20260913-omarchy.txt

Recently in the FOSS world, Omarchy has gained a lot of attention.
It's "opinionated" Arch with a bunch of AI slop built in. This is just
plain disgusting.

1. AI is the Antichrist of computing and human beings. It is wrong. It
is expensive. It is dumbing people down even more after the fucking
moron people addicted to TickTalk and other 10-second or less videos.

2. It has a ton of security flaws. I guess when you're getting AI
slop-shitters to generate and check code, you're going to have issues
like any program being able to perform tasks with root permissions
despite not being a sudoer or root.

3. In the irony of all ironies, the creator, DHH, is a deep state
conspiracy theorist. So evidently the governments and other PTBs are
out to get us (I guess there is truth in commercial companies stealing
our data), and his solution is to have those same PTBs' AIs code "his"
OS...

4. You don't have direct control over your device if you allow AI to
run it. As a self-proclaimed "agentic" (shitty ad-speak for AI
control) OS, you're not supposed to do things yourself. That's
antithetical to what computing and computer users should be doing.
People can call me a gatekeeper, but I believe there are way too many
people using computing devices that have absolutely no business doing
so. I'm talking people who can't do the most basic troubleshooting of
restarting the PC, people who don't know what a start menu is, and
people can't figure out their PC will go to sleep if they leave it
idle long enough. Those are the people that would get the most out of
an agentic OS and they should be learning how to use a computer (or
not using one at all) instead of outsourcing it to fucking learning
LLMs that are guaranteed to cause unemployment to rise.

5. Anything that needs to advertise as much as Omarchy does isn't
good. All these freemium games and VPNs that get shilled on so many
online videos are generally pretty terrible if you look into their
history. And if you're spending that much on advertising (especially
on illegal, undisclosed ads), chances are you're not spending that
much on actually making the product better.

Regardless of DHH's politics, which are too far right for my tastes
but certainly not the worst I've seen, an insecure OS is pointless
except in a toy situation: you want to play around with it. As
incredible as Terry Davis is, his TempleOS is a toy OS. Its usefulness
is crippled by a lack of a network stack. I'm not even sure if it has
the ability to transfer files to USB drives since I've never bothered
to try it myself. But yeah, I'm pretty sure there aren't many people
using TempleOS as a real OS and expecting to get things done.

Don't use Omarchy. I think most Gopher folks understand the importance
of not selling out or getting hoodwinked by misleading ads, but I'm
sure this will get mirrored on the WWW.