Omarchy gains $18.5M in backing, fresh converts – and fierce critics

In more than 30 years in the Linux business, we've never seen a distro win so much backing so fast – or make so many enemies.

As we write, it's less than three weeks since we wrote about David Heinemeier Hansson's Omarchy Arch-based Linux.

Much of Omarchy's success is due to the visibility of Hansson – better known as DHH – the man behind both the distro and the Ruby on Rails web framework.

He has attracted considerable attention for posts critical of immigration, including As I remember London and Wolves, sheep, and gypsies.

When we started work on that story, the organization established to fund and oversee Omarchy, the Omacom Foundation, claimed $8 million in backing.

By the time we finished writing the story the next day, it was up to $10 million.

But that was August, and Omarchy is gaining ground fast.

In the short interval since then, Omarchy has had two more point releases and is now at version 4.0.3.

The project has also announced Omarchy M, an initiative to bring the distro to Apple Silicon Macs, with support for older Intel models also planned.

Even the website has been redesigned, with more internationalization – and an animation that follows the mouse pointer. (It's been quite a while since we've seen one of those.) The more important changes are less immediately visible.

The Omacom Foundation says its pledges and donations have now reached approximately $18.5 million, a total that includes multiyear commitments and AI tokens.

It has a list of Patrons, which now includes OpenRouter and Four Technologies, as well as DigitalOcean, plus token pledges from Meta Superintelligence Labs, Anthropic, OpenAI, and Fireworks.

Indeed, the announcement says: "In fact, Omarchy Quattro has almost exclusively been built by agents.

Because they're just incredibly good at stuff like bash, QML, and debugging Linux issues." Omarchy is already spending some of that money on people.