I expect this is just a play to get more prominent placement for Qwen tools in a very AI bro 'distro'

It's strange that they're investing so much in a niche product that has always failed to gain mindshare outside of LARPers. The DIY people who make their own desktop from scratch aren't going to bite into a pre-made carnival of slop.

They're going to gain a ton of users fast but they're all going to drop off in a year or so when people realize having a calculator app that looks like the rest of the computer is something they want and their eyes get tired of seeing the same fake neon cyberpunk aesthetic.

I suspect that this genre of "ultra customizable unbloated leet hacker desktop" is going to die out as soon as KDE finishes their unified theming engine and you can fully larp as a windows XP user with KDE.

Linux is already fairly corporate. It's funded by corporate funding, which is not a conspiracy, it's just because every tech company relies on Linux and therefore has a vested interest in its development and robustness. It's not some small indie kernel; it's the biggest FOSS project in the world.

I guess if you want a non-corporate option, Plan9 and the BSDs are always there.

We are 100% seeing this happen as time goes on. Nothing popular can be good. Not because it's popular, but because big money will come and start to monopolise and enshittify it.

I genuinely actually tried to watch DHH explain "oo-mah-chi" to me because; maybe there actually is something to it if he can convince one of the biggest Chinese corporations to toss him $3mil.

No, there really isn't. Its really is just spacemacs but for arch. The only thing unique about it is it's keyboard focused and uses a tiling window manager. That's it. Hyprland for the compositor, QuickShell for widgets. Everything else is him just vibe coding a quickshell widgets to configure the quickshell widgets. You'd get more out of EWW and River.

I genuinely thought that DHH might've done something actually interesting when omarchy says its "AI-Native". Even if it was a bad idea, I would give him credit for trying. But no, just a keybind to open a menu to select Claude, cursor, copilot etc.

It really is just a meth'd up billionaires dotfiles.

If they don't mind doing business with zionists or any country run by literal fascists, then they won't do anything about this either. It's the inescapable result of dropping ideological struggle in favor of unprincipled peace that Mao warned about. That's how you end up with dog shit foreign policy like actively investing in countries that seek to destroy you and oppose everything you claim to stand for.

The entirety of Europe could resurrect and go full Nazi tomorrow, and the CPC would still push for "strengthening ties" and talk about being equal partners. 🤡

They absolutely should. They state in the announcement that they will use the money to push Omarchy to Chinese users, thereby getting them started in the fascist pipeline.

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.

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.

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.

It's not really about the 'distro' itself, but the growing ball of fascist money around it. Their aim seems to be to capture open source funding and make other projects dependent on them I believe.