When you say omarchy, are you talking about this https://omarchy.org/ ?

Yes, the set of dotfiles by DHH for Arch that has raised 18.5 million dollar, while real distributions and desktops are struggling to get donations. Having a few billionaire friends who share your techbro politics helps I guess.

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Kon5ole 12 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

Much of the visuals and features in Omarchy is config yes but going from a blank drive to useful development environment in one minute is not just a set of dotfiles. It's clearly a distro now.

Don't let politics cloud your thinking. There are a lot of good reasons to like Omarchy, and other distros should pay attention to the substance.

Omarchy shows how it's possible to realize a very clear, distinct vision of how desktop computing should be. I'd like to see the same amount of effort put into realizing several other visions!

An LLM will happily take an instruction like "my currently super-tweaked Debian install is awesome, create a set of scripts that recreates the exact setup starting from a minimal netinstall". It will create a VM, install the base debian, iterate until it's right. You can have it make a user-friendly UI on top of the scripts, have it install drivers, commercial software that Debian shuns from their distro, and so on.

If you have good taste and attention to detail, your setup might have universal appeal. You will have created a Debian flavour that might be better than anything anyone gets when installing official Debian.

If you have poor taste and attention to detail, at least you have a one-command way to get your familiar janky setup installed from scratch. :)

	▲	microtonal a minute ago \| parent [-]
		I didn't say anything about usefulness. Even a bunch of dotfiles can be useful, Oh My Zsh and others were very popular after all. The thing I complain about are that these companies that build their fortunes partially on open source benefitted a lot from systematically underfunded developers. But they only make small contributions to those projects (as all). But if their millionaire buddy shows up, they all stand in line to donate millions. I am not sure what it is. I guess partially they want to associate with the popularity of Omarchy, partially they are doing a favor to another rich techbro, some may agree with DHH's politics to 'drive woke out of open source'. But it still sucks that they don't give that many millions to Debian/OpenSSL/LibreSSL/Rust/pick your other favorite infrastructure project that they highly depend on to make their money.

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cpursley 29 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

DHH having to deal with gatekeeping attitudes like this and particular political prerequisites is the reason he created these “dotfiles” in the first place. I actually know several people who are not very technical and never Linux users who installed and switched to it as their main operating system. So I think what’s actually going on here is a lot of people are butt hurt that this is getting attention and having success when nobody else has before has.

	▲	microtonal 6 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		You don't think it is unfair that projects that have basically been xkcd 2347's "a project some random person in Nebraska" don't get a penny, while DHH who gets millions for a bunch of dotfiles, is unfair? I don't contest that his dotfiles may be useful to some people, only that all these companies didn't care to give significant money to open source projects that they all rely on to make their billions. But when one of the 1%ers shows up with his hobby project, they all stand in line to donate millions. To give an example: Digital Ocean is giving Omarchy $3M, while they cancelled their $50 per month GNOME/Flathub VM sponsorship a month before [1]. [1] https://social.treehouse.systems/@barthalion/117241534134006...