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.
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 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.
> 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 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.
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.
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.
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 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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™.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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 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 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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?
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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).
Wow, ok, now I'm actually quite interested in Ladybird seeing that they're actually serious and focused on their goal. Wish I could say the same for Mozilla. Been using Firefox for decades but can only imagine how much better it would be if the resources were allocated properly.
I never thought he of all people would go there !!!
Yes Britian is changing -like the US will be where minorities will outnumber the white population - I am a minority living in a black country, the same one where Elon was born and really it is not as scary :).
Totally irrational fear - they need to think seriously about themselves.
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.
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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.
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> Cloudflare supporting Ladybird makes sense for the same reasons that Valve invests in Proton.
Which Proton are you referring to?
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.
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> 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.
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> 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?
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Cloudflare is trying to establish itself as the toll station for AI. And anyone who doesn't play by their rules gets excommunicated.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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> 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?
How do you call someone who has been doing evil things suddenly do one good thing?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reputation_laundering
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> 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.
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.
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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.
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
Sure, you win, chief :)
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
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.
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!
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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.
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).
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.
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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.
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.
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!
Omarchy iso is literally 2 minutes from boot from usb to a productive pc
Good for you.
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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Does Omarchy offer anything other than opinionated dotfiles? These have always existed.
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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?
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How well does it work if I want to move outside the scripted defaults?
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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.)
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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.
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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.
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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.
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.
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
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
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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.
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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 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 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?
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> 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://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.
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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.
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.
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.
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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.
> 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.
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Instead why not choose one of the 10000 Windows ui clones
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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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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.
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$100k
https://x.com/ladybirdbrowser/status/1970160706650595592
So that's like... almost nothing compared to what's needed for browser development.
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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.
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.
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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
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> 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
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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?
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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?
hmm. Increasingly it feels like I shouldn't be using cloudflare.
I too hate when companies sponsor open source projects.
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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.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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"
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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?
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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.
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DHH very keen to demonstrate to all Londoners that he’s not been to London
edit: and also is a tool
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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.
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Timely sponsorship, downloading the Omarchy 3 ISO last week sat at about 600 KiB/s. Appreciated!
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
Browser war is probably going to be won by one of Google or Openai, and $net is late to the party
Refreshing to see a big corpo support these cool projects!
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.
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).
Ladybird is doomed with this.
Embrace, extend, extinguish.
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.
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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.
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This is the only situation where I'd fault the messenger and discard the message. DHH has been a huge turn-off for me since I discovered his ideology.
Omarchy is not for me.
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).
Isnt cloudflare NSA/CIA? lol
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Posted elsewhere in this thread, it appears that ladybird does not have a great record in this dept.
https://hyperborea.org/reviews/software/ladybird-inclusivity...
Wow, ok, now I'm actually quite interested in Ladybird seeing that they're actually serious and focused on their goal. Wish I could say the same for Mozilla. Been using Firefox for decades but can only imagine how much better it would be if the resources were allocated properly.
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I never thought he of all people would go there !!!
Yes Britian is changing -like the US will be where minorities will outnumber the white population - I am a minority living in a black country, the same one where Elon was born and really it is not as scary :).
Totally irrational fear - they need to think seriously about themselves.
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.