I have been running Omarchy on my machine for months now, and the thing I keep noticing has nothing to do with any single feature, it is that I have stopped thinking about my computer, which is the highest compliment I know how to pay a piece of software. Then I open the browser and read what the internet has decided about the man who built it, and the distance between those two experiences has been bothering me for weeks, because the machine in front of me is quiet and fast and beautiful while the conversation around it has turned into a war.

The charges arrive in a familiar order, which is that Omarchy is a pile of shell scripts with a coat of paint, that it is insecure because it installs from a pipe, that it is one man’s taste imposed on a community, that DHH is a fascist, and that the companies writing the cheques are funding something ugly, and I want to separate two things inside that list because one of them is a legitimate engineering conversation and the other is a mob with a search bar. The legitimate version is about attack surface and packaging and whether a distribution built around the taste of one person can outlive him, and I have read those arguments and some of them are reasonable (I am no expert on threat modelling so please take that with a bag of salt). In plain English; can a shell script be patched fast enough, and can the project survive the man who started it. The other version is a blog post whose headline announces that Nazism is being funded, which is the kind of sentence that tells you more about the person typing it than about the person it names.

Here is what the money actually looks like, since the critics keep waving it around as evidence of something sinister, which is that pledges to the project have crossed eighteen and a half million dollars, with DigitalOcean putting in three million as a founding corporate patron and the published tiers running at a million a year for corporations and a hundred thousand for smaller believers, and the repository sitting at something like forty one thousand stars with six and a half thousand commits behind it, and the whole thing incubated at 37signals where the man works, and none of it is hidden because the site names every patron under a heading that says the project is backed by the oligarchy with a shadowy agenda of better Linux, which is the sound of somebody who has decided to laugh at the accusation and get on with the work. And nobody publishes their funders under a joke heading if the money is meant to be secret.

The money arrived for the boring reason money arrives anywhere, which is that people were already using the thing, because there are thousands of community plugins now and meetups happening in Bangalore and Sydney and Berlin and Toronto and Havana and Providence, and the install takes under a minute on a modern machine while still running on a 2011 ThinkPad with two gigabytes of memory. A distribution that people are putting on fifteen year old laptops and writing plugins for at midnight is not a shell script with a marketing budget, and the funders read the same numbers that everybody else reads. 1Password and Framework learned this the hard way, since both of them wrote cheques and both of them got dragged into a fight about the politics of the man receiving the money, and I find it hard to describe that as anything except a tax on generosity. Do we really punish somebody for writing a cheque? I don’t think so!

I have spent my whole life around technical people and I have come to believe there are two kinds, which is the kind who looks at something broken and feels an itch to fix it, and the kind whose first instinct on seeing something work is to work out why it is a fraud. DHH belongs to the first kind and he is the loudest current example of it, since he shipped Rails into a world that was certain Java was the answer and made web development feel like writing sentences, and then shipped Hotwire into a world that was certain you needed a single page application, and wrote a book about working less, and left the cloud when everybody was moving in, and now he has shipped an operating system that installs in less than a minute on hardware most people already own. So, the second kind has never shipped an operating system, and it mostly writes about the people who have. Damn!

The sin the Linux world actually committed had nothing to do with scripts or licences, since the real damage was in the assumption that the person using the tool is an obstacle to be trained, which is why twenty years of genuinely excellent engineering arrived with an interface that expects you to read the documentation like scripture and recite the flags like a prayer. Nobody in that world seems to have sat through a single class on user gratification, and the culture kept rewarding the wrong virtue, because being technically correct was the only grade on offer and a program that does exactly the right thing while making the person in front of it feel stupid still passes the exam. Its so sad to see. Matz designed Ruby for humans and the whole language feels different because of that one decision, and Rails was the framework that read like English, and you can argue about the tradeoffs all day and the answer stays the same, which is that a person could sit down and build something without first having to become a different person.

Being technically correct is the cheapest thing in software, and I say that as somebody who has been technically correct about a great many things that nobody wanted, because correctness costs nothing to the person asserting it and everything to the person receiving it. This is why the critics never actually engage with the user experience, since their argument is about identity and purity and it has no room in it for the person who installed a beautiful system and finished their work in an hour, and that person is not going to be argued out of it by a thread about the security posture of a bootstrap script (or atleast that is how it seems to me).

I have been on Omarchy for months and my reason has nothing to do with any of this, which is that it is friendly in a way that desktop Linux has almost never been, and with Quattro the system lets me add the applications I want on my own terms, which sounds like a small thing until you remember how long we waited for it. I grew up on Windows 98 and Windows XP where the joy was in the decoration, and the themes and the widgets and the desktop enhancement tools of that era let you arrange the machine the way your own head was arranged, and all of it slowly died because the industry decided there was one respectable way for a desktop to look. And then you look at what people actually do to their machines and every one of them has piled things into it, because the urge was never wrong and the tools simply stopped arriving.

The moment that made all of this concrete for me came within an hour of installing Quattro, when I wanted to change my resolution and found there was no interface for it, and I told an agent to build me one, and it existed in about ten minutes, and I was so pleased with it that I decided to give it back to the community, and when I went to submit it I found that somebody had already built the same thing and it was already sitting in the plugin list. That is what a community looks like when it loves to build, and it looks nothing like the community that spent the last month deciding whether the people funding this work deserve to be punished for it. So cool!

I have read enough of DHH’s writing to know I do not agree with all of it, and I do not need to, because the operating system has never once asked me to agree with anything, and that is the whole promise of a tool, which is that it does its job and leaves your opinions alone. He is also combative in a way that invites some of what he gets, and I am not going to pretend otherwise, since a man who enjoys the fight cannot be surprised when the fight turns up, and none of that changes what the artifact does or whether the people who funded it deserved to be hounded for writing a cheque. The word fascist gets used so loosely now that it has stopped describing anything, and when it gets attached to a programmer because he has opinions about work culture and diversity programmes and the cloud, the word stops being a warning and becomes a way of winning an argument you were losing on the merits.

What I keep noticing in the loudest critics is that the criticism is the product, since the person tearing something down gets to look like the one who knows better without ever having to make anything, and the fastest way to make somebody look small is to say they do not understand the technology, which I have been told often enough to recognise the move from across the room. Every one of those threads is an audition, and the audience is the same twelve people who already agree with each other, and meanwhile somebody in Cuba is running Omarchy on a machine he rescued and a kid in Kolkata is writing his first plugin, and none of that needed anybody’s permission.

The posture is what I want to defend, which is the one that looks at a broken thing and assumes it can be fixed, because that posture is the only reason any of us have anything at all and the other posture has never given anybody a single usable tool. The optimists are the ones who build the thing that gets the next person started, and the last month has been a demonstration of how much energy a community can spend on the giver while the gift sits unopened on the table, and I keep coming back to those ten minutes and the stranger who had already solved my problem before I could hand it in.

Tweet to me the thing you built that nobody asked you to build. I am @troysk704.