Stop Stop-Omarchy

What this page is

In September 2026 a Neocities page titled Stop Omarchy began circulating. It describes Omarchy as “a political movement disguised as a Linux distro,” applies Roger Griffin and Robert Paxton to a desktop ricing project, publishes a “people to avoid” roster that runs from Richard Stallman to Jeff Geerling, and asks maintainers not to accept bug reports that arise on Omarchy systems.^A

That page is itself a political project. It is allowed to exist. So is this one. The original author released the text under CC0 and invited copies, remixes, and theft. This is a reply in the same register: public commentary, no call to violence, no call to unlawful action, no affiliation with Omarchy, Omacom, 37signals, or anyone named.

The facts, without the spell

1. Omarchy is a Linux distribution. It is an Arch-based, MIT-licensed desktop built around Hyprland and (as of 4.0 “Quattro”) a Quickshell desktop shell. DHH published the first version on 26 June 2025 as the sister project to Omakub, his Ubuntu setup. It grew from a post-install script into an ISO, a package repo, and a manual. Wikipedia, The Register, heise, and the project’s own site describe it that way.¹²³
2. It is popular for the boring reason that people like using it. DHH reported a petabyte of ISO downloads in a thirty-day window in late 2025, on the order of 150,000 installs. The GitHub repo has tens of thousands of stars. 37signals is moving ops and Ruby teams onto it on a hardware-refresh cycle. That is not “disguise.” That is product-market fit in a niche that has wanted a tasteful, batteries-included tiling desktop for years.⁴⁵⁶
3. Omacom is a nonprofit that funds a desktop OS and the projects under it. Founding patrons pledged $1 million each. Distinguished patrons pledged $100,000. Corporate patrons pledged multi-year cash or model tokens. DigitalOcean pledged $1 million a year for three years. Open patronage at $16–$8,192 is public. The foundation’s own pages say the money pays Hyprland, Quickshell, mise, artists in residence, infrastructure, plugin prizes, and full-time kernel and shell leads. That is an unusually well-funded ricing project. It is not a party militia.⁷⁸⁹
4. “$18 million from powerful men” is a fundraising total, not a secret. The original page treats the patrons list as a confession. Omarchy publishes the patrons list on purpose. The same page then treats “hundreds of smaller backers” as “laundering.” That is what an open patronage page looks like when you have already decided the project is illegitimate. Stripe, Shopify, Cloudflare, Dell, Dropbox, Coinbase, and 1Password funding a Linux desktop is not a coup. It is rich engineers paying for the computer they want to use.
5. The Omarchy Doctrine is a product creed, not Griffin’s palingenetic ultranationalism. Read it. “Heritage is duty” is about shipping vi fifty years after Bill Joy and a theme dedicated to von Neumann. “Hold the line” is about dropping CoC struggle sessions and judging work. “Command is service” is the standard BDFL sentence every long-lived FOSS project already lives under (Linux, Ruby, Rails). “You’re somebody now” is a pep talk to contributors. Flyingpenguin’s essay that the original page cites as proof of “fascism stage one” works by taking those slogans, ignoring their referents on the same page, and substituting DHH’s immigration essays as the “real” meaning.¹⁰¹¹ That is midrash, not political science.
6. A Linux distro does not become fascism because its author has restrictionist politics. If it did, the original page would owe an explanation of why the same method is not applied, with the same heat, to every project whose founder has written something vicious from the other direction. It does not. The method is reserved for the outgroup.

What the Doctrine actually says

The original page compresses the Doctrine into three phrases — “heritage as duty, hold the line, the will to power” — and then announces a match to Griffin and Paxton. Here is what the live page at omarchy.org/doctrine actually contains, in order:¹⁰

Paxton’s first stage of fascism is not “a founder, a README, and users.” If it were, every successful open-source project would already be there. Griffin’s palingenetic populist ultranationalism requires a myth of national rebirth against decadence for an ethnically defined people. A page about tiling window managers, agent CLIs, and von Neumann themes does not become that myth because the same man also writes about London demographics on a different URL.

Two things can be true at once: DHH’s politics are of a European restrictionist who likes national majorities, and the Doctrine is a Linux pep talk. Conflating them is the whole trick.

The essays, quoted not ventriloquized

Stop-Omarchy is most effective when it refuses to quote. Quoting is worse for the prosecutor than the paraphrase.

“As I remember London” (15 September 2025)

DHH wrote that he no longer wanted to live in London because the native-British share of the city fell from more than 60% in 2000 to about a third by 2024; that Copenhagen still feels Danish in a way London no longer feels British; that he understood the frustration on display at Tommy Robinson’s “March for Freedom”; that British speech enforcement (he cites daily arrests and the Graham Linehan arrest) is grotesque; and that “Denmark is primarily a country for the Danes, Britain primarily a united kingdom for the Brits” is not, in his view, racism.¹²

That is restrictionist nationalism. It is also a common position in European electoral politics, including in parties that win elections. Calling a large public march “heartwarming” because you think the flags and the free-speech complaint are healthy is not the same thing as joining the English Defence League. Tommy Robinson is a polarizing figure with a criminal record and a long media war around him. Noticing that a crowd of Britons is angry about demographic change and two-tier speech law is not “white nationalism” unless those words now mean “any defense of a historic national majority.” If they do, the original page should say so, because that is a much larger claim than “DHH is uniquely radioactive.”

“Wolves, sheep, and gypsies” (21 July 2026)

This one is worse, and the original page is right that it is worse. DHH compares Denmark’s returning wolf population and dead sheep to foreign vagrants — he uses the slur “gypsies” — camping in Copenhagen parks after the city legalized overnight sleeping in green space. The sentence everyone quotes is the sentence he wrote:

When wolves get out of control, you shoot them. When gypsies take over public spaces, you deport them. This isn’t hard, it isn’t cruel. It’s the basic logic of self-preservation.¹³

He does not say “shoot the people.” He does say “deport,” after an analogy whose other pole is lethal wildlife control. That is a crude, dehumanizing analogy. People of good faith can call it racist. An editor would have killed it. Anthropic’s model refusing to translate it is a product-safety anecdote, not a tribunal verdict.¹⁴

What the original page then does is treat that blog post as the hidden constitution of a Linux distribution, and treat every patron of the distribution as a co-author. That is not how speech, software, or donations work. 1Password’s CEO publicly said the company does not condone the opinions. They still funded a desktop OS. Adults can hold both thoughts.¹⁵

The “grooming gangs” line

The original page says DHH “invoked the far-right ‘grooming gangs’ narrative, a claim official child sexual abuse data does not support,” and cites the CSA Centre’s national trends page.¹⁶ National CSA totals and the documented history of group-based child sexual exploitation in Rotherham, Rochdale, and other towns are not the same dataset. The 2014 Jay report on Rotherham and subsequent inquiries described organized exploitation that local authorities failed to confront in part because they were afraid of being called racist. You can argue about scale, causation, and the politics of the phrase. You cannot honestly say “official data does not support” the existence of the scandals DHH is pointing at. That sentence is doing work the citation cannot carry.

The money is not a militia

Stop-Omarchy needs the treasury to be ominous. The public record is more banal.

• Launch: eight founding patrons at $1 million. Then twelve. Cash plus tokens plus multi-year corporate pledges plus ~$60,000 from ~500 small donors produced the “approximately $18.5 million” figure after DigitalOcean’s $3 million commitment.⁷⁸
• The foundation says it intends to spend what it raises over about three years: sponsorships for Hyprland and mise, Quickshell leadership, an Omarchy kernel lead, artists in residence, infrastructure, competitions.⁹
• Corporate patrons include 1Password and 37signals at $100,000/year for three years, Four Technologies on similar terms, token allotments from AI labs, and DigitalOcean at $1 million/year for three years. Meta appears as a token patron in secondary writeups. That is an AI-and-infra donor list, not a Waffen-SS reunion.¹⁷

Is it a lot of money for a desktop Linux project? Yes. Is money “reputation-washing” by definition if the founder has bad politics? Only if you believe no one is allowed to fund software written by people you dislike. The original page’s own “what you can do” section then asks maintainers to refuse bug reports from Omarchy systems. That is not anti-fascism. That is making the compiler a loyalty test.

The same page folds Amazon, Palantir, and Salesforce ICE contracts into the Omarchy story because “the same infrastructure companies bankrolling Omarchy are also the backbone of U.S. deportation violence.” Some companies on the wide secondary list have government contracts. Omarchy is a laptop OS. Collapsing those layers is how every technology company becomes complicit in every state action, which is a theory that makes the word “complicit” useless.

How a boycott list works

Read the original “People to Avoid” section slowly. It is the most honest part of the page, because it stops pretending this is about one distro.

The preamble says people are listed “not only for far-right connections” but also for transphobia, homophobia, misogyny, antisemitism, Islamophobia, harassment, doxxing, Kiwi Farms, sexual abuse allegations, conspiracy-mongering, and “commercial support for deportation and surveillance infrastructure.” Then it lists, among others:

• Richard M. Stallman
• Daniel J. Bernstein
• Eric S. Raymond
• Jack Dorsey
• Louis Rossmann
• Jeff Geerling
• Brendan Eich
• Jacob Appelbaum
• Andrew Torba
• Curtis Yarvin
• Vox Day

Those names do not belong in one bucket. Some of them have done things that would get them fired from a workplace. Some of them wrote old essays. Some of them built widely used tools and have opinions about pronouns, moderation, or the state. Some of them are actual extremists. A list that needs RMS, DJB, Geerling, and Vox Day on the same “do not contact” poster is not a safety document. It is a culture-war phone book.

The original page says “Do not contact, harass, or engage with these people in any way.” That sentence is doing two jobs: a disclaimer against stochastic targeting, and a request for total social death. You can decline to collaborate with anyone you want. Publishing a combined enemies list of FOSS elders, CEOs, and cranks, then wrapping it in “this is not a call to harassment,” is how harassment lists always describe themselves.

The secondary-sanctions list then names Adobe, Amazon, Apple, Google, Microsoft, Intel, NVIDIA, Oracle, Spotify, Framework, Mullvad, Hyprland, Suckless, Bluesky, and more. If the moral rule is “do not use far-right-enabling tech,” and the enabling set is most of the industry plus a VPN and a window manager, the rule is “use nothing, except the projects that have already joined our faction.” That is not a boycott. That is a church.

Hyprland, Freedesktop, and the purity machine

Stop-Omarchy says Omarchy is “already funding other projects with far-right leadership, including Hyprland (banned for enabling transphobic harassment).”

What happened in 2024 is public and narrower. Freedesktop’s CoC group warned Vaxry over conduct in Hyprland community spaces, then suspended his Freedesktop account after his blog response. LibreNews and Vaxry’s own post tell opposite morality plays about the same emails. Hyprland the compositor did not vanish. It is one of the most used Wayland compositors on enthusiast machines. Funding the compositor that your distro ships is ordinary downstream behavior. Treating a 2024 moderation fight as proof that 2026 desktop patronage is a fascist funding network is how every technical dependency becomes a moral infection.¹⁸¹⁹

The same move is applied to Ladybird, Xlibre, FUTO, Brave, Framework, GNOME-vs-Framework gossip, RailsConf vs Rails World, and Ruby Central. Each of those fights has its own record. None of them is “Omarchy.” Stacking them until the pile looks like a movement is the method.

Framework distancing, GNOME statements, staff resignations at 37signals after a politics ban — these are real workplace and community conflicts. They are also the ordinary weather of the last decade of FOSS. The original page needs them to be unique evidence of a new order. They are not. What is new is a well-funded, good-looking Arch spin whose founder will not perform the expected apology, and a faction that has decided the correct response is to poison the well for anyone who ships on top of it.

What you can actually do

If you hate DHH’s essays, you have options that do not require a denunciation website.

1. Don’t install Omarchy. There are other Arch spins, other tiling setups, Fedora, Debian, NixOS, and the computer you already have. Software you dislike does not have a claim on your disk.
2. Fork it. It is MIT licensed. The Doctrine’s own “Own the machine” section tells you to. A movement that cannot survive a fork was never a movement.
3. Argue with the essays on their merits. Quote them. Demographic statistics can be checked. Speech-arrest numbers can be checked. The Jay report can be read. “Fascism stage one” cannot be checked, which is why it is doing so much work.
4. Write to companies you pay. That is ordinary consumer speech. Demand they defund a Linux desktop if that is your line. They may say no. 1Password already split the difference: condemned the posts, kept the patronage. That is a revealing data point about how seriously large vendors treat the “fascist distro” frame.
5. Do not refuse bug reports by distro. A crash on Omarchy is a crash in your code or in a shared stack. Closing tickets because of the reporter’s ISO is political hygiene posing as engineering. It will ship bugs to everyone else.
6. Do not maintain people-to-avoid lists that mix Stallman, Geerling, and Vox Day. If your category needs that range, the category is “people I resent,” not “fascists.”
7. If you live near a headquarters, protest if you want. Peacefully. The original page says it is not calling for violence. This page says the same. A protest about a laptop OS will look like what it is.

Competence is a discipline

The original page ends in the register of church: “Hope is a discipline. Anger is fuel.” Then it recommends Co-op Cloud, Vaultwarden, Nepenthes, konterfAI, Fashware lists, bail funds, and “believe in redemption.” Some of those tools are fine. The juxtaposition is the tell. Repair, in that vocabulary, means: move the stack into a politically certified enclosure, keep a research list of the damned, and leave the door cracked for recantation.

There is an older FOSS ethic that does not require a liturgy:

• Ship the thing.
• Name the author.
• Let users vote with disks and forks.
• Keep the compiler out of the morality play.
• Reserve “fascism” for actual fascist movements, not for BDFL Linux and a bad metaphor about wolves.

DHH can be a grating nationalist blogger and a man who spent a year making a desktop that a lot of programmers enjoy. Companies can fund the desktop without endorsing the blog. Critics can refuse the desktop without building a three-section enemies list and a secondary embargo of Apple. Those distinctions are how a technical culture stays technical.

Stop-Omarchy erases them on purpose. That is why it needs a parallel page.

We can argue about immigration, CoCs, agents, and taste without pretending an ISO is a putsch. The Year of the Linux Desktop, if it arrives, will not arrive as a morality play. It will arrive as a machine that works.

References

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