Protest against the Omarchy/Omacom Foundation and the tech companies and executives funding far-right open source.
Donate to KDE and Gnome and your favorite linux programs!
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They are, but for some reason their only hobbies are contributing just to hide rainbow in the about. We can live with that 😄
disroot.org is a worthy mention. From their faq: What services can I use with my Disroot account? Your account allows you to use the following services with the same username and password:
Email Cloud Akkoma Chat The rest of the services (Pads, PasteBin, Upload, Search, Audio, Calls, Translate) don’t require any registration. Some need the creation of a specific account (Forgejo, Cryptpad, Scribe).
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?
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
He wrote on his blog “The last loonies on tech’s woke island”… (https://world.hey.com/dhh/calling-someone-a-nazi-is-a-permission-slip-for-violence-4bfbbb82)
Ironically, he’s using it in the context of saying slandering someone as an actual Nazi is unfair to people with more conservative views. But what he’s missing is it takes place in a context where trans people are often killed, subject to discrimination, and often commit suicide due to harassment and discrimination. So the “loonies” and “woke” being juxtaposed so closely together let me understand that he’s on the side of being unkind to trans people, who already have hard lives.
Usually when people write “woke” and “crazy” or “lunatic,” what it really refers to is “It’s crazy that some people born one gender want to be another gender and have different pronouns.” Usually it’s not just welcoming all races at work is “crazy” and “woke.” I’ve never seen someone write “crazy woke radical left” or something like that without also hating trans people. It’s just faster to dog whistle than explicating hate.
I have a better understanding now. Okay, so Omarchy looks interesting, but going to pass on trying it out.
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.
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.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Enlightenment
They want to overthrow democracy and turn it into some authoritarian techno-capitalist hellscape.
Eich, Yarvin, and peter thiel have ties to it, along with many others.
All I see here is major butt hurt
This is good messaging. I’m glad someone is making it explicit. I’ll bookmark this page and share it.
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.
Good to know what to omit, also:
Use and fund open alternatives to the boycotted tools: Bitwarden instead of 1Password, Nextcloud or Co-op Cloud instead of Dropbox or AWS, WooCommerce or Openfront instead of Shopify, Signal, Matrix, XMPP, or Delta Chat instead of Slack. Sourcehut, Gitea, or Forgejo instead of GitHub.
I bet here’s a typo, because I can’t believe Matrix is also bad
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.
I think the best way to counter this is to fix Ubuntu. It has what it needs to work as an introductory distro. I don’t know what made Ubuntu so bloated and buggy but I bet it’s salvageable. I’m not saying Ubuntu was ever the greatest but it was one of the first distro to be simple to use.
When I first came over from windows in 2013 Ubuntu detected all of my hardware and would install drivers by clicking a button. That seems like not a big deal now but then it felt like a miracle, it gave me a chance to learn about Linux while it was also functional.
If omarchy takes that new user crowd it might actually be a problem. Omarchy might fail if they don’t keep stealing from Arch development.
Maybe I’m out of touch because I have no idea what new linux users go to today. Steamos? What are the usual hurdles that new users face in 2026?
Fedora is the introductory distro now.
if Ubuntu can finally ditch the snaps and just use flatpak, we could recommend it again.
I think the main problem of Ubuntu is GNOME. After version 2 it became useless, like a kid’s toy.
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I thought that distro was just AI Slop? People are actually using it?
Omarchy has ties to Dark Enlightenment stuff so hard pass.
What is the supposed reason to avoid AWS from this?
Nothing will stop them at this point. They’re our masters. The only thing that might make any difference is a general strike. We tried that. Most workers are too afraid.
ugh… politics. wake me up when there is a technical controversy to talk about
Are atomic bombs only technical to you? No tech is apolitical. Wake up.
you are making an unfair comparison here by comparing apples to oranges. atomic bombs kill people, linux distros dont. and if you are still upset just a reminder that many defense, air craft, and MILITARY missile launching systems …use linux
It’s not unfair. Giving mindshare to those fuckers helps to kill people in the end. And don’t be disingenuous, linux is in military systems, yes -that’s bad- just like the good guys must have atomic bombs as a deterrent of Imperial greed (hopefully the Iranian people are making theirs right now 🇮🇷✊🇵🇸✊)
Were all Arch Linux users always THIS insufferably apolitical? Mein Gott. That’s why the far-right has them by the balls.
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No, Mr. Ed Sheeran, come back here
what ?
I mean, I’m pretty sure this excuse for a distro shipped with multiple critical bugs lol.
It really should not be receiving funding when compared to the handful of other arch packs thst actually have a functioning security model.
i agree with this. OP should have started with that
Such as the multiple input sanitation issues, allowing for direct shell excecution of arbitrary code?
People who don’t do politics are genuinely confusing to me.
i watched the video. my answer is simple, maybe even to a stupid degree: i don’t like to take heart medications
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If you don’t do politics, what do you do?
+1 from me. People are so happy to boycott projects that are presenting different political views while they don’t bat an eye when other projects they back up are similarly political but on the other side of the spectrum.
I agree it’d be best to have apolitical tech initiatives but since people won’t be able to have their beliefs to themselves then we just have to agree everyone has the right to have their political opinion tied to the projects that they develop. Sad, but at least honest.
Uh yeah, projects on the side of the political spectrum which hurts people and acts in bad faith are not worth supporting, and projects on the side which protects and helps people are worth supporting, no shit dumbass.
I don’t think anyone wants apolitical tech except for a few people like you, who haven’t thought about it very much.
I want liberationary tech. The entire reason I got interested in FOSS in the first place was because it forms a natural extension of the liberationary political work that I do in other fields. If you want apolitical software, then why are you interested in linux, which inherently challenges traditional notions of copyright? No tech is apolitical.
Do you want Liberation or Liberalism/Libertarianism? No sure whether I should click on the “agree” icon. I hope for the former, specially if you’re coming from the working class.
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.
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.
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
I’ve been to a few conferences and talks where Stallman was in the audience.
He often spoke up and asked why things weren’t free open software, even after one was explained how it would be a non-profit educational web service.
He wasn’t wrong, but he was often a dick about it.
He also rarely had shoes on, just socks. At least around the MIT campus in those days.
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