Leaving DigitalOcean, one site at a time

carnevalem 36 points 10 comments September 19, 2026
keith.is · View on Hacker News

Discussion Highlights (6 comments)

realsarm

I think this not something to ignore. They might argue we do not support everything they say. But at then the only thing delivered is the damage.

7bit

Great read. Great resolve.

dagi3d

Considering the multiple rounds of layoffs they have gone through, can't imagine how former employees must feel seeing how they decide to commit for $3M, which in imho has a more than questionable ROI.

thehamkercat

My frustration is omarchy getting more than $18 million in funding for some dotfiles... (i know it's an exaggeration, because omarchy foundation itself seems to be funding projects like Hyprland/Quickshell/mise) but archlinux project probably deserved it instead of omarchy (linux kernel already has enough funding i guess, so they don't need this) --- Can someone explain me, how are they going to profit off this? they can't expect to show ads to linux users right?

majorchord

A political analysis of the founders and leadership behind every product you use must be an exhausting way to live your life... but to each their own.

JohnTHaller

For the unfamiliar on the background, DigitalOcean pledged $3 million to the Omacom Foundation aka the Omarchy Linux distribution. It's an AI-built distro led by David Heinemeier Hansson aka DHH. The idea being that AI can build it and run it and create all the apps it is missing like Photoshop. And that things like codes of conduct are to be shunned. Toxic behavior is welcomed as long as your code is good. It's been derisively referred to as "DOGE Linux". Much of its popularity is apparently via certain YouTube influencers in sponsored videos that often hide their sponsorship or affiliation with Omarchy. It's gained quite a following in the "man-o-sphere". Omarchy was formed as a culture war weapon/counterpoint against other Linux distros with codes of conduct. DHH believes such codes are used by clowns and that prohibiting racism, sexism, homophobia, etc is stupid. DHH has some interesting views on "gypsies": https://world.hey.com/dhh/wolves-sheep-and-gypsies-ba44af6a And "retarded" immigration policies: https://world.hey.com/dhh/three-sacred-cows-that-must-die-so... From a technical perspective, it's been referred to as an opinionated theming layer on top of Arch Linux or a vibe coded dotfiles project as it is mostly Arch Linux with AI code atop. From a financial perspective, DigitalOcean recently pulled funding for multiple open source projects like GNOME before this $3 million investment in Omarchy.

Semantic search powered by Rivestack pgvector
7,105 stories · 65,136 chunks indexed