Fair point on the wording — I've reworded it. And thanks for the list. AI Edge and MLC use the GPU, which I don't yet, so PocketPal is the closest comparison to mine. It was slower than PocketPal and that's fixed now.
It raises the question: what is a distro since many distros are customizations of other distros. What makes Ubuntu a distro and not just a customization of Debian?
The video above is in inline with my opinion. If you ship an ISO (so users can install your distro directly without installing another distro first) and have control over the packages then you are a distro. Apparently, Omarchy has its own ISO and it's own mirror of the arch package repo so it is a distro by that definition.
Steamos is a mirrored snapshot of arch (like omarchy) + bash and python scripts (like omarchy) + their own shell (steam running on top of gamescope for steamos and a custom quickshell based one running on top of hyprland for omarchy) + modified upstream kernel (both steamos and omarchy)
At the time Ubuntu started, Debian's old installer (boot-floppies) was legendary for its unfriendliness, and the new all-singing, all-dancing replacement was a mammoth endeavour and a long way off completion. Ubuntu provided a simple, friendly installer that covered only the limited set of the most common use cases, but was a dramatic improvement for new users.
They also employed a bunch of Debian developers, and gave them space to continue their work for Debian. It wasn't all smooth sailing, but Debian was stronger as a result of their contributions right from the very start.
Now, maybe Omarchy are providing a similarly major contribution to Arch - but, if they are, they've kept quiet about it so far.
Hyperland being funded for 3 years benefits all distros and users that rely on it. The same goes for Quickshell. And my guess is that this is only the beginning. They will support any project that Omarchy is built on. They even reached out to AUR maintainers to support them financially and build better, more stable infrastructure for any distro that depends on AUR, but they refused.
> If the former, grow up and accept that the time of slavishly following the narrative is coming to an end, that free speech means people are free to voice their own thoughts and that you not agreeing is interesting only to you.
Consider taking your own advice here? Free speech means people are also free to object when other people with whom they disagree politically receive corporate funding. And likewise, you not agreeing with them is only interesting to you.
I disagree with the parent's wording and agree that the whole "people are free to say what they want" thing is generally not a compelling point in internet arguments, but there is a distinction you are omitting. People aren't just disagreeing with DHH's politics, they're implying that his project shouldn't be financed because of his politics. In that light, your counter-point isn't as applicable, since it's not symmetrical to what the parent is criticizing (regardless of whether you believe his politics are worthy of black-listing his work).
"DHH's politics" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. He has most recently called for citizens of western countries to be expelled on the basis of race. So while it's not exactly symmetrical, the people objecting to companies funding his project are not the only ones using their speech to put pressure on others.
It's especially weird considering DHH is heavily disliked by much of the Linux community for his political beliefs, and association with him is heavily frowned upon.
Over at KDE, we've seen some criticism for taking sponsorship money from Framework laptops because they sent him a laptop once.
I must believe on some level these sponsors are jumping on the bandwagon to show off how in they are with desktop Linux, now that it's slowly arriving in the mainstream, while possibly rather demonstrating their obliviousness.
The really strange thing about the criticism directed towards Framework is they simply sponsored the Hyprland window manager, not the Omarchy OS, but because Omarchy uses Hyprland that got conflated as funding Omarchy.
They keep sending DHH hardware and at one point they were sponsoring his Rails conference too. People backed off on the Hyprland sponsorship but Framework doubled down on DHH.
The power of contacts, and looking at the initial list it seems it’s a bunch of founders whose startups succeed using Ruby on Rails, so I guess yeah… they owe some to DHH
Most likely also technofascists and other oddballs helping out their technofascist buddies. One of the other big sponsors:
In July 2026, Lütke expressed support for setting voting rights proportional to the level of income tax paid by a citizen, with those paying no income tax being stripped of their voting rights and others gaining one additional vote for each $100,000 paid in income tax up to five votes per person.
Red Hat: billions, Canonical/Ubuntu, SUSE: hundreds of millions, Debian: one million/year. It's not that unusual for a distro to get funding - just a different scale here due to their connections.
Their foundation is now sponsoring Hyprland, mise and quickshell development, probably other projects to come.
There's a distinct difference between the contributions of Debian and that of Omarchy.
Debian is a foundational distro, it's a giant with huge populations standing on its shoulders. It shoulders a large ongoing burden, security guarantees, some of the largest maintained repos of any distro, a large amount of infrastructure.
Omarchy is a script and some dotfiles. Happy for them, of course, but it's odd. Omarchy just isn't doing that much.
Many distros don't bother with any of that. Calamares is a fine off-the-shelf installer. GRUB has fine defaults. Desktops have fine defaults. And many distros use those. Custom dotfiles and a way to apply them to a fresh system doesn't make a distro.
That's, truly, completely fine for a fledgling project, that's how many start before expanding beyond that... But why is Omarchy getting funding that's more in line with a distro that already has its own infrastructure?
>why is Omarchy getting funding that's more in line with a distro that already has its own infrastructure?
A few reasons spring to mind but I'll focus on the one I care about: It's damn good.
I've used Linux for over 20 years and it really stands out. Nothing has ever been as easy and fast to install and dropped me into a more polished, simple yet productive environment immediately.
I think the tiling VM will limit its appeal, and hope to see projects inspired by Omarchy put the same level of detail, pruning, curation and polish to Gnome and KDE-based distros.
> 'custom dotfiles and a way to apply them to a fresh system'
Latest Omarchy 4 is a full ISO installer, with a quickshell-based desktop - not scripts, their own system apps, taskbar, notifications, etc. I'm failing to see how it is less of a distro than most, and the fact it doesn't try to customize the kernel or filesystem is a plus for me. May be time to take another look at it.
You realize Omarchy just started a couple of months ago, right? The founder himself put his money and time where his mouth is.
Most of the thousands of distros are just a collection of config changes in GNOME, etc. There is no fundamental change in 99% of Linux distros. It's just different configurations of different tools, with the main differences being the package manager and window manager they use, plus their configs. Everything else is exactly the same.
That's a very simplistic and end-user-oriented view of what a distro is. Somebody hosts the infrastructure that Omarchy runs on. Somebody maintains the packages and applies specialized patches and communicates upstream. Omarchy doesn't do that. And that's fine.
Plenty of distros start out at that level. But those fledgling distros don't get these kinds of sponsorships. Why Omarchy?
Omarchy does do that. They host their own packaging servers, which they keep intentionally a month behind Arch's to catch broken packages. They ship a custom kernel. They have a small AUR-like extra repository as well.
> Why Omarchy?
Because DHH has friends. It's not anything more special than that.
It appears to be an opinionated, batteries included distro/OS using a tiling window manager, and it's targeted at Mac/Windows power users. It's a niche target and time will tell whether it pays off.
Its for a foundation where the Linux distro is their flagship product. Much like Mozilla or the Wikipedia foundation. It looks like they're also funding artists[1] and downstream projects[2].
I used to do this a long time ago just because that's how my brain would process how I'm talking on AIM/ICQ. Though I wouldn't add the period at the end of each new line, that is weird.
This was how I learnt to write, as it's how I think.
I latter learnt in school that writing is only deemed correct when it's stylised into elaborate sentences structures that no human would use when thinking in their own heads.
If you're just trying to convey a thought I don't know why people care?
Could you not understand the point OP was making or something? In what way is this a less valid way of writing (aside from the fact it's not what's taught as correct in school?)
I'm autistic. When I think in words, I typically think in bullet point sentences.
That said, I was so bad at English as kid that I've had to spend a lot of time learning how to write well. So I can do it if I care enough to invest the effort.
This not to say I see no value in creative writing. You can often summarise the core elements of fictional story in a couple of dozen bullet points, but the story of story isn't why we enjoy to read stories.
In my ideal world, when I'd like to make a point, I would use bullet points. But we don't live in that world so aside from my own personal notes, I rarely ever communicate in bullet points.
It's how everyone with a smartphone learns how to write these days. Editing large blocks of text on a smartphone is still extremely annoying, so people get used to hitting send between every few words.
I think it started on LinkedIn, where posts got more reach depending on how many users clicked the 'See More' expander link, so users who wanted to be 'Thought Leaders' were incentivised to present their banal ideas using as many newlines as possible.
A BYOK browser extension could work, but it would run in realtime when needed. To build the HN website concept that process the firehose it'd require a lot API credits.
"I was curious what would happen if I disabled this function, so I did, and I was happy to find out that once disabled, I was able to continue the sign-up process for my domain successfully. That means that this was only a frontend validation, not a server-side one."
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