David Heinemeier Hansson, the author of the Ruby on Rails web framework, announced a significant expansion of funding for the non-profit organization Omacom Foundation, created at the end of August to support the development of the Omarchy Linux distribution. In the two weeks following the organization's creation, various companies and individuals donated nearly $7 million to the fund, in addition to the initial $8 million investment. The total budget of the organization reached $14.95 million.
Brian Armstrong, the head of cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase, and Yunjie Dai, the creator of the Chinese game delivery platform TapTap, Drew Houston, the founder of Dropbox, and Peter Steinberger, the founder of OpenClaw, each contributed $1 million to the project.
Projects 1Password and 37signals also participated in funding Omacom Linux, each committing to donate $100,000 per year for the next three years. Contributions of $100,000 and above were made by the co-founder of PingCAP, the founder of Metaco, and the product director of Notion.
The Meta Superintelligence division provided the project with tokens for AI tools valued at $1.5 million. Companies Anthropic, OpenAI, and Fireworks each donated tokens worth $150,000.
In turn, the Omacom Foundation announced financial support for the open projects Hyprland, Quickshell, and mise, used in the Omarchy distribution. Krzysztof Wilczyński has been hired to work full-time on the Linux kernel package for Omacom, overseeing the subsystems related to the PCI bus within the Linux kernel.
Additionally, it is reported that within 18 days of the release, the Omarchy 4.0 installation ISO image was downloaded over 200,000 times. According to weekly statistics from 1Password, the Omarchy distribution ranked second among Linux distributions used by 1Password users, just behind Fedora.
The Omarchy distribution is based on the Arch Linux package base, but it doesn't simply offer a set of pre-installed packages. Instead, it aims to provide an environment of compatible applications selected for their aesthetics and task-solving efficiency. The project develops its own desktop environment, created using the Quickshell framework and the Hyprland composite window manager with a tiled window layout. Rather than focusing on a hypothetical average user, Omarchy offers only the applications that the author uses daily — from Neovim, Chromium, and LibreOffice to Spotify, Omawrite, Foot, and Zoom.
Source: opennet.ru
