There's a difference between a few small bugs because software is new and a half dozen eval(untrusted_input) in version 4.0.
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.
> Wouldn't the security team and the agents just go and fix the security holes?
Of course they’re going to react to what is reported and fix it. That’s 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 they’ve 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.
Yea, I don’t get the shade. As many have said, it’s just Arch + a very polished UX preconfigured so you can jump right in without a lot of setup overhead.
Why it’s security would be on a different level than any other Linux distro isn’t clear.
It’s a bit more than Arch. There are a bunch of programs written in shell and QML/JavaScript. I guess at least they are using memory-safe languages, but shell scripts make it easier to write the type of shell-injection bug mentioned in the article. Personally if I started a new project in 2026, I would not choose bash and vanilla JavaScript as the languages to write it in.
If they are interested in complaints. Probably they do not, so people write blogs on their own. This kind of also happened in the rails world; some people got upset at DHH and then started writing complaints; and many of these complaints are by themselves also total garbage (some are more objective criticism, these tend to be better). It's kind of agenda-based everywhere.
> 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.
Isn't the rise of AI basically turning software engineering into tumblr? Thats what I see; soon we'll have a forum that's just filled with roblox-but-for-adults.
People have taken 'everything is political' to mean 'politics must be discussed for everything'.
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.
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.
>> OTOH, fighting bigotry is something we should never leave behind.
> [we] just want to exist without being attacked for being themselves and [they say we're] wolves who need to be shot to protect the sheep.
Weird, you're the author of both of the above quotes but "just wanting to exist" is very different from "a never ending war on bigotry". It's either one or the other, can't be both because war begets war.
Just read DHH's blog and then you may quickly realise that
other distributions may be a better choice. There is a
difference between "opinionated" and ... whatever the content
criteria is for DHH nowadays to write stuff on his blog.
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'm somewhat out of the loop, and it's not really mentioned in the article, but what's with Omarchy getting this crazy amount of financial support from this list of fairly prominent individuals? Until a few weeks ago I'd never heard of it, then what I did hear is that it's being made by a very... uhh, eccentric(?) individual, and now it's suddenly got a crazy amount of funding. What am I missing?
Just to explain because not everyone is necessarily a native English speaker or gets the reference.
This is a reference to a dog whistle. Above 25kHz are sounds that dogs can hear but humans generally can't.
The term dog whistle is used to refer to phrases that racists use to indicate their racism, while sounding plausibly deniable. The idea is that it's a phrase that will make other racists realize that you are one of them, while not sounding openly racist to others.
DHH himself has gone beyond dog whistles. He's directly compared what he considers undesirable ehtnic populations to wolves who need to be shot. He's just openly calling for ethnic cleansing by now.
But support for Omarchy itself can be seen as a dog whistle. It's widely known that DHH is a fascist, but you have some plausible deniability by donating to Omarchy because you're just politically neutral and think it's cool tech, or something like that.
> DHH himself has gone beyond dog whistles. He's directly compared what he considers undesirable ehtnic populations to wolves who need to be shot. He's just openly calling for ethnic cleansing by now.
Let me prefix this with that DHH's opinions suck, not sure what he's going through but clearly something, and that blog post you're referencing is terrible in lots of ways. But he's not openly calling for ethnic cleansing, you're doing speaking against him a disservice by not providing an accurate view of what shit thing he said. It's still terrible, the verbatim quotes (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49448148), but deporting isn't the same as "ethnic cleansing". Even people we disagree with vehemently should be disagreed with honestly.
Then that blog post is just one of many where he've essentially gone of the rails in terms of hardline authoritarianism and fascist ideas, which makes it kind of weird he's getting the financial support he's getting. But then some just don't care about what viewpoints others have, I suppose that's a valid stance too even if I disagree with it.
> but deporting isn't the same as "ethnic cleansing".
I’m sorry, but forcibly deporting people because of their ethnic background is the very definition of ethnic cleansing.
In general, if people use violence on the population as a way to either kill or forcibly expel them, there would be a strong case to call it a genocide.
> forcibly deporting people because of their ethnic background is the very definition of ethnic cleansing
I agree, but I think if this is what you think he's arguing for, you either need to re-read the blog post, or you're not discussing that post honestly, which again does us all a disservice, regardless of how much we disagree with him or not.
He uses a word that is a slur for the Romani, an ethnic minority in many European countries. He never discusses nationality.
He also compares deporting them (to where, you might ask) to shooting wolves.
It's also not his only post on the topic. He has previous ones where he complains of how horrible London is because white British people no longer constitute a majority. He calls for not just ends to immigration and closing borders, but "remigration".
It is very clear from these posts that he strongly believes that non white ethnic groups should be removed from European countries.
If that's not ethnic cleansing, I don't know what is.
I'm not just trying to score points about whether he sucks, but specifically point out the types of policies that he advocates for, and there are a number of people in this thread trying to claim somehow that he doesn't advocate for policies that he clearly has been.
So I'm curious, what makes you think that what he calls for isn't ethnic cleansing?
From Wikipedia (and please, fill me in if you have a better definition):
"Ethnic cleansing is the systematic forced removal of ethnic, racial, or religious groups from a given area, with the intent of making the society ethnically homogeneous."
From DHH:
Calling for the deportation (forced removal) of a specific ethnic group (also note the violent analogy to wolves): "When wolves get out of control, you shoot them. When gypsies take over public spaces, you deport them."
Calling for the forced removal of millions of people of various ethnic groups he considers undesirable from Europe: "Because the sacred cow here is not just that mass migration must stop going forward. It's also that millions who are already in Europe must go. Remigration has gone from a fringe concept to the mainstream discourse in record time on account of that realization. The Overton window is swinging wide open, but the cow is still there."
Talking about how much he wanted to move to London but that he no longer has that desire due to its ethnic diversity: "As soon as I was old enough to travel on my own, London was where I wanted to go.... 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.... Recently, a projection that Danes would be a minority in their own country by 2096 caused an enormous stir in Denmark. Politicians across the spectrum decried what a catastrophe that would be for this world's oldest continuous monarchy. But a demographic nightmare worse than that has already enveloped London!"
As you can see, DHH is explicitly calling for the force removal (deportation and "remigration") of ethnic groups, because he is afraid of the results of the population becoming less ethnically homogeneous. I don't know how you could argue that what he's calling for is anything other than ethnic cleansing.
Also, note that none of this is due to any actualy on the ground experience; he lives in LA, he's lived in the US for over 20 years. This is purely an exercise in ideology. In fact, LA has a smaller percentage of the population that is white Anglo-American than London does of white British people.
Anyhow: I have laid out in detail the arugment for calling what he calls for "ethnic cleansing". Do you have any argument that it isn't ethnic cleansing that he's calling for? It seems pretty clear to me, so I'm confused why you have kept on insisting "if this is what you think he's arguing for, you either need to re-read the blog post", because I've read all three of these posts of his and more, and it all points towards him advocating for ethnic cleansing.
Something like "mass expulsion and killing of one ethnic or religious group in an area by another ethnic or religious group in that area" I suppose, but also, I really don't have any energy left to discuss something I don't care about. I don't like that guy, I don't like his views, and I don't want to argue against others who also don't like him.
Hope your text helped someone, enjoy the rest of your day!
Of course it differs by the individual. I think there are three camps: Those who have read DHH's blog posts, and agree with them. Those who have read DHH's blog posts, but think "he couldn't possibly mean that". Those who haven't read DHH's blog posts, but know that he's on "their side" (right-leaning).
You seem to be talking about users. They're talking about creators.
I don't think users know who DHH is, or care who DHH is. Probably like 0.01% of users have read a blog post, let alone a political one. (Maybe they all are, I haven't read any)
Disagree there; anyone who installs Omarchy does it because a social media creator they like suggested it, and there’s only a few degrees of separation between those creators. This isn’t like Slackware’s popularity in the 90s, peer to peer, this all top-down. I’d call it hype-driven, if they didnt have a neat product (which I’m not a customer of).
Also have to disagree with you there... there are other ways to find out about distros besides social media or people suggesting it. Back in the day, one of the only ways people even found out about new distros was through sites like Distrowatch who just reported on the facts of the distros and never tried to market them to people.
What about the people who have no idea who DHH is, what he stands for, and have heard about Omarchy for the first time just now and are trying to figure out what it even is and suddenly people are talking in circles about him being eccentric or problematic.
I switched to Omarchy 4.0 from CachyOS and is having an amazing experience so far, barely know anything about DHH other than that he made Rails, and now everybody is calling me a racist sympathizer.
What about "ignoring him, not knowing him, just using his product" is defending? Are you using Nestle products? Ah you do? You must be all for stealing people's water well and selling them bottled water from it.
Omarchy is just a pile of settings and a branding, you could have configured Cachy similarly and wouldn't have to associate yourself with the racists. Be careful of the company you keep.
Yes, if you're jumping on some hypetrain OSS distro built around a cult of personality and it has very few merits otherwise and that project's creator has racist views, absolutely yes. People's distro alignments are a little bit different than some small utilities or OSS libraries, nobody writes jokes like "how do you know someone uses libxml? They'll tell you" like they do for Gentoo, Arch, etc.
But keep defending it, we can see what you're ok associating with.
Come on, this is so dishonest, his personality has basically nothing to do with Omarchys popularity, and it has loads of merit. It's way more pleasant to use than all other distros I've tried.
To claim that it is super simple for everyone to transform Arch into Omarchy clones without reading the Omarchy repos and that everyone should just do that instead because of politics is beyond absurd.
His personality actually has everything to do with Omarchy’s popularity, because he gets funding based off of it.
Omarchy is a set of dotfiles. That’s it. We all know the only reason you, and everyone else, even knows about it is because DHH is behind it.
There’s, like, a million dot file repos on GitHub. Most probably higher quality than Omarchy. But somehow, Omarchy is popular. The actually dishonest view is to somehow think that DHH being DHH has nothing to do with Omarchy’s popularity.
Barely. Setting up a repo is next to nothing, and I would hardly call what they have "applications".
Omarchy is not an impressive, innovative, or exciting distro. Manjaro did what Omarchy did a decade ago, and better. Providing an out-of-the-box tolerable Arch Linux experience is very par for the course.
This is, at best, a weekend project. Not to mention I can find much more impressive, cohesive, and easier-to-use dotfile repos on GitHub.
I think the only people who think Omarchy is, well, anything, are either new to Linux or just like DHH. Which is fine. But if you're new to Linux, please, browse around. Arch Linux is really not the most cohesive and easy-to-use distro you can find.
Ugh, gosh really? I looked at one of the videos of the... eh excentric developer of the distro where he was presenting 4.0 and I was wondering about that retro neon design of background images he seemed to adore so much. I was wondering why someone would still think this Fashwave design to be cool. It's been what? 10 years when this trope peaked?
That OSS has become too entangled with political activism and ideological gatekeeping, when it should be about making great software, giving people control over their computers, and rediscovering the joy of computing.
I don't think Omarchy is anti-political so much as an attempt to revive the enthusiast/hacker ethos of the OSS community.
"Freedom to compute" cannot be separated from "Freedom to exist" as it explicitly depends on it. The authors of Omarchy pay lip service to the former while taking a stance against the latter.
He did. He claimed that the demographic has changed and he advocates for reverting this change. And it turns out that forcibly altering the demographic of an era is the literal definition of ethnic cleansing (and by the way the phrass has historicallt been coined with the specific meaning of removing Muslim people from Serbia, by the people who intended to perform that “cleansing”, so it's particularly apt here).
>> He did not call for forcibly altering the demographic.
> When wolves get out of control, you shoot them. When gypsies take over public spaces, you deport them.
And while I'm quoting:
MerriamWebster: Xenophobe
> one unduly fearful of what is foreign and especially of people of foreign origin
DHH:
> You can rest assured that I'd be in the streets waving a Danish flag if these were my conditions in my native country. I think that's a pretty universal sentiment. There's absolutely nothing racist or xenophobic in saying that Denmark is primarily a country for the Danes, Britain primarily a united kingdom for the Brits, and Japan primarily a set of islands for the Japanese.
I would say saying that is pretty much the definition of xenophobic.
Worse, in the context of DHHs rants, it comes off as racist - I don't get the sense he wants to throw out Norwegians from Denmark, for example.
Although shurly there are Norwegian migrants and foreign workers in Denmark.
> Supporting indigenous people and their rights to their native homelands is not xenophobic.
Xenophobia leads to the belief that white Danes need support for their rights to their native homeland.
It's not like this is some great battle to rise restitution for Native Americans, Maori or Aborigines.
It's about not having to see so many non-white faces in Copenhagen or London.
> Enforcing immigration laws is not ethnic cleansing.
That certainly depends on the law, and the enforcement.
More to the point: trampling nomadic sub- cultures, forcefully denying them access where they have lived for centuries, denying them their way of life - can certainly result in genocide ("the deliberate and systematic destruction of a racial, political, or cultural group").
> Worse, in the context of DHHs rants, it comes off as racist - I don't get the sense he wants to throw out Norwegians from Denmark, for example.
I think "primarily" is doing some lifting in "Denmark is primarily a country for the Danes", along with his vagueness about what it means to be of "the Japanese" (Yamato/Zainichi/Ainu/Ryukyuan/Bonin) or "the Brits" (English/Scots/Welsh/Cornish/Irish/Manx/Jamaican/...).
I'm not seeing anywhere that he actually claims someone doesn't have a right to exist. I see lots of people using colorful, subjective interpretations of other things he said to try and push a narrative, but that's all.
DHH has the capacity to assess that going full on white supremacist is still relatively frowned upon, so he does only as much as he thinks he can get away with.
Sponsoring his badly made OSS and giving him any type of a limelight will only embolden him and the likes of him. I personally want nothing to do with him and anything he touches.
I'm becoming really upset at people whom I otherwise align with for taking absolute statements that don't make sense.
DHH said some stuff you disagree with, incidentally while I have always identified with strong social systems, welfare, high taxes and things like free healthcare, I can't say I disagree with the core of what he tried to say, because there has been seizemic ethnic change within a single generation - and people not talking about it is actually fuelling the extreme position.
So when you say "has a right to exist", what do you mean exactly? Because if I was to stand in the lobby of a parliamentary building and was forcibly removed, would that mean I don't have the right to exist?
You have a right to exist, just not here, just like how White English people have no right to exist in India, and White Dutch people don't have a right to live in Zimbabwe.
Saying "Hey, this demographic and major cultural change in the last 20 years makes the environment different" is considered racism- which has the obvious consenquence of making the word "racist" have less power.. It's not racism to notice this, it's racist to think anyone else is lesser than natives or to group "them" and treat an ethnic group as a homogenous bloc.
I'm reminded of the phrase "if you don't respect me, I won't respect you" whereby respect can mean as an authority or as a person, and they mean "if you don't respect me as an authority, then I won't respect you as a person".
You're saying "if you don't let me do everything I want then you're denying that I have the right to exist at all" which is a type of hysteric language which permits any atrocity in response it can be framed as an act of self defence.
>Saying "Hey, this demographic and major cultural change in the last 20 years makes the environment different" is considered racism
perhaps if he said it like this, rather than comparing Roma to wolves that should be shot and comparing immigration as something to be survived like a bombing blitz, people wouldnt care as much
>it's racist to think anyone else is lesser than natives or to group "them" and treat an ethnic group as a homogenous bloc.
>there has been seizemic ethnic change within a single generation
There hasn't. Look at actual numbers, and what you see is the same hysteria that was directed against the Jews during the first half of the XXth century: foreign agents, traitors, parasites, nuisance... All for a tiny fraction of the population. All blown up by the same people who are the ones responsible for the misery of the majority of the population - yes, the "whites" are being screwed up by other "whites", not by the "brown" people.
>White English people have no right to exist in India, and White Dutch people don't have a right to live in Zimbabwe.
One: it was English people in Zimbabwe too, and two: they have the right to live there; the problem with them is that they took everything by force and decided the native people where subhuman. Pretending the situation is the same with brown-skinned low-wage immigrants coming in western countries is completely cuckoo crazy.
>it's racist to think anyone else is lesser than natives or to group "them" and treat an ethnic group as a homogenous bloc.
Which is exactly what DHH does. Thank you for agreeing that DHH is a racist.
This is why I don't like getting into online debates... most people seem wholly uninterested in the (seemingly to them) blasphemy that is "other perspectives that aren't mine." To me, continually stroking your confirmation bias just proves you're not really as smart as you think you are. And indeed I think the Dunning-Kruger effect still applies to "smart" people.
You don't stop when you are estimating your ability correctly; as you learn more, you gain more awareness of your ignorance and continue being conservative with your self-estimates.
What this behavior has led me to do is basically only challenge people who are actually asking a question, because then there's a chance they might be willing to entertain other perspectives than their own. But if I say something and get a matter-of-fact response by someone with an obvious god complex... it's like they're not interested in mutual understanding, they just want to "win" the argument by asserting things loud enough until they're believed.
But when I see people being straight up dogmatic and preaching walls of black-and-white opinions as if they're somehow infallible and that there can't be any other perspectives... I just see incompetence. But it is frustrating because you want to set the record straight, because you know others are going to believe the louder person... but there's really nothing you can do about it. One time someone tried to argue with me that "cloud storage does not exist." All I could do in that moment was just ignore them and move on.
"As a rule, strong feelings about issues do not emerge from deep understanding." -Sloman and Fernbach
No, it is definitely possible to make great software without inserting messaging on irrelevant issues into it. Whatever the quality of Omarchy, DHH is right about parts of the free software world becoming entangled worth various irrelevant causes.
This equivocation on the word "exist" doesn't work anymore. It's not 2018 anymore. Normal people with common sense understand that keeping politics separate from technology isn't the same thing as existential violence. Nobody, to "exist", needs to make software political.
Fully agreed. I have yet to encounter someone who is claiming something elss and is not privileged enough to just not need to worry about this. Ignorance doesn't reduce the political tech entanglement, it just... ignores it. Which is fine, do whatever. But don't claim it's not related.
Take one glance at history, and you'll see that having a sovereign ethnic homeland is crucial to that "freedom to exist". So you're wrong on both counts - they are also taking a stance for the latter, and the two freedoms can be separated. Distributing FOSS does not require one takes a stance on every ethnic and political conflict on Earth. The GNU manifesto never once talks about the occupation of Tibet. This "cannot be separated" is nothing but a cheap attempt to attach your own cause to some other, more widely accepted cause.
FOSS never was about the right of the distributor. It’s been always about protecting the user. The way to do it is to give the users a set of rights that cannot be revoked.
Maybe DHH should live by his own ethos and "shut up and program" rather than continually making divisive political statements that alienate people who might otherwise use and contribute to his distro.
I don’t think he’ll refrain from using the political power he amassed by building a very popular web framework. We gave him a megaphone and a soapbox, and he’ll use it.
> That OSS has become too entangled with political activism
Wait is that really the spin that DHH is pushing? That'd be insane given he's among the most politically active open sources developers put there by a wiiide margin.
I'm very far from it but I saw many exchanges in my twitter timeline (because now when you click on a tweet to read it or interact, the algorithm thinks it's your only interest in life).
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.
What collective human endeavour is devoid of politics?
Politics is how groups decide things, from what a code of conduct should be to where we should stop for coffee after lunch. It’s easy to not notice it, but we do politics dozens of times every day.
That's a reputation it had in the 90s to early 00s and has long since lost. Even in recent years the drama within Debian has been incredibly high.
A lot happened in debian-private, despite "We will not hide problems" being part of the project's social contract, and then leaks started happening and all hell broke loose. I didn't even mention the decade-long community censorship campaign yet. Or the Volunteer Day suicide. Or the "Please write a list of 5 Debian Developers you would like to kick out of the project." DPL election question. Or banning Linus from DebConf...
i doubt you have tried every distribution. at least you haven't tried the one i was part of: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foresight_Linux a small, but independent distribution (not a spin-off of anything). i can assure you, it was drama and asshole free. (maybe it didn't live long enough to develop drama, that would be a fair counterpoint, but other than that, i reject your statement)
Yeah but it was also made to showcase GNOME, which was kind of its own huge drama at that time.
I mean I can't even believe you're seriously posting this. It was created intended to be a marketing tool and for something folks had long already made their decision either way about.
So yeah, I never used your extremely niche distribution and that's some sort of gotcha on my argument. Weirdly, I've used a ton of niche Linux distros even. Even was an early GoboLinux contributor.
If you're a niche distro you don't have the manpower to do anything more than already be downstream of larger communities with their own huge drama. That's kind of the point I'm making. You will not meaningfully find no-drama. This isn't even just a Linux or a FOSS thing -- it's group project dynamics. It's inevitable in any project not run by a benevolent dictator (and even then...).
yeah, but with that you are making the whole argument meaningless, because you are arguing that since you can't have life without drama, asking to minimize drama is useless. that's like saying that reducing pollution is useless because you can't eliminate pollution. yes, we can reduce pollution, and we can minimize drama. we can't entirely avoid it, but that was not being asked for.
But Omarchy has no internal drama. It's entirely external drama around how noninvolved parties feel about DHH. That's way different than internal drama or upstream drama affecting your project.
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 they’re going to react to what is reported and fix it. That’s 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 they’ve 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 it’s security would be on a different level than any other Linux distro isn’t 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.
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.
> [we] just want to exist without being attacked for being themselves and [they say we're] wolves who need to be shot to protect the sheep.
Weird, you're the author of both of the above quotes but "just wanting to exist" is very different from "a never ending war on bigotry". It's either one or the other, can't be both because war begets war.
https://www.eurozine.com/blogging-the-nihilist-impulse/
https://web.archive.org/web/20240925180238/http://www.intell...
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.)
My guess is relationships and fame went a long way towards getting those funds.
Packaging and marketing matters.
The funders are not funding the development of a Linux distro, they are co-signing the political statement.
This is a reference to a dog whistle. Above 25kHz are sounds that dogs can hear but humans generally can't.
The term dog whistle is used to refer to phrases that racists use to indicate their racism, while sounding plausibly deniable. The idea is that it's a phrase that will make other racists realize that you are one of them, while not sounding openly racist to others.
DHH himself has gone beyond dog whistles. He's directly compared what he considers undesirable ehtnic populations to wolves who need to be shot. He's just openly calling for ethnic cleansing by now.
But support for Omarchy itself can be seen as a dog whistle. It's widely known that DHH is a fascist, but you have some plausible deniability by donating to Omarchy because you're just politically neutral and think it's cool tech, or something like that.
Let me prefix this with that DHH's opinions suck, not sure what he's going through but clearly something, and that blog post you're referencing is terrible in lots of ways. But he's not openly calling for ethnic cleansing, you're doing speaking against him a disservice by not providing an accurate view of what shit thing he said. It's still terrible, the verbatim quotes (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49448148), but deporting isn't the same as "ethnic cleansing". Even people we disagree with vehemently should be disagreed with honestly.
Then that blog post is just one of many where he've essentially gone of the rails in terms of hardline authoritarianism and fascist ideas, which makes it kind of weird he's getting the financial support he's getting. But then some just don't care about what viewpoints others have, I suppose that's a valid stance too even if I disagree with it.
I’m sorry, but forcibly deporting people because of their ethnic background is the very definition of ethnic cleansing.
In general, if people use violence on the population as a way to either kill or forcibly expel them, there would be a strong case to call it a genocide.
I agree, but I think if this is what you think he's arguing for, you either need to re-read the blog post, or you're not discussing that post honestly, which again does us all a disservice, regardless of how much we disagree with him or not.
He also compares deporting them (to where, you might ask) to shooting wolves.
It's also not his only post on the topic. He has previous ones where he complains of how horrible London is because white British people no longer constitute a majority. He calls for not just ends to immigration and closing borders, but "remigration".
It is very clear from these posts that he strongly believes that non white ethnic groups should be removed from European countries.
If that's not ethnic cleansing, I don't know what is.
So I'm curious, what makes you think that what he calls for isn't ethnic cleansing?
From Wikipedia (and please, fill me in if you have a better definition):
"Ethnic cleansing is the systematic forced removal of ethnic, racial, or religious groups from a given area, with the intent of making the society ethnically homogeneous."
From DHH:
Calling for the deportation (forced removal) of a specific ethnic group (also note the violent analogy to wolves): "When wolves get out of control, you shoot them. When gypsies take over public spaces, you deport them."
Calling for the forced removal of millions of people of various ethnic groups he considers undesirable from Europe: "Because the sacred cow here is not just that mass migration must stop going forward. It's also that millions who are already in Europe must go. Remigration has gone from a fringe concept to the mainstream discourse in record time on account of that realization. The Overton window is swinging wide open, but the cow is still there."
Talking about how much he wanted to move to London but that he no longer has that desire due to its ethnic diversity: "As soon as I was old enough to travel on my own, London was where I wanted to go.... 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.... Recently, a projection that Danes would be a minority in their own country by 2096 caused an enormous stir in Denmark. Politicians across the spectrum decried what a catastrophe that would be for this world's oldest continuous monarchy. But a demographic nightmare worse than that has already enveloped London!"
As you can see, DHH is explicitly calling for the force removal (deportation and "remigration") of ethnic groups, because he is afraid of the results of the population becoming less ethnically homogeneous. I don't know how you could argue that what he's calling for is anything other than ethnic cleansing.
Also, note that none of this is due to any actualy on the ground experience; he lives in LA, he's lived in the US for over 20 years. This is purely an exercise in ideology. In fact, LA has a smaller percentage of the population that is white Anglo-American than London does of white British people.
Anyhow: I have laid out in detail the arugment for calling what he calls for "ethnic cleansing". Do you have any argument that it isn't ethnic cleansing that he's calling for? It seems pretty clear to me, so I'm confused why you have kept on insisting "if this is what you think he's arguing for, you either need to re-read the blog post", because I've read all three of these posts of his and more, and it all points towards him advocating for ethnic cleansing.
Hope your text helped someone, enjoy the rest of your day!
I don't think users know who DHH is, or care who DHH is. Probably like 0.01% of users have read a blog post, let alone a political one. (Maybe they all are, I haven't read any)
I switched to Omarchy 4.0 from CachyOS and is having an amazing experience so far, barely know anything about DHH other than that he made Rails, and now everybody is calling me a racist sympathizer.
But keep defending it, we can see what you're ok associating with.
To claim that it is super simple for everyone to transform Arch into Omarchy clones without reading the Omarchy repos and that everyone should just do that instead because of politics is beyond absurd.
Omarchy is a set of dotfiles. That’s it. We all know the only reason you, and everyone else, even knows about it is because DHH is behind it.
There’s, like, a million dot file repos on GitHub. Most probably higher quality than Omarchy. But somehow, Omarchy is popular. The actually dishonest view is to somehow think that DHH being DHH has nothing to do with Omarchy’s popularity.
Omarchy is not an impressive, innovative, or exciting distro. Manjaro did what Omarchy did a decade ago, and better. Providing an out-of-the-box tolerable Arch Linux experience is very par for the course.
This is, at best, a weekend project. Not to mention I can find much more impressive, cohesive, and easier-to-use dotfile repos on GitHub.
I think the only people who think Omarchy is, well, anything, are either new to Linux or just like DHH. Which is fine. But if you're new to Linux, please, browse around. Arch Linux is really not the most cohesive and easy-to-use distro you can find.
I don't think Omarchy is anti-political so much as an attempt to revive the enthusiast/hacker ethos of the OSS community.
He did not.
>He claimed that the demographic has changed and he advocates for reverting this change.
Nothing wrong with supporting indigenous people and their rights to their native homelands.
>And it turns out that forcibly altering the demographic of an era is the literal definition of ethnic cleansing.
He did not call for forcibly altering the demographic.
> When wolves get out of control, you shoot them. When gypsies take over public spaces, you deport them.
And while I'm quoting:
MerriamWebster: Xenophobe
> one unduly fearful of what is foreign and especially of people of foreign origin
DHH:
> You can rest assured that I'd be in the streets waving a Danish flag if these were my conditions in my native country. I think that's a pretty universal sentiment. There's absolutely nothing racist or xenophobic in saying that Denmark is primarily a country for the Danes, Britain primarily a united kingdom for the Brits, and Japan primarily a set of islands for the Japanese.
I would say saying that is pretty much the definition of xenophobic.
Worse, in the context of DHHs rants, it comes off as racist - I don't get the sense he wants to throw out Norwegians from Denmark, for example.
Although shurly there are Norwegian migrants and foreign workers in Denmark.
>And while I'm quoting: >MerriamWebster: Xenophobe >> one unduly fearful of what is foreign and especially of people of foreign origin
He doesn't fear foreign people or things so this definition doesn't apply.
>I would say saying that is pretty much the definition of xenophobic.
Except it's not, words have meaning. Supporting indigenous people and their rights to their native homelands is not xenophobic.
>Worse, in the context of DHHs rants, it comes off as racist - I don't get the sense he wants to throw out Norwegians from Denmark, for example.
That's your interpretation, not the facts, and not what DHH has said.
Xenophobia leads to the belief that white Danes need support for their rights to their native homeland.
It's not like this is some great battle to rise restitution for Native Americans, Maori or Aborigines.
It's about not having to see so many non-white faces in Copenhagen or London.
> Enforcing immigration laws is not ethnic cleansing.
That certainly depends on the law, and the enforcement.
More to the point: trampling nomadic sub- cultures, forcefully denying them access where they have lived for centuries, denying them their way of life - can certainly result in genocide ("the deliberate and systematic destruction of a racial, political, or cultural group").
I think "primarily" is doing some lifting in "Denmark is primarily a country for the Danes", along with his vagueness about what it means to be of "the Japanese" (Yamato/Zainichi/Ainu/Ryukyuan/Bonin) or "the Brits" (English/Scots/Welsh/Cornish/Irish/Manx/Jamaican/...).
Sponsoring his badly made OSS and giving him any type of a limelight will only embolden him and the likes of him. I personally want nothing to do with him and anything he touches.
DHH said some stuff you disagree with, incidentally while I have always identified with strong social systems, welfare, high taxes and things like free healthcare, I can't say I disagree with the core of what he tried to say, because there has been seizemic ethnic change within a single generation - and people not talking about it is actually fuelling the extreme position.
So when you say "has a right to exist", what do you mean exactly? Because if I was to stand in the lobby of a parliamentary building and was forcibly removed, would that mean I don't have the right to exist?
You have a right to exist, just not here, just like how White English people have no right to exist in India, and White Dutch people don't have a right to live in Zimbabwe.
Saying "Hey, this demographic and major cultural change in the last 20 years makes the environment different" is considered racism- which has the obvious consenquence of making the word "racist" have less power.. It's not racism to notice this, it's racist to think anyone else is lesser than natives or to group "them" and treat an ethnic group as a homogenous bloc.
I'm reminded of the phrase "if you don't respect me, I won't respect you" whereby respect can mean as an authority or as a person, and they mean "if you don't respect me as an authority, then I won't respect you as a person".
You're saying "if you don't let me do everything I want then you're denying that I have the right to exist at all" which is a type of hysteric language which permits any atrocity in response it can be framed as an act of self defence.
Stop it.
perhaps if he said it like this, rather than comparing Roma to wolves that should be shot and comparing immigration as something to be survived like a bombing blitz, people wouldnt care as much
>it's racist to think anyone else is lesser than natives or to group "them" and treat an ethnic group as a homogenous bloc.
that is what he is doing
There hasn't. Look at actual numbers, and what you see is the same hysteria that was directed against the Jews during the first half of the XXth century: foreign agents, traitors, parasites, nuisance... All for a tiny fraction of the population. All blown up by the same people who are the ones responsible for the misery of the majority of the population - yes, the "whites" are being screwed up by other "whites", not by the "brown" people.
>White English people have no right to exist in India, and White Dutch people don't have a right to live in Zimbabwe.
One: it was English people in Zimbabwe too, and two: they have the right to live there; the problem with them is that they took everything by force and decided the native people where subhuman. Pretending the situation is the same with brown-skinned low-wage immigrants coming in western countries is completely cuckoo crazy.
>it's racist to think anyone else is lesser than natives or to group "them" and treat an ethnic group as a homogenous bloc.
Which is exactly what DHH does. Thank you for agreeing that DHH is a racist.
"Irish need not apply" right?
You don't stop when you are estimating your ability correctly; as you learn more, you gain more awareness of your ignorance and continue being conservative with your self-estimates.
What this behavior has led me to do is basically only challenge people who are actually asking a question, because then there's a chance they might be willing to entertain other perspectives than their own. But if I say something and get a matter-of-fact response by someone with an obvious god complex... it's like they're not interested in mutual understanding, they just want to "win" the argument by asserting things loud enough until they're believed.
But when I see people being straight up dogmatic and preaching walls of black-and-white opinions as if they're somehow infallible and that there can't be any other perspectives... I just see incompetence. But it is frustrating because you want to set the record straight, because you know others are going to believe the louder person... but there's really nothing you can do about it. One time someone tried to argue with me that "cloud storage does not exist." All I could do in that moment was just ignore them and move on.
"As a rule, strong feelings about issues do not emerge from deep understanding." -Sloman and Fernbach
1000x this
People who say they don’t need their rights guaranteed do that because they never realised they were protected their whole lives.
FOSS never was about the right of the distributor. It’s been always about protecting the user. The way to do it is to give the users a set of rights that cannot be revoked.
United States disproves this harebrained theory.
Statements dreamed up by people who get gilliganed by a coconut every morning.
...By injecting it with big money and pushing more AI slop?
We probably should have known better.
Wait is that really the spin that DHH is pushing? That'd be insane given he's among the most politically active open sources developers put there by a wiiide margin.
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.
Politics is how groups decide things, from what a code of conduct should be to where we should stop for coffee after lunch. It’s easy to not notice it, but we do politics dozens of times every day.
I've been using Linux since 1993 and at various points every distro under the sun and that perfectly describes exactly zero Linux distributions.
A lot happened in debian-private, despite "We will not hide problems" being part of the project's social contract, and then leaks started happening and all hell broke loose. I didn't even mention the decade-long community censorship campaign yet. Or the Volunteer Day suicide. Or the "Please write a list of 5 Debian Developers you would like to kick out of the project." DPL election question. Or banning Linus from DebConf...
I mean I can't even believe you're seriously posting this. It was created intended to be a marketing tool and for something folks had long already made their decision either way about.
So yeah, I never used your extremely niche distribution and that's some sort of gotcha on my argument. Weirdly, I've used a ton of niche Linux distros even. Even was an early GoboLinux contributor.
If you're a niche distro you don't have the manpower to do anything more than already be downstream of larger communities with their own huge drama. That's kind of the point I'm making. You will not meaningfully find no-drama. This isn't even just a Linux or a FOSS thing -- it's group project dynamics. It's inevitable in any project not run by a benevolent dictator (and even then...).