"Spell my name right."
According to the article, "There really is no such thing as bad publicity. As P. T. Barnum put it: 'Say anything you like about me, but spell my name right.'"
As long as it's not in the Epstein Files.
Omarchy distro gains serious backing
The controversial Omarchy distro is attracting both criticism and fans – and financial support, too. Omarchy is an opinionated respin of Arch Linux and a pet project of Ruby on Rails creator David Heinemeier Hansson, better known as DHH. Although the first release was as recent as June last year, this week sees the release of …
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Thursday 27th August 2026 20:47 GMT Throatwarbler Mangrove
WTAF
What the hell is an opinionated distro? Software doesn't have opinions. Speak fucking English. Jesus. I'd refuse to use this distro simply on the basis of it being fucking precious with its terminology. What sort of cunt describes goddamn software as "omakase"? I can only imagine the controversy around the creator is that he's such a complete prat that only two other people on Earth can stand to be in the same room with him, and one of them is legally fucking fucktarded.
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Friday 28th August 2026 03:16 GMT doublelayer
Re: WTAF
People come up with all sorts of weird names for their software. I don't see omakase as that much more unusual than ubuntu as words from languages the creators don't speak which don't have much to do with their software but they like using in names anyway.
I haven't been tempted to run this, both because of reports of security problems which appear to be quite real and because I already did my distro-hopping as a child discovering Linux. I've already experienced the cool new collection of tools and tweaks which gets abandoned, doesn't work properly with other things, or puts some philosophical point above functionality. Now, I ignore any distro until it's got at least a few years of maintenance behind it and even then, I need a reason why this is better before bothering with it.
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Friday 28th August 2026 07:35 GMT JLV
Re: WTAF
An opinionated distro is something that has a lot of presets and implied behavior. DHH came up with Ruby on Rails that has a lot of those 2. So does Django, a contemporary web app server. Not necessarily a bad thing, within reason: both rely heavily on naming conventions to wire up components together.
Omarchy, from a brief look at its characteristics, tends to decide what you ought to be using to develop software with. It could be a good idea to have a Linux that doesn’t need much fiddling around with to be good for a dev. But from a cursory read of those “opinions” I was unsure about what seems to be fairly intrusive UX decisions made on my behalf (as this article also highlights). Now it turns out the security aspect is iffy. So pass. Omakase usage, whatever the eff that means, ain’t a decision point. Omarchy seeming, to me, to be a bit of a fad was.
DHH’s initial claim to controversy IIRC is that he told his employees not to discuss politics on company time or media. That really riled up plenty of people. Although he may have doubled down on other controversies since. He’s a rich tech bro after all. Dunno. And maybe he IS precious. Dunno.
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Friday 28th August 2026 12:33 GMT Liam Proven
Re: WTAF
> What the hell is an opinionated distro?
Simple. It's a collection of software put together by a very opinionated man.
The claim is that this is a distro that is from an opinionated person...
But this isn't a distro -- its components are not packaged and do not all come from one repo. They can't; several are not FOSS.
It means "this contains the tools _I_ want".
This is as opposed to, say, the antiX approach: "here are all the smallest fastest tools that meet our goals. We give you them all and you can choose what you want."
Or the Ubuntu approach: "we carefully looked at all the options out there and have chosen what we feel are the best or most popular choices for you, so you have 1 tool included for every task that most people need to do."
Or the Debian approach: "we included _all the tools._ Here's a toolkit. Go build your own distro."
Or the Slackware approach: "we included _all the tools_ and we installed them on your hard disk, for your convenience. Go play, enjoy, and keep what you like."
Or the Alpine approach: "we carefully handpicked the absolutely smallest simplest components, and then we included only the absolute essentials. You have the bare minimum to get online and fetch the rest of what you need. Take this and build what you want."
Me, I like the Ubuntu approach, but I am increasingly moving over to the Alpine approach instead.
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Thursday 27th August 2026 22:57 GMT brep51r
you’re not off base
about the creator since he has purportedly written in favour of Tommy Robinson. safe to say i will never install anything by such a person, belonging in the same bucket as Urbit.
however i think it’s ok to call software and UX design opinionated. it’s not a value judgement.
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Friday 28th August 2026 00:10 GMT Brave Coward
Careful
Everybody to their own, of course, but it might be sort of interesting to have an in-depth read of this post (referenced by the article linked by Liam), prior to any installation:
https://マリウス.com/a-word-on-omarchy/
Looks like that distro is an absolute security nightmare.
On a side note, has anybody any information on the reason why Distrowatch is down since two days?
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Friday 28th August 2026 12:25 GMT Liam Proven
Re: Careful
> Looks like that distro is an absolute security nightmare.
I am not so totally convinced by that part. Don't get me wrong! It is *not good* but the security angles are the least of my concerns.
Omarchy was put together by someone who does not really know how Linux distros work, how packaging works and why, and does it his own way. So was Puppy Linux, and Puppy's developer's follow-on effort, EasyOS. (Spoiler: it is *not* easy.) Note that I never recommend Puppy Linux and I have never even got EasyOS running.
There are ways things are done in the Linux world. These are reasons things are done that way. Not all are good reasons. Some are bad reasons. But they are reasons: they exist.
That seems not to be good enough for DHH.
He has worked out how to put this stuff together for himself, with whatever turned out to be the quickest or the easiest way, and then he worked out how to ship it.
It's not a distro. It's not a remix of Arch. It's one guy's personal config of Arch, put on an ISO and shipped. It's a really weird config, it's not easy for either beginners or experienced users, and it has lots of idiosyncratic personal choices.
This appeals to some people who like to see themselves as contrarian, non-conformist, free thinkers. Such people are usually wrong. Rather than learning reason and critical thinking, they pick up their ideas from Youtube and podcasts.
So here we are.
It's not a distro. It will be very hard to maintain or upgrade. It will need substantial reworking to become a distro that can be installed, upgraded remotely, and maintained.
Now DHH has $10M to spend on that, he could go and hire some people to do that. Maybe he will. I hope so.
But I don't like the config, I don't like the choice of tools, I don't like the way it's packaged, I don't like the choices he's made about environments. I don't know the man, but I don't like the things that he says in public about my home country and former home city.
It's an alt-right, neo-reactionary sort of assemblage of software from a neo-reactionary sort of person. A lot of people like and admire this style. They see it as striking back at "Woke" people and thought.
I don't. I see it the alt-right an expression of gullibility, a lack of critical thinking, a lack of empathy and consideration and respect.
But it's making money, people like it, and it's probably going to get bigger from here. I thought that needed some coverage.
Thanks very much for the link to Marius.com and the writeup. (That's what "マリウス" says -- Marius.) I should have linked directly.
Some of the issues in Omarchy 3 have been fixed in Omarchy 4, but not that many.
P.S.
> Distrowatch is down since two days
It isn't. Works for me. Saying that, my favourite down-detector says it *is* down. Working right now in this browser.
*Shrug*
No idea.
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Friday 28th August 2026 14:14 GMT Kerfufflinator
Re: Careful
Just to be (perhaps) unnecessarily hung up on security, but shipping docker and ufw, and https://github.com/chaifeng/ufw-docker instead of just docker and nftables just removes any confidence I could've had in DHH taking security seriously for Omarchy (after all, its manual says that they take security "extremely seriously" - https://learn.omacom.io/2/the-omarchy-manual/93/security).
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Friday 28th August 2026 15:26 GMT Liam Proven
Re: Careful
> shipping docker and ufw
UFW present but not turned on. Excellent stuff. Hilarious. :-D
Docker, I think -- guessing here -- because it's a recognised _brand_ from a _proper company_ and so you can _trust_ it. I suspect, but do not know, that this sort of person likes brand names.
There are ways this could go.
1.
DHH could take his $10 mil, hire a couple of Arch devs, and they could put together something which is all FOSS, all in one repo, all native packages, all properly installed and all able to be updated with `pacman -Syu`.
Incidentally: I tried `pacman -Su`. I got a little warning message telling me "please do not press this button again" and got told to use `omarchy update` instead. So I did. It crashed out with a syntax error, because it's a bash script. Honestly, this OS just _exudes_ quality. No wait. The other thing. Hubris. It exudes something, and whatever that is, it smells of hubris.
Then, optionally, either there's a bash script which turns your all-Arch all-FOSS "Omarchy Lite" into Omarchy Pro with a bunch of FOSS tools replaced by proprietary freeware.
2.
DHH could hire some not-Arch-specific pros and they redo the whole thing in Nix or something. Deploy and forget.
3.
DHH could ignore the "haters" and keep doing it his own way, but gradually fix the problems people highlight, and spend the money on advertising or something.
Sadly that seems the most likely to me, but I do not know the man or his work.
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Friday 28th August 2026 16:25 GMT Kerfufflinator
Re: Careful
UFW not being turned on was hilarious, but got fixed a while ago. Docker is a perfectly fine piece of software, but it manages firewall rules in a way that is not compatible with UFW (in particular, if you expose a docker container port to the host, UFW will not block it, even if you ask it to, because Docker will create rules earlier in the path network packets take in your kernel. https://docs.docker.com/engine/network/packet-filtering-firewalls/. Hence, Omarchy shipping with some third party fix for this from github.
From your three options, I feel like third is by far the most likely. Looking at who's put in a million each, it's probably chump change to them to throw at a "cool" project that's created by someone who ostensibly has been around the block so to speak.
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Sunday 30th August 2026 11:44 GMT ianbetteridge
Re: Careful
"It's one guy's personal config of Arch, put on an ISO and shipped. It's a really weird config, it's not easy for either beginners or experienced users, and it has lots of idiosyncratic personal choices."
So the weird thing is that it's incredibly easy to use for beginners, much more so than anything Hyprland I've used before. Why? Because when you add an LLM to it, you can basically ask it to do anything to your system, and because it has a skill built for Claude etc that tells it how to configure Omarchy, *and the permissions* (something I will come back to) it just goes off and does it.
Simple example: natural scrolling. After years of using a Mac where the default is natural scrolling, the first thing I do on any system is change the touchpad to use it. The first time I used a Hyprland set up, I had to Google stuff, find and edit the right text file, etc. And I could it wrong because HELL what it is with all those nested settings?
In Omarchy 4 I just asked Claude Code in a terminal to change it, and it was done. Then I asked it to distill all my customisations into a script which I could run on a new Omarchy machine to set it up how I like, along with all the apps I like, and it did it. And, of course *saved it into Documents in my user directory* because, yes, it has access to everything on the system.
Now this is a HORRIBLE security environment. I have an LLM that can rampage across setup, files, etc. Even though I'm not an AI Refusenik, this horrifies me. But for inexperienced users who -- like DHH -- buy into the AI hype, it's really great. You can set it up any way you like, and move on to doing work rather than tinkering. And if you're part of the generation growing up now that is used to just typing and typing to a machine agent, it's going to be the most obvious way to interact with your machine and get it doing things you want. That's not for me (at least not on my actual work machine) but it's fairly obviously the future even if I don't like it.
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Friday 28th August 2026 08:31 GMT wolfetone
It Is Not An Opinionated Distro
It is a remix of Arch Linux. For a deluded gobshite like DHH I'm sure even he believes in the mantra of "If it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck" etc. What he is behind is yet another distribution of Linux that further waters down the ecosystem and brings absolutely nothing of value to the community. The only people getting any value out of this are scared little boys who feel, based on absolutely no evidence at all other than their own dreams, that they are "under threat" - and news sites who rely on advertising.
It suits scared boys like him to be thought of as being controversial or "opinionated" because they don't feel they are enough to stand on their own feet and be recognised for what they produce. And thankfully journalists like you Liam are Proven that (pun intended). Every article written by you about a distribution release you talk about what it offers and what it does. This article though, to my mind, gives a knowing nod to the "controversies" surrounding DHH more than the distro. To my mind that says all that needs to be said about it - the distro is nothing without the controversy, DHH feels he is nothing without the controversy.
Dolly Parton (RIP) and Tim Curry (RIP) never felt they had to stoop to the position of only being recognised for their political ideology. And look at the outpouring of grief at their passing. Both of them will be recognised for a long time about what they contributed to society. All that deluded little gobshite will be remembered for is being an entitled cunt.
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Friday 28th August 2026 09:47 GMT Bebu sa Ware
"deluded little gobshite will be remembered for is being an entitled cunt."
Not a personal favourite of yours then ?
Never heard of him but reading one of his epistles after following one of the links in the article I would conclude he is just one more right wing nut job of which our world currenty sports an embarrassing overabundance.
I could not easily find a meaning for Omarchy presumably derived from om [ॐ] and archy [αρχία] - ? rule by om ?
Wouldn't have thought the chap was a paid up buddhist but I suppose there is prior form amongst his lot of (mis)appropriating Indian religious symbols.
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Friday 28th August 2026 12:36 GMT Liam Proven
Re: "deluded little gobshite will be remembered for is being an entitled cunt."
> I could not easily find a meaning for Omarchy
Really? It is explained in several places.
It is _omakase_ plus _Arch_.
"Omakase" means "I will leave it up to you."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omakase
It is a way of ordering in a very high-class Japanese restaurant. It means "I will let the chef decide for me."
Omarchy means "I will let DHH choose what's installed on my Arch box for me."
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Saturday 29th August 2026 05:38 GMT ChoHag
Re: "deluded little gobshite will be remembered for is being an entitled cunt."
> he is just one more right wing nut job of which our world currenty sports an embarrassing overabundance.
I don't think there are more now than there usually are, but for various reasons they are no longer assured of being punched in the face when they spout their deranged ideology.
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Friday 28th August 2026 12:49 GMT Mythical Ham-Lunch
How on earth did he raise ten million bananas for a 16-GB terminal multiplexer? How do the investors ever hope to get any of their money back? Talk about a rogues' gallery of backers, too. Nothing says 'security first' like funding from OpenClaw!
To add insult to injury I initially thought the name was pronounced 'om-arky', by analogy to 'monarchy' and so on, which would be a clever pun on its 'opinionated' nature (and, I suppose, care towards its putative users), but it seems to be derived from the 'Arch' in 'Arch Linux' and pronounced 'om-archie', as in Betty and Victoria.
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Friday 28th August 2026 15:28 GMT Liam Proven
> pronounced 'om-arky', by analogy to 'monarchy' and so on
I think it's entirely possible that's in there too.
I do not know if DHH is a fan of Curtis Yarvin ("Mencius Moldbug") but it would fit -- and Yarvin is a proponent of monarchy and wants to re-establish the USA as a hereditary monarchy.
King Donald 1st of Ameristan.
Gods help all y'all.
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Saturday 29th August 2026 22:40 GMT JLV
(Canadian here) Unfortunately in the big circus tent of Planet Earth, the head clown in the US affects other countries. Unlike say his soulmate Orban, Trump’s stain spreads far beyond his country: as a US podcaster aptly put it, he’s probably the most disliked person on the planet right now.
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Saturday 29th August 2026 14:15 GMT Liam Proven
Re: Well I like them
> Puppy Linux (and many of it's variants), Quirky OS and Easy OS are very usable lightweight OSs.
That's fine. You do you.
I try not to write "hit pieces". They are fun to write and may be fun to read, but they hurt the feelings of the people who are the subject.
(And sometimes that means they sue.)
I thought Puppy horrendously insecure and the way it's built makes it nearly impossible to update.
I have never got EasyOS to work but I have tried, repeatedly, and read all the blog posts from its creator about how and why he did it that way, and I disagree with all of them, just as I did of Puppy.
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Sunday 30th August 2026 13:16 GMT STOP_FORTH
Re: Well I like them
I'm not accusing anyone on The Register of writing hit pieces.
Are there too many Linux distros? Probably.
Am I bothered? Not really.
Do I want to start a flame war about favourite and/or most disliked distros? No.
Let's all bury our differences and agree to use Haiku.
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Saturday 29th August 2026 14:02 GMT blu3b3rry
Had a quick play around with it in a VM, and a bare metal install.
The lack of normal keyboard shortcuts makes it feel very clunky to use. Settings options opening pure config files also wasn't something I was expecting,. Not ideal for what is claimed to be a "gateway distro.", and it seems to be using a lot of storage space for what comes bundled with it.
Style is a bit "edgy l33t h4ck3r" for my liking, also. Don't think I'll be switching.
