Omarchy gains $18.5M in backing, fresh converts – and fierce critics

In more than 30 years in the Linux business, we've never seen a distro win so much backing so fast - or make so many enemies. As we write, it's less than three weeks since we wrote about David Heinemeier Hansson's Omarchy Arch-based Linux. Much of Omarchy's success is due to the visibility of Hansson - better known as DHH - the man behind both the distro and the Ruby on Rails web framework. He has attracted considerable attention for posts critical of immigration, including As I remember London and Wolves, sheep, and gypsies. When we started work on that story, the organization established to fund and oversee Omarchy, the Omacom Foundation, claimed $8 million in backing. By the time we finished writing the story the next day, it was up to $10 million. But that was August, and Omarchy is gaining ground fast. In the short interval since then, Omarchy has had two more point releases and is now at version 4.0.3. The project has also announced Omarchy M, an initiative to bring the distro to Apple Silicon Macs, with support for older Intel models also planned. Even the website has been redesigned, with more internationalization - and an animation that follows the mouse pointer. (It's been quite a while since we've seen one of those.) The more important changes are less immediately visible. The Omacom Foundation says its pledges and donations have now reached approximately $18.5 million, a total that includes multiyear commitments and AI tokens. It has a list of Patrons, which now includes OpenRouter and Four Technologies, as well as DigitalOcean, plus token pledges from Meta Superintelligence Labs, Anthropic, OpenAI, and Fireworks. Indeed, the announcement says: "In fact, Omarchy Quattro has almost exclusively been built by agents. Because they're just incredibly good at stuff like bash, QML, and debugging Linux issues." Omarchy is already spending some of that money on people. Its first three announced hires are kernel developer Krzysztof Wilczyski, infrastructure head Emir Beganovi, and the pseudonymous outfoxxed, creator of Quickshell, a core component of the Omarchy 4 interface. Omarchy very pointedly doesn't have a code of conduct; instead, it has a Doctrine, the first principle of which is "uniting the nerds." We have to say that that goal isn't going quite so swimmingly. Although it is winning supporters and boosters, lots of them, it is also attracting some hostility in the FOSS world. Brennan Kenneth Brown set out the accusation in a post titled Normalized Fascism in Open Source: $12 Million Given to DHH. Blogger Jurgen "tante" Geuter is blunt: "Omarchy should not matter. But sadly it does. As a power grab." He continues: "Running Omarchy means... willingly integrating oneself into a fascist community. Legitimizing it. Supporting it. Omarchy is a fascist project that normalizes fascist thinking for everyone entering that community (even unknowingly)." There's now also a Stop Omarchy campaign, with a banner: "Omarchy is a political movement disguised as a Linux distro." Most recently, prominent FOSS boffin Matthew Garrett weighed in, saying: "I cannot understand the mindset of a (I hope small) subset of the free software community that software-related freedoms can never be impinged upon, but it's fine to remove arbitrary other freedoms that have a greater impact on people's lives. "Omarchy is fundamentally incompatible with the goals of free software... It's bad because it is, at the technical level, bad - and it's also bad because it's idealistically bad." The Register asked the Omacom Foundation to comment. Code, cash, and culture wars The problem of open source developers not getting paid for their efforts is a persistent one in the FOSS world, and yet people and organizations are lining up to pledge money, or tokens, or both, to Omarchy. Its popularity is undeniable, but its creator's politics are likely a contributing factor. Hansson is not the only prominent figure in the software industry whose politics have attracted scrutiny. In July, we reported that the co-owner of Mullvad made a large donation to an anti-migration political party in Sweden. In Britain, the right-wing populist Reform UK party is also receiving large donations - which has since doubled. A year earlier, the XLibre project launched and explicitly rejected DEI. Some were angry, but others embraced it, including endorsement from Devuan. XLibre upset some folks so much that one of the developers behind Alpine Linux launched the Wayback server sooner than planned, in response to XLibre. At the time, we wondered if compromise and cooperation were possible, but that possibility seems remote now. From Brexit and the election and re-election of Donald Trump to Alternative fur Deutschland winning a German regional election, right-wing populist movements have gained ground. Several observers have claimed that Omarchy isn't a distro as such: "Omarchy is not a Linux distribution in any traditional sense - in fact, the entire 'Omarchy distribution' amounts to little more than Arch Linux plus DHH's personal dotfiles." Even so, it is a brand - and one closely entwined with the politics of its creator. Other FOSS projects have embraced or endorsed right-wing values, but few Linux variants have placed them so prominently alongside the software. Omarchy is bold. It makes no effort to look familiar or be especially user-friendly, unlike beginner-friendly distros such as Linux Mint or Zorin OS. Its brand is that it's stylish and sophisticated; it uses Hyprland, a tiling Wayland compositor from a controversy-courting developer, with a keyboard-driven interface that makes no effort to work like any others. There are no window title bars, and Alt+F4 doesn't close a window here. It is designed to be different and new, embracing a steep learning curve. Its target market appears to be innovators, influencers, and AI-assisted developers. DHH is talking to users on X, and of course X's owner is no stranger to this area. It's working. Despite the criticism, Omarchy is attracting users, even previously Linux-averse ones, as well as donations. Populist movements attract supporters and win elections. Omarchy appears to be drawing some of that same audience to Linux. To paraphrase Winston Churchill, storm clouds are gathering over the free software scene, and we are underneath looking for any glimpse of a silver lining. For those who do not want to support these trends, we recommend Pop!_OS 24.04 LTS and the COSMIC desktop. It is every bit as modern, bold, innovative, and striking. The distro underneath is a performance-tuned Ubuntu and, in our considered opinion, it works a great deal better. (R)