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Alibaba chimes in with $3M for fash distro Omarchy (web.archive.org)
submitted 4 days ago* by to c/technology@hexbear.net
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[–] 22 points 4 days ago (10 children)

Can anyone explain to me what Omarchy claims to do (as in marketing only - not what it actually does) that would possibly justify all this money being flung at it? I have a hard time believing that all these companies are throwing this kind of money at something just because it's fascist (at least adjacent). Is it just a bandwagon effect at this point? Like, "oh, company X gave 3 million, so we need to give 3 million because it must be something special!" Is it claiming to do something revolutionary that is causing the stir in these companies' pants?

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  • [–] 23 points 4 days ago (5 children)

    It's an attempt to fashify open source by pouring money into an openly fascist project that then directs that funding towards other fash open source projects and uses the big swinging money dick to try and force compliance, silence, or exclusion on non-fash projects.

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  • [–] 15 points 4 days ago (4 children)

    Thanks, but that sounds like what it actually does rather than whatever claims it makes that attracts all this investment. I have a hard time believing that Alibaba is patronizing an organization with millions of dollars just because it's fascist. Surely they must at least claim that they believe that Omarchy is a great project because X or Y (even as window dressing) and not "because they're fascist".

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  • [–] 16 points 4 days ago* (3 children)

    I don't know exactly what Omarchy itself claims because I haven't look into it, but their claims aside, if any of these companies analyzed it for 5 minutes they would come to the same conclusion everyone else does, that it is a vibe-coded dotfiles distro, that's literally it, it doesn't do anything other than being Arch with hyprland by default and being heavily customized by AI, it makes absolute no sense for this much money to be flowing their way other than some far-right attempt of making it famous since it is run by a nazi.

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  • [–] 12 points 4 days ago (2 children)

    I guess I'm wondering if these investments are due to malice or ignorance combined with laziness. I wouldn't at all be surprised if it were the latter, coming from business people.

    I decided to take a quick look (ewww). I bet that it's its claim to be an "agentic OS" that's getting it all this attention. "Beautiful, fun & agentic Linux" is right on the website title. In other words, it seems similar to when any random company would get a big boost in their stock a few years ago just by adding "blockchain" or "crypto" to their name.

    I also figure that another factor contributing to this attention is this DHH character's tech cred for having created Ruby on Rails and being CTO of 37signals (Basecamp). In other words, he's part of the techbro club.

    I think this all makes more sense than thinking that all these companies are donating only because it's a fascist tech project. I'm sure that's a factor too, but it's probably fascism + ignorance/laziness + techbro club membership (which I guess also boils down to fascism). Ok, I just convinced myself in the end that it's mostly the fascism. :(

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  • [–] 17 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (1 child)

    Setting the obvious fascism thing aside for a moment (capitalists love fascism, news at 11), I think it might be helpful to actually look at this from the perspective of a labor struggle. The Free Software community at large has been doing a pretty lousy job of resisting LLM slop, but this is very inconsistent across the board. Some projects have rolled over and embraced the slop fully. Others have taken an infuriating "centrist" position which only demonstrates how little your average techbro knows or cares about sociology, and others still have taken a solid principled stand, that we are humans who make software for humans and the corporate practices of churning out the lowest quality product at the highest possible speed is NOT THE FUCKING OBJECTIVE of building software for the commons.

    This is inconvenient for the AI boosters. For better or worse, Silicon Valley in the 2020s is built on the back of Free Software and the (frequently) unpaid labor of volunteers. The tech stack of every major company relies on it, and they behave as if they own it. The fact that there are projects out here resisting this drive to slopify - refusing to comply because of ethical and moral principles - is unacceptable to them. They were happy when Free Software was largely a homogeneous corpus of technology they could appropriate at their own will. The fact that they now have to worry about individual projects refusing to embrace this technology has suddenly made Free Software an arena of political struggle in a way it hasn't been for a long time.

    These corporations can pay people to develop Free Software. Many do, when it serves their own interests. And when you are paying someone to do the work, you can dictate the conditions and practices of that work (e.g. If you're not using Copilot, you will be replaced by someone who will gladly shit out 100x as much code). But an innumerable amount of responsibilities in the Free Software world are not paid. And you can't force a volunteer to use LLMs if they are convinced it is a socially and ecologically poisonous technology.

    That ultimately is what this is all about. The fact that Free Software projects exist which will not accept these labor practices means that there are now some substantial pieces missing from the stack. The fact that the average software company has transformed most of their software engineers into LLM zombies means there are a lot of projects which will no longer accept their contributions. You can't simply pay them to land a patch in (many components of) GNOME anymore (for instance). Any project which digs in against LLM use needs to either be forked or substituted (or infiltrated).

    They need to recuperate the tech stack and plug these holes. That is the point of throwing millions of dollars at a vibe-coded fashslop dotfiles distro.

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  • [–] 18 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (1 child)

    Its big selling point is being "AI first" - they preinstall a bunch of AI apps and have some system tray integrations for them. The rest of the distro seems to be typical theming stuff that a lot of Linux users do and post about on places like r/unixporn.

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  • [–] 10 points 4 days ago

    Thanks! I went looking and noticed that "agentic OS" was right on their website title. I imagine that that may be the primary public justification for these companies' investments, but the fascism may be the real unstated reason, or at least the icing on the cake for some of them.

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  • [–] 9 points 4 days ago (1 child)

    The elevator pitch is that it's an easy to install and use Linux distro with extensive AI integration. From Alibaba's perspective, it's an AI project in a time where AI is booming that also isn't directly tied to big US tech firms. In theory, it could become a Windows/Mac competitor.

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