I run vanilla arch/i3, so not super interested in Omarchy itself - but am curious to know how polished of a distro they can come up with. I may give it a try soon.
So it turned out that my wifi adapter wasn't connected properly and I was giving a test and submission date was near and the wifi had died mid way and I couldn't connect to other wifi because I felt as if the terminal wasn't working and not the adapter...
Definitely give me a bit of a pain. really wish that they can use nm-applet as well... Optionally support terminal wifi too but definitely give atleast an option to get gui wifi.
Also I feel like omarchy focused quite much on bash and I used to use zsh with my custom dot filess which were really lovely. I had semi invented fish in zsh but it was my zsh and it was snappy.
Now I tried to have one ble.sh in bash and it stutters like it turned 80 lol. I definitely love zsh over bash and wish omarchy supported that too...
Luckily I have everything backed up so I will try to move away from bash I think,
One thing that I like is that omarchy has its own aur-ish thing where I found things like bun which isn't arch extra and aur definitely felt clunky. Using the omarchy repo to install bun was kinda nice actually.
I gave it a try because my system was bloated and I hadn't configured it properly in teh sense that my 100 gig was split into 40 40 and 8 swap and uh that 40 of home really got bloated somehow and I couldn't even update my pc using pacman and felt like a massive deal actually.
So I just actually picked my dotfiles and moved on. Might recommend it, it seems that omarchy also has backup support using btrfs by default which I didn't have in my ext4 arch
I currently recommend Bluefin... but this might be good for an _even_ easier (though less stable) setup, that has all the tiling bling.
One thing I think that would be nice to see would be self-oriented browser config syncing using one of a few different cloud file sync backends, even evil ones (google drive, one-drive, dropbox, etc).
>Ladybird has since grown into a cross-platform browser supporting Linux, macOS, and other Unix-like systems
Cool, seems it will support
BSD, hopefully that sticks with this new funding."If you're curious about trying Linux, why not install this obscure mouseless tiling TUI distro to guarantee you'll never attempt to use Linux again!"
And I've used Macs since 2008 (and it's still my main work computer)
Granted, it does have a TUI focus
> 311 Omarchy
> 312 Adélie
https://distrowatch.com/dwres.php?resource=popularity
311th is plenty obscure in my book.
I even mailed them back in June to confirm. They replied:
...
> When you donate to the Mozilla Foundation, your contribution goes directly toward advancing our mission to ensure the internet remains open and accessible for all. Our work focuses on issues like online privacy, open-source technologies, worthy AI and a digital world that puts people first. These funds directly support advocacy campaigns (i.e. asking irresponsible tech companies to protect your privacy), Mozilla’s fellowship program, MozFest gatherings, Common Voice, Responsible Computing Challenge, and so much more.
> However, it’s important to note that donations to Mozilla Foundation do not support the development of Firefox or any other Mozilla products.
> While we are a public-benefit 501(c)(3) organization under US law and the parent organization for the corporate entities that own Firefox, donations do not fund the Firefox browser and revenue is completely generated from within the product itself.
...
Imagine a world where Chromium is the only browser engine. Standards wouldn’t matter and Google could just do whatever they wanted — we’re pretty close to that as it is.
That makes Ladybird even more unique. It’s looking to do what even Apple and Google weren’t willing to do.
Just to clarify: I'm in favor of Cloudflare donating to Ladybird, and I'm in favor of them building it! I just don't think that's the solution to combating Chrome dominance.
Ladybird is still a good few years away from being a serious competitor, but nonetheless it is the most viable candidate in the absence of a path for Firefox to become competitive.
We pretty much live in that world right now. The only significant competition is Webkit.
AFAIK they are using: https://skia.googlesource.com/skia
Someday I hope Omarchu becomes the standard way to develop Ruby Rails on, just like how Ruby Rails was always on macOS and not Windows.
Mozilla promised that decacdes ago and yet they are still stuck with Google's money.
(Regardless of motivation, they’re lending more support than most other companies, so it’s applaudable nonetheless.)
> The big new game for them is AI crawler metering. Don’t think browser matters much anymore from their perspective.
Truly open browsers are easy to spoof. Approved browsers with whatever attestation features they champion builtin are hard to spoof. So browsers do matter.
Edit: authentication => attestation for accuracy.
Google with SafetyNet attestation (whatever the hell its called these days) has pretty much locked down Android as tightly as iOS at this point.
Hell, Apple device users already get to go in the internet "approved" fast lane because of attestation. iDevices and M-series Macbooks can send out a special response that bypasses all captchas.
Windows 11 has a requirement for TPM2, which features hardware attestation too.
Linux of course cannot be locked down in a similar manner, thus cannot attest and will have to suffer for it.
It would probably be illegal for CloudFlare + Google to outright block you from accessing the internet, but they can just drown you in a sea of captchas until you give up and join the attested crowd. Hell, YouTube outright forces you to sign in if they detect a VPN, they won't even offer a captcha.
Like 'Amusing Ourselves to Death' points out, it isn't a 1984-esque brutal fascist control that will erode our freedoms, but rather a Brave New World-esque situation where people will sign away all (digital) control because the dopamine must flow.
I'm also not sure how this can/would shake out when you can just use tools like Playwright/Puppeteer to manage a real browser. Both Google and MS do this (not as much as bare crawlers) to handle SPA-like site content.
Both companies are basically hedging against future incentive misalignment with other (larger) companies, and reducing their dependencies on platforms they have ~zero influence over.
Hedging on a promising upstart makes a lot of sense.
Who else would you consider?
Chromium-based browsers from companies other than Google are still contributing to Google’s hegemony. And Mozilla is funded by Google.
Interesting take, since Google has both authored and supported hundreds of FLOSS projects over many years. They even sponsored summer "internships" for students to contribute to Open Source software as long as a maintainer bothered to register and promise to mentor the student via "Summer of Code"
They aren’t going to do this, though, so long as new releases of Chromium are reasonable.
Also, I don’t see any sign that Google even wants to do it? This is not really evidence-based reasoning, it’s just “I can imagine something evil that Google might do.”
Google markets Chrome relentlessly, with popups in search and YouTube if you're using other browsers, browser choice dialogs in Google iOS apps (despite iOS having a default browser setting for 5 years now), Chrome getting bundled into random Windows software installers, etc.
Many devs actively desire single-engine development and testing and many aren't shy about using Chrome only features already. If they had the capability to tell users to go install Chrome instead of targeting broadly supported features, they would do so in a heartbeat.
Please read Mozilla's story on how Google sabotaged them: https://archive.is/tgIH9
Oh. And they very literally killed Internet Explorer: https://blog.chriszacharias.com/a-conspiracy-to-kill-ie6
Oh. And Google's mobile apps always conveniently forget the setting of "always use system browser and never ask me", and will keep asking you to open with "chrome", "google", or "system browser".
Oh and...
The only reason Google calls the shots is because they pour billions of dollars into maintaining Chromium. The fact that they can do that (and even fund Firefox at the same time) is because of their ad monopoly. Same with search, Gmail, Translate, Maps. None of those things can exist without the ad monopoly funding it all.
Complaining about Chrome is barking up the wrong tree.
Until that’s addressed, Chrome being dominant is a problem, because Google has created an “open moat” with their resource expenditure. Microsoft sure as hell isn’t going to be able to justify that kind of spend on their Chromium fork, and so their influence will never be of note.
> (at least until there’s a massive shift in political headwinds)
It did look like it for a while with the US its antitrust action and the EU also taking aggressive action. But then Google kissed the ring and the DoJ pulled back it's recommendation of Google divesting DoubleClick, and the EU lost the staredown with Trump and made their measures toothless too.
Who knows what will happen in the 2030s though. If the Democrats get into power again, I'm sure they'll remember how big tech switched up on them and there will be a serious reckoning.
I haven't trudged through Chromium's commit statistics but has Microsoft been upstreaming many contributions? I'm skeptical that they are ready to take on the full brunt of Chromium maintenance on a whim, it would take a decent while to build up the teams and expertise for it.
It would very unlikely be something which would affect Microsoft’s bottom line. They wouldn’t care.
> and everyone would switch their upstream to Edgium.
Who’s “everyone”? Anyone who cares minimally about possible shenanigans in Chromium is already selectively merging changes.
Edge aggressively sets itself as the default browser and slurps information from Chrome without permission. Edge and Microsoft are not and will not be a saviour from Google and Chrome.
Why would people trust Microsoft more than Google, though? Even with really bad actions, switching browsers is very difficult (i.e. it requires making an active choice and change about an obscure topic) and I don't see normal people doing it, which is what would be required for this to happen.
Microsoft can't get any traction for Edge even with the pushiness on their OS and massive market share. I recently installed Windows 11 on a box and even searching for Chrome had the top portion of the screen show "You don't need a different browser!" at the top of Bing. Did that stop me? No. Not going to use a Microsoft browser, thanks.
there are a alternative on the market like akamai and fastly
people free to use their favorite cdn over CF lol
> whether that’s the least bad practical solution on offer for website owners
> I don’t want to make a judgement on that
I explicitly said I don't want to debate that. Take a deep breath, no one is taking away your favorite CDN.
but replace CF with another provider and they would do the same shit
so I doubt they want that
a murky world where you "need" a guardian middle-man is what they want to preserve
As a normal user with a few sites, I'm glad they provide what they provide to block bots, attacks and everything AI.
For-profit companies care about profits for their shareholders, that's it. Heck, even non-profit often tend to value more profit than their integrity or cause but that's a topic for another day.
I wish this wasn't the case but even good-willed individuals at the helm of for-profits are forced to pursue profit and avoid anything clearly leading to losses, else they are sacked.
Integrity and a healthy market align with fiduciary duty as long as one can make the argument that it's in the long term interest of the company. It's really, really difficult to find examples of a person being held liable for not upholding their fiduciary duty because what can be argued as good for the long term success of the company involves a lot of prognostication.
Fiduciary duty is there to prevent things like a CEO choosing to oberpay his cousin's company that has no history in the market for things they've never done before when there is an obviously better option available.
Companies that act poorly, as you describe, do so out of their own desire, not because they are forced to by any sort of duty.
Examples of things which don't count:
- Supporting an open source competitor to avoid getting hammered by antitrust
- Giving money to a foundation (which they may or might not own) for greenwashing
- Giving money to a foundation ran by a friend/family member
- Doing an activity to try to fix an evil thing they did before and backfired
- Doing something good for obvious PR reason (e.g. By being heavily advertised) but then do something even worse in the same area later on
I'm genuinely interested in a healthy conversation about this. But I honestly cannot think of anything which either is generally free for the company or that will help them getting (or not losing) more money. Happy to be wrong.
This is quite simple and history bears it out: you can't rely on a for-profit corporation to operate in any other manner than optimizing shareholder value.
When VC money is flowing, you see things that look like (or even can be) altruism - but when the belts tighten and waste is eliminated these endeavors need to align with the company's goals.
Therefore, look for what Cloudflare is "buying" in this transaction. I suggest they probably want the PR win as it distracts from their objective of locking down the web, and it's worth the expenditure to them.
You can't even do that honestly. Look at Boeing. It got taken over by know-nothing managers that followed that religion of shareholder value, and what did it do? Destroy shareholder value!
I think we should instead say "we can't rely on any institution to be stable over time". That's a much more sane statement imo.
Startups nominally care more about the long view, as they need to convince investors that they high long-term value and have to act accordingly. As companies grow from VC-funded, to fast-growing public, then to well-established public company, the culture shifts to match dominant shareholder expectations.
For-profit institutions will almost always act in the interest of profit for the people who have an ownership stake and a claim to the prophet stream. That's definitionally why they exist, and we have enough evidence from the history of everything ever to assume that they will for the most part act that way.
You are saying something different. You are pointing out that the people making decisions aren't necessarily good at making those decisions. Or maybe the incentive structure is set up such that the people making the decisions do not share the goal of profit with the company, and so decide according to what's best for them, which might or might not be what's best for the profit objective.
The instability of institutions in general is yet a third characteristic.
This is like saying that history bears out that you can't rely on governments to do anything but prepare for war and then send you out to die in one.
I'm already bombarded with cloudflare captchas when using Firefox, especially on Linux. Residential IP address. I'm suspicious of everything cloudflare is doing right now.
I think general distrust with any major company these days is warranted, especially one with so much control over the internet. But I agree with your points, too.
This should be relevant to the Cloudflare discussion, posted today:
A New Internet Business Model?
(The site that was "deplatformed" was fine and still exists, much to the chagrin of the minorities it directs hate towards and the people literally stalked there.)
It seems your confusion stems from this premise. Is it possible this is not a correct assumption?
Without this recognition, the engine could have been blocked by impassable CAPTCHAs, which for the end user would mean the project is dead at its roots.
More eyes on it, DHH has a big following.
And it's getting a lot of attention because of DHH. Doesn't look half bad either which helps.
I'd argue there's a fairly big niche of people who want a tiling WM but also don't want to have to start from scratch, figure out what accompanying utilities and programs they want to satisfy things like runner/menu, status bar, etc.
Other dots aren't as opinionated, or don't come with such a detailed user guide that Omarchy does, nor a set up script.
I'd even argue that Omarchy isn't really for other Linux users looking to distro hop, but like Omakub, it's for mac users curious about Linux, wanting an equally opinionated set up.
I've been a desktop linux user since the 90's and entirely since 2003 (excluding gaming) so I'm not the target user.
Cute in the video on the omarchy page that they use Edward Hopper's - Nighthawks painting (~11m) - that was my default wallpaper for about 15 years on Linux.
Maybe I'm boring but I'm sticking to Debian/Gnome...
It's not magic, but damn it's nice.
I think the beauty of this is to get to understand all components in your system, which is quite simple actually.
Think of it as "Ubuntu, but explicitly marketed for devs" Plus hype because DHH is a well-known figure.
Linux fandom really doesn't understand the power of defaults and the power of user experience. I mean, in the first versions of Omarchy installer you had to type in some CLI commands just to select and connect to wifi. This comes from Arch, a " a lightweight and flexible Linux® distribution that tries to Keep It Simple" [1] What's more simple than connecting to one of the most ubiquitous connection types via iwctl [2] during OS installation.
So DHH decided to make an opinionated config that mostly just works and provide you with a few conveniences out of the box.
[1] Yes, those capital letters are on their website https://archlinux.org
Sounds a lot like Rails when you put it that way, which is no coincidence given the figure behind it.
[1]: I don't agree with all of them, e.g. the chatbot shortcuts. But they're trivial to disable and/or redirect and, indeed, the project does a good job of trying not to mess with your changes.
1/ (biggest group by far) People who are new to Linux on the desktop and, to a lesser extent, want to get out of the macOS ecosystem
2/ Power users who run Arch btw, and have probably installed, configured, partitioned, and encrypted Arch without the installer script at least a few times and now want a sane default Arch + Hyprland install with sane defaults and a production-grade environment in just a few minutes
I use every possible opportunity to say "Fuck Ubuntu Snaps"
archinstall. You can even select a DE in it
Hyprland is a great WM that has garbage default settings and requires wading through tons of documentation, as well as a lot of effort to set up.
Omarchy is a distribution that ships Arch + Hyprland with sane defaults. The whole thing installs in minutes, and is overall very easy to get going with. This has lead to a lot of people who were previously turned off by all the sharp edges of both Arch and Hyprland to give Arch and Hyprland a shot. Since both of these things are pretty great once you get them going, a lot of people are enthusiastic.
Also, it has sane, sensible and appealing defaults. It's installable in a few minutes, so it saves time. I'm a happy Omakub user, even if I first used Linux back in 2005.
And if you think that writing a JS interpreter is the only hard part of a browser engine, have I got news for you.
IOW, Ladybird has depth, Omarchy has breadth.
This announcement is just cloudflare saying ‘we are the proverbial nazi bar’
... that you like Linux, Rails and despise Apple?
This really is some orwellian language coming from Cloudflare.
Guess we'll have to keep waiting for someone with a 'clean' record to show up and promote Linux.
Especially Cloudflare's commitment on DEI.
https://tekin.co.uk/2025/09/the-ruby-community-has-a-dhh-pro...
https://www.cloudflare.com/en-gb/diversity-equity-and-inclus...
ForHackernews•2h ago
The browser ecosystem is dangerously centralized and another independent rendering engine would be welcome. In contrast, I don't see the value in yet another flavor-of-the-week Linux distro. Even sponsoring Arch directly would make more sense here.
indigodaddy•2h ago
ericd•2h ago
draven•2h ago
EricRiese•2h ago
nomdep•1h ago
arrowtrench•1h ago
nomdep•42m ago
Everyone could, in theory, learn how to configure Arch and Hyprland, but most of us don’t have the time or interest to do it.
So Omarchy is to Arch something similar of what Ubuntu was to Debian 15 years ago.
lavela•2h ago
Didn't care for the DHH controversies for a long time but if you start writing white national blog posts[1] I don't know what to say anymore.
[1] https://world.hey.com/dhh/as-i-remember-london-e7d38e64
kolektiv•2h ago
DHH is (or should be) pretty close to a toxic brand right now, and for someone who published various edicts on "don't talk about politics at work", it would be lovely if he followed his own advice a little more.
nomdep•1h ago
* Migrant hotels kept expanding: https://news.sky.com/story/government-struggling-to-reduce-m...
* 30 arrests a day for wrongthink: https://freespeechunion.org/police-make-30-arrests-a-day-for...
* Graham Linehan jailed for three tweets: https://grahamlinehan.substack.com/p/i-just-got-arrested-aga...
* Pakistani rape gangs unchecked: https://www.economist.com/britain/2025/06/18/the-grooming-ga...
* Rampant street thefts: https://www.standard.co.uk/news/crime/mobile-phone-theft-lon...
youngtaff•34m ago
Being arrested for ‘wrong think’ is often a case of being arrested for inciting violence of racial hatred
There are more white grooming gangs than Pakistani ones
etc… etc…
DHH’s post just picked the stories that suited his bias
bpoyner•11m ago
pelagicAustral•2h ago
kolektiv•2h ago
lavela•2h ago
bdn_•2h ago
I have the freedom to scream "FIRE" in a crowded building when there really isn't a fire, does this mean I should be excused from the consequences? DHH has the freedom to post racist and intentionally divisive BS on his own site, and we have the freedom to let people who care about being anti-racist know to stay away from him and his work.
jwhiles•39m ago
edit: and also is a tool
risho•2h ago
ForHackernews•2h ago
Something like https://www.anduinos.com/ is far friendlier and more approachable for folks new to Linux. Why not sponsor that? I cannot imagine who the target audience is going from MacOS straight to TUIs on Arch.
pmdr•16m ago
Linux didn't need only polish and money, it needed an evangelist with a story of dumping and supposedly fighting against Apple. This might put off people that obviously never needed any help in using or customizing Linux, but not those looking to switch over.
leoc•2h ago
nemomarx•2h ago
leoc•1h ago
shadytrees•49m ago
https://github.com/SerenityOS/serenity/graphs/commit-activit... https://github.com/SerenityOS/jakt/graphs/commit-activity
If Cloudflare wants to defend the future of the web, maybe they could also throw a few dollars towards projects with better governance and aren't helmed by a BFDL with a spotty record and are written in a more future-proof language than C++ [0]. (For example, Servo.)
[0]: In Kling's own words! https://web.archive.org/web/20250819053816/https://awesomekl...
youngtaff•38m ago
skyfaller•23m ago
https://corteximplant.net/objects/f2d30c92-a64f-4154-940f-99...
https://archive.is/ZtQpj
Sadly we cannot expect anything good from Ladybird (although the original SerenityOS browser still exists, without the problematic lead dev but also without the resources he brought).
veeti•5m ago
robinhood•1h ago