> 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.

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.

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.

$100k

https://x.com/ladybirdbrowser/status/1970160706650595592

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.

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.

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

Instead why not choose one of the 10000 Windows ui clones

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

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.

It's famously impossible to donate money to Firefox (at least for users).

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?

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...?

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.

I too hate when companies sponsor open source projects.

Why bring up Gentoo at all?

What is the state of the project again? Alpha status?

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.

You forgot the /s

Also isn't it just a script to install some stuff and customize

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

So that's like... almost nothing compared to what's needed for browser development.

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.

The "almost" is very load bearing there... It's not remotely competitive with blink/webkit/gecko yet, be it for features support or performance.

> 310 FydeOS

> 311 Omarchy

> 312 Adélie

https://distrowatch.com/dwres.php?resource=popularity

311th is plenty obscure in my book.

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.

> It’s one of the very, very few independent browsers built from the ground up

AFAIK they are using: https://skia.googlesource.com/skia

> 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

By this you mean that donations can only go to Mozilla and cannot be earmarked for the Firefox browser specifically right?

Why even donate to a business that keeps paying their CEO more and more while laying off employees?

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.

sponsoring omarchy is, to all intents and purposes, sponsoring DHH. Not someone you publicly associate your organisation with him unless you want to send a certain message.

This announcement is just cloudflare saying ‘we are the proverbial nazi bar’

Because

> Gentoo already has all dev tools installed

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.

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.

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"

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.

I wonder how many will or already have followed the Omarchy path without realizing the difficulty they'll have dual booting.

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 :)

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

Does Omarchy offer anything other than opinionated dotfiles? These have always existed.

Isn't that just Ubuntu?

How well does it work if I want to move outside the scripted defaults?

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.)

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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'd be surprised if it was actually illegal. "operating system" isn't a protected characteristic in law

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.

> 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

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.

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.

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.

Yes, it goes beyond mere dotfiles.

There's a LUKS setup, PAM setup, ufw setup, yay/aur setup.

The "nice defaults" of Ubuntu and Omarchy cater to completely different audiences

Way, way better than Ubuntu. And it adheres to *NIX philosophy by making all the config editable via text files.

Yes, but ubuntu made stupid choices most developers don't agree with

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

it's one package install tho. did you try to search for Bluetooth on the arch wiki?

Have you tried KDE/plasma6 recently? IMHO, it's better than anything else, including Windows and OS X.

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.

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)

SteamOS is a good analogy

Or Kali Linux

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.

> 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.

> 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.

> 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.

>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.

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.

surely they can be held responsible - they are the ones defining whatever heuristics cause traffic to be classed as malicious!

> 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.

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.

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.

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".

That's ahistoric. Democratic governments are correlated with a _decrease_ in violent conflict.

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.

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.

> 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.

> SafetyNet […] provides an API for applications to verify the app is running in a verifiable and locked down environment.

FTFY

Access to public resources is. Companies aren't even allowed to dictate what can be installed on their OS anymore.

Thank you, this is my pet peeve as well

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.

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 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.

Isn't that just tasksel and defaults? Iirc the various Ubuntu flavors each have a package for their default settings...

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.

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.

Like what?

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 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.

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.

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.”

KHTML, Gecko, most Blink forks.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

>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?

> 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.

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.

no?

> 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.

> prophet stream

!!!

> 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

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.

> you're no longer allowed to do this

This doesn't resonate with me generally. How are you trying to browse anonymously?

CF is not magic, they have limits too. What's the point of serving cached copies to bots while real users experience unavailability?

Verify, it doesn't do any kind of locking down itself.

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 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.

comparing arch with LFS is wild, but thanks for sharing.

I personally just pacman install the kde metapackage, and I'm done.

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.

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.

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

I'm not sure how true that is when half the Rust job postings are cryptocurrency related.

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...

Someone should do some digging into GamerGate…

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.

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.

> 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...

> 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.

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.

KHTML development stopped nearly ten years ago and I don’t know any significant Blink forks.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Why do you think they moved to Chromium then? They switched because they could not support a competitive engine by themselves.

Webkit is ~10% as big as Chromium and Ladybird and Netsurf are less than 1%.

> 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.

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.

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.

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 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'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.

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.

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.

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

>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.)

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.

> 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.

How well do Gmail and Google Docs work on Firefox today?

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Also: reset/change selected client certificate without restarting.

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.

The captcha pages are guaranteed to be static while the upstream content could miss the cache at any time.

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

  $ cat ~/.local/user/applications/HEY.desktop
  [Desktop Entry]
  Version=1.0
  Name=HEY
  Comment=HEY
  Exec=omarchy-launch-webapp "https://app.hey.com"
  Terminal=false
  Type=Application
  Icon=/home/user/.local/share/applications/icons/HEY.png
  StartupNotify=true