Omarchy distro gains serious backing

The controversial Omarchy distro is attracting both criticism and fans – and financial support, too.

Omarchy is an opinionated respin of Arch Linux and a pet project of Ruby on Rails creator David Heinemeier Hansson, better known as DHH.

Although the first release was as recent as June last year, this week sees the release of Omarchy 4.0.1 – a security fix for the mid-August Omarchy 4 “Quattro”.

Although it started out just over a year ago, Omarchy now has a sibling project Omakub, which is based on Ubuntu, and an organization behind it called Omacom.

A week ago, DHH announced the launch of the Omacom Foundation with $8 million.

Its founding patrons include figures behind Shopify, Stripe, Dell, Block, Cloudflare, Sesame, and 37signals - closely followed by people behind Dropbox and OpenClaw, taking the total to $10 million.

The project, like the man behind it, is controversial.

But that means attention, and an “opinionated distro” gets opinionated reviews.

Some of the criticism is strong stuff: for instance, Merchants of Insecurity, whose top line is: “First, a PSA: Do NOT use Omarchy if you care about security of your machine even a little bit.” Author “One Happy Fellow” is not the first: last year, a member of Framework's community forums posted Omarchy is not a secure distribution and should be taken off the Linux installation options.

Others like it or give it a guarded thumbs up while saying it’s not for them.

There really is no such thing as bad publicity.

As P.

T.

Barnum put it: "Say anything you like about me, but spell my name right." DHH is no stranger to controversy.