Your Racist Linux Distro Is Very Nice

sometimes, you know, you should be judged

Today I found out my password manager betrayed me.

No, not like that - it didn't leak my bank account login to the Uzbek mafia or anything nearly that dramatic. Instead, my password manager - which I've used and recommended for at least a decade now - gave a substantial corporate donation to a Linux distribution.

"Gosh, Lum, with everything waves arms going on in the world, you're mad about that, specifically? Could you be just a tiny bit more precious and privileged?"

But you see, it is about everything going on in the world.

The Linux distribution in question is Omarchy. Omarchy is the creation of David Heinemeier Hansson, who goes by "dhh" because he's like Madonna only considerably less sexy and with more hair (and also, most likely, because only 13% of Americans would spell "Hansson" correctly). dhh was famous for, in rough order, creating a project manager, opensourcing the web framework said project manager was written in, being mildly racist, telling his employees not to be political, being political, being hysterically racist, being hideously racist, did I mention the racist thing?

I trust it will not surprise you that dhh is very active on X, The Everything App, which for some crazy reason has the reputation of being, ah, fascist-adjacent. He posted this a few weeks back:

He then made a blog post doubling down on this, with the usual "But CHYNA!" whataboutism you'd expect from our tech elite. A passage from that struck me in particular:

But the idea that Anthropic should decide what you get to read is insane. Translating a text isn't endorsing it. What if Microsoft Word started refusing to right-align paragraphs it disagreed with? Or Windows wouldn't print an excerpt from The Camp of the Saints? (I know, don't give them any ideas!).

"The Camp of the Saints" is the worst book ever written.

Yes. Worse than "Mein Kampf". Worse than "The Turner Diaries". Worse than "Twilight".

It has been endorsed by Steve Bannon. It has been recommended by Stephen Miller. It is racist. It is, to a mind-blowing degree, obscene (and I've seen what MMO players can come up with). It is frequently used, by politicians that should know better, as justification for exclusion and, eventually, genocide.

Sure, dhh made it very clear that he has some clear issues regarding race. For example, from "The Rape of Britain":

...the industrial-scale sexual atrocities committed by predominantly Pakistani Muslims against mostly White British girls in the United Kingdom over decades. It's the stuff of nightmares. 

And "As I Remember London":

They're still reeling from the Pakistani rape gangs that were left free to terrorize cities like Rotherham and Rochdale for years on end with horror-movie-like scenes of the most despicable, depraved abuse of British girls. Unlike Linehan's tweets, I actually implore you not to peruse these stories too closely, though, because they'll make you sick. 

Clearly, dhh spends a lot of time thinking about Pakistani rapists in between musings on opinionated Linux distros.

But for me, the alarm is "The Camp of the Saints". Of all the books ever written he could have reached for in his grasping metaphor of the boot of corporate censorship stomping on the face of "race realist" free thinkers forever, he reached for that one. Twice. If you ever imply you've read "The Camp of the Saints" for fun, much less recommend it as a little light reading for your friends? Congratulations - you're a racist and most likely a fascist as well. You can, in fact, be judged by the company you keep.

Thus, how I judge dhh. As someone who got insanely wealthy through some good coding and much more good luck, and used that to channel his inner Jean-Marie Le Pen.

How the CEOs of Dell, Shopify, Cloudflare, Dropbox, Coinbase, Stripe and others judge dhh? A little differently. Just a bit.

At least, however, they did so in their own personal capacity. If Michael Dell wants to blow a million on a racist, he's perfectly allowed to. Dude is no longer getting a Dell, but it's within his rights as a free person and an idiot. You'd expect it from the CEO of a company getting rich off brokering the trade of sudokus you can trade for heroin, at least.

1Password, on the other hand, did so as a corporate sponsor. That means the money I spend yearly on 1Password is now going towards dhh.

I dislike this.

Obviously I'm not the only one (someone as incandescently furious as I has already spoken out demanding action, more will shortly I'm sure) but what this displays is not only a cowardice towards any moral judgement (or worse, an agreement with it) but a darkly amusing incompetence - Omarchy just isn't very good.

Its best points are what it inherits. Arch Linux is a good base distro! It's also unofficially the distro adopted by trans women who like anime. I'm sure dhh would rather you not know this.

Its worse points are that it mainly just installs things dhh thinks are cool. Such as, you know, Basecamp and Hey. dhh thinks those are very cool because he wrote them. They are not that cool. There's no real rhyme or reason to what Omarchy does - it's just a scripted installer of random stuff. (warning: if you have javascript enabled, that website will try to give you a jumpscare because the author hates it. forget it jake, it's linuxtown.)

Its worst points are, uh, it gives out root access to your system. Whoopsie.

Look, if you want to have a cool Unix system, that's great! I run two. One is Mac OS. The other is CachyOS. You might like Bazzite instead for pre-installed pro gamer moves. Or just hell with it, go with boring old Ubuntu and never worry about compatibility issues ever again. If you want it to look like something Case is typing on from the Chatsubo in Chiba City, /r/linuxporn posts something new roughly every 8 seconds.

You don't have to give a racist $300,000 of subscription revenue for his very nice Linux distro that only occasionally gives people root access.

You especially don't have to give them money I gave you. Really. I'd rather you not. Thanks.