I’m skeptical. Cloudflare clearly wants to move us to a future where only approved browsers are allowed to access the web. People have been fiercely debating whether that’s a terrible thing, or whether that’s the least bad practical solution on offer for website owners. I don’t want to make a judgement on that, but I don’t think the observation that CF is pushing us in that direction is very controversial. But an independent open source web browser is obviously against that ethos. So what’s the play here exactly? Just for goodwill?
(Regardless of motivation, they’re lending more support than most other companies, so it’s applaudable nonetheless.)
Cloudflare supporting Ladybird makes sense for the same reasons that Valve invests in Proton. Cloudflare's job is easier if everyone standardizes on a few approved browsers, but right now the three major browser engines are controlled by Google (IIRC most of Mozilla's funding comes from Google) and Apple, just as Valve's Steam is heavily dependent on Microsoft's Windows.
Both companies are basically hedging against future incentive misalignment with other (larger) companies, and reducing their dependencies on platforms they have ~zero influence over.
To add to this, Apple’s share of the control is minimal and precarious. A timeline where Google is the sole web engine authority could easily become reality and is even likely.
Hedging on a promising upstart makes a lot of sense.
I haven’t seen any signs that Apple will abandon Safari, have you? Also, a browser that uses Chromium could put a halt to Google’s plans if they wanted. The easiest way would be to stop upgrading and just port over security patches. (Sure, it brings progress to a halt, but this is unlikely to matter to web developers in the short run and it would get people’s attention.)
They aren’t going to do this, though, so long as new releases of Chromium are reasonable.
If/when Apple is forced to start allowing Blink on iOS globally, all it takes is a hearty marketing push from Google and devs putting “best viewed in Chrome” badges on their sites for Safari’s marketshare (and with it, Apple’s influence) to plummet.
Given how AMP eventually died, it seems unlikely that web developers would go along with it. What’s in it for them?
Also, I don’t see any sign that Google even wants to do it? This is not really evidence-based reasoning, it’s just “I can imagine something evil that Google might do.”
Google markets Chrome relentlessly, with popups in search and YouTube if you're using other browsers, browser choice dialogs in Google iOS apps (despite iOS having a default browser setting for 5 years now), Chrome getting bundled into random Windows software installers, etc.
Many devs actively desire single-engine development and testing and many aren't shy about using Chrome only features already. If they had the capability to tell users to go install Chrome instead of targeting broadly supported features, they would do so in a heartbeat.
I have hit a few sites over the last year that threw up full page "This site only works in chrome" blocks, even though they usually work perfectly fine in Firefox if you set the user agent to chrome.
So in the enterprise world, it has been common for years for companies to "only support Chrome" even on iOS, where it's just skinned Safari. I have constantly had to call vendors mean names and point out how obviously iOS support means they are Webkit/standards-compliant. This is how I know, in fact, these websites will also work on Firefox. Apple's annoying iPhone monopoly is the last thing protecting the open web as needing to be standards-compliant.
The moment iPhones aren't allowed to force browsers to use Webkit (the EU is already pushing for this), the open web dies. There will no longer be any draw for web developers to develop for standards instead of developing for Chrome.
And it's not just the WebKit monopoly in iOS, but also being slow on adopting new features pushed by Google. Often even being slower than Mozilla funnily enough. I don't care about what Apple's intentions could be for being a slowpoke on adopting the new features, as long as it allows independent browsers like Pale Moon to catch up with the mainstream.
Oh. And Google's mobile apps always conveniently forget the setting of "always use system browser and never ask me", and will keep asking you to open with "chrome", "google", or "system browser".
> Oh. And they very literally killed Internet Explorer
I disagree with this. Firstly, in this article they talk about how they "killed" IE6 in favour of later versions of IE, but MS ultimately killed IE with neglect until it was far too late.
Microsoft might have been neglecting IE, but Google was Definitly playing games with IE, constantly breaking video acceleration on YouTube in IE in any way they could. They were literally introducing invisible elements overlapping the video for no other reason than to break IE.
I wish Apple had some sort of "Geforce Now" style setup to run a Mac in a box. I know they'd never go for something like a legit image you could run in a VM, but surely they could come up with something.
My work sent over some old MacBook for when we need to test something unique to Safari, so it's not even the hardware aspect. It's the "I need to find another place to stash a machine, and then wire up KVM switches to use my highly opinionated I/O device choices, on a finite sized desk" factor.
Is keeping up with "just security patches" on Chromium reasonable?
As sickening as thought as it is, the best hope there is Microsoft-- they can afford to hire the necessary army of developers, and their incentives are aligned just far enough away from Google's that they would have reasons to do it.
The problem is that they're also in the ad economy now, so their opportunity to play it for relevance is shot.
They had a window where they could have said "Edge: the Chromium-based browser that treats uBlock Origin as a first-class citizen" but instead they'd rather add weird popups to credit card fields asking if I want to use Klarna instead.
Apple isn't the only one standing in the way of a Google hegemony. If they are, then the web is already fucked since neither corporation has a benevolent track record pertaining to Open Source. Apple just can't compete without steering privileges that are equally harmful to the open web.
If web devs get permission to start ignoring Safari (which currently sits at ~20% marketshare), there’s no way they’re going to care about Firefox which doesn’t have even a fifth as much. If Safari falls so does Firefox.
> If they are, then the web is already fucked since neither corporation has a benevolent track record pertaining to Open Source.
Interesting take, since Google has both authored and supported hundreds of FLOSS projects over many years. They even sponsored summer "internships" for students to contribute to Open Source software as long as a maintainer bothered to register and promise to mentor the student via "Summer of Code"
As someone who's lived in the bay for a bit over 10 years now, when I first moved here Google was very much that company that you think they were. Now, they are not. Every single friend (and it was >50% when I moved here!) has since left Google in the bay area. There is one left at Google entirely, and they're only remaining due to physical location (near family outside the US). I have watched my friends get brutally and relentlessly pipped over the tiniest bullshit reasons. This is all entirely 2nd hand so my perspective is very skewed, but even my friends from Facebook/Netflix/Apple weren't treated that way.
I'm aware of the many changes; including the cancellation of Google SoC. However, gp claimed neither Google nor Apple have a benevolent track record towards open source, and that doesn't ring true to me. The old Google was very benevolent, perhaps only rivalled by Red Hat and (old) IBM.
Hi, can you provide a few examples of 'tiniest bullshit reasons'? Kinda curious as what is considered bullshit there, I'm from the EU with zero experience of anything like S.F.
One was pipped because they were placed on a moonshot, told how amazing their work was, gave internal talks on it, then the moonshot was defunded... so they got pipped over their lack of business impact. Instead of, y'know, being placed on a normal team, like where they came from only a year or so before.
Google doesn't have control of Chromium though. The source is available and it is permissively licensed. If they did something truly onerous, Microsoft would fork it within hours and everyone would switch their upstream to Edgium.
The only reason Google calls the shots is because they pour billions of dollars into maintaining Chromium. The fact that they can do that (and even fund Firefox at the same time) is because of their ad monopoly. Same with search, Gmail, Translate, Maps. None of those things can exist without the ad monopoly funding it all.
Complaining about Chrome is barking up the wrong tree.
It would very unlikely be something which would affect Microsoft’s bottom line. They wouldn’t care.
> and everyone would switch their upstream to Edgium.
Who’s “everyone”? Anyone who cares minimally about possible shenanigans in Chromium is already selectively merging changes.
Edge aggressively sets itself as the default browser and slurps information from Chrome without permission. Edge and Microsoft are not and will not be a saviour from Google and Chrome.
I think you missed the point here. Forking is and always has been a totally viable hedge against any other parties control in an Open Source product. Google can't force Microsoft to take it as it is with no input because Microsoft can absolutely fork. Just like Apple and Google forked from each other.
The real difficulty is that you need someone with large pockets to fund any forks if those forks are going to be viable. And that is due to the complexity of the web as a platform.
The person they're replying to straight up claimed "Google doesn't have control over Chromium", which to me reads most naturally as treating the unforked code base as a community project where anyone can submit commits.
As you noted, I don't think forking and maintaining a Google sized code base is a realistic alternative. But by the same token, I don't think that the possibility of forking said code base is what people typically mean by not having control.
Chromium is upstream of Chrome, not the other way around.
However, Google Chrome is so ubiquitous that any changes Google makes to it are expected to be available in all other browsers and its a kind of defacto control even if it isn't technically control of the upstream Chromium project.
In practical reality, Chromium is a downstream less-googled fork of Chrome. First they decide what they want to put into Chrome, and then they put the less-googled parts of that into Chromium.
While I agree with you, as indicated by my comment about Google having de facto control, the terms upstream or downstream when discussing forking an open source codebase has specific meaning. Chromium is not a downstream forked that has ripped all the google pieces out. It is the upstream codebase that Google then builds all their telemetry and other Google shenanigans into.
If we're discussing someone else forking Chromium because hypothetically Google decided to once again Be Evil it is important to understand, from a technical standpoint, that the fork comes from code before Google does their stuff and not after. Ripping all of google's tendrils out would be a monumental undertaking. Building a similar browser from before Google bakes in their telemetry is infinitely easier and more trustworthy in my opinion.
Some of the "evil" isn't the Google stuff, but rather "standards" that Google is pushing or dropping support for without the support of the other members of the consortium and just as present in Chromium as it is in Chrome.
"upstream" and "downstream" is about the direction changes flow. Changes flow from Chrome into Chromium. The fact they arrive in the Chromium repository before they arrive in a public release of Chrome is not relevant.
Context: I worked on Chrome for 15 years (until June) and am still a Chromium committer. I am probably as familiar with how development in Chrome actually works as anyone (at least as of a couple months ago).
It is correct that Google can and does decide that some features should remain private before they are developed. However, there are significant logistic and cultural hurdles to keeping something private, and as a result it's really only possible in certain parts of the codebase. Sometimes things that have been developed in private are eventually made public, and Chrome devs will often call that "upstreaming", but I think that's not really the same thing as what most people are talking about when they use the words upstream and downstream. And these instances are fairly uncommon in the history of the project.
Otherwise, IMO it is not really correct to say that changes flow from Chrome into Chromium. Nearly all development is done in the public repos and so they would be available simultaneously for either build. There aren't really official releases of Chromium per se, but a full build of Chromium containing a given change is basically always available before the corresponding full build of Chrome. There may be very rare exceptions for security fixes that are shipped before they are made public, but it would actually pretty hard to land such a change so I doubt it's happened more than a few times.
So, more generally speaking, in my opinion it's not really useful to talk about "upstream" and "downstream" for Chrome and Chromium, definitely not in the day-to-day sense. Chrome and Chromium are multi-repo projects, and there is only ever a single copy of a particular repo that is used for either. The same branches in a given repo are used for both Chrome and Chromium at any point in time. There is a main branch and release branches, and most of the time (but not always) a change will land in the main branch before a release branch. But I don't think most people would call "main" upstream of "release" in that sense.
[ There are rare situations where Google will develop experiments on a private branch of a repo, but those don't usually end up getting shipped to anyone. ]
This is different from how (most of?) the other Chromium-based browsers operate, where my understanding is that they usually do have true forks of (some of) the repos and changes flow downstream from the Google-maintained ones to ones under their control in the normal sense of the word.
I didn't take them to be suggesting that, and I don't think it makes any difference to the point they're making. Google controls commits to Chromium which then make it into Chrome.
They do have technical control over the upstrean Chromium project. There's an invite only pool of developers who decide what gets committed to Chromium and they are Google employees.
I haven't trudged through Chromium's commit statistics but has Microsoft been upstreaming many contributions? I'm skeptical that they are ready to take on the full brunt of Chromium maintenance on a whim, it would take a decent while to build up the teams and expertise for it.
Before they swapped Edge over to use Chromium they were capable of maintaining their own engine just fine. Probably not overnight, but in the past they have shown that they have the budget to support a browser engine if they want to.
Because no amount of money was going to solve the problem of people saying they think Microsoft's browser is slower/worse/etc. Switching to Chromium negated that in a way nothing else could.
When Microsoft beat Netscape with IE, it was by building a far better browser. Google is a stronger competitor than Netscape ever was though. Without Google dropping the ball (like Netscape), Microsoft would never exceed Chrome's performance by enough to be the fastest, most compatible (with Chrome), etc.
It is also just classic Microsoft when they are hungry. Like making Word use WordPerfect files and keyboard shortcuts. Only today it is that their browser is mostly Google, Linux is built into Windows 11, SQL Server ships on Linux, and their most popular IDE is open-source built on open tech (Electron) they didn't create.
When they get threatened, nothing is too sacred for Microsoft to kill or adopt.
I feel like they burnt enough browser goodwill with IE that no one who was on the internet back then wants to touch a microsoft browser regardless of the engine
They are on the record about why they switched to a chromium based browser. It’s been a while, but if I’m remembering correctly, at the time Google was making changes to YouTube to make it actively slower, and use more power on IE. Microsoft realized that while they could compete as a browser, they couldn’t compete and fight google trying to do underhanded things to sabotage their browser.
Because they could archive the same product using chromium with less cost. Should that change their investment in that area would probably increase as a consequence.
No, because using Chromium was the only way the could stay relevant in the browser space. They were just unable to build the same product with their own stack.
They were facing the same problem that everybody is—Google adds features too fast to keep up. If Google went in a bad direction with Chrome, they’d Microsoft would just have to keep up with Mozilla and Apple.
Microsoft lands many changes in Chromium first before they show up in Edge (logistically it's easier to do things this way for merging reasons), but they do also upstream changes to Chromium that show up in Edge first.
There's a tightly controlled pool of developers who make up the decision-making body about which commits get approved. That pool is dominated by Google employees so they effectively control whether something gets committed.
So it's not open in the sense that would be most people's first impression, which is that anyone can contribute code to the project and see it realized. You'd have to fork it and maintain a Google sized code base.
>Complaining about Chrome is barking up the wrong tree.
I don't see how that follows. Google disproportionately invests in a browser, controls it and with it much of the destiny of the web. The fact that Google is leveraging their ad monopoly to create and maintain a dominant browser is the issue. At least, it's an issue. The ad monopoly powers their control over the web and vice versa.
Even if that’s true, are we going to see Google’s dominance in the ad space meaningfully curbed? It seems highly unlikely at best, and it doesn’t matter how loud any of us are barking (at least until there’s a massive shift in political headwinds).
Until that’s addressed, Chrome being dominant is a problem, because Google has created an “open moat” with their resource expenditure. Microsoft sure as hell isn’t going to be able to justify that kind of spend on their Chromium fork, and so their influence will never be of note.
> Even if that’s true, are we going to see Google’s dominance in the ad space meaningfully curbed?
> (at least until there’s a massive shift in political headwinds)
It did look like it for a while with the US its antitrust action and the EU also taking aggressive action. But then Google kissed the ring and the DoJ pulled back it's recommendation of Google divesting DoubleClick, and the EU lost the staredown with Trump and made their measures toothless too.
Who knows what will happen in the 2030s though. If the Democrats get into power again, I'm sure they'll remember how big tech switched up on them and there will be a serious reckoning.
Except they do. One just has to look at the inability to keep JPEG-XL mainlined in Chromium. Sure, some forks still have JPEG-XL, but it's effectively gone at this point.
> Microsoft would fork it within hours and everyone would switch their upstream to Edgium.
Why would people trust Microsoft more than Google, though? Even with really bad actions, switching browsers is very difficult (i.e. it requires making an active choice and change about an obscure topic) and I don't see normal people doing it, which is what would be required for this to happen.
Microsoft can't get any traction for Edge even with the pushiness on their OS and massive market share. I recently installed Windows 11 on a box and even searching for Chrome had the top portion of the screen show "You don't need a different browser!" at the top of Bing. Did that stop me? No. Not going to use a Microsoft browser, thanks.
Edge solely exists to keep the Windows OS bundled with their own browser.
My 70 year old mother doesn't want the faff of installing Firefox so Edge fits the bill. It provides for her, her needs. I've installed Firefox and it sits untouched.
Microsoft doesn't care if people use it or not. It's easier and cheaper for them to integrate as Chromium does than it is to upkeep Trident. It's not their business too.
My take to why they chose Chromium is that Firefox (Netscape) has always been seen as an independent rebel.
Microsoft is corporate as is Google. I'm sure some backhand deals too.
> Why they chose Chromium and not Firefox? Firefox has always been independent whereas as Microsoft is corporate as is Google. At least my take on it. I'm sure some backhand deals too.
I don't have any more insight than any other commenter, but in my estimation a major factor is how practical the browser is to fork. By the time Microsoft switched to a Chromium base for edge, creating and maintaining a Chromium fork with meaningfully different UI was fairly well-trodden ground because it had been done several times already, whereas almost nobody had forked Firefox (except for toggle some flags or keep the UI frozen in time). The one countervailing example, Brave, also switched to Chromium for similar reasons.
Additionally, this was the beginning of the arc of working overtime to court web developers that it's still in the midst of. By shuttering Chakra (the old Edge rendering engine) and switching to Blink, Microsoft improved its reputation with web devs.
Edge has windows-integrated o parental controls which Firefox lacks entirely and Chrome has its own implementation of. Non-parents probably have no reason to care, but edge has an advantage in Microsoft households.
That response ignores the fact that Valve isn't in the business of preventing you from playing your games on niche operating systems but Cloudflare is in the business of blocking non-standard browsers. If Cloudflare truly wants to prevent a Google/Apple web duopoly the most effective thing they can do is to stop blocking alternatives or even just browser-configurations that are Google-hostile.
I have never seen credible evidence that this is what Cloudflare sees as their business. They fundamentally don't care what browser the user is using. What they care about are the traffic patterns of users and preventing their customers from getting hit by bots, spam, and other malicious traffic. The fact that some browsers that look like malicious traffic is not something they can control or reasonably be held responsible for.
> Valve isn't in the business of preventing you from playing your games on niche operating systems
Getting your Steam library to work on Linux before it got Valve's blessing with Proton wasn't a great experience. If they wanted to, they could have easily decided to block games from running on Linux and gave some statement about preventing piracy and protecting users from malware.
I'm optimistic that this investment means we'll see more open standards and large browser makers being forced to collaborate and create simpler standards without compromising security.
> Getting your Steam library to work on Linux before it got Valve's blessing with Proton wasn't a great experience.
There weren't any real roadblocks for that caused by Valve. And it definitely wasn't as hard as you're implying.
> If they wanted to, they could have easily decided to block games from running on Linux and gave some statement about preventing piracy and protecting users from malware.
They could have just like any software developer could but they didn't. They also didn't block the Steam for Linux client from running on unapproved distributions or even FreeBSD.
I don't understand why we always assume bad faith. I wish more companies were like Cloudflare actually - trying to balance the need of revenues while trying to do good for internet and open source as a whole.
As a normal user with a few sites, I'm glad they provide what they provide to block bots, attacks and everything AI.
> I don't understand why we always assume bad faith. I wish more companies were like Cloudflare actually - trying to balance the need of revenues while trying to do good for internet and open source as a whole.
This is quite simple and history bears it out: you can't rely on a for-profit corporation to operate in any other manner than optimizing shareholder value.
When VC money is flowing, you see things that look like (or even can be) altruism - but when the belts tighten and waste is eliminated these endeavors need to align with the company's goals.
Therefore, look for what Cloudflare is "buying" in this transaction. I suggest they probably want the PR win as it distracts from their objective of locking down the web, and it's worth the expenditure to them.
> This is quite simple and history bears it out: you can't rely on a for-profit corporation to operate in any other manner than optimizing shareholder value.
You can't even do that honestly. Look at Boeing. It got taken over by know-nothing managers that followed that religion of shareholder value, and what did it do? Destroy shareholder value!
I think we should instead say "we can't rely on any institution to be stable over time". That's a much more sane statement imo.
For-profit institutions will almost always act in the interest of profit for the people who have an ownership stake and a claim to the prophet stream. That's definitionally why they exist, and we have enough evidence from the history of everything ever to assume that they will for the most part act that way.
You are saying something different. You are pointing out that the people making decisions aren't necessarily good at making those decisions. Or maybe the incentive structure is set up such that the people making the decisions do not share the goal of profit with the company, and so decide according to what's best for them, which might or might not be what's best for the profit objective.
The instability of institutions in general is yet a third characteristic.
> For-profit institutions will almost always act in the interest of profit for the people who have an ownership stake and a claim to the [profit] stream.
But they won't. This statement is a declaration of faith/religion, not a statement of fact. It's a common belief, but that doesn't make it true.
It's a matter of historical fact. When has this not been the case. Can you think of any serious examples? Everyone everywhere all the time is just responding to the incentives in their environment. "Make a lot of money" is a very very powerful incentive.
There are exceptions all over the place where businesses don't act like robber barons, sure. Take for example Market Basket up here in New England, where the CEO for years and years resisted raising prices and tried to treat workers well, in the interest of maintaining a long-term positive image and being a sustainable element of the region's economy. But guess what: he was just forced out for not being greedy enough. Lots of people seem to be expecting a private equity takeover soon.
The actual metric management maximizes management remuneration, which is dependent on short-term shareholder value.
Startups nominally care more about the long view, as they need to convince investors that they high long-term value and have to act accordingly. As companies grow from VC-funded, to fast-growing public, then to well-established public company, the culture shifts to match dominant shareholder expectations.
> you can't rely on a for-profit corporation to operate in any other manner than optimizing shareholder value.
I would like to understand where this breaks down. Would a for-profit individual be more reliable? Would a non-profit? At which point does quality deteriorate?
I think Public Benefit Corporation (PBC) are a way to try and solve that problem.
I recently switched to Kagi and their Orion browser, and that's when I learned about PBCs.
A PBC legally takes a triple mandate, the first is just as any for-profit corp, to maximize shareholder value, the second is to the benefit of the stakeholders, and the last can be anything they write down when they register as a PBC. The Delaware law says:
> The board of directors shall manage or direct the business and affairs of the public benefit corporation in a manner that balances the stockholders’ pecuniary interests, the best interests of those materially affected by the corporation’s conduct, and the specific public benefit or public benefits identified in its certificate of incorporation.
If they fail at any of these mandates, you can sue them.
That means they are still for-profit, but also can't decide to favor profit over their other mandate or change their mind. Their other mandate being stakeholders interests, like users, as well as the explicitly stated benefit. For Kagi, that benefit is:
> Kagi is committed to creating a more human-centric and sustainable web that benefits individuals, communities, and society as a whole, with a transparent business model that aligns the incentives of everyone involved.
Now it's not all roses, Anthropic I learned is another PBC. Their benefit is:
> the responsible development and maintenance of advanced AI for the long-term benefit of humanity
Which is quite vague, and can be taken in many directions.
But overall, it's much better than normal corporations, because here they are legally obligated to care about stockholder, stakeholder, and some additionally specific "public benefit".
where are you getting this? PBC has no actual legal aspect to it at all - its all self reporting and self adherence. PBC is more marketing/signalling than legal requirements
From my interpretation (which I think would match that of an attorney at the PBC):
1) Legally Enforceable: periodic self reporting of public benefit related activities
2) Not legally enforceable: the detailed scope and actual delivery/implementation of said benefits. Third party auditing
i.e. if you try going and suing OpenAI, Anthropic etc. on their stated public benefit contradicting the severe impact datacenters are having to water/electricity in some areas, im quite certain that you would lose.
> This is quite simple and history bears it out: you can't rely on a for-profit corporation to operate in any other manner than optimizing shareholder value.
This is like saying that history bears out that you can't rely on governments to do anything but prepare for war and then send you out to die in one.
No they are not. DPT is just about "democratic" government having conflicts with each other. They find it difficult because they are economically intertwined. They have no such problem preying on other countries, often in cooperation.
> I don't understand why we always assume bad faith.
I'm already bombarded with cloudflare captchas when using Firefox, especially on Linux. Residential IP address. I'm suspicious of everything cloudflare is doing right now.
I recently saw https://neal.fun/not-a-robot/ on the front-page but then I gave up as that's my daily reality with cloudflare and friends already. I use 3 browsers on linux with Thai IP address because at least one of them is always blocked by cloudflare. Especially if I go work on public wifi I often actually have to hotspot myself to 4g to even get stuff to load.
I've started taking more extreme stance these days of ctrl+w instantly and maybe email the admins if I'm particularly angry that I will not buy whatever they're selling because I simply can't be bothered with their spyware blocking me. Maybe some day people will wisen up on the damage cloudflare is doing to their business.
Anecdotally, I'm not. I always use Firefox (or Zen) and get almost no Captchas. Neither at home, nor at work. Not on Windows, not on Linux, not on macOS.
I'm not going to say that Cloadflare isn't doing anything fishy, but if they are, it's probably more complicated.
You're bombarded with Cloudflare captchas because bots are heavily scraping the websites you're browsing and they are struggling to stay online by putting in place heavy-handed bot-fighting tactics. Without Cloudflare, you wouldn't have the website you're browsing.
Unless they're actually dropping the connections with a RST, I wonder how much bots repeatedly hammering at their CAPTCHA pages (which is actually relatively large in comparison to many static sites) costs them, vs. just serving the actual content which could actually be smaller.
> I don't understand why we always assume bad faith.
> I wish more companies were like Cloudflare actually - trying to balance the need of revenues while trying to do good for internet and open source as a whole.
> As a normal user with a few sites, I'm glad they provide what they provide to block bots, attacks and everything AI.
I think general distrust with any major company these days is warranted, especially one with so much control over the internet. But I agree with your points, too.
This should be relevant to the Cloudflare discussion, posted today:
Assuming bad faith in the case of Cloudflare specifically? Know first that the CIA once ran a front company for decades that was meant to be a trusted source for cryptographic hardware for use by embassies and the like: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crypto_AG
If the CIA wanted to MITM all web traffic, and why wouldn't they, a company like Cloudflare is probably exactly how they'd do it.
They're a gatekeeper to a large chunk of Internet already. If they decide that your IP range stinks? Hope you enjoy your ration of 22 captcha pages a day!
Now, they're making some very transparent moves to leverage what they have to get even more control. And once they get even more control? It's not an "if" they start choking you with it to get more revenue. It's a "when".
People used to say "I wish more companies were like Google". They don't say that anymore.
And what are the rules? Don’t use AI to steal training content across the internet, spread nuclear grade spam and propaganda at scale, hack servers with automated agents? Seems fine.
the end game will be ai training bots will have to be:
1) like 1 cent or fraction of cent to get access to page
2) scrawlers will just cache this data on their server or just train on it so will pay just once
3) small content creators will get just make like few dollars our of it
4) CF will get some 10-30% cut from their content semaphore.
5) in the end you small content creator trading their whole content for few dollars but because CF has mass of scale they will make multi millions or more.
It's pretty easy, these are private companies and not democratic institutions that build consensus within their communities. It is better to assume bad faith upon corporate actors because they don't typically advocate for things that help humanity, mostly only themselves.
> I don't understand why we always assume bad faith
Because they all seem to eventually "screw" us. Google seemed (and maybe actually was) altruistic at some point, and even Apple seemed to be (when the only way they could make money was to do right by the users).
Cloudflare is running the largest and longest denial of service attacks in the history of the internet by acting as arbitrary gatekeeper to important government sites like congress.gov. I haven't been able to load it in years.
Nope. It's because the cloudflare captchas require a bleeding edge browser. If one uses a modern commercial browser it works and you've never even presented with a captcha. But in both cases I am tunneling to a VPS to avoid Comcast/Xfinity's MITM injections of javascript into pages and that adds some oddness to my connections. Comcast has a monopoly on high speed internet in my town and I cannot even get DSL or I'd switch.
Lacking lived experience re: discrimination is something that's pretty common. I hate to compare my entirely optional 'software veganism' struggles with real discrmination issues, but just because you don't experience discrimination doesn't mean it doesn't happen. I go to online stores, government services, even places of recreation and I get denied service because I have to tunnel to avoid my ISP's unethical practices and I don't use a cloudflare approved browser. It feels bad.
I know Firefox works fine, even if you use a decent tunnel, but if that is too commercial and bleeding edge perhaps the Ladybird project is actually a solution if it gets up speed?
Well, you see, once a Cloudflare site violated the TOS so badly that they had to get their C-levels involved to decide if the TOS violation was bad enough to not want them on their platform. That one site was kicked off and this site *HOWLED* at the terrible giant internet company doing a censorship and they have never been forgiven.
(The site that was "deplatformed" was fine and still exists, much to the chagrin of the minorities it directs hate towards and the people literally stalked there.)
There is no way you didn't write this comment while laughing out loud.
For-profit companies care about profits for their shareholders, that's it. Heck, even non-profit often tend to value more profit than their integrity or cause but that's a topic for another day.
I wish this wasn't the case but even good-willed individuals at the helm of for-profits are forced to pursue profit and avoid anything clearly leading to losses, else they are sacked.
It is baffling and concerning that anyone disagrees with you. The blind faith of so many that companies will magically and selflessly act in the best interest of anyone but their shareholders is, perhaps, the most damaging social ill we face (exacerbated by Citizens United).
You're severely misinformed and parotting misinformed meme interpretations of fiduciary duty.
Integrity and a healthy market align with fiduciary duty as long as one can make the argument that it's in the long term interest of the company. It's really, really difficult to find examples of a person being held liable for not upholding their fiduciary duty because what can be argued as good for the long term success of the company involves a lot of prognostication.
Fiduciary duty is there to prevent things like a CEO choosing to oberpay his cousin's company that has no history in the market for things they've never done before when there is an obviously better option available.
Companies that act poorly, as you describe, do so out of their own desire, not because they are forced to by any sort of duty.
Since you seem so well-informed I would love any example of good-will and strictly not-for-profit activities done directly by a large corporation with shareholders which weren't done have other reasons.
Examples of things which don't count:
- Supporting an open source competitor to avoid getting hammered by antitrust
- Giving money to a foundation (which they may or might not own) for greenwashing
- Giving money to a foundation ran by a friend/family member
- Doing an activity to try to fix an evil thing they did before and backfired
- Doing something good for obvious PR reason (e.g. By being heavily advertised) but then do something even worse in the same area later on
I'm genuinely interested in a healthy conversation about this. But I honestly cannot think of anything which either is generally free for the company or that will help them getting (or not losing) more money. Happy to be wrong.
> Giving money to a foundation (which they may or might not own) for greenwashing
What evidence would be required for you to believe that a donation to an environmental cause wasn't greenwashing?
Your list of exceptions seems fairly obviously aimed at making the task impossible because it's all based on interpretation of motives. You're essentially discounting all actions that have positive societal effects as long as doing so is motivated by money which is counter to the point I was making.
Giving money away to charity, by the meme interpretation of fiduciary duty, would be illegal. Instead, companies do it all the time because it makes them look better which might improve their business outlook in the future. That satisfies fiduciary dury despite it being a red line in the accounting books.
Wouldn't you like to live in a world where people care enough about doing good things that they'd prefer to patronize companies that do good things? That seems like an incredibly positive effect, regardless of the business' motives.
Those of us who get blocked from access services (government, commercial, personal) by cloudflare nearly every day have the lived experience to really understand the issue and the company. Most are blissfully unaware of their lack of experience. If you stick to corporate browsers you'd never know. It's not your fault, but maybe reflect on this lack of experience before commenting with so much confidence.
Cloudflare is domiciled in the USA, where shareholder supremacy has been part of US corporate law going all the way back to Dodge v Ford Motor Co. in 1919.
Now, it's in Cali, where it's not as strong a statement as in some other states, but it's still got a lot of precedent behind it.
Hi, we assume bad faith because we have seen again and again that corporate humans can be expected in ways that would at best be described as sociopathic when referring to a real flesh and blood human.
Responding to a dead comment from a banned account:
> The big new game for them is AI crawler metering. Don’t think browser matters much anymore from their perspective.
Truly open browsers are easy to spoof. Approved browsers with whatever attestation features they champion builtin are hard to spoof. So browsers do matter.
Browser attestation doesn't really matter, its device attestation. Browser attestation is downstream from that.
Google with SafetyNet attestation (whatever the hell its called these days) has pretty much locked down Android as tightly as iOS at this point.
Hell, Apple device users already get to go in the internet "approved" fast lane because of attestation. iDevices and M-series Macbooks can send out a special response that bypasses all captchas.
Windows 11 has a requirement for TPM2, which features hardware attestation too.
Linux of course cannot be locked down in a similar manner, thus cannot attest and will have to suffer for it.
It would probably be illegal for CloudFlare + Google to outright block you from accessing the internet, but they can just drown you in a sea of captchas until you give up and join the attested crowd. Hell, YouTube outright forces you to sign in if they detect a VPN, they won't even offer a captcha.
Like 'Amusing Ourselves to Death' points out, it isn't a 1984-esque brutal fascist control that will erode our freedoms, but rather a Brave New World-esque situation where people will sign away all (digital) control because the dopamine must flow.
I think this is why things like the mdl ID standard are important. It allows for a privacy preserving and open approach not controlled by big companies. It's not perfect, it's controlled by government. But I'd like government to at least challenge the power of Google and Apple.
I haven't notice too many captchas from Linux myself... maybe about 50% more than Windows or Mac, but in general it hasn't been so bad. I do think that it could potentially get bad though.
I'm also not sure how this can/would shake out when you can just use tools like Playwright/Puppeteer to manage a real browser. Both Google and MS do this (not as much as bare crawlers) to handle SPA-like site content.
> Google with SafetyNet attestation (whatever the hell its called these days) has pretty much locked down Android as tightly as iOS at this point.
SafetyNet doesn't lock anything down, it just provides an API for applications to verify the app is running in a verifiable and untampered environment.
I would think it's like Vercel and Svelte. Investing in something so small is good PR and gives them an image of goodwill but also very unlikely to result in actual market changes.
By your argument, this could still be interpreted as Cloudflare approving Ladybird. I don't see how indie genuine browsers (i.e. not bots) are "against the ethos" of restricting the web to approved browsers only.
"Approved browser" in this context have technical restrictions on user freedom, e.g. https://developers.cloudflare.com/fundamentals/reference/cry... I'm not talking about someone at CF just adding a random browser to an approved list. More empirically speaking, a browser can't be considered approved if you can freely fork it and not revoke the approved status.
I read the article you referenced, though not very carefully due to lack of time, but I don't see anything like a list of supported browsers. They even mention Firefox as supported, which can be forked just like Ladybird.
> Cloudflare clearly wants to move us to a future where only approved browsers are allowed to access the web
CloudFlare is in the CDN business.
If CloudFlare gatekeeps who can access their CDN, then people will move to a different CDN. Because people want their websites to be accessed by as many people as possible.
Corporations sometimes will do seemingly good things in order to maintain their control, Google is a threat to Cloudflare and their business, what I believe however is that this will have significant pushback from the government seeing how Google seems to be pretty favorable for the current admin, not sure Cloudflare is on the same favorability.
Honestly the post tries to frame it under the banner of the open web, and offers some justifications for Omarchy that I think could all also apply to a project like Bluefin, so it feels a bit flimsy. My guess would be that it's just that someone with access to the purse strings got excited about both projects and decided to fund them, without necessarily a larger play in mind.
It is not an installer script (anymore), so instead you have to download a 7GB ISO file (in the name of 'good UX') that ships with Zoom, Spotify, Hey, Basecamp, Steam, Minecraft (??), etc. but you still end up using the same package mirrors (arch's). If it was an install script, like LARBS or many others (before and after omarchy), I'd (almost) get it. If it was a derivative distro, like endeavour or manjaro, I'd (almost) get it. But this just makes no sense. I'm all for making Linux more accessible, but this ain't it, chief.
Into an Arch install, and Arch already has an install script. I know it doesn't spit out a usable ultra pretty system. I think it's a good thing the Arch system doesn't require a single whole-drive LUKS configuration, meaning you get to do the thing we talk about as a sort of benchmark in the devops world: setting up Arch with one or a few encrypted volumes.
Strange to me to hear me criticizing linux spreading, yet...
It’s not for me either. I peeked at the script and repo the other day. There were choices I wouldn’t make, but it’s written opinionated in the front. That’s totally fine by me.
It is definitely making Linux more accessible. Yet still new comers to Linux will struggle when they want to do sightly more than what Omarchy offers. In that sense, the current Omarchy may not be _accessible_. But I think with this amount of users coming in, they will be able to find ways for almost anything.
It’s been having a great side effect. Hyprland is having a lot of support. I hope that many other pieces will have supports for better Linux experience. Who knows most of major software applications will have official Linux support in a few years.
I think you are not in the target audience for it.
I am not in it either, I think arch has great defaults and archinstall is enough. On top of that it's incredibly well documented. But some people just want to hop in as quickly as possible and get to something working.
It's not just a few libs (anymore), so instead you have to download hundreds of gems (in the game of 'good dev ex') that ships with activsupport, and ORM, ERB and even pushes an app architecture on you but you still end up using ruby. If it was just a few things like sinatra and sequel I'd (almost) get it. If it was a fork of another project like Merb I'd (almost get it) but this just make no sense. I'm all for making web development more accessible but this aint it, chief.
People distro hop all the time for out of the box experience. Very few enjoy configuring their desktop to perfection, because frankly it's a huge PITA with everything being split between a thousand control panels and config files with differing conventions and levels of documentation.
When a distro with a default configuration close to what some group of users is looking for shows up, that's exciting to that group because it's that much less fiddling they need to think about, and perhaps most importantly it's not going to randomly break on them one day because it's represented in the distribution's testing.
It's mostly a PITA on Linux because once you do things yourself they will eventually break and you're the one who will have to figure out how to solve it via your own custom setup again. Similar to Vim templates it saves a lot of time joining a community build.
Claude Code really helped me with this recently. I have a rather old dotfiles repository (10+ years) for my Arch system, and I can really feel the fatigue from updating and maintaining it. So much so that over the years, it has accumulated many minor annoyances that I never fixed. Nowadays, I can simply explain these issues to an LLM, and it will mostly resolve them.
The install script is still there, you don't have to use the ISO [0]. I prefer to do my own btrfs subvolumes, partitioning, tweaks, etc and just run the script after a base install. Uninstalling anything is a matter of seconds from the provided menus.
I was curious, and i wasn't able to run an earlier version of the install script into a system i'd already set up; script complained about non-encrypted volumes. That was enough for me to walk away.
It is strange to me that omarchy took off and not Regolith Desktop [1], which is a very similar project, and has been around a lot longer. I suppose the DHH effect is real. There is definitely a critical mass accumulating around the hyprland ecosystem. They seem to be forming their own culture separate from the wider FOSS community that I find concerning.
Oh man, I forgot about Regolith! I ran it for a few weeks on an old ThinkPad a few years ago when it had a new release and it was pretty nice compared to configuring i3 and all that myself.
I wanted to try Omarchy out on my endeavouros desktop, but got annoyed that there wasn't a simple install script. I don't really want to re-install my whole OS just to try a new DE config.
It's YouTube-hype, there is a newfound love for TUIs and DHH, as a very influencial person fell for it as well. I don't think anybody really wants an OS with e.g. Rails pre installed, not even people using Rails. People use specific versions for specific apps. I think Omarchy will be soon forgotten.
With Linux you can have a million rices with passionate creators who motivate their family, friends, audience to try something new. I would prefer spliting the money among more projects like this rather than misplacing resources into a hobbiest/poweruser thing. Ideas that would be more appropriate than money: an award, signal boost, pizza, invite to a convention
If I was conspiratorially minded I would say Omarchy exists and get support just so LARBS users have someone to spit at while feeling like the underdog.
Props to the Omarchy creator for being so unabashedly opinionated in their rice despite the years of hate on soy devs. Unused RAM is wasted ram!
I am pretty sure all the stuff is optional and the main point is having everything like drivers working right away instead of looking for solutions yourself
That's something most distros do already, or at least try to. Good default setup and working drivers Ubuntu aimed for a decade ago. So that would not be exciting.
Maybe it's more about the willingness to include software other distros see critically and would not include by default, like docker.
I cannot for the life of me understand the Omarchy hype. The Linux community has been theming their distribution installs for decades. What distinguishes this from that?
Arch linux is a great linux distro that's kinda difficult to set up (more so historically but it's got that reputation).
Hyprland is a great WM that has garbage default settings and requires wading through tons of documentation, as well as a lot of effort to set up.
Omarchy is a distribution that ships Arch + Hyprland with sane defaults. The whole thing installs in minutes, and is overall very easy to get going with. This has lead to a lot of people who were previously turned off by all the sharp edges of both Arch and Hyprland to give Arch and Hyprland a shot. Since both of these things are pretty great once you get them going, a lot of people are enthusiastic.
Sounds like Omarchy also ships with a bunch of bloatware. Why would I need the Hey or Basecamp apps – neither are targeted at developers, neither are commonly used, and both are just websites loosely packaged as installable apps anyway. Similarly for Steam (which runs at startup by default I believe), Spotify, Minecraft (which will bring a JVM?). It's bordering on Dell shipping Norton Antivirus to everyone and calling it a value-add.
Apart from Spotify, it ships with a few app launchers for PWAs for some of 37signals' stuff. These launchers are easily removed, and basically just launch chrome windows.
It does not ship with steam or minecraft, though it has a menu where you can install it (along with various popular software, mainly development tools).
It basically is opinionated dotfiles and a few scripts, though that's a bit of a reductive take.
The killer feature of Omarchy is how accessible and streamlined it is. You can set up your own arch+hypr environment in a weekend of tweaking and fiddling assuming basic Linux competency, or you can use Omarchy and get where you want to be in 10 minutes with no tweaking or fiddling.
If you want is the outcome of the fiddling, then Omarchy is a great choice. If you want is fun of the fiddling process, then it's not for you.
I'm surprised so many people who want to use Arch aren't in it for the fiddling.
I've had publicly installable dotfiles with a "1 command and ~5 minutes later" you have your development environment set up for a few years now. It is command line focused since my main box is running WSL 2 with Arch Linux. The script works for Debian, Ubuntu, Arch and macOS since I use a work laptop that's running a MBP.
It was a lot of fun building things up and learning about the process as I went.
When I got a laptop to install native Linux a little while back, Omarchy was just coming out and I figured ok since I will want a solution to trick out a window manager / DE I'll want more than command line tools so I took a look.
I ended up avoiding it for a few reasons but the main one was I don't want to ask for permission or maintain a fork to deviate from the Omarchy defaults that cannot be customized without a fork.
I love Rails and the philosophy behind it but I don't think the same model applies to something as intimate and personal as your OS. Your OS is more like a custom application made for you, especially if you're going down the Arch (or Linux in general) route.
If you feel it's not for you, then it's probably not for you.
I don't think Omarchy is or needs to be for everyone. Its recipe for success is likely that it's catering to a fairly particular archetype that's generally overlooked by most distributions and OS vendors, and not trying to be or do anything else.
I don't think distributions or OS vendors focus on that because imagine the outrage if you installed Windows and it pre-installed Zoom, Spotify and 80 other apps for you out of the box.
I think it's popular because DHH turned dotfiles into a product and it's being marketed as a distro. Arch + (Hyprland, Waybar, Walker and Mako) are all really popular and standlone tools that make up a reasonable looking desktop environment which Omarchy happens to use too.
I have nothing against it. If it gets more people using Linux, that is a huge win. I just find it fasinating to see it from the outside.
I think this is a bit reductive. I came from using basically the same configuration, configured piecemeal, and migrated to Omarchy because I really enjoy the cohesiveness of the experience.
The bundled software aspect is also kinda exaggerated. It almost entirely consists of app launchers for a few chrome-based PWAs. There's like no software to speak off, it's just a .desktop-file you can remove if you don't want it (there's even a menu for that).
It's arguably more of a demo of Omarchy's excellent PWA tooling than anything else, where you can create your own PWAs with a simple TUI that blend seamlessly into the rest of the system.
Thousands of people share their dotfiles though, there's just no need for it to be its own Arch-derivative distribution. Could've just been 'here are my dotfiles, works best on Arch'.
I came from doing that that before switching to Omarchy and it really is not the same.
A lot of "other people's dotfiles" have issues, and often just a few too many anime waifus bundled. That's fine I guess, but it's not what I'm looking for in a WM.
The fact that DHH's managed to rally a community to participate and maintain Omarchy is also a big part of it. If you have an issue, other people will have that issue, and quickly work together to find a fix. There's also a discord full of people running your exact setup you can exchange experiences with.
I'm not at all discounting the value of rallying a community around one configuration - I just think dotfiles could have been the distribution mechanism, and it would be as valuable given the same community around it.
every single arch user thought of making a distro with opinionated defaults, but then they realize the just have to edit the wiki to provide the community the same benefit.
some rich dude lack the self awareness for such.
he's both ignoring advanced users would rather have option open and defaults documented, and new users would just use manjaro.
I like Omarchy as an advanced user. I migrated off vanilla Arch + Hypr to Omarchy because it saves me a bunch of hassle setting all that up myself. I want the outcome, don't particularly enjoy the fiddling. I definitely could, I've even done LFS way back in the day, but I have other things I'd rather do with my time these days.
I think it's in many ways a project that caters to professional programmers. It's definitely not for beginners, neither for enthusiasts.
I respect there are people who would rather do all the fiddling themselves, but that's not what I'm looking for, and neither am I looking for a windows- or mac-a-like desktop environment like the ones you get with most distros. What I want in a desktop is exactly what Omarchy is offering.
The great strength of Omarchy is the fact that they've repackaged every good things from many different projects (arch, hyperland, and many packages) so I can install a fully functional distro with nice defaults, and every hardware working (bluetooth etc...), in less than 3 minutes without any interaction whatsoever. And it just works. Not because of Omarchy per se, but because they scripted the hell out of it so it just works™.
What exactly in the UNIX philosophy says configs should be editable via text files? It specifically talks about CLI tools using plaintext for their I/O to allow piping commands - not about configuration.
It's called the "Rule of Textuality", a component of which is: "Store data in flat text files." This principle recognizes that text files are human-readable, easily editable with any text editor, version-controllable, and can be processed by standard UNIX tools.
Right now, snap (2016-present). Before that, Unity instead of GNOME (2011-2017), Mir instead of Wayland (2006-2015), Upstart instead of systemd (2013-2017).
They always do something custom-made and not adopted by anyone else, only to completely backpedal and go with what everyone else has already been doing. So, even if you like their custom-made solution you'll eventually end up being disappointed. After that, it becomes like a relic that only some frustrated sysadmins like me will have to deal with whenever we interact with some legacy systems, which definitely doesn't help with Ubuntu's overall reputation.
It's not hard, but it's advisable to eventually set up a parallel blank Arch install where you configure everything from scratch based on things you liked from Omarchy.
I think the beauty of this is to get to understand all components in your system, which is quite simple actually.
Omarchy isn’t for me, but for those who find a minimal tiled Linux desktop interesting but don’t want to get lost in the jungle setting their own thing up, I don’t think you can possibly do better. It’s throughly thought through, polished, streamlined, and designed specifically to be accessible to newcomers.
Omarchy sounds very compelling (though I'm personally done with trying to run Linux on the desktop), but tiling window managers are just not very practical, for numerous reasons. DHH would be wise to also offer and optimize non-tiling WM setups.
Plasma isn't bad and better than Windows in most respects, but it's kind of the opposite of Omarchy in that it has a trillion toggles and its defaults don't work for many, so a good deal of tweaking is required to make it "cozy".
I'm curious which defaults you find so unusable. I'm rather fiddly and particular, but I haven't done much more to my KDE setup than disable mouse acceleration.
I agree, but that seems unlikely given his inclinations. While there's loads of options for distributions that ship with a traditional floating window manager/desktop environment, few have gone the extra mile in holistic design with e.g. unified configuration and eliminating hoop-jumping to the greatest extent possible.
> tiling window managers are just not very practical, for numerous reasons
What reasons? I've been using tilling window managers for years now, and I feel like it's 1995 whenever I need to deal with dragging and maximizing windows.
I agree with the gp. I like some aspects of tiling vms but gave up after a while.
The main pain points for me were
1) I often end up with two windows each taking a side of the screen leaving basically nothing of interest in the centre. So I end up jumping through some tetris-like hoops to make a window be centered.
2) If I close any window all the others move, often causing a repeat of problem 1
3) apps not supporting it properly causing weird graphical glitches
4) some apps should never be small windows, others never large.
Basically I ended up spending more time managing windows with a tiling vm than I ever did before, which eventually outweighed the benefits.
It's a way for web developers to easily work in the linux sphere without getting burdened too heavily. Not saying that as a dig to web devs, I'm a web deb but that's all it really appears to me. Popular dude in web dev community made it slightly easier for other web devs to do a thing.
The interesting part is, how not dev-friendly their website looks and acts. It smells more like a toy for r/unixporn than something that actually caters to real developers. How old is this project? Is this just a result of lacking manpower?
First time I've heard of omarchy, that said often when I really don't understand the hype of a product I have to remember it's possibly just not for me.
I've been a desktop linux user since the 90's and entirely since 2003 (excluding gaming) so I'm not the target user.
Cute in the video on the omarchy page that they use Edward Hopper's - Nighthawks painting (~11m) - that was my default wallpaper for about 15 years on Linux.
It's a dead-simple distribution with an opinionated setup that, well, mostly just works. It's a techie's version of a non-tech distribution where you don't have to tweak anything (or almost anything) to get a nice experience out of the box.
Think of it as "Ubuntu, but explicitly marketed for devs" Plus hype because DHH is a well-known figure.
Linux fandom really doesn't understand the power of defaults and the power of user experience. I mean, in the first versions of Omarchy installer you had to type in some CLI commands just to select and connect to wifi. This comes from Arch, a " a lightweight and flexible Linux® distribution that tries to Keep It Simple" [1] What's more simple than connecting to one of the most ubiquitous connection types via iwctl [2] during OS installation.
So DHH decided to make an opinionated config that mostly just works and provide you with a few conveniences out of the box.
Omarchy is DHH of rails fame. Lots of us like ruby a lot (myself very much included), that being said I've got Omarchy running on a vm as a test case and in the <2 minutes I've looked at it i dont really think it's very intuitive.
> At its core, Omarchy embraces Linux . . . makes a version of it that is accessible and fun to use for developers that don’t have a deep background in operating systems.
Good description of what Omarchy really is. It's for two groups of people:
1/ (biggest group by far) People who are new to Linux on the desktop and, to a lesser extent, want to get out of the macOS ecosystem
2/ Power users who run Arch btw, and have probably installed, configured, partitioned, and encrypted Arch without the installer script at least a few times and now want a sane default Arch + Hyprland install with sane defaults and a production-grade environment in just a few minutes
I don't think it's that crazy. Hyprland has, for a long time, looked really lovely when configured. But most don't want to configure it, the linux ricing community is really small in proportion to even the people who want to install Linux. Omarchy is dead-simple to install, has good documentation, decent opinions[1], and has huge influence because of DHH himself. I stopped running it myself after while, in favor of configuring my own Hyprland install, but it's an easily accessible shiny new thing by someone with a big following. Seems reasonable to me that people like it.
[1]: I don't agree with all of them, e.g. the chatbot shortcuts. But they're trivial to disable and/or redirect and, indeed, the project does a good job of trying not to mess with your changes.
You just need to watch the video to get the hype: it's the specific person leading the hype, with pretty good presentation and loyal audience. At least to me it made sense once I've seen it (the hype made sense, not the distro).
It's so opinionated but many people find it okay. And it's hard to install Arch successfully. Compared to Ubuntu Arch's package manager (also combined with AUR) are great.
I use every possible opportunity to say "Fuck Ubuntu Snaps"
The Linux community has, to my knowledge, never had someone with DHH's outreach experience and promote a "come-to-Linux" moment. Especially after using Apple products for 20 years.
Also, it has sane, sensible and appealing defaults. It's installable in a few minutes, so it saves time. I'm a happy Omakub user, even if I first used Linux back in 2005.
It's just a very simple Linux install meant for developers. It's not for people who have used Linux before but meant to be a way for new people to try it for the first time.
And it's getting a lot of attention because of DHH. Doesn't look half bad either which helps.
I think it started when PewDiePie released his Arch/Hyprland video, then DHH jumped on the train and made it super easy to install, now everyone can feel like a hacker/ricer easily.
Maybe I'm boring but I'm sticking to Debian/Gnome...
It's popularity I think comes from a) it's brain dead easy to get running while also being a very usable and nice hyprland config b) it's from DHH which has cult following status
I'd argue there's a fairly big niche of people who want a tiling WM but also don't want to have to start from scratch, figure out what accompanying utilities and programs they want to satisfy things like runner/menu, status bar, etc.
Other dots aren't as opinionated, or don't come with such a detailed user guide that Omarchy does, nor a set up script.
I'd even argue that Omarchy isn't really for other Linux users looking to distro hop, but like Omakub, it's for mac users curious about Linux, wanting an equally opinionated set up.
Dude, if you ever find out, let me know. I don't get it, and it makes me incredibly skeptical of people that acted like Linux was unusable until this god-send of a shipped default config came around. I cannot possibly roll my eyes harder. Just goes to show how much hype accounts for, still, even in nerd circles.
Also, there's always been a section of the desktop-Linux user community which is inclined to get very excited about about hypebeast window managers. Back in the day Slashdot was absolutely buzzing about Enlightenment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enlightenment_(window_manager) .
These 2 projects are so different in complexity. Ladybird is a foundational ground-up browser, meanwhile Omarchy is just an opinionated arch setup. I wonder why they were both mentioned in one article.
For one, I don't think complexity is determinative of impact. At least I hope not, otherwise my startup ideas are all DOA. For two, Omarchy is becoming more complex as more maintainers come in to write way more automation. You can kind of foresee where this is going: an Arch wrapper slowly growing into effectively a separate OS that's pushing other software to accommodate its choices. (See getting chromium to support live theme reloading, trying to get Fortnight to support Linux, etc).
Why is it that Servo has been around for ages, chugging along, making progress, and then Ladybird comes along and gets, pretty much instantly, anointed as the last great hope against Chrome? What does everyone else know about Servo that I don't?
Servo was a side-project. Mozilla laid off the Servo team. Its development then stopped. It eventually found a home in Linux Foundation but it lost the initial acceleration. It lost the ambition. Many key developers moved on. Whatever nature your project is, closed or open source, when you lose key people and stop training new ones, the project slowly dies. People matter much much more than the license or the parent organization.
Ladybird didn't lose its initial speed. There is a leader with strong vision. There is no shenanigans from half-assed management. There is clear and responsible funding. It attracts similarly ambitious people. All of that ends up with visible and real progress.
I've actually been watching all the Ladybird update videos (because I'm absolutely giddy at the prospect of a new, open-source browser engine), and they compare their test passing numbers to other browsers, including Servo. And from their own slides, Servo is behind them, but not by much, and making progress at about the same rate.
Maybe that says it all, considering how much of a head start Servo had, but Servo also took a very long... break, as you said.
The previous projects were simply hobbies. This one has a full non-profit behind it. In the end though, there is always a risk. Then you need to hope that there is also enough development of secondary leaders who can carry the torch. It is more likely when people are employed under an organization with a clear goal. Mozilla and Servo lacked this goal and vision.
I think if you look at old threads there was a lot of hype and similar high hopes for Servo back in the days, but Mozilla never positioned it as a new browser, only a testbed for parts to integrate into Firefox.
I can think of two reasons
- it's a browser engine, not a browser
- it was created and maintained for the longest time by mozilla, before the linux foundation took over a couple years ago. That creates history and governance that I could image puts of contributors or the broader excitement
I really wish the open source projects that actually have meaningful impact on the whole industry were target of sponsorship, not the ones with good marketing, but I know how hard that is to achieve. Taking money from someone is unfortunately complicated in this society. In many cases it's easier not to even ask for sponsorship, unless you are willing to deal with the bureaucracy. Ladybird is at least fighting for diversity, but I don't see the added value of Omarchy.
There are only a limited number of browser engines out currently and lady bird adds another, hence diversity enhancement. Omarchy is +1 more distro out of thousands, hence while making the "market" a little bit more diverse it's not a huge double-digit percentage increase in viable browser engines. Pretty straight forward.
I think the parent comment means that Ladybird is fighting to be an additional browser engine in the current ecosystem of “Chromium and a couple of tiny, unimportant competitors.”
However, on the subject of the other meaning of “diversity,” and whether or not it is in the business models of either of these projects, I think we have pretty conclusive evidence that actually it is NOT a core value to either of them:
As someone directly affected by this sort of thing, I really want nothing to do with either project.
I also can’t help but notice that this “tech-right smell” is about the only thing that these two projects seem to have in common with one another, making me question Cloudflare’s intentions with this.
Keep in mind that cloudflare is essentially a MITM "totally not created and backed by any spy agency that might come to mind" free service that lives off of few large clients but otherwise offers their services essentially for free because they are just a good company that wants to help people with DDOS and CDN and .... Cloudflare is to online communication what Facebook is to personal identity.
Great to see CF sponsoring Ladybird! One of the most important projects out there right now.
I run vanilla arch/i3, so not super interested in Omarchy itself - but am curious to know how polished of a distro they can come up with. I may give it a try soon.
I kind of wish that Servo would get similar attention to get over the hump itself as well... afaik, Ladybird and Servo are both at a similar level in terms of standards support. Though Servo also really needs a full browser project around it, since it's an engine alone.
One thing I think that would be nice to see would be self-oriented browser config syncing using one of a few different cloud file sync backends, even evil ones (google drive, one-drive, dropbox, etc).
I was running hyprland with my own dotfiles and using omarchy was quite painless except the only gripe I had were quickly fixed and the other gripe that I have is that it doesn't have nm-applet manager to manage wifi etc. and has a terminal.
So it turned out that my wifi adapter wasn't connected properly and I was giving a test and submission date was near and the wifi had died mid way and I couldn't connect to other wifi because I felt as if the terminal wasn't working and not the adapter...
Definitely give me a bit of a pain. really wish that they can use nm-applet as well... Optionally support terminal wifi too but definitely give atleast an option to get gui wifi.
Also I feel like omarchy focused quite much on bash and I used to use zsh with my custom dot filess which were really lovely.
I had semi invented fish in zsh but it was my zsh and it was snappy.
Now I tried to have one ble.sh in bash and it stutters like it turned 80 lol. I definitely love zsh over bash and wish omarchy supported that too...
Luckily I have everything backed up so I will try to move away from bash I think,
One thing that I like is that omarchy has its own aur-ish thing where I found things like bun which isn't arch extra and aur definitely felt clunky. Using the omarchy repo to install bun was kinda nice actually.
I gave it a try because my system was bloated and I hadn't configured it properly in teh sense that my 100 gig was split into 40 40 and 8 swap and uh that 40 of home really got bloated somehow and I couldn't even update my pc using pacman and felt like a massive deal actually.
So I just actually picked my dotfiles and moved on. Might recommend it, it seems that omarchy also has backup support using btrfs by default which I didn't have in my ext4 arch
I think it's pretty cool that I have something I can send to someone who uses a macbook and wants to try out linux. I use a custom Nix config that I've built up over the last 5 years; it's not exactly something I can recommend.
I currently recommend Bluefin... but this might be good for an _even_ easier (though less stable) setup, that has all the tiling bling.
This sponsorship is very important for the project. Not for financial reasons, but because it gathered recognition from the company that creates much of the critical infrastructure and bot protection services.
Without this recognition, the engine could have been blocked by impassable CAPTCHAs, which for the end user would mean the project is dead at its roots.
Yes most web properties have voluntarily adopted Cf as their only protection option. Do you or I have the power to get hundreds of millions if not billions of these properties off of Cf? No, so yes they're a reality of the Web at this point, sadly. They can be no more avoided than say the tier 1 ISPs.
The problem with Firefox is that the money has to go through Mozilla, and Mozilla is not spending most of that money on Firefox. You cannot sponsor the development of Firefox directly, so your money ends up being wasted.
Firefox/Gecko also just can’t be as relevant as a Chrome/Blink competitor since Gecko doesn’t support embedding on desktop operating systems, which precludes things like Electron-style wrapping and hybrid apps. It’s a fatal flaw that Mozilla doesn’t seem to have any interest in addressing.
They don’t penalize browsers for not being Chrome – Safari users almost never see those, because their devices support a protocol for attesting real hardware with a real user, in what is hopefully a privacy-preserving manner:
That’s the underlying problem here: web sites are constantly getting suspicious traffic and if you do something like using Tor or a “free” VPN, the owners of those sites are probably going to ask companies like Cloudflare to validate or block you rather than try to tell whether you’re a bot.
Anyone concerned with privacy really needs to be focused on that problem because most site owners care more about not going broke than supporting browsers or privacy tools which few of their customers use. It’s destroying the open web.
So you are saying they don't penalize browser from not being Chrome and then link to a specific mechanism that they are allow listing Safari. That goes directly counter to what you are claiming.
I have seen it myself, from my own system. Firefox, almost impossible to use the web due to non-stop bot checks by CF. For the same session, same site(s), I give up and use Chrome, with all the same browser extensions, and I sail right in. Multiple times.
Suspicious traffic is using Firefox, because Chrome browsers are 90%+ of the traffic. And the rich mac users have a special mechanism for bypassing them as your article outlines.
> Firefox, almost impossible to use the web due to non-stop bot checks by CF. For the same session, same site(s), I give up and use Chrome, with all the same browser extensions, and I sail right in.
This is very much not my experience. I don't know if you use a VPN or have a ton of extensions but if I was hitting that so hard I'd consider trying a clean profile with no extensions and adding things back in to see if you can find the trigger condition.
Firefox on macOS is fine. I've been using it as my primary browser for years. I consistently get captchas on archive.is (and just verified I also do on Brave), but rarely see it elsewhere.
I don't know the cause of what you're seeing, but it's not simply Firefox.
The post does not mention how much money they are giving. Maybe I am a pessimist, but unless the number is in tens of millions or hundreds of millions (very unlikely), I don't think it helps the development of an independent browser very much. Google probably has poured over billions of dollars into Chrome development over the years, and if you look at what Chrome supports, it's massive. I seriously doubt anybody else can match their feature set, not to mention involvement in drafting the latest standards.
LuaJIT was developed by one person. Ladybird doesn't need hundreds of millions of dollars, it needs interpreter specialists who are willing to lend their time to the project, and an army of volunteers to work on the rest of the rendering engine.
LuaJIT has ~85k lines of code. Chromium and Firefox have somewhere in the neighborhood of ~30 million. If you need ~1 developer for "a LuaJIT" then you need ~350 developers for a browser.
why do you think the js interpreter is that special compared to all the rest?
AFAIU, CSS is a much more complex beast, as the spec has not been written to reflect the way it could be implemented
Writing JS JITs is a specialized skill that requires a deep knowledge of compilers, JavaScript, and CPU architectures.
CSS is complicated but it's not as complex. It's just a matter of throwing enough sufficiently competent developers at the problem.
Ladybird doesn't even have a JIT right now. They used to, but it got taken out because as best as I can tell, nobody on the project knows how to write one.
So you want people to work for free on one of the most complex pieces of software in existence? Why wouldn't you want to give those people hundreds of millions of dollars?
And if you think that writing a JS interpreter is the only hard part of a browser engine, have I got news for you.
My point was not that people/companies shouldn't donate money to the Ladybird project, but that an equally effective way of contributing is to contribute time, especially the time of developers with specialized skills that would otherwise be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars at market rates.
Why should anyone work for free? Because they love the Web and hate Google's stranglehold over it.
For relative definitions of "soon" and depending on the feature you use. I'd say it's probably 2 years or so away from being a real competitive option to FF/Chrome.
Clearly you haven't been following what Ladybird's team have been doing in the last months. With almost no resources, they've created this web engine that is almost at par with the giants.
> Omarchy 3.0 was released just last week with faster installation and increased Macbook compatibility, so if you’ve been Linux-curious for a while now, we encourage you to try it out!
"If you're curious about trying Linux, why not install this obscure mouseless tiling TUI distro to guarantee you'll never attempt to use Linux again!"
Is people more open to try Linux if it's very different from Mac or Windows? Was the problem with other Desktop Environments that they work too similarly to them?
I'm well into the Linux world and have been for years. I've never heard of Omarchy.
Do they also sponsor the same way projects that are the basis of Arch Linux, for example? I'm thinking about pacman, infra, etc.
It’s one of the very, very few independent browsers built from the ground up and not on top of one the few existing engines (Gecko, Chromium, WebKit), which is extremely important to the health of the open web.
Imagine a world where Chromium is the only browser engine. Standards wouldn’t matter and Google could just do whatever they wanted — we’re pretty close to that as it is.
To combat a Chrome hegemony you need strong opposition, not a long-tail of weak opposition. Or in other words: Firefox needs to become more competitive. I (unfortunately) don't think having another 0.1% market cap browser is the solution, at least not for now.
Just to clarify: I'm in favor of Cloudflare donating to Ladybird, and I'm in favor of them building it! I just don't think that's the solution to combating Chrome dominance.
What is Firefox if not weak opposition? Even given a reliable firehose of income from Google they haven't cracked that 0.1% market cap, and I don't see how funneling more resources into a browser that's been floundering for over a decade now will change anything.
Ladybird is still a good few years away from being a serious competitor, but nonetheless it is the most viable candidate in the absence of a path for Firefox to become competitive.
It's possible combating it in terms of pushing for different standards could be sufficient. More little guys at the table means more sway to push things like JPEG XL through.
Only if they’re bringing real users in sufficient numbers to affect site owners’ decisions. Right now, “the web” is what Chrome and Safari want it to be. Mozilla largely ceded their seat at that table but is probably the closest to being relevant again if they can come up with a better pitch to users.
> To combat a Chrome hegemony you need strong opposition, not a long-tail of weak opposition.
Do you have any ideas on how to accomplish this in a better way than what Ladybird is trying to do? In other words, what should Ladybird be doing differently?
I mean... that is just a 2d accelerated graphic library, tough it being developed by Google makes uneasy since they are very eager to deprecate support for platform past their lifecycle support
Yes. You can donate to the foundation but not only do they prevent earmarking, they actively don't use it for browser development.
I even mailed them back in June to confirm. They replied:
...
> When you donate to the Mozilla Foundation, your contribution goes directly toward advancing our mission to ensure the internet remains open and accessible for all. Our work focuses on issues like online privacy, open-source technologies, worthy AI and a digital world that puts people first. These funds directly support advocacy campaigns (i.e. asking irresponsible tech companies to protect your privacy), Mozilla’s fellowship program, MozFest gatherings, Common Voice, Responsible Computing Challenge, and so much more.
> However, it’s important to note that donations to Mozilla Foundation do not support the development of Firefox or any other Mozilla products.
> While we are a public-benefit 501(c)(3) organization under US law and the parent organization for the corporate entities that own Firefox, donations do not fund the Firefox browser and revenue is completely generated from within the product itself.
Google started out by sponsoring Firefox, then hired many of their key developers to build Chrome. Cloudflare is likely doing the same thing, they know that strategically they depend too much on Google for the browser. This will get their foot in the door without making a large commitment. If the project goes well, it will be absorbed into Cloudflare in a few years.
Maybe a stupid question but: given the massive vulnerability surface area that a browser presents, why would one choose to build it in C++ instead of something memory and concurrency safe like Rust?
I know Rust doesn't automatically make the software safe, but it does rule out a very large % of the exploitable vulnerabilities allowed by unsafe languages like C and C++.
Why build a new browser in C++ when safer and more modern languages are available? [1]
> Ladybird started as a component of the SerenityOS hobby project, which only allows C++. The choice of language was not so much a technical decision, but more one of personal convenience. Andreas was most comfortable with C++ when creating SerenityOS, and now we have almost half a million lines of modern C++ to maintain.
> However, now that Ladybird has forked and become its own independent project, all constraints previously imposed by SerenityOS are no longer in effect.
> We have evaluated a number of alternatives, and will begin incremental adoption of Swift as a successor language, once Swift version 6 is released.
Wow! This is great news. While no language can make JS interpretation more safe, I am just happy to hear the the codebase will be in something other than C++. Having started my career with C++, I've enjoyed almost every other language more. The issue I had was I didn't _want_ to touch C++ so it is unlikely I would've contributed. But when Swift makes up more of the codebase, I might go and look around.
Who knows, maybe they cared about shipping a working product and not spend all their time fighting the borrow checker and harassing everyone else about memory safety. See Servo for ex.
But why would anyone use Omarchy (based on Arch) and not use Gentoo directly? Not a separate project based on Gentoo, but a Gentoo Reference System [1]?
Gentoo already has all dev tools installed - they're an indispensable part of the package manager.
I wish they would fund Mozilla (or Firefox) instead of creating yet another browser. Clawing Firefox out of the hole that Mozilla and its dependency on Google have dug for it would be a true service to humanity. Replacing it by yet another browser only causes churn and standard proliferation.
>We don't have anyone actively working on Windows support, and there are considerable changes required to make it work well outside a Unix-like environment.
>We would like to do Windows eventually, but it's not a priority at the moment.
What's the user share again? 70% of desktop users?
Yeah, and it supports Mac, with the worst compilation experience on the market and 10% of the userbase. Starting support for another OS this late in the project is going to be a nightmare, it's insane to do it for Windows last.
It is late here so maybe I missed it in the article ... but what exactly do they mean with support for Ladybird? Giving them free coffee or developers or money? If yes, how much?
not sure - if I were holding the CF purse strings I'd give any money to DHH or his endeavors but I do think the folks over at Ladybird are doing some awesome things wrt to the browser.
I don't use it myself since I'm a long time Linux user, but I'm a big fan of Omarchy brining Linux to the masses. This is great that Cloudflare is sponsoring it!
I wasn't being sarcastic? I heard they're making a new Koenigsegg and I'm genuinely concerned that without corporate sponsorship it might be out of his price range.
Ladybird is great, but Omarchy is a weird choice. Why can't DHH / Basecamp sponsor David's hobby distro if he wants?
The browser ecosystem is dangerously centralized and another independent rendering engine would be welcome. In contrast, I don't see the value in yet another flavor-of-the-week Linux distro. Even sponsoring Arch directly would make more sense here.
I think the last mile polish has always been a big weakness of the oss ecosystem (on average), so this kind of integration into a nice package is important work, I think. Personally, I’m really enjoying Omarchy.
Omarchy will still have to distribute its image, so lots of bandwidth since they do not want to rely on the AUR during the install process (since AUR has been targeted by DDOSS attacks recently). Perhaps Cloudflare will provide that and not a dollar amount?
I have to say, a single announcement that Cloudflare is sponsoring specifically these two projects does start to look a bit like an attempt to curry favour with the grassroots part of the tech right: give “their guys” some money and praise and maybe they’ll stay off Cloudflare’s back for a bit. And to be clear, that’s not to say that it’s bad to sponsor Ladybird, or maybe even Omarchy.
It kind of is, though not explicitly. If you follow Andreas on X you will see a lot of his comments and replies are either a) posting about being aggrieved about users who are mean and rude on BlueSky or b) Amplifying traditional family values, right wing beliefs, etc, in a somewhat indirect way. He seems to be too cautious to outright say anything, but it’s obvious by the company he keeps.
Somewhat - Kling is explicitly 'apolitical' and this always attracts a certain ilk of people.
---
And - maybe this is a stretch, but you also have to consider that the competing product (Servo) is written in Rust, while Ladybird is C++.
From what you read on hn, I think Rusts community being very liberal sort of resulted in memory safety being perceived as a culture war thing by some; ("authoritarian big compiler is forcing you to not free this memory" vs "the handmade c programmer with his artisanal allocations").
So Ladybird not being written in a safe language might be part of the appeal.
And I know that Ladybird is supposed to adopt Swift, but I don't think any single LOC has been written yet?
In Rust communities, like the official Discord server, there tend to be more left type people. Furthermore, if you go to left leaning communities that aren't related to programming the few programmers who are there are almost always Rust enjoyers. The cryptocurrency use also exists, of course. I suspect that the common thread in both cases is idealism -- leftists want what they see as an ideal economic system while crypto bros, when they aren't scamming, want an ideal financial system. Rust in many ways is closer to an ideal language in a way that feels to me to be similar to those other idealist arguments
I wouldn't describe it as such, but that's not what matters here. Andreas Kling has been out championing the anti-anti-Charlie-Kirk cause on Twitter, so it's a safe bet that the Lundukish grassroots anti-wokes see him as one of theirs. Whether he has any juice with the right-wing VC set I don't know.
Kling's politics aside, he's also had a history of abandoning projects after hyping them up on social media and attracting contributors. Here is what happened to SerenityOS and jakt, for example:
If Cloudflare wants to defend the future of the web, maybe they could also throw a few dollars towards projects with better governance and aren't helmed by a BFDL with a spotty record and are written in a more future-proof language than C++ [0]. (For example, Servo.)
>Kling's politics aside, he's also had a history of abandoning projects after hyping them up on social media and attracting contributors. Here is what happened to SerenityOS and jakt, for example:
He published free, open-source software. He's not obligated to work on a particular project forever. This is a particularly strange critique given that he shifted focus away from those projects to focus on other open-source work.
If anyone else wants to take over the work Andreas was doing on old projects, all his code is there for them to use.
This is a very strange take. SerenityOS is a hobby project, from which both Jakt and Ladybird were born. Jakt never took off even within the Serenity community. Ladybird is where most of us were spending our time, and its departure from Serenity was a pretty natural evolution.
Ladybird is now a legally established nonprofit, with a board of directors and several full-time employees. Not a hobby.
Isn't Ladybird (now) supposed to be moving to Swift, though?
(I think that investment in Servo is also likely to be an excellent idea. Sponsoring Igalia's Servo work is an obvious starting place for any European institutions which are actually serious about "tech sovereignty", just to start with.)
Damn that's worse than I thought it would be. Citing non white-british ethnic groups as non-native is worrying. Especially to try use it as an anti-immigrant statement, when plenty of those are going to be third generation at the least. In fact why isn't anyone who is born here classed as native by DHH. Troublesome.
Especially when the main reason for a lot of the problems with the country is rich white men, notably the Tories and their failed governance over the past 14 years.
Yup, and just to add, for those not in the UK, or particularly connected to London, etc. - this take is utter garbage. The UK certainly has a variety of challenges, but they are not what the far right (and that's what the people he's talking about absolutely are) make them out to be. London is not what it's painted to be by external rabble-rousers and populists, and this mania/delusion that's being pushed (sometimes by the very wealthy who are often much closer to the problem than immigrants are) is a significant problem.
DHH is (or should be) pretty close to a toxic brand right now, and for someone who published various edicts on "don't talk about politics at work", it would be lovely if he followed his own advice a little more.
omarchy has brought in thousands of new linux users that previously had no interest in desktop linux. its one of the best things that has happened to desktop linux in recent memory. most everythign else in linux is incestuous self referential stuff for people who already use linux. that is why it is different.
I'd like to see a citation on that. I don't think I've ever encountered Omarchy outside the pages of this website. SteamOS seems far more consequential to me in terms of end-user Linux adoption.
Something like https://www.anduinos.com/ is far friendlier and more approachable for folks new to Linux. Why not sponsor that? I cannot imagine who the target audience is going from MacOS straight to TUIs on Arch.
Why not sponsor something that is already gaining traction? Lots of posts on Omakub/Omarchy on X and reddit, so they're clearly doing something right.
Linux didn't need only polish and money, it needed an evangelist with a story of dumping and supposedly fighting against Apple. This might put off people that obviously never needed any help in using or customizing Linux, but not those looking to switch over.
I guess the only real data of non-linux users switching to omarchy as of today, are the 37signals employees (including those that will be forced to use it)
The momentum that Omarchy seems to have is impressive. I wonder if a tighter collaboration with Framework is in the cards, especially with their founder and CEO submitting pull requests to the project[1].
DHH seems to be driven by bitterness at Apple charging for inclusion in their walled garden. Fair enough, his choice. Interesting he includes his paid email service bundled in Omarchy.
I haven't tried Omarchy but based on DHH videos, while I like the idea, I'd say it is a little too opinionated - including random stuff that DHH likes / uses on a day-to-day basis and by his employees.
It also kind of begs the question, how deep in the "supply chain" should support go. Maybe if the Hyprland folks got a bit more sponsorship the setup would be easy. The same goes for Arch itself (though I do think some of the "squirrel catchers" are there on purpose).
I am happy for a new browser/engine but I'm highly skeptical that Ladybird will ever come close to Chrome or Firefox in terms of features, compatibility and performance. It's just very hard to imagine. There's servo and look at where it is after 13 years!
No offense to anyone really but browser engines are inhumane amount of talent and effort. Might as well just keep making Firefox better.
The problem with Firefox is Mozilla. That’s also a common thread with Servo. Maybe Servo will get better now that it doesn’t have that baggage anymore. If we’re going to have a chromium alternative, it won’t be anything from Mozilla.
Firefox doubled down on using/selling user data for advertising purposes, so that's a big reason for avoiding it.
I held onto it as someone who didn't even like the politics of the people behind it (the beauty of open source), for the sake of browser engine diversity, but changing terms of service of use of personal data was the final blow
It seems irrational to me to switch to chrome (and where else could you switch to?) over data sale concerns. A more rational approach could be a Firefox fork that preserves privacy.
ITT: some of you would rather see Omarchy fail and thus Linux desktop adoption slowed down because you don't agree with DHH's 'controversial' political views.
Guess we'll have to keep waiting for someone with a 'clean' record to show up and promote Linux.
people downvoting is fine. Omarchy is great. Worked 12 years for a Linux Distro and they were never able to achieve what he did in months (on top of Arch for sure).
I’m skeptical. Cloudflare clearly wants to move us to a future where only approved browsers are allowed to access the web. People have been fiercely debating whether that’s a terrible thing, or whether that’s the least bad practical solution on offer for website owners. I don’t want to make a judgement on that, but I don’t think the observation that CF is pushing us in that direction is very controversial. But an independent open source web browser is obviously against that ethos. So what’s the play here exactly? Just for goodwill?
(Regardless of motivation, they’re lending more support than most other companies, so it’s applaudable nonetheless.)
Cloudflare supporting Ladybird makes sense for the same reasons that Valve invests in Proton. Cloudflare's job is easier if everyone standardizes on a few approved browsers, but right now the three major browser engines are controlled by Google (IIRC most of Mozilla's funding comes from Google) and Apple, just as Valve's Steam is heavily dependent on Microsoft's Windows.
Both companies are basically hedging against future incentive misalignment with other (larger) companies, and reducing their dependencies on platforms they have ~zero influence over.
To add to this, Apple’s share of the control is minimal and precarious. A timeline where Google is the sole web engine authority could easily become reality and is even likely.
Hedging on a promising upstart makes a lot of sense.
I haven’t seen any signs that Apple will abandon Safari, have you? Also, a browser that uses Chromium could put a halt to Google’s plans if they wanted. The easiest way would be to stop upgrading and just port over security patches. (Sure, it brings progress to a halt, but this is unlikely to matter to web developers in the short run and it would get people’s attention.)
They aren’t going to do this, though, so long as new releases of Chromium are reasonable.
If/when Apple is forced to start allowing Blink on iOS globally, all it takes is a hearty marketing push from Google and devs putting “best viewed in Chrome” badges on their sites for Safari’s marketshare (and with it, Apple’s influence) to plummet.
Given how AMP eventually died, it seems unlikely that web developers would go along with it. What’s in it for them?
Also, I don’t see any sign that Google even wants to do it? This is not really evidence-based reasoning, it’s just “I can imagine something evil that Google might do.”
Both are already happening.
Google markets Chrome relentlessly, with popups in search and YouTube if you're using other browsers, browser choice dialogs in Google iOS apps (despite iOS having a default browser setting for 5 years now), Chrome getting bundled into random Windows software installers, etc.
Many devs actively desire single-engine development and testing and many aren't shy about using Chrome only features already. If they had the capability to tell users to go install Chrome instead of targeting broadly supported features, they would do so in a heartbeat.
I have hit a few sites over the last year that threw up full page "This site only works in chrome" blocks, even though they usually work perfectly fine in Firefox if you set the user agent to chrome.
So in the enterprise world, it has been common for years for companies to "only support Chrome" even on iOS, where it's just skinned Safari. I have constantly had to call vendors mean names and point out how obviously iOS support means they are Webkit/standards-compliant. This is how I know, in fact, these websites will also work on Firefox. Apple's annoying iPhone monopoly is the last thing protecting the open web as needing to be standards-compliant.
The moment iPhones aren't allowed to force browsers to use Webkit (the EU is already pushing for this), the open web dies. There will no longer be any draw for web developers to develop for standards instead of developing for Chrome.
And it's not just the WebKit monopoly in iOS, but also being slow on adopting new features pushed by Google. Often even being slower than Mozilla funnily enough. I don't care about what Apple's intentions could be for being a slowpoke on adopting the new features, as long as it allows independent browsers like Pale Moon to catch up with the mainstream.
That's an interesting take that I hadn't heard before
> This is not really evidence-based reasoning, it’s just “I can imagine something evil that Google might do.”
Please read Mozilla's story on how Google sabotaged them: https://archive.is/tgIH9
Oh. And they very literally killed Internet Explorer: https://blog.chriszacharias.com/a-conspiracy-to-kill-ie6
Oh. And Google's mobile apps always conveniently forget the setting of "always use system browser and never ask me", and will keep asking you to open with "chrome", "google", or "system browser".
Oh and...
> Oh. And they very literally killed Internet Explorer
I disagree with this. Firstly, in this article they talk about how they "killed" IE6 in favour of later versions of IE, but MS ultimately killed IE with neglect until it was far too late.
Microsoft might have been neglecting IE, but Google was Definitly playing games with IE, constantly breaking video acceleration on YouTube in IE in any way they could. They were literally introducing invisible elements overlapping the video for no other reason than to break IE.
And web developers everywhere thanked them for killing IE6
How well do Gmail and Google Docs work on Firefox today?
Effortlessly, at least with uBO installed.
> What’s in it for them?
Never having to use polyfills or CanIUse tables, plus testing on the same environment they develop on.
There's no way to test on Safari without either buying Apple hardware or subscribing to services like Browserstack.
This is a problem of Apple's own making.
I wish Apple had some sort of "Geforce Now" style setup to run a Mac in a box. I know they'd never go for something like a legit image you could run in a VM, but surely they could come up with something.
My work sent over some old MacBook for when we need to test something unique to Safari, so it's not even the hardware aspect. It's the "I need to find another place to stash a machine, and then wire up KVM switches to use my highly opinionated I/O device choices, on a finite sized desk" factor.
Is keeping up with "just security patches" on Chromium reasonable?
As sickening as thought as it is, the best hope there is Microsoft-- they can afford to hire the necessary army of developers, and their incentives are aligned just far enough away from Google's that they would have reasons to do it.
The problem is that they're also in the ad economy now, so their opportunity to play it for relevance is shot.
They had a window where they could have said "Edge: the Chromium-based browser that treats uBlock Origin as a first-class citizen" but instead they'd rather add weird popups to credit card fields asking if I want to use Klarna instead.
Apple isn't the only one standing in the way of a Google hegemony. If they are, then the web is already fucked since neither corporation has a benevolent track record pertaining to Open Source. Apple just can't compete without steering privileges that are equally harmful to the open web.
If web devs get permission to start ignoring Safari (which currently sits at ~20% marketshare), there’s no way they’re going to care about Firefox which doesn’t have even a fifth as much. If Safari falls so does Firefox.
> Apple isn't the only one standing in the way of a Google hegemony.
Who else would you consider?
Chromium-based browsers from companies other than Google are still contributing to Google’s hegemony. And Mozilla is funded by Google.
KHTML, Gecko, most Blink forks.
KHTML development stopped nearly ten years ago and I don’t know any significant Blink forks.
> If they are, then the web is already fucked since neither corporation has a benevolent track record pertaining to Open Source.
Interesting take, since Google has both authored and supported hundreds of FLOSS projects over many years. They even sponsored summer "internships" for students to contribute to Open Source software as long as a maintainer bothered to register and promise to mentor the student via "Summer of Code"
As someone who's lived in the bay for a bit over 10 years now, when I first moved here Google was very much that company that you think they were. Now, they are not. Every single friend (and it was >50% when I moved here!) has since left Google in the bay area. There is one left at Google entirely, and they're only remaining due to physical location (near family outside the US). I have watched my friends get brutally and relentlessly pipped over the tiniest bullshit reasons. This is all entirely 2nd hand so my perspective is very skewed, but even my friends from Facebook/Netflix/Apple weren't treated that way.
I'm aware of the many changes; including the cancellation of Google SoC. However, gp claimed neither Google nor Apple have a benevolent track record towards open source, and that doesn't ring true to me. The old Google was very benevolent, perhaps only rivalled by Red Hat and (old) IBM.
Hi, can you provide a few examples of 'tiniest bullshit reasons'? Kinda curious as what is considered bullshit there, I'm from the EU with zero experience of anything like S.F.
One was pipped because they were placed on a moonshot, told how amazing their work was, gave internal talks on it, then the moonshot was defunded... so they got pipped over their lack of business impact. Instead of, y'know, being placed on a normal team, like where they came from only a year or so before.
Google doesn't have control of Chromium though. The source is available and it is permissively licensed. If they did something truly onerous, Microsoft would fork it within hours and everyone would switch their upstream to Edgium.
The only reason Google calls the shots is because they pour billions of dollars into maintaining Chromium. The fact that they can do that (and even fund Firefox at the same time) is because of their ad monopoly. Same with search, Gmail, Translate, Maps. None of those things can exist without the ad monopoly funding it all.
Complaining about Chrome is barking up the wrong tree.
> If they did something truly onerous
It would very unlikely be something which would affect Microsoft’s bottom line. They wouldn’t care.
> and everyone would switch their upstream to Edgium.
Who’s “everyone”? Anyone who cares minimally about possible shenanigans in Chromium is already selectively merging changes.
Edge aggressively sets itself as the default browser and slurps information from Chrome without permission. Edge and Microsoft are not and will not be a saviour from Google and Chrome.
Anyone who tries to push changes to Chromium will quickly find Google does control it.
And look at how Adblock has gone
I think you missed the point here. Forking is and always has been a totally viable hedge against any other parties control in an Open Source product. Google can't force Microsoft to take it as it is with no input because Microsoft can absolutely fork. Just like Apple and Google forked from each other.
The real difficulty is that you need someone with large pockets to fund any forks if those forks are going to be viable. And that is due to the complexity of the web as a platform.
The person they're replying to straight up claimed "Google doesn't have control over Chromium", which to me reads most naturally as treating the unforked code base as a community project where anyone can submit commits.
As you noted, I don't think forking and maintaining a Google sized code base is a realistic alternative. But by the same token, I don't think that the possibility of forking said code base is what people typically mean by not having control.
> Just like Apple and Google forked from each other.
“Each other”? Google forked from Apple; Apple forked from KDE, not Google.
> Google doesn't have control of Chromium though.
They do. If they merge DRM into it tomorrow or something alike, it trickles down to all users of Chromium and Google Chrome.
You can build _a fork_ of it. But the enormous majority of the masses don’t use your fork — they use upstream.
Chromium is upstream of Chrome, not the other way around.
However, Google Chrome is so ubiquitous that any changes Google makes to it are expected to be available in all other browsers and its a kind of defacto control even if it isn't technically control of the upstream Chromium project.
In practical reality, Chromium is a downstream less-googled fork of Chrome. First they decide what they want to put into Chrome, and then they put the less-googled parts of that into Chromium.
While I agree with you, as indicated by my comment about Google having de facto control, the terms upstream or downstream when discussing forking an open source codebase has specific meaning. Chromium is not a downstream forked that has ripped all the google pieces out. It is the upstream codebase that Google then builds all their telemetry and other Google shenanigans into.
If we're discussing someone else forking Chromium because hypothetically Google decided to once again Be Evil it is important to understand, from a technical standpoint, that the fork comes from code before Google does their stuff and not after. Ripping all of google's tendrils out would be a monumental undertaking. Building a similar browser from before Google bakes in their telemetry is infinitely easier and more trustworthy in my opinion.
Some of the "evil" isn't the Google stuff, but rather "standards" that Google is pushing or dropping support for without the support of the other members of the consortium and just as present in Chromium as it is in Chrome.
"upstream" and "downstream" is about the direction changes flow. Changes flow from Chrome into Chromium. The fact they arrive in the Chromium repository before they arrive in a public release of Chrome is not relevant.
Context: I worked on Chrome for 15 years (until June) and am still a Chromium committer. I am probably as familiar with how development in Chrome actually works as anyone (at least as of a couple months ago).
It is correct that Google can and does decide that some features should remain private before they are developed. However, there are significant logistic and cultural hurdles to keeping something private, and as a result it's really only possible in certain parts of the codebase. Sometimes things that have been developed in private are eventually made public, and Chrome devs will often call that "upstreaming", but I think that's not really the same thing as what most people are talking about when they use the words upstream and downstream. And these instances are fairly uncommon in the history of the project.
Otherwise, IMO it is not really correct to say that changes flow from Chrome into Chromium. Nearly all development is done in the public repos and so they would be available simultaneously for either build. There aren't really official releases of Chromium per se, but a full build of Chromium containing a given change is basically always available before the corresponding full build of Chrome. There may be very rare exceptions for security fixes that are shipped before they are made public, but it would actually pretty hard to land such a change so I doubt it's happened more than a few times.
So, more generally speaking, in my opinion it's not really useful to talk about "upstream" and "downstream" for Chrome and Chromium, definitely not in the day-to-day sense. Chrome and Chromium are multi-repo projects, and there is only ever a single copy of a particular repo that is used for either. The same branches in a given repo are used for both Chrome and Chromium at any point in time. There is a main branch and release branches, and most of the time (but not always) a change will land in the main branch before a release branch. But I don't think most people would call "main" upstream of "release" in that sense.
[ There are rare situations where Google will develop experiments on a private branch of a repo, but those don't usually end up getting shipped to anyone. ]
This is different from how (most of?) the other Chromium-based browsers operate, where my understanding is that they usually do have true forks of (some of) the repos and changes flow downstream from the Google-maintained ones to ones under their control in the normal sense of the word.
I didn't take them to be suggesting that, and I don't think it makes any difference to the point they're making. Google controls commits to Chromium which then make it into Chrome.
They do have technical control over the upstrean Chromium project. There's an invite only pool of developers who decide what gets committed to Chromium and they are Google employees.
> Microsoft would fork it within hours
I haven't trudged through Chromium's commit statistics but has Microsoft been upstreaming many contributions? I'm skeptical that they are ready to take on the full brunt of Chromium maintenance on a whim, it would take a decent while to build up the teams and expertise for it.
Before they swapped Edge over to use Chromium they were capable of maintaining their own engine just fine. Probably not overnight, but in the past they have shown that they have the budget to support a browser engine if they want to.
Why do you think they moved to Chromium then? They switched because they could not support a competitive engine by themselves.
Because no amount of money was going to solve the problem of people saying they think Microsoft's browser is slower/worse/etc. Switching to Chromium negated that in a way nothing else could.
When Microsoft beat Netscape with IE, it was by building a far better browser. Google is a stronger competitor than Netscape ever was though. Without Google dropping the ball (like Netscape), Microsoft would never exceed Chrome's performance by enough to be the fastest, most compatible (with Chrome), etc.
It is also just classic Microsoft when they are hungry. Like making Word use WordPerfect files and keyboard shortcuts. Only today it is that their browser is mostly Google, Linux is built into Windows 11, SQL Server ships on Linux, and their most popular IDE is open-source built on open tech (Electron) they didn't create.
When they get threatened, nothing is too sacred for Microsoft to kill or adopt.
We have enough people of working age now that hasn't lived through the Microsoft of old and don't remember what they can/could do.
Microsoft firing on all cylinders, when they want to, is a terrifying force.
I feel like they burnt enough browser goodwill with IE that no one who was on the internet back then wants to touch a microsoft browser regardless of the engine
They are on the record about why they switched to a chromium based browser. It’s been a while, but if I’m remembering correctly, at the time Google was making changes to YouTube to make it actively slower, and use more power on IE. Microsoft realized that while they could compete as a browser, they couldn’t compete and fight google trying to do underhanded things to sabotage their browser.
Because they could archive the same product using chromium with less cost. Should that change their investment in that area would probably increase as a consequence.
No, because using Chromium was the only way the could stay relevant in the browser space. They were just unable to build the same product with their own stack.
Unable is not the right reason, more like management wasn't willing to fund the team as it needed.
Just like management doesn't a F about the state of UWP, WinUI and anything related to it.
They were facing the same problem that everybody is—Google adds features too fast to keep up. If Google went in a bad direction with Chrome, they’d Microsoft would just have to keep up with Mozilla and Apple.
Yes, Microsoft actively contributes to Chromium.
Microsoft lands many changes in Chromium first before they show up in Edge (logistically it's easier to do things this way for merging reasons), but they do also upstream changes to Chromium that show up in Edge first.
>Google doesn't have control of Chromium though.
There's a tightly controlled pool of developers who make up the decision-making body about which commits get approved. That pool is dominated by Google employees so they effectively control whether something gets committed.
So it's not open in the sense that would be most people's first impression, which is that anyone can contribute code to the project and see it realized. You'd have to fork it and maintain a Google sized code base.
>Complaining about Chrome is barking up the wrong tree.
I don't see how that follows. Google disproportionately invests in a browser, controls it and with it much of the destiny of the web. The fact that Google is leveraging their ad monopoly to create and maintain a dominant browser is the issue. At least, it's an issue. The ad monopoly powers their control over the web and vice versa.
>You'd have to fork it and maintain a Google sized code base.
As opposed to maintaining an alternate google size code base of a non-chromium browser?
Webkit is ~10% as big as Chromium and Ladybird and Netsurf are less than 1%.
Even if that’s true, are we going to see Google’s dominance in the ad space meaningfully curbed? It seems highly unlikely at best, and it doesn’t matter how loud any of us are barking (at least until there’s a massive shift in political headwinds).
Until that’s addressed, Chrome being dominant is a problem, because Google has created an “open moat” with their resource expenditure. Microsoft sure as hell isn’t going to be able to justify that kind of spend on their Chromium fork, and so their influence will never be of note.
> Even if that’s true, are we going to see Google’s dominance in the ad space meaningfully curbed?
> (at least until there’s a massive shift in political headwinds)
It did look like it for a while with the US its antitrust action and the EU also taking aggressive action. But then Google kissed the ring and the DoJ pulled back it's recommendation of Google divesting DoubleClick, and the EU lost the staredown with Trump and made their measures toothless too.
Who knows what will happen in the 2030s though. If the Democrats get into power again, I'm sure they'll remember how big tech switched up on them and there will be a serious reckoning.
Except they do. One just has to look at the inability to keep JPEG-XL mainlined in Chromium. Sure, some forks still have JPEG-XL, but it's effectively gone at this point.
Nobody worth mentioning to big corporations uses Chromium.
> Microsoft would fork it within hours and everyone would switch their upstream to Edgium.
Why would people trust Microsoft more than Google, though? Even with really bad actions, switching browsers is very difficult (i.e. it requires making an active choice and change about an obscure topic) and I don't see normal people doing it, which is what would be required for this to happen.
Microsoft can't get any traction for Edge even with the pushiness on their OS and massive market share. I recently installed Windows 11 on a box and even searching for Chrome had the top portion of the screen show "You don't need a different browser!" at the top of Bing. Did that stop me? No. Not going to use a Microsoft browser, thanks.
Edge solely exists to keep the Windows OS bundled with their own browser.
My 70 year old mother doesn't want the faff of installing Firefox so Edge fits the bill. It provides for her, her needs. I've installed Firefox and it sits untouched.
Microsoft doesn't care if people use it or not. It's easier and cheaper for them to integrate as Chromium does than it is to upkeep Trident. It's not their business too.
My take to why they chose Chromium is that Firefox (Netscape) has always been seen as an independent rebel.
Microsoft is corporate as is Google. I'm sure some backhand deals too.
> Why they chose Chromium and not Firefox? Firefox has always been independent whereas as Microsoft is corporate as is Google. At least my take on it. I'm sure some backhand deals too.
I don't have any more insight than any other commenter, but in my estimation a major factor is how practical the browser is to fork. By the time Microsoft switched to a Chromium base for edge, creating and maintaining a Chromium fork with meaningfully different UI was fairly well-trodden ground because it had been done several times already, whereas almost nobody had forked Firefox (except for toggle some flags or keep the UI frozen in time). The one countervailing example, Brave, also switched to Chromium for similar reasons.
Additionally, this was the beginning of the arc of working overtime to court web developers that it's still in the midst of. By shuttering Chakra (the old Edge rendering engine) and switching to Blink, Microsoft improved its reputation with web devs.
Edge has windows-integrated o parental controls which Firefox lacks entirely and Chrome has its own implementation of. Non-parents probably have no reason to care, but edge has an advantage in Microsoft households.
Also: reset/change selected client certificate without restarting.
That response ignores the fact that Valve isn't in the business of preventing you from playing your games on niche operating systems but Cloudflare is in the business of blocking non-standard browsers. If Cloudflare truly wants to prevent a Google/Apple web duopoly the most effective thing they can do is to stop blocking alternatives or even just browser-configurations that are Google-hostile.
I have never seen credible evidence that this is what Cloudflare sees as their business. They fundamentally don't care what browser the user is using. What they care about are the traffic patterns of users and preventing their customers from getting hit by bots, spam, and other malicious traffic. The fact that some browsers that look like malicious traffic is not something they can control or reasonably be held responsible for.
surely they can be held responsible - they are the ones defining whatever heuristics cause traffic to be classed as malicious!
no?
> Valve isn't in the business of preventing you from playing your games on niche operating systems
Getting your Steam library to work on Linux before it got Valve's blessing with Proton wasn't a great experience. If they wanted to, they could have easily decided to block games from running on Linux and gave some statement about preventing piracy and protecting users from malware.
I'm optimistic that this investment means we'll see more open standards and large browser makers being forced to collaborate and create simpler standards without compromising security.
> Getting your Steam library to work on Linux before it got Valve's blessing with Proton wasn't a great experience.
There weren't any real roadblocks for that caused by Valve. And it definitely wasn't as hard as you're implying.
> If they wanted to, they could have easily decided to block games from running on Linux and gave some statement about preventing piracy and protecting users from malware.
They could have just like any software developer could but they didn't. They also didn't block the Steam for Linux client from running on unapproved distributions or even FreeBSD.
They at least still put out a native Linux client, even if there weren't that many native Linux games.
That at least demonstrated, to some extant, that Valve doesn't care where you run your games, as long as you buy them on Steam.
I don't understand why we always assume bad faith. I wish more companies were like Cloudflare actually - trying to balance the need of revenues while trying to do good for internet and open source as a whole.
As a normal user with a few sites, I'm glad they provide what they provide to block bots, attacks and everything AI.
> I don't understand why we always assume bad faith. I wish more companies were like Cloudflare actually - trying to balance the need of revenues while trying to do good for internet and open source as a whole.
This is quite simple and history bears it out: you can't rely on a for-profit corporation to operate in any other manner than optimizing shareholder value.
When VC money is flowing, you see things that look like (or even can be) altruism - but when the belts tighten and waste is eliminated these endeavors need to align with the company's goals.
Therefore, look for what Cloudflare is "buying" in this transaction. I suggest they probably want the PR win as it distracts from their objective of locking down the web, and it's worth the expenditure to them.
> This is quite simple and history bears it out: you can't rely on a for-profit corporation to operate in any other manner than optimizing shareholder value.
You can't even do that honestly. Look at Boeing. It got taken over by know-nothing managers that followed that religion of shareholder value, and what did it do? Destroy shareholder value!
I think we should instead say "we can't rely on any institution to be stable over time". That's a much more sane statement imo.
They are kind of different statements.
For-profit institutions will almost always act in the interest of profit for the people who have an ownership stake and a claim to the prophet stream. That's definitionally why they exist, and we have enough evidence from the history of everything ever to assume that they will for the most part act that way.
You are saying something different. You are pointing out that the people making decisions aren't necessarily good at making those decisions. Or maybe the incentive structure is set up such that the people making the decisions do not share the goal of profit with the company, and so decide according to what's best for them, which might or might not be what's best for the profit objective.
The instability of institutions in general is yet a third characteristic.
> For-profit institutions will almost always act in the interest of profit for the people who have an ownership stake and a claim to the [profit] stream.
But they won't. This statement is a declaration of faith/religion, not a statement of fact. It's a common belief, but that doesn't make it true.
It's a matter of historical fact. When has this not been the case. Can you think of any serious examples? Everyone everywhere all the time is just responding to the incentives in their environment. "Make a lot of money" is a very very powerful incentive.
There are exceptions all over the place where businesses don't act like robber barons, sure. Take for example Market Basket up here in New England, where the CEO for years and years resisted raising prices and tried to treat workers well, in the interest of maintaining a long-term positive image and being a sustainable element of the region's economy. But guess what: he was just forced out for not being greedy enough. Lots of people seem to be expecting a private equity takeover soon.
> prophet stream
!!!
The actual metric management maximizes management remuneration, which is dependent on short-term shareholder value.
Startups nominally care more about the long view, as they need to convince investors that they high long-term value and have to act accordingly. As companies grow from VC-funded, to fast-growing public, then to well-established public company, the culture shifts to match dominant shareholder expectations.
> you can't rely on a for-profit corporation to operate in any other manner than optimizing shareholder value.
I would like to understand where this breaks down. Would a for-profit individual be more reliable? Would a non-profit? At which point does quality deteriorate?
I think Public Benefit Corporation (PBC) are a way to try and solve that problem.
I recently switched to Kagi and their Orion browser, and that's when I learned about PBCs.
A PBC legally takes a triple mandate, the first is just as any for-profit corp, to maximize shareholder value, the second is to the benefit of the stakeholders, and the last can be anything they write down when they register as a PBC. The Delaware law says:
> The board of directors shall manage or direct the business and affairs of the public benefit corporation in a manner that balances the stockholders’ pecuniary interests, the best interests of those materially affected by the corporation’s conduct, and the specific public benefit or public benefits identified in its certificate of incorporation.
If they fail at any of these mandates, you can sue them.
That means they are still for-profit, but also can't decide to favor profit over their other mandate or change their mind. Their other mandate being stakeholders interests, like users, as well as the explicitly stated benefit. For Kagi, that benefit is:
> Kagi is committed to creating a more human-centric and sustainable web that benefits individuals, communities, and society as a whole, with a transparent business model that aligns the incentives of everyone involved.
Now it's not all roses, Anthropic I learned is another PBC. Their benefit is:
> the responsible development and maintenance of advanced AI for the long-term benefit of humanity
Which is quite vague, and can be taken in many directions.
But overall, it's much better than normal corporations, because here they are legally obligated to care about stockholder, stakeholder, and some additionally specific "public benefit".
> A PBC legally takes a triple mandate
where are you getting this? PBC has no actual legal aspect to it at all - its all self reporting and self adherence. PBC is more marketing/signalling than legal requirements
I was taking it from here: https://delcode.delaware.gov/title8/c001/sc15/
But IANAL. I am just learning about this, so I'm curious, if you know more than I do, please share.
From my interpretation (which I think would match that of an attorney at the PBC):
1) Legally Enforceable: periodic self reporting of public benefit related activities 2) Not legally enforceable: the detailed scope and actual delivery/implementation of said benefits. Third party auditing
i.e. if you try going and suing OpenAI, Anthropic etc. on their stated public benefit contradicting the severe impact datacenters are having to water/electricity in some areas, im quite certain that you would lose.
> This is quite simple and history bears it out: you can't rely on a for-profit corporation to operate in any other manner than optimizing shareholder value.
This is like saying that history bears out that you can't rely on governments to do anything but prepare for war and then send you out to die in one.
That's ahistoric. Democratic governments are correlated with a _decrease_ in violent conflict.
No they are not. DPT is just about "democratic" government having conflicts with each other. They find it difficult because they are economically intertwined. They have no such problem preying on other countries, often in cooperation.
> I don't understand why we always assume bad faith.
I'm already bombarded with cloudflare captchas when using Firefox, especially on Linux. Residential IP address. I'm suspicious of everything cloudflare is doing right now.
I use firefox and I almost never see cloudflare captchas. I don't think it's the browser that is causing the problem.
I recently saw https://neal.fun/not-a-robot/ on the front-page but then I gave up as that's my daily reality with cloudflare and friends already. I use 3 browsers on linux with Thai IP address because at least one of them is always blocked by cloudflare. Especially if I go work on public wifi I often actually have to hotspot myself to 4g to even get stuff to load.
I've started taking more extreme stance these days of ctrl+w instantly and maybe email the admins if I'm particularly angry that I will not buy whatever they're selling because I simply can't be bothered with their spyware blocking me. Maybe some day people will wisen up on the damage cloudflare is doing to their business.
Determining if traffic is genuine requires the user to completely and totally give up privacy.
I compare Cloudflare to border control. Open up your bag. Answer the questions. Present your papers.
Anecdotally, I'm not. I always use Firefox (or Zen) and get almost no Captchas. Neither at home, nor at work. Not on Windows, not on Linux, not on macOS.
I'm not going to say that Cloadflare isn't doing anything fishy, but if they are, it's probably more complicated.
I am. Try to browse anonymously. On the modern internet you're no longer allowed to do this.
Cloudflare can't determine who you are? No website for you.
> you're no longer allowed to do this
This doesn't resonate with me generally. How are you trying to browse anonymously?
Same experience here. Debian Linux with Firefox or especially using BrowSH, is a depressing experience.
If you're on a Residential IP, and your IP gets refreshed, like, every day, it's possible that one of the IP has been flagged.
Cannot blame CloudFlare for that; they have an obligation to try protect the users of their CDN.
You're bombarded with Cloudflare captchas because bots are heavily scraping the websites you're browsing and they are struggling to stay online by putting in place heavy-handed bot-fighting tactics. Without Cloudflare, you wouldn't have the website you're browsing.
> Without Cloudflare, you wouldn't have the website you're browsing
What ridiculous statement.
Or CF could just do better caching, which was their original reason for existence.
CF is not magic, they have limits too. What's the point of serving cached copies to bots while real users experience unavailability?
Unless they're actually dropping the connections with a RST, I wonder how much bots repeatedly hammering at their CAPTCHA pages (which is actually relatively large in comparison to many static sites) costs them, vs. just serving the actual content which could actually be smaller.
The captcha pages are guaranteed to be static while the upstream content could miss the cache at any time.
> I don't understand why we always assume bad faith. > I wish more companies were like Cloudflare actually - trying to balance the need of revenues while trying to do good for internet and open source as a whole. > As a normal user with a few sites, I'm glad they provide what they provide to block bots, attacks and everything AI.
I think general distrust with any major company these days is warranted, especially one with so much control over the internet. But I agree with your points, too.
This should be relevant to the Cloudflare discussion, posted today:
A New Internet Business Model?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45334599
Assuming bad faith in the case of Cloudflare specifically? Know first that the CIA once ran a front company for decades that was meant to be a trusted source for cryptographic hardware for use by embassies and the like: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crypto_AG
If the CIA wanted to MITM all web traffic, and why wouldn't they, a company like Cloudflare is probably exactly how they'd do it.
Cloudflare is 100% acting in bad faith.
They're a gatekeeper to a large chunk of Internet already. If they decide that your IP range stinks? Hope you enjoy your ration of 22 captcha pages a day!
Now, they're making some very transparent moves to leverage what they have to get even more control. And once they get even more control? It's not an "if" they start choking you with it to get more revenue. It's a "when".
People used to say "I wish more companies were like Google". They don't say that anymore.
Cloudflare business model is basically to hold the internet for ransom. Why would anyone assume good faith?
I do not understand your position at all.
Cloudflare is trying to establish itself as the toll station for AI. And anyone who doesn't play by their rules gets excommunicated.
And what are the rules? Don’t use AI to steal training content across the internet, spread nuclear grade spam and propaganda at scale, hack servers with automated agents? Seems fine.
the end game will be ai training bots will have to be:
1) like 1 cent or fraction of cent to get access to page
2) scrawlers will just cache this data on their server or just train on it so will pay just once
3) small content creators will get just make like few dollars our of it
4) CF will get some 10-30% cut from their content semaphore.
5) in the end you small content creator trading their whole content for few dollars but because CF has mass of scale they will make multi millions or more.
Unless you have an idea to stop scraping, the status quo is all downside. Everything gets grabbed but also crawlers overwhelm servers.
So… invest in Cloudflare
It's pretty easy, these are private companies and not democratic institutions that build consensus within their communities. It is better to assume bad faith upon corporate actors because they don't typically advocate for things that help humanity, mostly only themselves.
> I don't understand why we always assume bad faith
Because they all seem to eventually "screw" us. Google seemed (and maybe actually was) altruistic at some point, and even Apple seemed to be (when the only way they could make money was to do right by the users).
Cloudflare is running the largest and longest denial of service attacks in the history of the internet by acting as arbitrary gatekeeper to important government sites like congress.gov. I haven't been able to load it in years.
It loads fine for me. Maybe you have some other problem?
Nope. It's because the cloudflare captchas require a bleeding edge browser. If one uses a modern commercial browser it works and you've never even presented with a captcha. But in both cases I am tunneling to a VPS to avoid Comcast/Xfinity's MITM injections of javascript into pages and that adds some oddness to my connections. Comcast has a monopoly on high speed internet in my town and I cannot even get DSL or I'd switch.
Lacking lived experience re: discrimination is something that's pretty common. I hate to compare my entirely optional 'software veganism' struggles with real discrmination issues, but just because you don't experience discrimination doesn't mean it doesn't happen. I go to online stores, government services, even places of recreation and I get denied service because I have to tunnel to avoid my ISP's unethical practices and I don't use a cloudflare approved browser. It feels bad.
Tell me more? Your setup seems unique and confusing.
Browsing through a proxy does not need to change your User-Agent. I do this all the time.
Xfinity is not MITMing HTTPS sites! You control your trusted CA list.
You don't need to allow JavaScript to run on all sites.
I know Firefox works fine, even if you use a decent tunnel, but if that is too commercial and bleeding edge perhaps the Ladybird project is actually a solution if it gets up speed?
Well, you see, once a Cloudflare site violated the TOS so badly that they had to get their C-levels involved to decide if the TOS violation was bad enough to not want them on their platform. That one site was kicked off and this site *HOWLED* at the terrible giant internet company doing a censorship and they have never been forgiven.
(The site that was "deplatformed" was fine and still exists, much to the chagrin of the minorities it directs hate towards and the people literally stalked there.)
There is no way you didn't write this comment while laughing out loud.
For-profit companies care about profits for their shareholders, that's it. Heck, even non-profit often tend to value more profit than their integrity or cause but that's a topic for another day.
I wish this wasn't the case but even good-willed individuals at the helm of for-profits are forced to pursue profit and avoid anything clearly leading to losses, else they are sacked.
It is baffling and concerning that anyone disagrees with you. The blind faith of so many that companies will magically and selflessly act in the best interest of anyone but their shareholders is, perhaps, the most damaging social ill we face (exacerbated by Citizens United).
You're severely misinformed and parotting misinformed meme interpretations of fiduciary duty.
Integrity and a healthy market align with fiduciary duty as long as one can make the argument that it's in the long term interest of the company. It's really, really difficult to find examples of a person being held liable for not upholding their fiduciary duty because what can be argued as good for the long term success of the company involves a lot of prognostication.
Fiduciary duty is there to prevent things like a CEO choosing to oberpay his cousin's company that has no history in the market for things they've never done before when there is an obviously better option available.
Companies that act poorly, as you describe, do so out of their own desire, not because they are forced to by any sort of duty.
Since you seem so well-informed I would love any example of good-will and strictly not-for-profit activities done directly by a large corporation with shareholders which weren't done have other reasons.
Examples of things which don't count:
- Supporting an open source competitor to avoid getting hammered by antitrust
- Giving money to a foundation (which they may or might not own) for greenwashing
- Giving money to a foundation ran by a friend/family member
- Doing an activity to try to fix an evil thing they did before and backfired
- Doing something good for obvious PR reason (e.g. By being heavily advertised) but then do something even worse in the same area later on
I'm genuinely interested in a healthy conversation about this. But I honestly cannot think of anything which either is generally free for the company or that will help them getting (or not losing) more money. Happy to be wrong.
There is no act in the world that cannot be interpreted cynically.
You are arguing from a prejudiced position.
Bringing exactly 0 examples does not help the case though.
I was pointing out that giving examples would be wasted effort.
> Giving money to a foundation (which they may or might not own) for greenwashing
What evidence would be required for you to believe that a donation to an environmental cause wasn't greenwashing?
Your list of exceptions seems fairly obviously aimed at making the task impossible because it's all based on interpretation of motives. You're essentially discounting all actions that have positive societal effects as long as doing so is motivated by money which is counter to the point I was making.
Giving money away to charity, by the meme interpretation of fiduciary duty, would be illegal. Instead, companies do it all the time because it makes them look better which might improve their business outlook in the future. That satisfies fiduciary dury despite it being a red line in the accounting books.
Wouldn't you like to live in a world where people care enough about doing good things that they'd prefer to patronize companies that do good things? That seems like an incredibly positive effect, regardless of the business' motives.
I'm sorry you see the world that way.
Those of us who get blocked from access services (government, commercial, personal) by cloudflare nearly every day have the lived experience to really understand the issue and the company. Most are blissfully unaware of their lack of experience. If you stick to corporate browsers you'd never know. It's not your fault, but maybe reflect on this lack of experience before commenting with so much confidence.
Cloudflare is domiciled in the USA, where shareholder supremacy has been part of US corporate law going all the way back to Dodge v Ford Motor Co. in 1919.
Now, it's in Cali, where it's not as strong a statement as in some other states, but it's still got a lot of precedent behind it.
Hi, we assume bad faith because we have seen again and again that corporate humans can be expected in ways that would at best be described as sociopathic when referring to a real flesh and blood human.
Responding to a dead comment from a banned account:
> The big new game for them is AI crawler metering. Don’t think browser matters much anymore from their perspective.
Truly open browsers are easy to spoof. Approved browsers with whatever attestation features they champion builtin are hard to spoof. So browsers do matter.
Edit: authentication => attestation for accuracy.
Browser attestation doesn't really matter, its device attestation. Browser attestation is downstream from that.
Google with SafetyNet attestation (whatever the hell its called these days) has pretty much locked down Android as tightly as iOS at this point.
Hell, Apple device users already get to go in the internet "approved" fast lane because of attestation. iDevices and M-series Macbooks can send out a special response that bypasses all captchas.
Windows 11 has a requirement for TPM2, which features hardware attestation too.
Linux of course cannot be locked down in a similar manner, thus cannot attest and will have to suffer for it.
It would probably be illegal for CloudFlare + Google to outright block you from accessing the internet, but they can just drown you in a sea of captchas until you give up and join the attested crowd. Hell, YouTube outright forces you to sign in if they detect a VPN, they won't even offer a captcha.
Like 'Amusing Ourselves to Death' points out, it isn't a 1984-esque brutal fascist control that will erode our freedoms, but rather a Brave New World-esque situation where people will sign away all (digital) control because the dopamine must flow.
I think this is why things like the mdl ID standard are important. It allows for a privacy preserving and open approach not controlled by big companies. It's not perfect, it's controlled by government. But I'd like government to at least challenge the power of Google and Apple.
I haven't notice too many captchas from Linux myself... maybe about 50% more than Windows or Mac, but in general it hasn't been so bad. I do think that it could potentially get bad though.
I'm also not sure how this can/would shake out when you can just use tools like Playwright/Puppeteer to manage a real browser. Both Google and MS do this (not as much as bare crawlers) to handle SPA-like site content.
> Google with SafetyNet attestation (whatever the hell its called these days) has pretty much locked down Android as tightly as iOS at this point.
SafetyNet doesn't lock anything down, it just provides an API for applications to verify the app is running in a verifiable and untampered environment.
> SafetyNet […] provides an API for applications to verify the app is running in a verifiable and locked down environment.
FTFY
Verify, it doesn't do any kind of locking down itself.
i'd be surprised if it was actually illegal. "operating system" isn't a protected characteristic in law
Access to public resources is. Companies aren't even allowed to dictate what can be installed on their OS anymore.
I would think it's like Vercel and Svelte. Investing in something so small is good PR and gives them an image of goodwill but also very unlikely to result in actual market changes.
By your argument, this could still be interpreted as Cloudflare approving Ladybird. I don't see how indie genuine browsers (i.e. not bots) are "against the ethos" of restricting the web to approved browsers only.
"Approved browser" in this context have technical restrictions on user freedom, e.g. https://developers.cloudflare.com/fundamentals/reference/cry... I'm not talking about someone at CF just adding a random browser to an approved list. More empirically speaking, a browser can't be considered approved if you can freely fork it and not revoke the approved status.
I read the article you referenced, though not very carefully due to lack of time, but I don't see anything like a list of supported browsers. They even mention Firefox as supported, which can be forked just like Ladybird.
> Cloudflare clearly wants to move us to a future where only approved browsers are allowed to access the web.
It seems your confusion stems from this premise. Is it possible this is not a correct assumption?
> Cloudflare clearly wants to move us to a future where only approved browsers are allowed to access the web
CloudFlare is in the CDN business.
If CloudFlare gatekeeps who can access their CDN, then people will move to a different CDN. Because people want their websites to be accessed by as many people as possible.
Your statement does not compute.
How do you call someone who has been doing evil things suddenly do one good thing?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reputation_laundering
Corporations sometimes will do seemingly good things in order to maintain their control, Google is a threat to Cloudflare and their business, what I believe however is that this will have significant pushback from the government seeing how Google seems to be pretty favorable for the current admin, not sure Cloudflare is on the same favorability.
a wide rollout of remote attestation would mean cloudflare becomes completely redundant
so I doubt they want that
a murky world where you "need" a guardian middle-man is what they want to preserve
Honestly the post tries to frame it under the banner of the open web, and offers some justifications for Omarchy that I think could all also apply to a project like Bluefin, so it feels a bit flimsy. My guess would be that it's just that someone with access to the purse strings got excited about both projects and decided to fund them, without necessarily a larger play in mind.
why you acting like cloudflare forced people to use their services????
there are a alternative on the market like akamai and fastly
people free to use their favorite cdn over CF lol
> People have been fiercely debating
> whether that’s the least bad practical solution on offer for website owners
> I don’t want to make a judgement on that
I explicitly said I don't want to debate that. Take a deep breath, no one is taking away your favorite CDN.
people have hate boner for CF, you cant deny that
but replace CF with another provider and they would do the same shit
The hype around Omarchy is just insane..
It is not an installer script (anymore), so instead you have to download a 7GB ISO file (in the name of 'good UX') that ships with Zoom, Spotify, Hey, Basecamp, Steam, Minecraft (??), etc. but you still end up using the same package mirrors (arch's). If it was an install script, like LARBS or many others (before and after omarchy), I'd (almost) get it. If it was a derivative distro, like endeavour or manjaro, I'd (almost) get it. But this just makes no sense. I'm all for making Linux more accessible, but this ain't it, chief.
I don't really mind 7GB ISO file. What gets my nerve is the default packaging of shit-load of unnecessary apps.
Into an Arch install, and Arch already has an install script. I know it doesn't spit out a usable ultra pretty system. I think it's a good thing the Arch system doesn't require a single whole-drive LUKS configuration, meaning you get to do the thing we talk about as a sort of benchmark in the devops world: setting up Arch with one or a few encrypted volumes. Strange to me to hear me criticizing linux spreading, yet...
They're one and the same? Without the 'default packaging of shit-load of unnecessary apps' you have a 1.4GB Arch image.
It’s not for me either. I peeked at the script and repo the other day. There were choices I wouldn’t make, but it’s written opinionated in the front. That’s totally fine by me.
It is definitely making Linux more accessible. Yet still new comers to Linux will struggle when they want to do sightly more than what Omarchy offers. In that sense, the current Omarchy may not be _accessible_. But I think with this amount of users coming in, they will be able to find ways for almost anything.
It’s been having a great side effect. Hyprland is having a lot of support. I hope that many other pieces will have supports for better Linux experience. Who knows most of major software applications will have official Linux support in a few years.
I wonder how many will or already have followed the Omarchy path without realizing the difficulty they'll have dual booting.
I think you are not in the target audience for it.
I am not in it either, I think arch has great defaults and archinstall is enough. On top of that it's incredibly well documented. But some people just want to hop in as quickly as possible and get to something working.
The hype around Rails is just insane.
It's not just a few libs (anymore), so instead you have to download hundreds of gems (in the game of 'good dev ex') that ships with activsupport, and ORM, ERB and even pushes an app architecture on you but you still end up using ruby. If it was just a few things like sinatra and sequel I'd (almost) get it. If it was a fork of another project like Merb I'd (almost get it) but this just make no sense. I'm all for making web development more accessible but this aint it, chief.
This but unronically
Archlinux:
> Arch Linux is intentionally minimal, and is meant to be configured by the user during installation so they may add only what they require.
They should have been like DHH, opinonated, convention over configuration and ship with minecraft pre installed
Sure, you win, chief :)
People distro hop all the time for out of the box experience. Very few enjoy configuring their desktop to perfection, because frankly it's a huge PITA with everything being split between a thousand control panels and config files with differing conventions and levels of documentation.
When a distro with a default configuration close to what some group of users is looking for shows up, that's exciting to that group because it's that much less fiddling they need to think about, and perhaps most importantly it's not going to randomly break on them one day because it's represented in the distribution's testing.
It's mostly a PITA on Linux because once you do things yourself they will eventually break and you're the one who will have to figure out how to solve it via your own custom setup again. Similar to Vim templates it saves a lot of time joining a community build.
Claude Code really helped me with this recently. I have a rather old dotfiles repository (10+ years) for my Arch system, and I can really feel the fatigue from updating and maintaining it. So much so that over the years, it has accumulated many minor annoyances that I never fixed. Nowadays, I can simply explain these issues to an LLM, and it will mostly resolve them.
The install script is still there, you don't have to use the ISO [0]. I prefer to do my own btrfs subvolumes, partitioning, tweaks, etc and just run the script after a base install. Uninstalling anything is a matter of seconds from the provided menus.
[0] https://learn.omacom.io/2/the-omarchy-manual/96/manual-insta...
I was curious, and i wasn't able to run an earlier version of the install script into a system i'd already set up; script complained about non-encrypted volumes. That was enough for me to walk away.
7 gigabytes? With a “G”? That must take 10s of seconds, minutes even. And for what, a ‘good experience’? Humans make no sense to me either.
I feel like quoting that classic hn comment reaction to the release of Dropbox. Why do we need this good experience? We already have ftp!
> I feel like quoting that classic hn comment reaction to the release of Dropbox.
You mean the one where the commenter was respectful and helpful and had a productive conversation, just like HN encourages?
Every time you mention that comment in a bad light, you worsen dang’s day.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27068148
Thank you, this is my pet peeve as well
People online will always find some angle to complain about things other people are enjoying.
"This is a 7GB ISO that includes the entire system for offline installation (just 1/10th the size of macOS!)."
This is literally from Omarchy's release notes. How is it a problem if I make a comparison but it's ok when DHH does it :) Anyhow, you do you.
It is strange to me that omarchy took off and not Regolith Desktop [1], which is a very similar project, and has been around a lot longer. I suppose the DHH effect is real. There is definitely a critical mass accumulating around the hyprland ecosystem. They seem to be forming their own culture separate from the wider FOSS community that I find concerning.
[1] https://regolith-desktop.com/
Mind elaborating on that last bit? Both about their specific culture, and your concerns?
Oh man, I forgot about Regolith! I ran it for a few weeks on an old ThinkPad a few years ago when it had a new release and it was pretty nice compared to configuring i3 and all that myself.
Yeah I don't get it. Why can't you just install that stuff on Arch?
If Windows came with all that crap preinstalled we'd call it bloatware.
Very very weird finding choice. There must be hundreds of better strategic investments that could be made. Thousands even.
The Arch installer even prompts you to ask if you want to add various common stuff (and you can of course add anything else).
I wanted to try Omarchy out on my endeavouros desktop, but got annoyed that there wasn't a simple install script. I don't really want to re-install my whole OS just to try a new DE config.
It's YouTube-hype, there is a newfound love for TUIs and DHH, as a very influencial person fell for it as well. I don't think anybody really wants an OS with e.g. Rails pre installed, not even people using Rails. People use specific versions for specific apps. I think Omarchy will be soon forgotten.
Omarchy iso is literally 2 minutes from boot from usb to a productive pc
Good for you.
As someone who has been running all the components of omarchy before they made it, I agree with you in spirit especially as an arch user.
But other people need an ISO and yes all those things are kinda considered standard at this point.
People like you and I aren't the target audience, but for the people who are, this is what they have been asking for.
With Linux you can have a million rices with passionate creators who motivate their family, friends, audience to try something new. I would prefer spliting the money among more projects like this rather than misplacing resources into a hobbiest/poweruser thing. Ideas that would be more appropriate than money: an award, signal boost, pizza, invite to a convention
If I was conspiratorially minded I would say Omarchy exists and get support just so LARBS users have someone to spit at while feeling like the underdog. Props to the Omarchy creator for being so unabashedly opinionated in their rice despite the years of hate on soy devs. Unused RAM is wasted ram!
I am pretty sure all the stuff is optional and the main point is having everything like drivers working right away instead of looking for solutions yourself
That's something most distros do already, or at least try to. Good default setup and working drivers Ubuntu aimed for a decade ago. So that would not be exciting.
Maybe it's more about the willingness to include software other distros see critically and would not include by default, like docker.
> at least try to
this. they try to be un-opinionated.
The difference is of taste.
I cannot for the life of me understand the Omarchy hype. The Linux community has been theming their distribution installs for decades. What distinguishes this from that?
Arch linux is a great linux distro that's kinda difficult to set up (more so historically but it's got that reputation).
Hyprland is a great WM that has garbage default settings and requires wading through tons of documentation, as well as a lot of effort to set up.
Omarchy is a distribution that ships Arch + Hyprland with sane defaults. The whole thing installs in minutes, and is overall very easy to get going with. This has lead to a lot of people who were previously turned off by all the sharp edges of both Arch and Hyprland to give Arch and Hyprland a shot. Since both of these things are pretty great once you get them going, a lot of people are enthusiastic.
Sounds like Omarchy also ships with a bunch of bloatware. Why would I need the Hey or Basecamp apps – neither are targeted at developers, neither are commonly used, and both are just websites loosely packaged as installable apps anyway. Similarly for Steam (which runs at startup by default I believe), Spotify, Minecraft (which will bring a JVM?). It's bordering on Dell shipping Norton Antivirus to everyone and calling it a value-add.
That's more than a bit exaggerated.
Apart from Spotify, it ships with a few app launchers for PWAs for some of 37signals' stuff. These launchers are easily removed, and basically just launch chrome windows.
It does not ship with steam or minecraft, though it has a menu where you can install it (along with various popular software, mainly development tools).
Because DHH, obviously.
Does Omarchy offer anything other than opinionated dotfiles? These have always existed.
It basically is opinionated dotfiles and a few scripts, though that's a bit of a reductive take.
The killer feature of Omarchy is how accessible and streamlined it is. You can set up your own arch+hypr environment in a weekend of tweaking and fiddling assuming basic Linux competency, or you can use Omarchy and get where you want to be in 10 minutes with no tweaking or fiddling.
If you want is the outcome of the fiddling, then Omarchy is a great choice. If you want is fun of the fiddling process, then it's not for you.
I'm surprised so many people who want to use Arch aren't in it for the fiddling.
I've had publicly installable dotfiles with a "1 command and ~5 minutes later" you have your development environment set up for a few years now. It is command line focused since my main box is running WSL 2 with Arch Linux. The script works for Debian, Ubuntu, Arch and macOS since I use a work laptop that's running a MBP.
It was a lot of fun building things up and learning about the process as I went.
When I got a laptop to install native Linux a little while back, Omarchy was just coming out and I figured ok since I will want a solution to trick out a window manager / DE I'll want more than command line tools so I took a look.
I ended up avoiding it for a few reasons but the main one was I don't want to ask for permission or maintain a fork to deviate from the Omarchy defaults that cannot be customized without a fork.
I love Rails and the philosophy behind it but I don't think the same model applies to something as intimate and personal as your OS. Your OS is more like a custom application made for you, especially if you're going down the Arch (or Linux in general) route.
If you feel it's not for you, then it's probably not for you.
I don't think Omarchy is or needs to be for everyone. Its recipe for success is likely that it's catering to a fairly particular archetype that's generally overlooked by most distributions and OS vendors, and not trying to be or do anything else.
I don't think distributions or OS vendors focus on that because imagine the outrage if you installed Windows and it pre-installed Zoom, Spotify and 80 other apps for you out of the box.
I think it's popular because DHH turned dotfiles into a product and it's being marketed as a distro. Arch + (Hyprland, Waybar, Walker and Mako) are all really popular and standlone tools that make up a reasonable looking desktop environment which Omarchy happens to use too.
I have nothing against it. If it gets more people using Linux, that is a huge win. I just find it fasinating to see it from the outside.
I think this is a bit reductive. I came from using basically the same configuration, configured piecemeal, and migrated to Omarchy because I really enjoy the cohesiveness of the experience.
The bundled software aspect is also kinda exaggerated. It almost entirely consists of app launchers for a few chrome-based PWAs. There's like no software to speak off, it's just a .desktop-file you can remove if you don't want it (there's even a menu for that).
It's arguably more of a demo of Omarchy's excellent PWA tooling than anything else, where you can create your own PWAs with a simple TUI that blend seamlessly into the rest of the system.
This is the supposed bloatware looks like
It's more than the PWAs.
There's:
https://github.com/basecamp/omarchy/blob/master/install/omar...
https://github.com/basecamp/omarchy/blob/master/install/omar...
There's around 180 packages being installed, most of which are considered base packages.
1password and tons upon tons of other apps and tools.
Thousands of people share their dotfiles though, there's just no need for it to be its own Arch-derivative distribution. Could've just been 'here are my dotfiles, works best on Arch'.
I came from doing that that before switching to Omarchy and it really is not the same.
A lot of "other people's dotfiles" have issues, and often just a few too many anime waifus bundled. That's fine I guess, but it's not what I'm looking for in a WM.
The fact that DHH's managed to rally a community to participate and maintain Omarchy is also a big part of it. If you have an issue, other people will have that issue, and quickly work together to find a fix. There's also a discord full of people running your exact setup you can exchange experiences with.
I'm not at all discounting the value of rallying a community around one configuration - I just think dotfiles could have been the distribution mechanism, and it would be as valuable given the same community around it.
absolutely not.
every single arch user thought of making a distro with opinionated defaults, but then they realize the just have to edit the wiki to provide the community the same benefit.
some rich dude lack the self awareness for such.
he's both ignoring advanced users would rather have option open and defaults documented, and new users would just use manjaro.
I like Omarchy as an advanced user. I migrated off vanilla Arch + Hypr to Omarchy because it saves me a bunch of hassle setting all that up myself. I want the outcome, don't particularly enjoy the fiddling. I definitely could, I've even done LFS way back in the day, but I have other things I'd rather do with my time these days.
I think it's in many ways a project that caters to professional programmers. It's definitely not for beginners, neither for enthusiasts.
I respect there are people who would rather do all the fiddling themselves, but that's not what I'm looking for, and neither am I looking for a windows- or mac-a-like desktop environment like the ones you get with most distros. What I want in a desktop is exactly what Omarchy is offering.
comparing arch with LFS is wild, but thanks for sharing.
I personally just pacman install the kde metapackage, and I'm done.
I'm not saying arch is anything like LFS, I'm saying I've done LFS and this is not an "arch is too hard" thing.
Yes, it goes beyond mere dotfiles.
There's a LUKS setup, PAM setup, ufw setup, yay/aur setup.
The great strength of Omarchy is the fact that they've repackaged every good things from many different projects (arch, hyperland, and many packages) so I can install a fully functional distro with nice defaults, and every hardware working (bluetooth etc...), in less than 3 minutes without any interaction whatsoever. And it just works. Not because of Omarchy per se, but because they scripted the hell out of it so it just works™.
It's not magic, but damn it's nice.
Isn't that just Ubuntu?
The "nice defaults" of Ubuntu and Omarchy cater to completely different audiences
Isn't that just tasksel and defaults? Iirc the various Ubuntu flavors each have a package for their default settings...
Way, way better than Ubuntu. And it adheres to *NIX philosophy by making all the config editable via text files.
What exactly in the UNIX philosophy says configs should be editable via text files? It specifically talks about CLI tools using plaintext for their I/O to allow piping commands - not about configuration.
It's called the "Rule of Textuality", a component of which is: "Store data in flat text files." This principle recognizes that text files are human-readable, easily editable with any text editor, version-controllable, and can be processed by standard UNIX tools.
having run ubuntu-server for awhile for my home server.. what config files do i need to edit without a text editor?
That sounds worse.
Yes, but ubuntu made stupid choices most developers don't agree with
Like what?
Right now, snap (2016-present). Before that, Unity instead of GNOME (2011-2017), Mir instead of Wayland (2006-2015), Upstart instead of systemd (2013-2017).
They always do something custom-made and not adopted by anyone else, only to completely backpedal and go with what everyone else has already been doing. So, even if you like their custom-made solution you'll eventually end up being disappointed. After that, it becomes like a relic that only some frustrated sysadmins like me will have to deal with whenever we interact with some legacy systems, which definitely doesn't help with Ubuntu's overall reputation.
The big one for me is moving packages to snap. You can work around it, but that defeats the whole “works out of the box” aspect
How well does it work if I want to move outside the scripted defaults?
It's not hard, but it's advisable to eventually set up a parallel blank Arch install where you configure everything from scratch based on things you liked from Omarchy.
I think the beauty of this is to get to understand all components in your system, which is quite simple actually.
You're not supposed to with these macOS-like distributions, that's their whole idea, "take it or leave it".
Don't. Just use arch if you plan on changing. It's not for you
Right. Bluetooth notoriously isn't enabled and working out of box on literally every main distro I can think of. /s (and yes, yes it is.)
it's one package install tho. did you try to search for Bluetooth on the arch wiki?
Omarchy isn’t for me, but for those who find a minimal tiled Linux desktop interesting but don’t want to get lost in the jungle setting their own thing up, I don’t think you can possibly do better. It’s throughly thought through, polished, streamlined, and designed specifically to be accessible to newcomers.
Omarchy sounds very compelling (though I'm personally done with trying to run Linux on the desktop), but tiling window managers are just not very practical, for numerous reasons. DHH would be wise to also offer and optimize non-tiling WM setups.
Have you tried KDE/plasma6 recently? IMHO, it's better than anything else, including Windows and OS X.
Plasma isn't bad and better than Windows in most respects, but it's kind of the opposite of Omarchy in that it has a trillion toggles and its defaults don't work for many, so a good deal of tweaking is required to make it "cozy".
I'm curious which defaults you find so unusable. I'm rather fiddly and particular, but I haven't done much more to my KDE setup than disable mouse acceleration.
It's less about any specific setting and more that many aren't quite to my taste. It's usable, but getting to a place where I like it takes some time.
I agree, but that seems unlikely given his inclinations. While there's loads of options for distributions that ship with a traditional floating window manager/desktop environment, few have gone the extra mile in holistic design with e.g. unified configuration and eliminating hoop-jumping to the greatest extent possible.
> tiling window managers are just not very practical, for numerous reasons
What reasons? I've been using tilling window managers for years now, and I feel like it's 1995 whenever I need to deal with dragging and maximizing windows.
I agree with the gp. I like some aspects of tiling vms but gave up after a while.
The main pain points for me were
1) I often end up with two windows each taking a side of the screen leaving basically nothing of interest in the centre. So I end up jumping through some tetris-like hoops to make a window be centered.
2) If I close any window all the others move, often causing a repeat of problem 1
3) apps not supporting it properly causing weird graphical glitches
4) some apps should never be small windows, others never large.
Basically I ended up spending more time managing windows with a tiling vm than I ever did before, which eventually outweighed the benefits.
Curious to hear why you think tiling window managers aren't practical.
Hyprland is like half the point of Omarchy (the other half being Arch)
It's a way for web developers to easily work in the linux sphere without getting burdened too heavily. Not saying that as a dig to web devs, I'm a web deb but that's all it really appears to me. Popular dude in web dev community made it slightly easier for other web devs to do a thing.
Which is a great use of Linux. I have gaming oriented ones (Bazzite, SteamOS) installed for gaming, why not a dev oriented one for dev-ing.
SteamOS is a good analogy
Or Kali Linux
It's not just slightly easier. It's much easier.
Sure, there's no innovation in it. But not everything has to be innovative. Useful things can be important too.
The interesting part is, how not dev-friendly their website looks and acts. It smells more like a toy for r/unixporn than something that actually caters to real developers. How old is this project? Is this just a result of lacking manpower?
Developers oftentimes struggle to understand how important marketing is.
First time I've heard of omarchy, that said often when I really don't understand the hype of a product I have to remember it's possibly just not for me.
I've been a desktop linux user since the 90's and entirely since 2003 (excluding gaming) so I'm not the target user.
Cute in the video on the omarchy page that they use Edward Hopper's - Nighthawks painting (~11m) - that was my default wallpaper for about 15 years on Linux.
It's "hannah montana linux" (https://linuxreviews.org/Hannah_Montana_Linux) for the late 2020s.
It's a dead-simple distribution with an opinionated setup that, well, mostly just works. It's a techie's version of a non-tech distribution where you don't have to tweak anything (or almost anything) to get a nice experience out of the box.
Think of it as "Ubuntu, but explicitly marketed for devs" Plus hype because DHH is a well-known figure.
Linux fandom really doesn't understand the power of defaults and the power of user experience. I mean, in the first versions of Omarchy installer you had to type in some CLI commands just to select and connect to wifi. This comes from Arch, a " a lightweight and flexible Linux® distribution that tries to Keep It Simple" [1] What's more simple than connecting to one of the most ubiquitous connection types via iwctl [2] during OS installation.
So DHH decided to make an opinionated config that mostly just works and provide you with a few conveniences out of the box.
[1] Yes, those capital letters are on their website https://archlinux.org
[2] https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Iwd#iwctl
> It's a dead-simple distribution with an opinionated setup that, well, mostly just works.
Sounds a lot like Rails when you put it that way, which is no coincidence given the figure behind it.
Omarchy is DHH of rails fame. Lots of us like ruby a lot (myself very much included), that being said I've got Omarchy running on a vm as a test case and in the <2 minutes I've looked at it i dont really think it's very intuitive.
I spent 2 days trying to get it to run in a VM and it was not playing well. So I just gave it up.
> At its core, Omarchy embraces Linux . . . makes a version of it that is accessible and fun to use for developers that don’t have a deep background in operating systems.
out of box experience that provides sane defaults with minimal effort to get to working mode
Good description of what Omarchy really is. It's for two groups of people:
1/ (biggest group by far) People who are new to Linux on the desktop and, to a lesser extent, want to get out of the macOS ecosystem
2/ Power users who run Arch btw, and have probably installed, configured, partitioned, and encrypted Arch without the installer script at least a few times and now want a sane default Arch + Hyprland install with sane defaults and a production-grade environment in just a few minutes
I don't think it's that crazy. Hyprland has, for a long time, looked really lovely when configured. But most don't want to configure it, the linux ricing community is really small in proportion to even the people who want to install Linux. Omarchy is dead-simple to install, has good documentation, decent opinions[1], and has huge influence because of DHH himself. I stopped running it myself after while, in favor of configuring my own Hyprland install, but it's an easily accessible shiny new thing by someone with a big following. Seems reasonable to me that people like it.
[1]: I don't agree with all of them, e.g. the chatbot shortcuts. But they're trivial to disable and/or redirect and, indeed, the project does a good job of trying not to mess with your changes.
You just need to watch the video to get the hype: it's the specific person leading the hype, with pretty good presentation and loyal audience. At least to me it made sense once I've seen it (the hype made sense, not the distro).
The quality is pretty good too. You try it and it works decently. It looks great and ready to go. It serves as a foundation to customize your linux.
This is not like DHH selling dogshit to you. It's a high quality package / product or whatever you want to call it..
Now everyone is thinking why nobody did this un-innovative thing before DHH did.
It's so opinionated but many people find it okay. And it's hard to install Arch successfully. Compared to Ubuntu Arch's package manager (also combined with AUR) are great.
I use every possible opportunity to say "Fuck Ubuntu Snaps"
>And it's hard to install Arch successfully.
archinstall. You can even select a DE in it
I only learned it with Omarchy after all of these years :(
The Linux community has, to my knowledge, never had someone with DHH's outreach experience and promote a "come-to-Linux" moment. Especially after using Apple products for 20 years.
Also, it has sane, sensible and appealing defaults. It's installable in a few minutes, so it saves time. I'm a happy Omakub user, even if I first used Linux back in 2005.
Basically, it comes from DHH, who has a kind of big following. Primeagen also made some videos, and it's good enough.
It's just a very simple Linux install meant for developers. It's not for people who have used Linux before but meant to be a way for new people to try it for the first time.
And it's getting a lot of attention because of DHH. Doesn't look half bad either which helps.
I think it started when PewDiePie released his Arch/Hyprland video, then DHH jumped on the train and made it super easy to install, now everyone can feel like a hacker/ricer easily.
Maybe I'm boring but I'm sticking to Debian/Gnome...
It's popularity I think comes from a) it's brain dead easy to get running while also being a very usable and nice hyprland config b) it's from DHH which has cult following status
I'd argue there's a fairly big niche of people who want a tiling WM but also don't want to have to start from scratch, figure out what accompanying utilities and programs they want to satisfy things like runner/menu, status bar, etc.
Other dots aren't as opinionated, or don't come with such a detailed user guide that Omarchy does, nor a set up script.
I'd even argue that Omarchy isn't really for other Linux users looking to distro hop, but like Omakub, it's for mac users curious about Linux, wanting an equally opinionated set up.
Dude, if you ever find out, let me know. I don't get it, and it makes me incredibly skeptical of people that acted like Linux was unusable until this god-send of a shipped default config came around. I cannot possibly roll my eyes harder. Just goes to show how much hype accounts for, still, even in nerd circles.
>What distinguishes this from that?
More eyes on it, DHH has a big following.
Also, there's always been a section of the desktop-Linux user community which is inclined to get very excited about about hypebeast window managers. Back in the day Slashdot was absolutely buzzing about Enlightenment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enlightenment_(window_manager) .
Not going to lie, the big Grok ad in that homepage video made me nope out pretty quick.
Reminds me of the rsync Dropbox comment lol.
How blind are most developers to UX being a primary selling point.
This is a great example of the insane levels of hype I’m talking about. Dropbox was never just some scripts and config files.
It's created by dev Jesus /s
These 2 projects are so different in complexity. Ladybird is a foundational ground-up browser, meanwhile Omarchy is just an opinionated arch setup. I wonder why they were both mentioned in one article.
For one, I don't think complexity is determinative of impact. At least I hope not, otherwise my startup ideas are all DOA. For two, Omarchy is becoming more complex as more maintainers come in to write way more automation. You can kind of foresee where this is going: an Arch wrapper slowly growing into effectively a separate OS that's pushing other software to accommodate its choices. (See getting chromium to support live theme reloading, trying to get Fortnight to support Linux, etc).
IOW, Ladybird has depth, Omarchy has breadth.
I think it’s likely the politics, I’m afraid: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45334359
Why is it that Servo has been around for ages, chugging along, making progress, and then Ladybird comes along and gets, pretty much instantly, anointed as the last great hope against Chrome? What does everyone else know about Servo that I don't?
Servo was a side-project. Mozilla laid off the Servo team. Its development then stopped. It eventually found a home in Linux Foundation but it lost the initial acceleration. It lost the ambition. Many key developers moved on. Whatever nature your project is, closed or open source, when you lose key people and stop training new ones, the project slowly dies. People matter much much more than the license or the parent organization.
Ladybird didn't lose its initial speed. There is a leader with strong vision. There is no shenanigans from half-assed management. There is clear and responsible funding. It attracts similarly ambitious people. All of that ends up with visible and real progress.
I've actually been watching all the Ladybird update videos (because I'm absolutely giddy at the prospect of a new, open-source browser engine), and they compare their test passing numbers to other browsers, including Servo. And from their own slides, Servo is behind them, but not by much, and making progress at about the same rate.
Maybe that says it all, considering how much of a head start Servo had, but Servo also took a very long... break, as you said.
There is a leader with a strong vision sure, but how long will he stick with it? We’ve seen him completely abandon a few projects now.
The previous projects were simply hobbies. This one has a full non-profit behind it. In the end though, there is always a risk. Then you need to hope that there is also enough development of secondary leaders who can carry the torch. It is more likely when people are employed under an organization with a clear goal. Mozilla and Servo lacked this goal and vision.
I think if you look at old threads there was a lot of hype and similar high hopes for Servo back in the days, but Mozilla never positioned it as a new browser, only a testbed for parts to integrate into Firefox.
I can think of two reasons - it's a browser engine, not a browser - it was created and maintained for the longest time by mozilla, before the linux foundation took over a couple years ago. That creates history and governance that I could image puts of contributors or the broader excitement
I really wish the open source projects that actually have meaningful impact on the whole industry were target of sponsorship, not the ones with good marketing, but I know how hard that is to achieve. Taking money from someone is unfortunately complicated in this society. In many cases it's easier not to even ask for sponsorship, unless you are willing to deal with the bureaucracy. Ladybird is at least fighting for diversity, but I don't see the added value of Omarchy.
Archlinux refused the sponsorship
Source?
A month ago Arch came under ddos attack. DHH and others were offering to either pay for or get Cloudflare to sponsor antiddos protection for Arch.
Instead of accepting the offers or even saying why they won't various Arch services were down for almost a month.
Then Arch published https://archlinux.org/news/recent-services-outages/ essentially saying that they are seeking ideologically pure service
I didn't see "ideologically pure" anywhere in the linked statement but what I did find was this quote:
> We are also evaluating DDoS protection providers while carefully considering factors including cost, security, and ethical standards.
How is that not reasonable?
Arch (and most FOSS Linux distributions) are highly resistant to ddos attacks.
Good luck trying to ddos their mirrors and mailing lists.
Literally August and parts of September
https://status.archlinux.org/788139639/calendar
To be fair, the mirrors and mailing lists were fine throughout.
> Ladybird is at least fighting for diversity
What does this even mean? And if it's an important part of a business model, how do you know that Omarchy isn't?
There are only a limited number of browser engines out currently and lady bird adds another, hence diversity enhancement. Omarchy is +1 more distro out of thousands, hence while making the "market" a little bit more diverse it's not a huge double-digit percentage increase in viable browser engines. Pretty straight forward.
I think the parent comment means that Ladybird is fighting to be an additional browser engine in the current ecosystem of “Chromium and a couple of tiny, unimportant competitors.”
However, on the subject of the other meaning of “diversity,” and whether or not it is in the business models of either of these projects, I think we have pretty conclusive evidence that actually it is NOT a core value to either of them:
Citation for Ladybird: https://hyperborea.org/reviews/software/ladybird-inclusivity...
Citation for DHH, the creator of Omarchy: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30600746
As someone directly affected by this sort of thing, I really want nothing to do with either project.
I also can’t help but notice that this “tech-right smell” is about the only thing that these two projects seem to have in common with one another, making me question Cloudflare’s intentions with this.
Exactly, I meant was browser engine diversity.
Keep in mind that cloudflare is essentially a MITM "totally not created and backed by any spy agency that might come to mind" free service that lives off of few large clients but otherwise offers their services essentially for free because they are just a good company that wants to help people with DDOS and CDN and .... Cloudflare is to online communication what Facebook is to personal identity.
Great to see CF sponsoring Ladybird! One of the most important projects out there right now.
I run vanilla arch/i3, so not super interested in Omarchy itself - but am curious to know how polished of a distro they can come up with. I may give it a try soon.
I kind of wish that Servo would get similar attention to get over the hump itself as well... afaik, Ladybird and Servo are both at a similar level in terms of standards support. Though Servo also really needs a full browser project around it, since it's an engine alone.
One thing I think that would be nice to see would be self-oriented browser config syncing using one of a few different cloud file sync backends, even evil ones (google drive, one-drive, dropbox, etc).
I was running hyprland with my own dotfiles and using omarchy was quite painless except the only gripe I had were quickly fixed and the other gripe that I have is that it doesn't have nm-applet manager to manage wifi etc. and has a terminal.
So it turned out that my wifi adapter wasn't connected properly and I was giving a test and submission date was near and the wifi had died mid way and I couldn't connect to other wifi because I felt as if the terminal wasn't working and not the adapter...
Definitely give me a bit of a pain. really wish that they can use nm-applet as well... Optionally support terminal wifi too but definitely give atleast an option to get gui wifi.
Also I feel like omarchy focused quite much on bash and I used to use zsh with my custom dot filess which were really lovely. I had semi invented fish in zsh but it was my zsh and it was snappy.
Now I tried to have one ble.sh in bash and it stutters like it turned 80 lol. I definitely love zsh over bash and wish omarchy supported that too...
Luckily I have everything backed up so I will try to move away from bash I think,
One thing that I like is that omarchy has its own aur-ish thing where I found things like bun which isn't arch extra and aur definitely felt clunky. Using the omarchy repo to install bun was kinda nice actually.
I gave it a try because my system was bloated and I hadn't configured it properly in teh sense that my 100 gig was split into 40 40 and 8 swap and uh that 40 of home really got bloated somehow and I couldn't even update my pc using pacman and felt like a massive deal actually.
So I just actually picked my dotfiles and moved on. Might recommend it, it seems that omarchy also has backup support using btrfs by default which I didn't have in my ext4 arch
I think it's pretty cool that I have something I can send to someone who uses a macbook and wants to try out linux. I use a custom Nix config that I've built up over the last 5 years; it's not exactly something I can recommend.
I currently recommend Bluefin... but this might be good for an _even_ easier (though less stable) setup, that has all the tiling bling.
This sponsorship is very important for the project. Not for financial reasons, but because it gathered recognition from the company that creates much of the critical infrastructure and bot protection services.
Without this recognition, the engine could have been blocked by impassable CAPTCHAs, which for the end user would mean the project is dead at its roots.
Maybe one company should not be able to decide which browsers we are allowed to use.
I agree with you. But that’s the reality we have to deal with.
No we don't. We're accepting it as if it's our only option.
Yes most web properties have voluntarily adopted Cf as their only protection option. Do you or I have the power to get hundreds of millions if not billions of these properties off of Cf? No, so yes they're a reality of the Web at this point, sadly. They can be no more avoided than say the tier 1 ISPs.
What’s the other option?
Consumers can pay for Ladybird themselves.
A culture that encourages rewarding creators for their work.
Sure, as long as consumers are not forced to update which will justify a subscription model.
Agreed, and definitely a sign something is very wrong with the internet.
> Supporting the future of the open web
This really is some orwellian language coming from Cloudflare.
Cool to see Ladybird get some corporate love. I wish Firefox got more varied sponsoring from multiple sources, too.
> I wish Firefox got more varied sponsoring from multiple sources, too.
Mozilla promised that decacdes ago and yet they are still stuck with Google's money.
The problem with Firefox is that the money has to go through Mozilla, and Mozilla is not spending most of that money on Firefox. You cannot sponsor the development of Firefox directly, so your money ends up being wasted.
Firefox/Gecko also just can’t be as relevant as a Chrome/Blink competitor since Gecko doesn’t support embedding on desktop operating systems, which precludes things like Electron-style wrapping and hybrid apps. It’s a fatal flaw that Mozilla doesn’t seem to have any interest in addressing.
There is nothing wrong with using CEF/Electron for some apps and then browser-based Firefox clients for the other ones.
Big names like Slack and Spotify can’t choose to use a Gecko-based Electron/CEF alternative though, which limits its potential impact.
Maybe that's why Servo got the boot?
Unlike Gecko, Servo supports embedding as a first class feature. It was designed from the ground up with this in mind.
How about Cloudflare stops penalizing non-chrome browsers with elevated rates of bot checks and captchas?
They don’t penalize browsers for not being Chrome – Safari users almost never see those, because their devices support a protocol for attesting real hardware with a real user, in what is hopefully a privacy-preserving manner:
https://blog.cloudflare.com/eliminating-captchas-on-iphones-...
That’s the underlying problem here: web sites are constantly getting suspicious traffic and if you do something like using Tor or a “free” VPN, the owners of those sites are probably going to ask companies like Cloudflare to validate or block you rather than try to tell whether you’re a bot.
Anyone concerned with privacy really needs to be focused on that problem because most site owners care more about not going broke than supporting browsers or privacy tools which few of their customers use. It’s destroying the open web.
So you are saying they don't penalize browser from not being Chrome and then link to a specific mechanism that they are allow listing Safari. That goes directly counter to what you are claiming.
I have seen it myself, from my own system. Firefox, almost impossible to use the web due to non-stop bot checks by CF. For the same session, same site(s), I give up and use Chrome, with all the same browser extensions, and I sail right in. Multiple times.
Suspicious traffic is using Firefox, because Chrome browsers are 90%+ of the traffic. And the rich mac users have a special mechanism for bypassing them as your article outlines.
Using Firefox is the internet equivalent of DWB.
> Firefox, almost impossible to use the web due to non-stop bot checks by CF. For the same session, same site(s), I give up and use Chrome, with all the same browser extensions, and I sail right in.
This is very much not my experience. I don't know if you use a VPN or have a ton of extensions but if I was hitting that so hard I'd consider trying a clean profile with no extensions and adding things back in to see if you can find the trigger condition.
Firefox on macOS is fine. I've been using it as my primary browser for years. I consistently get captchas on archive.is (and just verified I also do on Brave), but rarely see it elsewhere.
I don't know the cause of what you're seeing, but it's not simply Firefox.
I get them with Firefox on FreeBSD. Chromium on FreeBSD less so.
Firefox on Ubuntu here. I switched over the past couple of months from using Chrome on Windows.
I see exactly the same amount of security checks, as far as I can tell.
The post does not mention how much money they are giving. Maybe I am a pessimist, but unless the number is in tens of millions or hundreds of millions (very unlikely), I don't think it helps the development of an independent browser very much. Google probably has poured over billions of dollars into Chrome development over the years, and if you look at what Chrome supports, it's massive. I seriously doubt anybody else can match their feature set, not to mention involvement in drafting the latest standards.
LuaJIT was developed by one person. Ladybird doesn't need hundreds of millions of dollars, it needs interpreter specialists who are willing to lend their time to the project, and an army of volunteers to work on the rest of the rendering engine.
LuaJIT has ~85k lines of code. Chromium and Firefox have somewhere in the neighborhood of ~30 million. If you need ~1 developer for "a LuaJIT" then you need ~350 developers for a browser.
The assumption that a browser needs ~30 million lines of code may be false.
It may be possible for a scripting language with at least the same features as LuaJIT to be as fast as LuaJIT in less than 85K lines of code.
why do you think the js interpreter is that special compared to all the rest? AFAIU, CSS is a much more complex beast, as the spec has not been written to reflect the way it could be implemented
Writing JS JITs is a specialized skill that requires a deep knowledge of compilers, JavaScript, and CPU architectures.
CSS is complicated but it's not as complex. It's just a matter of throwing enough sufficiently competent developers at the problem.
Ladybird doesn't even have a JIT right now. They used to, but it got taken out because as best as I can tell, nobody on the project knows how to write one.
So you want people to work for free on one of the most complex pieces of software in existence? Why wouldn't you want to give those people hundreds of millions of dollars?
And if you think that writing a JS interpreter is the only hard part of a browser engine, have I got news for you.
My point was not that people/companies shouldn't donate money to the Ladybird project, but that an equally effective way of contributing is to contribute time, especially the time of developers with specialized skills that would otherwise be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars at market rates.
Why should anyone work for free? Because they love the Web and hate Google's stranglehold over it.
> Why should anyone work for free? Because they love the Web and hate Google's stranglehold over it.
Why would they work for free even given this? It's not something you hack on in an evening or two
$100k
https://x.com/ladybirdbrowser/status/1970160706650595592
So that's like... almost nothing compared to what's needed for browser development.
If I understand it correctly, Ladybird uses Skia. So they are also benefiting from those "billions poured over Chrome".
Go look at what the Ladybird project has accomplished with much fewer resources. Ladybird will soon be as good as Firefox.
For relative definitions of "soon" and depending on the feature you use. I'd say it's probably 2 years or so away from being a real competitive option to FF/Chrome.
Clearly you haven't been following what Ladybird's team have been doing in the last months. With almost no resources, they've created this web engine that is almost at par with the giants.
The "almost" is very load bearing there... It's not remotely competitive with blink/webkit/gecko yet, be it for features support or performance.
> Omarchy 3.0 was released just last week with faster installation and increased Macbook compatibility, so if you’ve been Linux-curious for a while now, we encourage you to try it out!
"If you're curious about trying Linux, why not install this obscure mouseless tiling TUI distro to guarantee you'll never attempt to use Linux again!"
Is people more open to try Linux if it's very different from Mac or Windows? Was the problem with other Desktop Environments that they work too similarly to them?
I use the mouse in Omarchy all the time.
And I've used Macs since 2008 (and it's still my main work computer)
Not mouseless or obscure but it definitely is a distro
Granted, it does have a TUI focus
> 310 FydeOS
> 311 Omarchy
> 312 Adélie
https://distrowatch.com/dwres.php?resource=popularity
311th is plenty obscure in my book.
Isn't their ranking based on how many hits their respective pages get? Omarchy hype is happening on social media for the most part.
Omarchy just got added to Distro watch. Ranking currently #10 on the last 7 days.
I, too, only look at position and not velocity or acceleration.
Instead why not choose one of the 10000 Windows ui clones
I'm well into the Linux world and have been for years. I've never heard of Omarchy. Do they also sponsor the same way projects that are the basis of Arch Linux, for example? I'm thinking about pacman, infra, etc.
It's a very new "distro". DHH (that ruby on rails guy) shared it like 3 months ago as a distribution of his configs, then it grew rapidly.
https://youtu.be/I5Mnni7cea8
I'm curious what makes LadyBird so special compared to other major browsers like Firefox and Chromium?
It’s one of the very, very few independent browsers built from the ground up and not on top of one the few existing engines (Gecko, Chromium, WebKit), which is extremely important to the health of the open web.
Imagine a world where Chromium is the only browser engine. Standards wouldn’t matter and Google could just do whatever they wanted — we’re pretty close to that as it is.
To combat a Chrome hegemony you need strong opposition, not a long-tail of weak opposition. Or in other words: Firefox needs to become more competitive. I (unfortunately) don't think having another 0.1% market cap browser is the solution, at least not for now.
Just to clarify: I'm in favor of Cloudflare donating to Ladybird, and I'm in favor of them building it! I just don't think that's the solution to combating Chrome dominance.
What is Firefox if not weak opposition? Even given a reliable firehose of income from Google they haven't cracked that 0.1% market cap, and I don't see how funneling more resources into a browser that's been floundering for over a decade now will change anything.
Ladybird is still a good few years away from being a serious competitor, but nonetheless it is the most viable candidate in the absence of a path for Firefox to become competitive.
I don't believe that Firefox can become stronger so long as Mozilla continues to be structured as it is.
It's possible combating it in terms of pushing for different standards could be sufficient. More little guys at the table means more sway to push things like JPEG XL through.
Only if they’re bringing real users in sufficient numbers to affect site owners’ decisions. Right now, “the web” is what Chrome and Safari want it to be. Mozilla largely ceded their seat at that table but is probably the closest to being relevant again if they can come up with a better pitch to users.
> To combat a Chrome hegemony you need strong opposition, not a long-tail of weak opposition.
Do you have any ideas on how to accomplish this in a better way than what Ladybird is trying to do? In other words, what should Ladybird be doing differently?
Especially not if that browser currently ignores the biggest markets (Windows and mobile).
Firefox is also sustained by Google. So you have a choice between Google and Google.
And WebKit was built on top of KHTML. And Chromium (Blink) was built on top of WebKit.
That makes Ladybird even more unique. It’s looking to do what even Apple and Google weren’t willing to do.
> It’s one of the very, very few independent browsers built from the ground up
AFAIK they are using: https://skia.googlesource.com/skia
I mean... that is just a 2d accelerated graphic library, tough it being developed by Google makes uneasy since they are very eager to deprecate support for platform past their lifecycle support
I would not be worried about lifecycle of Skia. 2d rendering is important part of browser. Skia is essential for Chrome (and Ladybird now as well).
> Imagine a world where Chromium is the only browser engine.
We pretty much live in that world right now. The only significant competition is Webkit.
I suppose one immediate consequence of writing your own engine is you can't publish it to Apple Store, not that I think they care
In EU one can. And currently there is still a huge market not bound to Apple App Store.
It's famously impossible to donate money to Firefox (at least for users).
By this you mean that donations can only go to Mozilla and cannot be earmarked for the Firefox browser specifically right?
Yes. You can donate to the foundation but not only do they prevent earmarking, they actively don't use it for browser development.
I even mailed them back in June to confirm. They replied:
...
> When you donate to the Mozilla Foundation, your contribution goes directly toward advancing our mission to ensure the internet remains open and accessible for all. Our work focuses on issues like online privacy, open-source technologies, worthy AI and a digital world that puts people first. These funds directly support advocacy campaigns (i.e. asking irresponsible tech companies to protect your privacy), Mozilla’s fellowship program, MozFest gatherings, Common Voice, Responsible Computing Challenge, and so much more.
> However, it’s important to note that donations to Mozilla Foundation do not support the development of Firefox or any other Mozilla products.
> While we are a public-benefit 501(c)(3) organization under US law and the parent organization for the corporate entities that own Firefox, donations do not fund the Firefox browser and revenue is completely generated from within the product itself.
...
Why even donate to a business that keeps paying their CEO more and more while laying off employees?
It's not financed by Google.
Google is evil and Mozilla is incompetent. Ladybird has the potential to be a third option with neither of these attributes.
it's another browser engine (LibWeb), that seems notable enough on its own doesn't it?
Google started out by sponsoring Firefox, then hired many of their key developers to build Chrome. Cloudflare is likely doing the same thing, they know that strategically they depend too much on Google for the browser. This will get their foot in the door without making a large commitment. If the project goes well, it will be absorbed into Cloudflare in a few years.
Maybe a stupid question but: given the massive vulnerability surface area that a browser presents, why would one choose to build it in C++ instead of something memory and concurrency safe like Rust?
I know Rust doesn't automatically make the software safe, but it does rule out a very large % of the exploitable vulnerabilities allowed by unsafe languages like C and C++.
Why build a new browser in C++ when safer and more modern languages are available? [1]
> Ladybird started as a component of the SerenityOS hobby project, which only allows C++. The choice of language was not so much a technical decision, but more one of personal convenience. Andreas was most comfortable with C++ when creating SerenityOS, and now we have almost half a million lines of modern C++ to maintain.
> However, now that Ladybird has forked and become its own independent project, all constraints previously imposed by SerenityOS are no longer in effect.
> We have evaluated a number of alternatives, and will begin incremental adoption of Swift as a successor language, once Swift version 6 is released.
[1] https://ladybird.org/#faq:~:text=Why%20build%20a%20new%20bro...?
Wow! This is great news. While no language can make JS interpretation more safe, I am just happy to hear the the codebase will be in something other than C++. Having started my career with C++, I've enjoyed almost every other language more. The issue I had was I didn't _want_ to touch C++ so it is unlikely I would've contributed. But when Swift makes up more of the codebase, I might go and look around.
Who knows, maybe they cared about shipping a working product and not spend all their time fighting the borrow checker and harassing everyone else about memory safety. See Servo for ex.
hmm. Increasingly it feels like I shouldn't be using cloudflare.
I too hate when companies sponsor open source projects.
But why would anyone use Omarchy (based on Arch) and not use Gentoo directly? Not a separate project based on Gentoo, but a Gentoo Reference System [1]?
Gentoo already has all dev tools installed - they're an indispensable part of the package manager.
[1] https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Project:RelEng_GRS
Why bring up Gentoo at all?
Because
> Gentoo already has all dev tools installed
I wish they would fund Mozilla (or Firefox) instead of creating yet another browser. Clawing Firefox out of the hole that Mozilla and its dependency on Google have dug for it would be a true service to humanity. Replacing it by yet another browser only causes churn and standard proliferation.
My big question about Ladybird, will it support BSD also ?
>Ladybird has since grown into a cross-platform browser supporting Linux, macOS, and other Unix-like systems
Cool, seems it will support BSD, hopefully that sticks with this new funding.
>Will Ladybird work on Windows?
>We don't have anyone actively working on Windows support, and there are considerable changes required to make it work well outside a Unix-like environment.
>We would like to do Windows eventually, but it's not a priority at the moment.
What's the user share again? 70% of desktop users?
What is the state of the project again? Alpha status?
Yeah, and it supports Mac, with the worst compilation experience on the market and 10% of the userbase. Starting support for another OS this late in the project is going to be a nightmare, it's insane to do it for Windows last.
May be one day Ladybird will be the default on Omarchy. And on a fast system with fast USB you could install Omarchy in under 2 minute.
Someday I hope Omarchu becomes the standard way to develop Ruby Rails on, just like how Ruby Rails was always on macOS and not Windows.
It should sponsor an attempt at making the netsurf browser libs handle javascript with quickjs.
They are C, namely bringing something really significantly new: you could build a web engine with a simple C compiler.
It is late here so maybe I missed it in the article ... but what exactly do they mean with support for Ladybird? Giving them free coffee or developers or money? If yes, how much?
Cloudflare is listed as a Platinum sponsor on the Ladybird website (https://ladybird.org). Also from their website:
What are the sponsor tiers?
Platinum USD $100,000
Gold USD $50,000
Silver USD $10,000
Bronze USD $5,000
Copper USD $1,000 (no logo, text only)
Sponsorships run for one year, then you are welcome to renew.
not sure - if I were holding the CF purse strings I'd give any money to DHH or his endeavors but I do think the folks over at Ladybird are doing some awesome things wrt to the browser.
I don't use it myself since I'm a long time Linux user, but I'm a big fan of Omarchy brining Linux to the masses. This is great that Cloudflare is sponsoring it!
Glad to see them sponsoring struggling indie developers like DHH.
You forgot the /s
I wasn't being sarcastic? I heard they're making a new Koenigsegg and I'm genuinely concerned that without corporate sponsorship it might be out of his price range.
You forgot you're not on Reddit.
Ladybird is great, but Omarchy is a weird choice. Why can't DHH / Basecamp sponsor David's hobby distro if he wants?
The browser ecosystem is dangerously centralized and another independent rendering engine would be welcome. In contrast, I don't see the value in yet another flavor-of-the-week Linux distro. Even sponsoring Arch directly would make more sense here.
Also isn't it just a script to install some stuff and customize
I think the last mile polish has always been a big weakness of the oss ecosystem (on average), so this kind of integration into a nice package is important work, I think. Personally, I’m really enjoying Omarchy.
Like Dropbox was "just an sftp server"
Managing servers that store terabytes of data for you isn't exactly the same as configuring and stitching Linux programs together.
My point is that it’s not about what work is done, but about what users get from that work.
Everyone could, in theory, learn how to configure Arch and Hyprland, but most of us don’t have the time or interest to do it.
So Omarchy is to Arch something similar of what Ubuntu was to Debian 15 years ago.
It's not, though, Ubuntu worked out a lot of UI/UX that is just not there in Debian.
Omarchy is mostly a custom configuration of the same OS, nothing more ...
I agree that they should have sponsored Arch directly instead but nepos gonna nepo.
That's what I thought but I just checked and 3.0.0 was released 5 days ago and it has an ISO.
omakub (https://omakub.org/) is/was (for Ubuntu), this looks more like a "real" Arch derivative.
Omarchy will still have to distribute its image, so lots of bandwidth since they do not want to rely on the AUR during the install process (since AUR has been targeted by DDOSS attacks recently). Perhaps Cloudflare will provide that and not a dollar amount?
I have to say, a single announcement that Cloudflare is sponsoring specifically these two projects does start to look a bit like an attempt to curry favour with the grassroots part of the tech right: give “their guys” some money and praise and maybe they’ll stay off Cloudflare’s back for a bit. And to be clear, that’s not to say that it’s bad to sponsor Ladybird, or maybe even Omarchy.
Is Ladybird a tech right thing?
It kind of is, though not explicitly. If you follow Andreas on X you will see a lot of his comments and replies are either a) posting about being aggrieved about users who are mean and rude on BlueSky or b) Amplifying traditional family values, right wing beliefs, etc, in a somewhat indirect way. He seems to be too cautious to outright say anything, but it’s obvious by the company he keeps.
Somewhat - Kling is explicitly 'apolitical' and this always attracts a certain ilk of people.
---
And - maybe this is a stretch, but you also have to consider that the competing product (Servo) is written in Rust, while Ladybird is C++.
From what you read on hn, I think Rusts community being very liberal sort of resulted in memory safety being perceived as a culture war thing by some; ("authoritarian big compiler is forcing you to not free this memory" vs "the handmade c programmer with his artisanal allocations"). So Ladybird not being written in a safe language might be part of the appeal.
And I know that Ladybird is supposed to adopt Swift, but I don't think any single LOC has been written yet?
I'm not sure how true that is when half the Rust job postings are cryptocurrency related.
In Rust communities, like the official Discord server, there tend to be more left type people. Furthermore, if you go to left leaning communities that aren't related to programming the few programmers who are there are almost always Rust enjoyers. The cryptocurrency use also exists, of course. I suspect that the common thread in both cases is idealism -- leftists want what they see as an ideal economic system while crypto bros, when they aren't scamming, want an ideal financial system. Rust in many ways is closer to an ideal language in a way that feels to me to be similar to those other idealist arguments
I wouldn't describe it as such, but that's not what matters here. Andreas Kling has been out championing the anti-anti-Charlie-Kirk cause on Twitter, so it's a safe bet that the Lundukish grassroots anti-wokes see him as one of theirs. Whether he has any juice with the right-wing VC set I don't know.
Kling's politics aside, he's also had a history of abandoning projects after hyping them up on social media and attracting contributors. Here is what happened to SerenityOS and jakt, for example:
https://github.com/SerenityOS/serenity/graphs/commit-activit... https://github.com/SerenityOS/jakt/graphs/commit-activity
If Cloudflare wants to defend the future of the web, maybe they could also throw a few dollars towards projects with better governance and aren't helmed by a BFDL with a spotty record and are written in a more future-proof language than C++ [0]. (For example, Servo.)
[0]: In Kling's own words! https://web.archive.org/web/20250819053816/https://awesomekl...
>Kling's politics aside, he's also had a history of abandoning projects after hyping them up on social media and attracting contributors. Here is what happened to SerenityOS and jakt, for example:
He published free, open-source software. He's not obligated to work on a particular project forever. This is a particularly strange critique given that he shifted focus away from those projects to focus on other open-source work.
If anyone else wants to take over the work Andreas was doing on old projects, all his code is there for them to use.
It would be a bad look if he took the money and quit.
This is a very strange take. SerenityOS is a hobby project, from which both Jakt and Ladybird were born. Jakt never took off even within the Serenity community. Ladybird is where most of us were spending our time, and its departure from Serenity was a pretty natural evolution.
Ladybird is now a legally established nonprofit, with a board of directors and several full-time employees. Not a hobby.
Isn't Ladybird (now) supposed to be moving to Swift, though?
(I think that investment in Servo is also likely to be an excellent idea. Sponsoring Igalia's Servo work is an obvious starting place for any European institutions which are actually serious about "tech sovereignty", just to start with.)
Someone should do some digging into GamerGate…
Openly aligning with DHH is certainly a choice. After all being created by DHH is the only feature they list on their website.
Didn't care for the DHH controversies for a long time but if you start writing white national blog posts[1] I don't know what to say anymore.
[1] https://world.hey.com/dhh/as-i-remember-london-e7d38e64
Damn that's worse than I thought it would be. Citing non white-british ethnic groups as non-native is worrying. Especially to try use it as an anti-immigrant statement, when plenty of those are going to be third generation at the least. In fact why isn't anyone who is born here classed as native by DHH. Troublesome.
Especially when the main reason for a lot of the problems with the country is rich white men, notably the Tories and their failed governance over the past 14 years.
Yup, and just to add, for those not in the UK, or particularly connected to London, etc. - this take is utter garbage. The UK certainly has a variety of challenges, but they are not what the far right (and that's what the people he's talking about absolutely are) make them out to be. London is not what it's painted to be by external rabble-rousers and populists, and this mania/delusion that's being pushed (sometimes by the very wealthy who are often much closer to the problem than immigrants are) is a significant problem.
DHH is (or should be) pretty close to a toxic brand right now, and for someone who published various edicts on "don't talk about politics at work", it would be lovely if he followed his own advice a little more.
Sad you have to come to the bottom of the comment section to find any criticism of DHH. I wouldn't do business with the guy, nor use his OS.
DHH very keen to demonstrate to all Londoners that he’s not been to London
edit: and also is a tool
omarchy has brought in thousands of new linux users that previously had no interest in desktop linux. its one of the best things that has happened to desktop linux in recent memory. most everythign else in linux is incestuous self referential stuff for people who already use linux. that is why it is different.
I'd like to see a citation on that. I don't think I've ever encountered Omarchy outside the pages of this website. SteamOS seems far more consequential to me in terms of end-user Linux adoption.
Something like https://www.anduinos.com/ is far friendlier and more approachable for folks new to Linux. Why not sponsor that? I cannot imagine who the target audience is going from MacOS straight to TUIs on Arch.
Why not sponsor something that is already gaining traction? Lots of posts on Omakub/Omarchy on X and reddit, so they're clearly doing something right.
Linux didn't need only polish and money, it needed an evangelist with a story of dumping and supposedly fighting against Apple. This might put off people that obviously never needed any help in using or customizing Linux, but not those looking to switch over.
I guess the only real data of non-linux users switching to omarchy as of today, are the 37signals employees (including those that will be forced to use it)
Timely sponsorship, downloading the Omarchy 3 ISO last week sat at about 600 KiB/s. Appreciated!
Browser war is probably going to be won by one of Google or Openai, and $net is late to the party
The momentum that Omarchy seems to have is impressive. I wonder if a tighter collaboration with Framework is in the cards, especially with their founder and CEO submitting pull requests to the project[1].
[1] https://github.com/basecamp/omarchy/pull/1368
Not to disrespect omarchy intent, but if you want provably safe OS, is there not a more reduced surface yet, such as .. dare I say it nix?
If that kind of reductionism is too far, how about Alpine?
DHH seems to be driven by bitterness at Apple charging for inclusion in their walled garden. Fair enough, his choice. Interesting he includes his paid email service bundled in Omarchy.
Refreshing to see a big corpo support these cool projects!
Good karma
I haven't tried Omarchy but based on DHH videos, while I like the idea, I'd say it is a little too opinionated - including random stuff that DHH likes / uses on a day-to-day basis and by his employees.
It also kind of begs the question, how deep in the "supply chain" should support go. Maybe if the Hyprland folks got a bit more sponsorship the setup would be easy. The same goes for Arch itself (though I do think some of the "squirrel catchers" are there on purpose).
I am happy for a new browser/engine but I'm highly skeptical that Ladybird will ever come close to Chrome or Firefox in terms of features, compatibility and performance. It's just very hard to imagine. There's servo and look at where it is after 13 years!
No offense to anyone really but browser engines are inhumane amount of talent and effort. Might as well just keep making Firefox better.
The problem with Firefox is Mozilla. That’s also a common thread with Servo. Maybe Servo will get better now that it doesn’t have that baggage anymore. If we’re going to have a chromium alternative, it won’t be anything from Mozilla.
Firefox doubled down on using/selling user data for advertising purposes, so that's a big reason for avoiding it.
I held onto it as someone who didn't even like the politics of the people behind it (the beauty of open source), for the sake of browser engine diversity, but changing terms of service of use of personal data was the final blow
It seems irrational to me to switch to chrome (and where else could you switch to?) over data sale concerns. A more rational approach could be a Firefox fork that preserves privacy.
Privacy is a big deal for many, especially if you grew up before the age of telemetry everywhere.
For now, a privacy preserving chromium fork will do, until hopefully the Ladybird project is mature enough to provide alternatives
Why a chromium fork over a Firefox fork? Both preserve privacy
Embrace, extend, extinguish.
Ladybird is doomed with this.
ITT: some of you would rather see Omarchy fail and thus Linux desktop adoption slowed down because you don't agree with DHH's 'controversial' political views.
Guess we'll have to keep waiting for someone with a 'clean' record to show up and promote Linux.
> someone with a 'clean' record
Just don't be a fascist. We're not asking for much here.
Isnt cloudflare NSA/CIA? lol
so crazy to think that 2025 will be finally the "Year of the Linux Desktop (TM)" and it's all DHH fault! love it <3
people downvoting is fine. Omarchy is great. Worked 12 years for a Linux Distro and they were never able to achieve what he did in months (on top of Arch for sure).
Honestly nice move on CF's part, have to say; there's more real energy moving in the open source world since Lunduke started commenting.