I'm not going to comment on DHH himself here (huge mixed feelings on many levels), but people completely underestimate the power of curated experience.
If there was a piece of software that needed 3 colors set, and there was a choice to set the 3 colors yourself, or pick a color preset that some person spent time combining just right, a lot of people would appreciate the latter.
Sitting and making subjective taste-based considerations is a huge energy and time sink, and takes a certain kind of individual to actually enjoy. Even if you did take time on one thing, you still hope that you don't have to do that on others. Having somebody sweat these details for you, so your baseline is strong, is a lot of value in practice, because we're human and we like nice things, and knowing that even if we don't customize it, somebody already did with great care.
Why even listen to premade music. You can just throw together samples/notes yourself. Why listen to lyrics/poems, you can just put together some words yourself. Why hire an interior designer. You can just make it the way you like yourself. Etc.
Ubuntu was curated by Mark Shuttleworth for years. GNOME OS and KDE Linux are also fairly curated. It's not clear that DHH's curation of Omarchy actually created a better distro.
This is a good thread about why it didn't work: <a href="https://x.com/dvdsgl/status/2096775107989672007" rel="nofollow">https://x.com/dvdsgl/status/2096775107989672007
> Sitting and making subjective taste-based considerations is a huge energy and time sink, and takes a certain kind of individual to actually enjoy.
I would gently disagree. There are hundreds people on reddit who spend inordinate time to rice their desktop and share their dotfiles. They just haven't previously written their name all over a few prominent online projects to then market what they've done as a distro and solicit multimillion dollar donations with a straight face.
Just like you’d be reluctant to pull in any non-trivial dependency that has 2 GitHub stars and barely any activity, or a distro created one time by a reddit guy, there is value in big name and multimillion dollar donations supporting your dependency.
I dont understand the ad nauseam argument of "its just someones .dot files".
1. Omarchy now has its own Kernel now Omarchy 4.0.4-1 - Linux 7.2.5-3-omarchy.
2. Has its own package repository.
3. AUR is not its default repository.
4. Cloudfare as its CDN
5. Solid new team hiring wrt security, infrasturcture and kernel.
It also has people paid to promote it. Despite you being an account that is 1 hour old, I will reply substantively.
Just because you can recompile a kernel following someone else's recipe doesn't mean that you understand how to configure one yourself, much less how it works. Regarding security, just a month ago any Omarchy user who understood how the `docker` group works could escalate to root without a password.
What I'm trying to say is that one cannot buy the technical competence. Working on medium-complexity web apps and doing system development are two very different things. So far, Omarchy has been amateur hour when it comes to the latter.
I find myself in a weird position to defend Omarchy as a person who doesn't use Omarchy and doesn't agree with DHH (including public rebuttals on twitter).
> one cannot buy the technical competence
The most charitable interpretation here is "just by paying for AI tokens, you don't get smarter", with which I would agree. And yet your full comment seems to suggest that there's no way to buy technical competence in general.
But Omarchy is literally buying it[1]. And so does every business that pays tech employees.
hakunin · · focus · HN ↗
If there was a piece of software that needed 3 colors set, and there was a choice to set the 3 colors yourself, or pick a color preset that some person spent time combining just right, a lot of people would appreciate the latter.
Sitting and making subjective taste-based considerations is a huge energy and time sink, and takes a certain kind of individual to actually enjoy. Even if you did take time on one thing, you still hope that you don't have to do that on others. Having somebody sweat these details for you, so your baseline is strong, is a lot of value in practice, because we're human and we like nice things, and knowing that even if we don't customize it, somebody already did with great care.
Why even listen to premade music. You can just throw together samples/notes yourself. Why listen to lyrics/poems, you can just put together some words yourself. Why hire an interior designer. You can just make it the way you like yourself. Etc.
wmf · · focus · HN ↗
jdoliner · · focus · HN ↗
chambers · · focus · HN ↗
bananaquant · · focus · HN ↗
I would gently disagree. There are hundreds people on reddit who spend inordinate time to rice their desktop and share their dotfiles. They just haven't previously written their name all over a few prominent online projects to then market what they've done as a distro and solicit multimillion dollar donations with a straight face.
neko_ranger · · focus · HN ↗
compare that to the billions who just use computer
hakunin · · focus · HN ↗
dilipm1 · · focus · HN ↗
If its not a distribution, what is it then?
bananaquant · · focus · HN ↗
Just because you can recompile a kernel following someone else's recipe doesn't mean that you understand how to configure one yourself, much less how it works. Regarding security, just a month ago any Omarchy user who understood how the `docker` group works could escalate to root without a password.
What I'm trying to say is that one cannot buy the technical competence. Working on medium-complexity web apps and doing system development are two very different things. So far, Omarchy has been amateur hour when it comes to the latter.
hakunin · · focus · HN ↗
> one cannot buy the technical competence
The most charitable interpretation here is "just by paying for AI tokens, you don't get smarter", with which I would agree. And yet your full comment seems to suggest that there's no way to buy technical competence in general.
But Omarchy is literally buying it[1]. And so does every business that pays tech employees.
[1]: <a href="https://omarchy.org/teams/" rel="nofollow">https://omarchy.org/teams/
enderkus · · focus · HN ↗
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