide for themselves:
https://world.hey.com/dhh/as-i-remember-london-e7d38e64
Bittorrent requires substantially more connections generally.
Normal web browsing etc is more or less indistinguishable from fibre or cable. Streaming - including high participant count Zoom meetings for work, as well as 4k Netflix etc - works perfectly well too.
But bittorrent? Nah. The sheer number of connections quickly overload the link, the speed drops to a max of only 1 or 2 Mbps, and it kills off anything else I'm trying to do at the same time.
Pushing / pulling containers has a similar issue - I have to set image_parallel_copies = 3 in /etc/containers/containers.conf as the default of 6 can cause problems, especially if two or containers are being pulled at the same time. I reckon that the comfortable limit for the number of parallel connections on 5g is probably somewhere around 10.
Plus, y'know, range requests have been supported since HTTP/1.1 way back in the mid 90s, so resuming downloads should work just fine with the likes of wget or any normal web browser.
Saying that, the author also mentions that he was WiFi - so why doesn't he just use that rather than tethering? Doesn't matter if it's slow, he could always do something else on the tethered connection while he waits...
* I don't really like Hyprland. I want to use Niri and hacking at Omarchy to make that happen doesn't seem worth it.
* getting flatpaks working with it is painful
* it's too dependent on the aur which I try to avoid
A lot of the nicer features - some of the shell and nvim setup configs are things that I don't really care about.
I think this is really good setup for someone smarter then I am. I think at the end of the day I want something simpler then this - though it does say "opinionated" right on the tin and I had a blast playing around with it.
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I don't think their mission statement covers ongoing internet dramas & cancel campaigns. Rather, this article feels like mission creep, lacking novel insight. For me, the only new info I caught is the author's intimation that the founder of Framework laptops should be canceled.
I get people are totally within their rights to ban movies/software/sports, etc. for creators whose beliefs they disagree with. However, software is the people who make it? I rarely, if ever, know the authors who create software or what they believe in.
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