[Hugsbox]

Just a little gripe, but near the end of the article he links to a site for something called "Omarchy" which appears to be a Linux distribution. If you click on the link, the only information available is in the form of a video.

If you're making a Linux distro, please don't do this. I will not watch your video. I was interested, and now I'm not.

[n6242]

I've heard the meme that Omarchy is for people who would like to use Arch but don't want to read the documentation or follow the installation guide. Having a video and no text sounds like it would align with that target audience. If you want information and not a video you'd want to look at Arch instead, it has an excellent wiki and the best documentation of any OS I've ever used.

[Kiro]

Bad advice considering the success Omarchy has had in marketing it. Whatever they're doing other distros should take note.

[danlitt]

Is there any evidence of people actually using it?

[markovs_gun]

Yeah I switched to Linux full time at home last year and never even heard of this distro in doing any research about it.

[prmoustache]

I heard about it but since I also heard it was built by a white supremacist, I'd rather use one that is made by decent people, especially when the added value is only a preconfigured hyprland desktop.

So good marketing? Hell no.

[jjgreen]

It has smooth graphics but an unfortunate tendency to annex the Sudetenland. 2 stars.

[TiredOfLife]

> I heard about it but since I also heard it was built by a white supremacist

As much as i don't like DHH and think many of his takes are quite stupid. A white supremacist he is not.

[Hugsbox]

If it walks like a duck...

[soco]

I'm a Linux user and this is the very first time I hear this name. Data set of one, which says don't base your marketing on that.

[Hugsbox]

I mean, I'm an everyday Linux user and half the content I consume daily is about the Linux/FOSS world and today is my first time hearing of it. And all the information I have about it is from replies to my comment, because its website doesn't actually offer any details. Genius marketing.

[inigyou]

It's by the same guy who started a Rails conference because he was kicked out of a different Rails conference, so that he wouldn't be kicked out of this one.

[Kiro]

The same guy who also happens to be the creator of Rails.

[inigyou]

Imagine being so bad you get kicked out of the thing you created. A Notch situation.

[danlitt]

Omarchy is basically just Arch with a bunch of configuration. It's not a particularly useful project, and the author is noted fascist DHH. So probably not worth your time.

[TiredOfLife]

Unlike arch it installs in 3 minutes and offline.

[hypfer]

I think more precise terminology would go a long way here.

What is "a fascist" (in context of being labelled that on the interwebs). That could mean a lot of things.

As a reader, you learn basically nothing about DHH other than that some people might not like him.

___

So to fix that:

DHH has always been a very opinionated guy - with not all of those being agreed on, but there being usually some kind of point to them.

Starting somewhere late-ish last year, however, he seems to have dropped deep through the alt-right pipeline and started babbling talking points basically copy-pasted as-is from other talking heads.

So, in essence, he kinda stopped being opinionated, because that would require having an own opinion, and instead started just being yet another person not doing all too well mentally on the internet.

I mean the guy suddenly started talking about "body counts". What's his age again?

__

Of course, moral outrage happened but achieved absolutely nothing, because it's not the right tool for the job here.

[graemep]

He is simply racist.

I do not disagree with what your said, but I think it just boils down to that.

[hypfer]

Fix to what?

Sorry to say, but that word probably has an equally low impact on regular people by now. Worse if we look at what people actually think/vote/etc.

People by now at large seem to be rather fine with both being called racist or just.. well.. being racist.

We do not actually want that, because (big surprise upcoming) racism is bad. But I think we might need to remind people why that whole cluster of ideas is bad.

This shouldn't be too hard, given that it's objectively worse in many many aspects, but for that to be seen, I suppose we need to point out what makes it objectively worse.

The shorthand is unfortunately dead and got killed by twitter dot com.

__

How that could be done is how I've demonstrated before you've regrettably dismissed it and tried returning to the shorthand

[graemep]

I edited my wording before I saw your reply to take the word fix out.

> People by now at large seem to be rather fine with both being called racist or just.. well.. being racist.

I disagree. I do not get that feel at all in real life (in the UK, BTW). On Facebook you get that feel because it is full of ragebait and attracts nutters.

There are some people like that, but most people would be deeply ashamed to think themselves racist or be thought racist.

Edit, to add: DHH also seems to have a weird obsession with the UK. At least two of his racist blog posts about the UK. His first racist post that I was aware off is essentially "two many non-white people in London".

[hypfer]

Hm. I mean I would wish that your observation is correct, but I kinda doubt it.

Doesn't match what I am seeing outside of the Internet.

But, regardless of that, I still believe that shorthand terms and indirection are a less clean solution, and, if possible, the cleaner one with less dependencies should be used.

[omnimus]

To be fair DHH became exceedingly unhinged.

For example in his latest blog post he first describes problem of growing populations of wolves that are killing sheep and cannot be shot because they are protected by the state. And then starts to compare the situation with danish gypsies (Romani) in danish cities.

That's as close to fascism as you can get... it's pretty out there on the edge of legality.

I mean I used to respect his (at the time mainly technical) takes and I recommended Basecamp to so many organizations. How has this table turned so much I have no idea.

[graemep]

I went to his blog to have a look at his racist posts, and that (which is the last post on his site) is more unhinged than his previous posts. A definitely trend of getting worse.

[watwut]

I dont think "fascist" and "been a very opinionated guy" are mutually replacable. In fact, insistence on euphemisms like that harmed the discussion a lot and overall culture a lot.

[Brian_K_White]

They are commenting on Omarchy, not DHH other than as relates to Omarchy. They also didn't recite a wikipedia entry to define what Arch is, or linux, or what distribution means.

[rightbyte]

One could argue that fascist run FOSS projects might be working against your interest as a user.

Fascist is not just a silly label. The political collapse of neoliberalism made a lot of closet fascists emerge and they seem quite common among what was earlier thought of as "techno libertarians". E.g. the VPN provider owner (forgot which) just lately.

If there was too much crying wolf 15 years ago, doesn't really matter now anyways.

[hypfer]

> One could argue that fascist run FOSS projects might be working against your interest as a user.

I guess so, but that's abstract and hard to grasp for most people.

"The guy has clearly lost it and thus is probably not making sensible decisions" otoh is pretty easy to understand, signals effectively the same and side-steps basically all the drama.

[markovs_gun]

> "The guy has clearly lost it and thus is probably not making sensible decisions"

That isn't the problem though. Fascism isn't mental instability, it's an ideology. Someone going off the deep end and making bad decisions does so essentially at random, while someone driven by ideology messes things up in very specific ways. In the case of Fascist ideology, the specific ways they ruin things are specifically intended to harm specific groups of people, so I think the distinction matters. Writing it off as the guy having "lost it" obscures the specific goal he is working towards.

[rightbyte]

Sure. You need to relate to the overton window to not seem like a tinfoil hat alarmist hysteric to normal people. I can agree on that.

It is really hard to keep your cool.

[watwut]

>,If there was too much crying wolf 15 years ago, doesn't really matter now anyways.

There was not. I used to think they are crying wolf, but imo, it turned out they were correct all along.

They were paying attention to what these people were saying and doing. They then concluded these people are fascists. Then a bunch of us, not paying attention crowd, came in accused them of crying wolf.

Maybe, crying wolf is about a boy who sees a wolf, causes commotion and protects the village. Then they dont feel like going in one time, wolfs eats them. But, village just wont admit they were obviously wrong and blames the boy.

[inigyou]

We're still doing that btw

[rightbyte]

Yeah you have a point here.

[inigyou]

It was one of the Mullvad owners.

We should probably ask ourselves why there aren't more Mullvads. I think the answer is twofold - first, developers can't business, and second, running something like that carries massive political risk which that type of person is more willing to shoulder. If one doesn't feel afraid to help found a Nazi party they sure won't be afraid to run a VPN service.

[inigyou]

Nothing on this list screams explicitly nazi to me, but this is a long list for things that are believed mostly by neo-nazis. Like heavily complaining that London isn't racillly pure enough. And supporting a prominent political figure who believes every Muslim is a terrorist. And complaining about "woke" all the time.

so it depends if you believe that everyone who supported the nazi party was a nazi, or only the people who actually did the holocaust.

https://blogs.gnome.org/alatiera/2025/11/06/dhh-and-omarchy-...

https://jakelazaroff.com/words/dhh-is-way-worse-than-i-thoug...