Omarchy: 1Password and 37signals become Distinguished Corporate Patrons

https://omarchy.org/news/2026/08/1password-and-37signals-become-distinguished-corporate-patrons/

33•tosh•1h ago

Comments

mdrzn•33m ago

$12.6 millions for a Linux distro?

fwip•31m ago

The random selection of people chipping in for this is so weird. Do they owe DHH a favor or something?

sho_hn•26m ago

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.

cpburns2009•17m ago

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.

edu•26m ago

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

StrLght•29m ago

> distro

It's more like a set of dotfiles, but yeah.

edu•27m ago

Not even a distro, it’s a customization of Arch and Hyoerland.

Hope they redirect some of their fundings to them!

theshrike79•20m ago

So like SteamOS?

jdiff•1m ago

SteamOS runs its own infrastructure and is more than a static set of scripts and dotfiles on top of an existing distro.

gclawes•19m ago

Yeah and Ubuntu just started as customized Debian

nerdix•10m ago

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?

https://youtu.be/yIA4idIdY_k

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.

fourseventy•27m ago

Why are people complaining about money going into FOSS?

sdcfgy•25m ago

It’s who the money is going to in FOSS.

Avshalom•23m ago

Because it doesn't seem to be actually going to FOSS

bbg2401•20m ago

You're going to have to clarify that rather bold statement.

StrLght•22m ago

I believe it's more about money ending up in an overhyped vibecoded Bash mess maintained by a very controversial figure. And that's putting it mildly.

mirzap•6m ago

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.

ricardobeat•26m ago

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.

Zambyte•24m ago

What services does Omarchy provide?

cpburns2009•6m ago

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.

jdiff•23m ago

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.

ricardobeat•15m ago

I was not comparing them.

I think the "set of dotfiles" was called Omakub. Omarchy is a distro like any other - custom installer, bootloader, desktop and WM setup, etc.

Lalabadie•25m ago

but, but, the people who get a residency receive 2.5k per month!

weberer•24m ago

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].

[1] https://omarchy.org/air/

[2] https://omarchy.org/sponsorships/

ok123456•14m ago

What exactly is the Mozilla Foundation developing these days? What is their budget?

cpburns2009•11m ago

You'd think a foundation raking in half a billion per year could accomplish more.

kelvinjps10•29m ago

How much money is going upstream? Like hyprland and arch? Omarchy is basically just a script all the work is being done by otherpeople.

cpburns2009•26m ago

That describes most distributions, even the base ones like Debian and Fedora.

reddalo•26m ago

...by other people and by AI, so by other people indirectly.

mirzap•21m ago

They just founded the Foundation, and the money has not been allocated yet. But Hyperland, Quickshell, and some others already got 3 year sponsorship deals.

The AUR maintainers refused the cooperation and the money. So they will start working on new package management for Omarchy.

My guess, though, is that most of the money will go to DHH's obsession with Macs and anti-Apple stance (porting Linux to work on M architecture), either by directly funding Asahi Linux or by forking it to speed up development.

sho_hn•1m ago

I highly doubt the current crop of Asahi people would take money from DHH.

jonkoops•28m ago

1Password can't even include ARM builds of their app in their existing packages [1]. I am highly skeptical of anything DHH (David Heinemeier Hansson) is the benevolent dictator of, and for good reason [2]. Perhaps that money would be spent better elsewhere in the ecosystem.

1. https://support.1password.com/install-linux/#arm-or-other-di... 2. https://thelibre.news/lets-talk-about-dhh/

312ag16•28m ago

There is this movie "Mickey Blue Eyes" where Hugh Grant play an auctioneer whose girlfriend is the daughter of a mafia member.

The boss of the mafia org then forces the auctioneer to offer worthless paintings and forces various people to bid high. The paintings are just required so that something exchanges hands.

This is much of the software industry in a nutshell, except that no coercion is required. Just something needs to exchange hands.

ajmurmann•12m ago

The mafia needs money to change hands to launder it. What money is being laundered in software? Do you think anyone in the ecosystem is sitting on piles of dirty money?

cedws•27m ago

Obama giving himself medal dot jpeg

sdcfgy•25m ago

Adding them to shit list. Oh no wait they are already on there.

pelagicAustral•25m ago

Good for the Linux ecosystem. People forget they are not bound to install it, if you are so sore from a blog post just use any of the other hundreds of distros out there.

FelineStateMach•22m ago

I wish DHH even had pretended a solidified use of the funds.

Beyond my moral objections and public security concerns, I saw more forethought from ClearLinux by Intel around the same maturity point.

Hype doesn't make an OS appealing to me.

Hamuko•15m ago

I don't really understand how a "Linux but for vibecoding" would even be that generally appealing.

rglover•21m ago

I can't quite put my finger on it but this rush to astroturf Omarchy just has bad vibes all around. DHH has been on a politician-level campaign to fund/promote what seems like a fun nerd project. Call me paranoid but it all just comes across as dubious.

athorax•16m ago

At a minimum its DHH trying to launder his reputation

mertbio•21m ago

I don’t know why we see Omarchy almost every day on the front page. Do people really want to use a distro from a white supremacist?

Hamuko•19m ago

Twitter's still pretty popular.

copperx•17m ago

Linux embraces diversity. A vibecoded Nazi distro is just another Linux flavor. There's some irony in all this.

sho_hn•16m ago

HN is generally attracted to "success", not integrity.

sunaurus•15m ago

I think that's the main reason why Omarchy gets talked about so much.

In large parts of the internet, open bigotry is thankfully still socially unacceptable. But when bigotry is wrapped up in a software project like this, it gives people posting/upvoting/sharing a level of plausible deniability.

lampeli•14m ago

hn crowd has always been favorable to trump because at the end of the day they want lower taxes, but i think a few other ideas have been smuggled along with that

radku•17m ago

Why such a dislike towards DHH? More people using Linux surely is a good thing.

terracatta•9m ago

Hey, 1Password product lead here who worked on this. I thought I'd share some thoughts.

First, I'm pretty excited by Omarchy, and it seems 1Password customers are as well. Omarchy 4 was the first release to identify itself as Omarchy vs. Arch, and in just two short weeks since the launch it's already the #3 most-used Linux distro by active users. Ubuntu is #1 but has a pretty extreme sawtooth pattern where usage collapses on the weekends. This is not true with Omarchy, where we are seeing virtually no drop-off on the weekends yet, and last Saturday it actually surpassed Ubuntu 24.04 as the #1 most-used Linux distro. I suspect it will remain #1 every weekend going forward.

Second, what keeps us up at night is credentials getting into AI inference/context. We are working with everyone we can to stay as close as possible to the tools and OS' that become the canonical ways to use agents, so we can ensure that the humans who pay for 1Password remain in control of their credentials — and ideally, that those credentials never are seen by an AI agent.

What we released about a month ago with Anthropic (security info here: https://support.1password.com/1password-claude-security/) is a glimpse into how we are making that happen architecturally. Being able to work closely with the frontier-model and harness companies and builders is essential to our mission to create a safer, simpler digital future for everyone.

Omarchy and Linux in general are an exciting place for us to dream pretty big about how we solve these problems. This is a very malleable OS, lately it's where the most AI-forward users are, and a place where we can learn together how to create something that's both convenient and safe.

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