Regardless of everyone's opinions, myself included... One thing's for certain: this is a masterclass in fund raising. How the hell is he pulling it off ?
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omfg this cannot be happening.. how is this happening? Are they all getting fomo from not giving money or something?
How has this distro done so well? It's just some dude's personal preferences for arch packaged up with some pretty ASCII art.
probably because he’s deeply networked and invented a popular programming language :/
He didn't invent a programming language. He designed a framework for a programming language. I assure you the second one is a lot easier. It's like a library of functions and class suites that make programming quicker and easier as the boilerplate code you'd have to write is done already.
...Let's play devil's advocate.
Isn't it a terrible architecture for agents?
The ideal distro would be:
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A strictly immutable base configuration.
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"Rings" of access privilege everywhere, enforced across the whole OS. Something like Qubes OS.
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Top tier, security audited, prepackaged setups for vllm, llama.cpp, various agenic frameworks and such, something better than a massive docker install for every one.
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Multiple versions of patched/optimized Python akin to Clear Linux or CachyOS.
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A kernel/scheduler tuned for compute and low IO latency.
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Good Nvidia/rocm/Intel support, which Arch does provide, admittedly.
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Simple, minimalistic desktop UI that is easy for an agent to interpret in a screenshot, and easy for it to operate. Ideally with integrated hooks.
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And an “easy” headless mode for less overhead
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Prepackaged, open source agenic browsers and embeddings servers.
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Links and guides for more niche machine learning/data processing projects, instead of to the most popular ones that already have official guides.
Omarchy has... precisely none of that? Except for what in inherits from Arch.
Lack of any containerization in particular is one reason OpenClaw (the previous Twitter AI fad) was such a flaming mess.
Seems like their AIs had some of the same ideas you're having here, since about a week or two ago they had an issue open about moving the basis of Omarchy over to Nix.
That got buried somehow, cannot find it in Github anymore.
I wouldn't trust an agent outside of a capabilities-based OS, like if Genode was ready for production. I don't even use AI at all, but if I was actually using agents, I'd want guarantees that not only do you not have access to certain things, you cannot properly conceive of how to access them, it is utterly beyond the agent.
Well, yes, exactly! You shouldn’t trust it.
If this was any other computer program that could execute arbitrary system commands unreliably, standard procedure would be to sandbox the living snot out of it.
It’s baffling to me that “AI” is somehow an excuse to ignore this. Hence that’s exactly what I mean: I’d want rock solid guarantees of containerization, and granular scoping.
This is all good and well, but does it matter? Are people switching to a distro because it is well funded? And even if they do, will they stick around? To me, this looks like a little money furnace that will shut down the moment the cash stops coming in.
So far I know zero people who have even considered switching to this this slop stain of an operating system.
I know one person - the one who recommended it to me.
The premise was interesting. The execution? As you’ve said, slop.
You could get the same done by installing Arch, Claude Code or Codex, and a $20 subscription, plus about a day’s worth of tinkering- which you’d still do on Omarchy to get it working as you want it to…
Hopefully this all keeps being open source so the leftovers could be reused, for the benefit of other projects.
No, but such companies see it as a pocket change and if it does get popular, they'll benefit immensely from all these people buying AI tokens.
They could go and put all this money into any other distro (like Linux Mint, which is incredibly popular and takes a lot of work to make, yet runs on ~$10k a month), they just don't see what's in it for themselves.
They could get $3B for all I care, I’ll never use it.
yeah, don't. I tried it again last week after I saw they have their own "kernel" now. It's an absolute mess of a "distro".
The launcher is a cluster fuck of vibe coded slop prompted by someone who was coked out of their mind. it doesn't work and is incredibly poorly designed.
Normally if you want to configure Hyprland you do so via one LUA config file. Claude Code decided that cutting said config up into 6 LUAs that are ALL commented out would be a better approach. It uses neovim as it's default editor. note the VIM part. so logically to navigate a TILING WINDOW MANAGER whose default editor is neoVIM you'd use VIM style navigation right? nope not on omarchy. it's arrow keys. want to actually have vim nav for your vim based WM? ok find the correct hyprland lua config and then UNBIND all the existing configs to then REBIND them to what you want. Normally you'd just literally swap out the keybinds in one lua config. nope on omarchy you gotta make sure you're in the right lua config file and then try to find out which keys are bound, unbind them, then rebind them to what you want. This is just the primary example of how this "distro" operates.
for something that claims it will speed up dev time for users it sure as fuck prides itself on slowing you down as much as possible and forcing the user to pay for an LLM subscription. THIS is why companies are dumping money into the thing. unlike say Windows where you can easily use the OS without an AI agent Omarchy is designed to force you to use one if you want to get anything done. you have no choice. the configurations are so ass backwards that only an AI can configure them in a timely manner.
I hope Arch is getting some funding from this some how...
DHH offered to upstream some of the funding to arch but they declined
Good on them. Taking money from the alt right is like the one bad apple that spoils the whole barrel.
I remember reading somewhere that DHH offered them money but they politely declined.
So I guess we cannot whine anymore that he doesn't give money upstream.
Fascists helping a fascist. What a shock
So what are they actually doing with all this money they’ve raised?
Like, why all the sponsors? We can look at Mitchell Hashimoto and Ghostty to see that these rich CEOs can retire and build freely. I don’t get it.
How is it that nobody understands that NixOS is the ideal agentic OS.
It's declarative. It can become whatever you want just by tacking an include to a minimal configuration.nix.
I have a laptop set up right now that is headless until you tell an agent what kind of computer it should be.
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