Protest against the Omarchy/Omacom Foundation and the tech companies and executives funding far-right open source.
All I see here is major butt hurt
I clicked the first referenced article just out of curiosity, and the guy is like ‘The Brits are pissed because of the erosion of their national identity and that’s understandable’!
Dude. You’re talking about the biggest colonial empire in history…yet people like you actually love to complain about migrants and praise those who do the same…? Self-awareness of a rainworm.
From the article:
The Omarchy Doctrine is a public, fascist creed: heritage as duty, hold the line, the will to power. It matches Roger Griffin’s palingenetic populist ultranationalism and Robert Paxton’s first stage of fascism: a creed, a leader, followers. And there’s $18.5 million already pledged for the next stage.
Despite this, more than a dozen top tech executives and corporations have pledged millions to the Omarchy / Omacom Foundation. They include the CEOs of Shopify, Stripe, Dell, Cloudflare, Block, Dropbox, Coinbase, and others, as listed on Omarchy’s patrons page.
I think it is not despite, but precisely because of it that these people are funding it.
this website is so scarily designed (in a way that screams “scam” to me regardless of its content) that i doubt it will reach anybody but us
I get what u mean, but at the same time, there’s plenty of “friendly,” normal looking, and now probably AI generated, scam sites too. The colors are bold, but it’s a simple, informative design. And if we, the ones who read and try to be vigilant of bad actors, are the only ones it can reach, so be it ig.
there’s plenty of “friendly,” normal looking, and now probably AI generated, scam sites too
there’s way more non-friendly disinfo sites than those, the percentages
we, the ones who read and try to be vigilant of bad actors
—have heard about this before. Preaching to the choir will not help you fight the fascists.
I suppose the question is then, how should this site have been designed iyo?
even the minimalist style shared by https://stallman-report.org/ and https://dmpwn.info/—heck, even the style of Time Cube (warning: better viewed on a phone)—would’ve been nicer than this.
…The heck happened?
I’ve been under a rock for a bit.
Explain to me: why is there so much hype (and controversy) around some Hyperland Arch Linux config, within like a month? Is this some astroturfing thing?
Probably the digital ocean donation.
They bought coverage. There is 0 reasons to use Omarchy over well… about anything. It’s like using Ubuntu despite Mint existing, but they also lack reputation, are evil, have had relatively many vulnerabilities in a short time frame, and have shady backing. I refuse to believe that anyone who promotes Omarchy daily drives it nor does not receive monetary compensation.
Positive polarization: a lot of rich people are donating a lot of money to it, maybe (probably?) because the creator is well-connected and the OS makes lots of references to AI. Negative polarization: The creator has bad opinions, and the OS is very AI-forward.
Disclaimer: I only know bits of this story and am missing details.
Creator vibe codes configs, makes a “distro”
Creator says fairly fucked up things online, effectively a “dog whistle” gathering right aligned attention and money- and a quite a lot of it.
Begins hiring similarly minded people, claiming “the money will be spent” on the distro
All of it wreaks of BS.
Yeah. Kinda feels like OpenClaw and a few ‘trends’ before that.
Omarchy is a distro in the same way that I’m a fighter pilot because I stayed at a Holiday Inn last night.
Great allegory! It’s a distro in the same way that Bob was done with his homework by having handed in Alice’s copy of it and called it a day.
I have no idea what I just read (since I know next to nothing about programming and linux) but then I read this:
“Believe in redemption, not permanent condemnation. People can be wrong and still be welcome back when they step away from harm. This is not about outrage or scolding, but rather attempting repair and healing for FOSS and the world.”
…
“Believe in the redemption of middle aged nazis who know exactly what theyre doing gois , OK?! OK! Happy-Go-Lucky!”
I may be too charitable, but I imagine it has to do with how many people, such as colleagues we may have, can fall for this type of shit. We’re all able to be reactionary and give in to bs, some of us just have more knowledge and/or more empathy so we’re able to see through it much easier. So while DHH may not be redeemable, some dumbass on Twitter who defends DHH may still be redeemed, depending on the choices they make and how much harm they do or don’t do along the way.
ANY middle aged person should be able to understanf thst theyre supporting or spreading nazi bullshit.
Thats why we HAD to hang a couple propagandists during the Nuremburg Trials. If youre old enough to understand that youre supprting and spreading nazi bullshit? Youre old enough to recieve ALL the consequences of doing that.
I don’t disagree
Never heard of Omarchy until people started criticizing it. Are you sure you’re not just giving them free advertising?
Ignoring fascists and hoping they go away is one reason why fascism is having a resurgence right now. Immoral behavior should be challenged as widely and publicly as necessary to make everyone aware that it’s inappropriate. People don’t stop doing immoral things unless there are social consequences for it.
Ignoring fascists and hoping they go away
EXACTLY. This is what I’m responding (in other words) to “free advertisement” argument as well.
Is The Primeagen also a garbage person? I’ve always thought of him as pretty down to earth and real… But man he’s been making them rounds with DHH lately and getting heavily involved in Omarchy
and with ladybird, another well known fashware: https://drewdevault.com/weird-guys/
I am not trying to argue this, but some people will say “It just looks like a linux distro that is designed to be more agentic friendly, even if some of its backers have unscrupulous pasts.” What is the response to this? Because I’m sure it’s vibe-coded and insecure, but there aren’t really linux distros that are agentic first distros and some computer enthusiasts really like AI. And yes, people can just install Jan or LM Studio on their own in another distro, but some people may want open source code and linux designed for AI. I know people on Lemmy often hate AI, so please don’t hate me for writing this. I just don’t totally get the reasoning aside from some people involved in the project seem to be assholes… or is that the reasoning?
To be honest, if not for security concerns I’d probably try this distro if it weren’t somehow linked to anti-trans things, which makes anything completely toxic. But I looked at the Omarchy page just to see what it looked like and conceptually for people interested in agentic stuff, it didn’t look that bad, it seemed sort of interesting.
Trans people are some of the best network engineers and coders out there and greatly help the open source community. Any open source project that isn’t kind to trans people should be ignored. Maybe that’s the point? That normally a project like this linked to anything anti-trans would be rejected by the open source community and it’s only through soulless corporations and right wing tech bros that this is existing?
The biggest issue for me is its ties to the Dark Enlightenment movement, which is much more scary than any -phobia or -ism.
This is a really interesting comment. I’d like to know more about your views on this.
This isn’t just a case of some abrasive people involved. The guy who runs the project, DHH, is an open and proud racist. He posts his very straightforward racist beliefs on his blog. He made ruby on rails, and after being rejected from the ruby community he’s now trying to insert himself into the Linux/open source community. On top of that, the “distro” is Arch + some dot files. Despite that, he’s managed to raise millions of dollars in outside funding, which is insane for open source project. Either his industry connections are willing to look past the racism and hand him a bunch of money anyway, or they actively agree with him and want to build a space for racists in the open source community.
Add in the AI stuff and people have plenty of reason to boycott this project.
Is he actually racist? I’ve read he wrote about remigration, but that’s about uncontrolled immigration, nothing to do with hatred for races
Well, the AI (LLM stuff) is right wing. It makes the last thing neoliberalism didn’t make obsolete useless. Who cares if you actually understand what you’re doing and are able to do it way better than a LLM. “You are now useless. Fuck you.”
The neoliberal ideology now made everyone useless. How can a person still be a neoliberal when you can see none of us really have any value (intellectual or otherwise), we never did. The only thing humans had was pretending to be useful (or competent in any way) and they are taking it away from us little by little.
That’s why I’m a leftist, I’ve seen basic human dignity being taken away from people since my childhood and experienced repression (as much as a minority in a non third world country can) and I know many people have it worse.
the value of a neoliberal is their capital, and that sowe of them at least support everyone’s right to complete bodily autonomy unlike most of the traditional left and right.
Same. Capitalism will kill us all if we don’t do something, that’s why I’m a social distributist.
I don’t know if I agree with you because someone still needs to tell an LLM what the project is for it to work and a normal person who has no science or computer science background can’t do that efficiently or check the technical aspects of a project to make sure the AI isn’t doing something incorrectly (and eventually the AI will do something incorrectly usually). I think we need UBI sooner rather than later because so many jobs will be obsolete, but if I’m chatting with an LLM or you are and we say “is the docker container up?” or “you built a page and there’s no clear way to navigate it” or “test for what would be exposed data in the case of a breach” the AI can do that, but a normal person doesn’t even understand any of that stuff to chat with an AI about that. I know it’s awful right now for coders who are getting paid less or are underemployed, but that seems to be more of a UBI problem instead of an LLM problem. There are legitimate environmental fears however, but LLMs and data centers seem to be a cherry on top of egregious environmental policy. Environmental catastrophe is headed this way with or without the cherry and it’s not clear to me if we had good universal public transportation and banned gasoline that somehow data centers would still be an existential human risk.
I think the problem is that decision makers /people in power often don’t understand the technical jargon either. All that matters is, “is it working?” So once they see that they can get it “working” without paying for the expertise, they will take it.
The thing is also - the LLM will eventually get it wrong, but the frontier models are pretty good at fixing it if you can articulate the problem. Even non technically.
Under the hood? Impossible to understand. But it works!
Counterpoint - system architecture is really built around helping humans to build mental models of systems. If your plan is to have LLMs to all the work in the future, those mental models no longer matter the way they did in the past.
Probably, systems will break, and LLM costs will rise, and the arithmetic will shift - but that isn’t happening fast enough to stop the brain drain and negative pressure on employment and compensation.
I agree about the risk of brain drain with fewer people learning to code.
Yeah, don’t use Omarchy, not sure why anyone would need to since there are versions with more stable support and a myriad of other free options for every niche. The site lists many great reasons not to use it, that is appreciated.
I don’t use Cloudflare but I’ll say that’s probably the hardest service for people to leave because it’s been the easiest to set up and forget.
Now my one gripe. The People to Avoid category is a weird omelette that put together multiple lists of people and brands them all as fascists to avoid. It’s a set of massive purity test retcons that are not productive because it mixes overt bigots (Yarvin) and Silicon Valley grifters (Dorsey) with people that are living foundations of open source who are accused of odd behaviour.
Is rms going around harassing women? Cuz the last talk I watched of him he was battling cancer. (I have read the Stallman Report, but as far as I interpret it he is just trying to make sense of normally taboo topics by writing it out, even if the way he writes it out people feel harmed or creeped out about it because it doesn’t match today’s accepted norms.) I wouldn’t ask him for dating advice but I wouldn’t hesitate to ask him for computer advice. Louis Rossman has an opinion that I believe is wrong, but not one he holds strongly enough that he would discriminate or disrespect a customer over it or let it interfere with the goals of owning goods you buy.
Yes, question the questionable parts, but to avoid them altogether is excessive IMHO, each should be taken case-by-case.
Everyone, without exception, is flawed in certain ways. While there are people that make their flaws their whole identity, which you should avoid, for those who don’t, you have accept to a certain degree to achieve solidarity and accomplish things bigger than themselves. That degree doesn’t have to be charitable as me, but my opinion is that lists that make it seem all equally bad is disingenuous.
If those individuals want to distance themselves from a Nazi movement, they can do so. They can put out statements clarifying their association. RMS battling cancer is an extreme case.
Right in the paraphrased quote declaring Rossman a transphobe he doesn’t care enough to be trans-exclusive, in fact I’d argue the main point is that the culture war is stupid and unproductive, he’d prefer to be inclusive because it’s irrelevant, that seems like clarification to me and it’s the author muddying the waters up with the bad paraphrasing. His organization FULU is funded by an organization called FUTO led by someone who is a loose acquaintance of a fascist supporter (fixed). I know almost exactly how Rossman picked up some chud-like opinions, it’s because he got bullied and screwed over so hard in New York, not from any other relationship. No evidence has been presented that he has anything to do with Omarchy, MAGA, or right-wing fascist movement, including that comment.
I want people not to confuse some latent opinions with a lack of integrity.
The full comment for context
I have my own idea of what a man or a woman is that I am going to guess is different from the politician in question. That being said, bringing this shit up all the time is absolutely counterproductive and useless. Especially when it has nothing to do with the topic at hand.
Imagine if I was talking to a politician who weighed 400 pounds and agreed with me on an issue that mattered. And let’s say that person did not like being referred to as fat because they do not think they are overweight. Would it be incumbent upon me to point out that they are fat? What benefit does that do for me? If this person is trying to help me not get screwed over by companies that lie and cheat to get laws passed in their favor so they can rob us blind, it’s not really important in that moment that I point out that that person is in fact obese. What their personal belief of “obesity” is is a useless discussion that has nothing to do with my own actions and identity.
What people choose to do in their own homes or what they choose to call themselves is their business and is not something I care to discuss.
What matters more than that to me is what people tell me I am not allowed to do in my own home with the products that I bought and paid for. That is an issue that is much more important to me.
Rossmann has worked with FUTO, but his organization is FULU Foundation.
Thanks for the correction. Is this right now? I want to represent it as faithfully as possible.
His organization FULU is funded by an organization called FUTO led by someone who is a loose acquaintance of a fascist supporter
No no no, you don’t get it.
Everyone to my right that I don’t like is a Nazi.
Everyone to my left that I don’t like is an ultra.
People around the same political position that I don’t like are all trots.
If you disagree with me you’re gas lighting.
Thank you for coming to my TED talk.
Everyone to my right that I don’t like is a Nazi.
No, nazis are nazis. If you argue for ethnic cleansing the bare minimum you can expect is some pushback, no one owes your opinions any respect as a baseline.
I have to ask: How exactly would someone support the fascist people just by using Omarchy? It costs nothing, there’s no data collection, no subscription, nothing. It seems like a fucking purity test to not touch anything any possible fascist has ever touched.
This money is going into marketing and reputation-washing to make far-right politics look like normal open-source community building as well as attempts at centralization in FOSS.[24]
You’re giving those fuckers mindshare. Just DON’T.
🤫
Attention is currency
They passed a bunch on to Hyprland. Fuck all these transphobes and other bigoted right-wing assholes.
Actually, no. Fuck someone nice. Or don’t; I’m not your mother.
There will be a day when I finally learn to code properly and fork the fuck out of X. I’ll name it
antifaX.Or not, because it sounds… what’s the opposite of sex positive? 🥵
I kinda want to fork Linux and make it AI-free and Rust-free. Wanna help? /hj
I’d be all over that if I had anything to contribute with, but at the moment, I’m still learning the very basics of C and I’m in the middle of some other projects… 😅 Don’t let my preoccupation kill your enthusiasm though!!! 🙏💞
Anecdote time
I recently inherited a Commodore 64 from my dad. It’s from the 80’s. While all I could do with it was- type text and see it displayed
- load some games from cassette tapes
It was extremely refreshing to see that literally nothing was going on in the system other that what I saw on the screen.
Eh, it’s probably not a realistically managable project. I might actually have more luck forking the NetBSD kernel to use compat_linux by default, which would achieve decent compatibility with the Linux ABI.
re: Anecdote Time
That’s so cool! Yeah, it’s pretty neat seeing or using a really simple system like that. Smaller or older computers tend to be a lot easier to understand, too, in my opinion.
It is always easy to judge, especially when using a software that was mainly developed by tankies. Can’t always win.
“Judge”? My brother free/libre software, they’re the ones who want me to not exist. I do not wish an ill fate upon them; however, I cannot tolerate intolerance.
Also, if they were vocally hateful against any other marginalised community, it would be totally unacceptable to the vast majority of Linux users.
Oh, there is no question about how evil Hyprland devs are. Don’t forget that tankies are pro-Russia and pro-Russia is anti-trans. Same shit, different boat.
It’s almost like you have to judge software based on its utility rather than the political wisdom of the developer.
Okay then. Hyprland is not performant, and it’s over-complicated. Simpler WMs are my preference, and so, I shall use Sway.
I’m sure that’s your sincere opinion, but even if it’s not, at least it’s coherent.
I don’t even understand these “tankies” as they’re called. I thought they were Communists, but if they support a Capitalist country (Russia), then they’re not very Communist, are they?
Russia is only critically supported by communists for its objective material opposition to the current imperialist hegemony by the US. The idea that communists can only support communists is a bit reductive, communists support the international working classes and their liberation. This means supporting elements that weaken the primary world contradiction right now, US imperialism. Obviously communists would prefer Russia turn socialist, but that does not change that it is still playing a progressive role in undermining the US.
Communists that support Russia have critical support, which means we support some of what they do, such as supporting Cuba during a genocidal blockade, but we still have valid criticisms. You won’t see any of us claim Russia is morally good or some nonsense.
Communists don’t judge countries based on their perceived moral character. Russia, like all countries, acts in the interest of its own ruling class. Right now the interest of their ruling class is aligned with anti-imperialist forces. We understand that imperialism is the primary contradiction, and that as long as we live under a unipolar world order the global majority will only get poorer and more exploited, that climate change will inevitably kill most of us and that those who survive will be tied to the same exploitative forces.
The only reason why some of us come across as “pro-Russia” is because we’re often debunking imperialist propaganda. As long as people are willing to read beyond wikipedia or a genocide-denying newspaper, we’re fine discussing events with a lot more nuance than we get credit for. But it’s a lot easier to pretend we’re crazy Putin-loving tankies, so that’s what you see here.
And that’s where things start to get interesting. Wait until you learn that Stalin/Lenin weren’t really communists, came to power in a non-democratic way, which is basically something only right-wing does. And yeah, tankies are not really the smartest breed. Same category as rednecks. Too much lead was in the water when they grew up.
Lenin and Stalin were both communists. Both Lenin and Stalin were supported democratically as well. Trying to dismiss communists by claiming we are all brain damaged is deeply ableist.
Ah, another tankie, sure buddy :)
I’m well aware of all the fake Communists out there. I hate them so fucking much.
I do object to those last two statements, though. They’ve been intentionally miseducated and indoctrinated by the government; cultivated to not think critically, to question nothing, and support whatever they’re told—basically, they’re brainwashed.
P.S. btw, why is your username “antianarchist”?
As form of a protest to the so called Fediverse Anarchist Flotilla, consisting of a few instances who are maintained by tankies, and not by anarchists as you would expect. I guess they’re the same category as those you call fake Communists.
I agree with what you said about the conservative US citizens. They are deliberately shaped by the current and former governments, since basically Reagan was dismantling the confederation.
I just made the switch from Hyprland to Mango today, and it has everything Hyprland had and more, and no transphobia that I know of!
What are they getting for their money? Fork it if it’s so good.
Forking would mean the main developers does not work on it. They would need to work on their own. Do giving money will ensure the project stays up (in theory). Forking does not solve the issues you have with the mainline project automatically.
The only issue anyone seems to be taking with the main line project is the dev. Half of his design choices are completely uncontroversial on the other half would never generate this much fucking heat.
Eh no, there are two big issues with Omarchy: a) political issues with the dev, b) many big, dumb and very dangerous security issues.
It is really funny that I have no idea what security issues there are with the software, because everybody seems to be concerned with anything but.
That’s unfortunate that you are not informed. The best part is, that even DHH himself agrees that Omarchy has lot of bad security issues. His argument is that these get reported and fixed, so it will be secure someday (so his argument, but ignoring that vibe coding is never secure). Here is a part of the interview with Brodie in YouTube (about 10 minutes): https://youtu.be/M8gVXNlZFFg
- https://blog.happyfellow.dev/merchants-of-insecurity/
- https://youtu.be/DYu9391lVP0 another video from Brodie, this time talking about an issue where the default configuration was set to allow any remote control of Kitty without asking the user.
- https://lemmy.ml/post/52085916 Omarchy: Any User Process Can Escalate to Root (with default Docker password, that is no password)
- https://github.com/omacom/omarchy/pull/8129 [Security] Stop USB device names from being executed as Hyprland Lua
- https://github.com/omacom/omarchy/pull/7884 Stop an installed theme from running code - #7884
- https://github.com/omacom/omarchy/pull/7847 [Security] Stop a video title from becoming the Download Video play command
And the list goes on and on. These are not just security issues… these are dumb issues that should not have been there. Its incompetence and negligence. Every software has issues and bugs and security issues. But why don’t the other distributions have this many dumb issues like these? And it won’t get better, because its heavily vibe coded.
So I hope you are informed now.
Actual useful info, very cool. How interesting it might have been if this were the subject of the post, but sadly it seems like this is secondary to arguments about personality.
I agree with you. But its important that there are two different of topics of issues, one of them is focused in this article. And I don’t think it is unreasonable, because it is focusing on a topic with many information. Although I’m not a fan of some parts of it and the overall presentation and tone.
Good post, but I don’t like the mention of people and things that are not related to Omarchy. It gives feelings of just personal opinion. It should stick to the cause of boycotting Omarchy.
Agreed. Also this entire presentation looks too much emotional. It should stick to an informal type of presentation to be taken seriously. Edit: Also I’m highly against lists of people to avoid. Discussed this again and again, as this comes up again and again with these topics. Extremely dangerous thing to do!
It’s pointing out the supporters of the project and highlighting their fascist ties. Boycott them too.
The “people to avoid” section mostly has nothing to do with Omarchy
