But the foundation is not just for the Oligarchy and the Corporate Patrons. It’s for everyone. Anyone who can get behind beautiful, fun & agentic Linux.

So as of today, patronage is open to everyone. There are four tiers: $16, $256, $2,048, and $8,192. Power of the bits, naturally! Every patron is part of the same mission, and every dollar buys the same thing: a real shot at fulfilling the Linux on the Desktop prophecy!

And every patron gets a digital rally credential to show for it. Each tier has its own badge, social card, and wallpapers, designed by our Artist in Residence OldJobobo. Class 016 takes you through the Forest Stage. Class 8K runs the Night Stage. Pick your class! And more variations from other artists are coming soon.

The money is already hard at work. The foundation is the exclusive sponsor of Hyprland and the premier sponsor of Quickshell and mise, three of the pillars Omarchy is built on. It funds the Artists in Residence who make the distro beautiful. It keeps the lights on for all the infrastructure a Linux distribution needs. It runs the plugin competitions, with a new $10,000 one coming soon with more winners than the first. And as of today, it has its first full-time employee: a Linux kernel developer leading the work on the Omarchy Kernel. There’s more of all of it on the way!

Because this money is not being raised to start the Iron Bank. We’re aiming to spend everything raised this year over the next three years. More patrons, more spending. Everyone can be part of this.

Become a patron today.

Krzysztof is a longtime Linux kernel developer. He co-maintains the PCI Endpoint subsystem along with the native PCI host bridge and endpoint drivers. That’s the plumbing that connects Linux to your GPU, your NVMe drive, and your WiFi card. He’s also a reviewer on the kernel’s new Rust PCI work. Before going deep on the kernel, he spent years in systems engineering, working on Kubernetes and container runtimes.

Now he’ll bring all that experience to the Omarchy Kernel. The focus: performance, compatibility, and security. We want Linux to fly on brand-new laptops and ancient ThinkPads alike. We want it to work out of the box on more machines. And we want it locked down tight.

Krzysztof is also joining Omarchy Core, so he’ll help set the direction for the distro as a whole.

Welcome aboard, Krzysztof! Let’s make the kernel scream.

So the Omacom Foundation is accelerating its spending goals. Everything raised this year will be spent over the next three. Not parked in an endowment. Not dripped out over a decade. Spent!

With $13 million already committed, that means yearly budgets in excess of $4 million for 2027, 2028, and 2029. And more as money comes in from patrons of all types. Founding, Distinguished, Corporate, and everyone who joined the mission today.

That money goes to the open-source projects Omarchy is built on. To the artists who make it beautiful. To the developers who make it fast, compatible, and secure. To competitions, grants, and infrastructure. To everything it takes to fulfill the Linux on the Desktop prophecy.

The money is not the point. The mission is. But it sure helps to have both!

Want to be part of it? Become a patron through our new open patronage. And if you’re interested in the Founding Patron or Distinguished Patron options, for individuals or corporations alike, write david@omarchy.org.

Downloads come from 215 countries and territories. That’s more places than the UN has members! Over half the downloads come from outside the top five countries. And on a per-capita basis, the Nordics are leading the charge: Iceland, Norway, and Denmark all pull Omarchy at more than twice the American rate. Vikings for the win! (But the US is still 28% of downloads in absolute numbers.)

Another great way to see the momentum: 1Password knows which Linux distros their users run, and during the week, Omarchy is now their #2 distro, ahead of Fedora. On the weekends? We’re #1! People run Omarchy for fun. When nobody is telling them what to use, this is what they pick.

So let’s extrapolate wildly: At the current pace of the last week, we pull the millionth Quattro ISO on November 4. And that’s the conservative count on installs: it’s completed-download equivalents from our own servers, before you add people using the same ISO twice.

The Year of Linux on the Desktop!

Ryan R. Hughes needs no introduction around here. He’s a member of Omarchy Core, my wingman on the distro since day one, and a partner at Oodle. Now he’s backing the foundation with his own money too. That’s conviction!

Ed Huang is the cofounder and CTO of PingCAP, the company behind TiDB, the distributed SQL database. He’s spent a decade proving that serious open-source infrastructure can also be a serious business.

Adrien Treccani founded Metaco, the Swiss digital-asset custody platform that Ripple acquired. Another crypto pioneer joining the mission of making Omarchy a great place for crypto.

Max Schoening is Head of Product at Notion, and before that he ran design at Heroku and was VP of Design at GitHub. He’s shaped more of the tools developers love than most people will ever know.

Together with the twelve Founding Patrons and our two Distinguished Corporate Patrons, that’s eighteen backers and $13 million committed in under two weeks.

Welcome aboard, all four. The mission grows!

Brian Armstrong is cofounder and CEO of Coinbase, which was born using Ruby on Rails, and grew into the top spot for crypto with over a hundred million users. Brian was also early to say no to political nonsense at work when he declared Coinbase a mission-focused company back in 2020. He took a ton of heat for that stance at the time, but has since been thoroughly vindicated (a true man of the Night’s Watch!).

And on crypto, well, I changed my mind years ago. With Brian on board, we’re going to make Omarchy a great place for crypto. Because we can fix everything!

Yunjie Dai is a games entrepreneur from China who runs TapTap, one of the country’s largest game discovery and distribution platforms. One that takes no revenue share from developers. But I’ll let him introduce himself, because the letter he sent was wonderful:

21 years ago, in 2005, I had just graduated from college when I watched your video building a blog with Ruby on Rails and TextMate on Mac OS X in about 15 minutes. I bought a white MacBook soon after, left Windows behind, bought TextMate, and started learning Ruby. It dramatically changed how much I enjoyed coding.

I’m a games entrepreneur from China, and my family and I now live in the U.S. We build games, and we also run TapTap… Unlike the App Store or Google Play, we take no revenue share from developers, while still operating at meaningful scale and profitably. That instinct feels close to what I’ve always admired about 37signals: stay independent, earn your keep, don’t extract rent just because you can, and build something useful enough that people choose to stay.

20 years ago, Apple made the coolest software in the world. Today, that sense of ambition feels largely gone. I think a lot of us are waiting for an operating system that feels exciting again — modern, opinionated, and truly made for developers. And now, with AI making software increasingly malleable, openness matters more than ever: the system itself should be something we can understand, change, and make our own. Omarchy feels like it could be that.

When Steve Jobs was building the Mac, he saw his team as pirates — they even flew a pirate flag over their building. “Better to be a pirate than join the navy.” Omarchy gives me a little of that same feeling. Maybe it’s time for the pirates again. 🏴‍☠️🏴‍☠️🏴‍☠️

Couldn’t have said it better. Welcome aboard, Brian and Yunjie. Hoist that rebel flag and let’s set sail for fulfilling the prophecy!

1Password has been part of Omarchy from day one (and part of Omakub before that!). Because it’s kept my credentials safe for many years before switching to Linux was even a twinkle in my eye.

Like Dropbox, it’s one of the essential tools to enable the no backup, no cry method. Whenever I set up a new machine (which is about three times a week these days!), the first thing I do is Install > Service > 1Password. Then setting up my agents, logging into Basecamp and HEY, and everything else is just trivial. Yet perfectly safe, perfectly secure.

37signals has been the incubation station for Omarchy since before it had a name. We’ve already switched the whole technical team over to Omarchy, and we’ve been footing all manner of bills on the road to Quattro (and before). Now the support is formal, through the foundation, on the same terms as everyone else.

It’s worth noting, too, that corporate money and individual money all buy the same thing: recognition for being part of the mission. There’s no quid pro quo here.

Omarchy will always base its decisions on what makes for the very best malleable OS in the world. And that’s even more specifically defined with the “by DHH” byline when you install the system. Before this can be an amazing system for everyone, it first has to be an amazing system for me, personally. Put your own mask on first and all that!

Want your company to be part of this historic transformation of the operating system? Write david@omarchy.org.

🥇 First place: Radio Atlas by Akshar Patel. Spin a globe, land on a city, and listen to what they’re listening to. It takes $2,500.

🥈 Second place: Omagotchi by SLcode777. A little creature that lives in your bar and needs you. Absolutely nobody needed this and everybody wants it. That’s $1,000.

🥉 Third place: AirPods by GM. Battery levels and one-click switching for your AirPods, right in the bar. The kind of thing you only miss when you come from a Mac. $500 for that.

Honorable mention to GitHub by Rob Zolkos, which puts your notifications and pull requests in the bar. No prize money, but a lot of votes!

Congratulations to all four, and thank you to everyone who submitted. Going through them was genuinely hard, which is the best possible problem to have.

And we’re doing this again! More competitions, more prize money, more excuses to build something ridiculous for a Linux desktop. Watch this space.

So we’re starting Omarchy AIR — Artists in Residence — to support the best of them. A six-month residency for artists to work freely on themes, plugins, and whatever else they think Omarchy needs next. No roadmap, no tickets. The point is to let creativity flow with the support of the Omacom Foundation.

Each residency comes with $2,500 a month for the full six months, a token account so the agents never need to stop, and permanent recognition as AIR alumni once the six months are up.

There are up to three seats available at any one time, and two of them are now taken for this first season.

HANCORE has two themes shipping with Omarchy — Solitude and Last Horizon — and another twenty on the extras page, more than anyone else has contributed: Batou, Oxo Carbon, Velvet Night, Rose of Dune, Shades of Jade, and it keeps going. He’s a mechanical engineer who became one of the defining aesthetic forces in this community, sits on Omarchy Core, and helps steward the plugin ecosystem.

OldJobobo is responsible for three of the themes that ship with Omarchy — Lumon, Miasma, and Retro 82 — plus another ten on the extras page, from Batman to City-783 to Sakura Mochi. He works in whole palettes rather than one-off colour schemes, which is why his themes hold together across the terminal, Neovim, btop, and the shell instead of only looking good in a screenshot.

The last seat is by invitation. The program begins in October.

I like Vitruvius’ three requirements for good architecture: firmitas, utilitas, venustas. It must stand up, it must be useful, and it must be beautiful. Not two out of three. We will invest in all of it. We can fix everything.

In terms of bandwidth, we flung nearly one petabyte in those same seven days. A thousand terabytes of Linux in a week between ISOs and package updates!

This would surely have taken Omarchy down in another age. Sent us scrambling for mirrors or torrents (and thinking about needing another mortgage on the house to pay the hosting bill). But we didn’t need to.

That’s because Cloudflare sits in front of all of it: the ISOs, the Omarchy packages, and our Arch mirror. It’s all on R2 and behind their CDN. Neither of which of course ever broke a sweat. And that’s the reason a hundred thousand people had a fast, boring, uneventful download from anywhere in the world in the past week.

Thank you to everyone at Cloudflare, and to Matthew Prince in particular. Matthew is also one of the Founding Patrons, which means he’s backing this project with both the infrastructure and his own money. Muchas gracias, señor!

A hundred thousand ISOs in a week. Wow.

Enter Omarchy Rangers: A new official team setup to help people find their way.

The inaugural three members (and their Discord handles):

• Mihai @Michael91, Romania
• Mateo Vaz @m4teo, Uruguay
• Nira @.+ N1R4 .+, Nepal

Three people, three continents, which is roughly the point. Omarchy’s community doesn’t keep office hours in a single time zone, and neither should the people helping it. The Discord is always buzzing.

Because almost nobody switches to Linux alone. And they often stay because somebody made the first week feel welcoming. Some then return the favor by doing the same for the next person. That’s how this whole thing grows.

If you’d like to help new users find their way, consider joining Omarchy Rangers. Apply to rangers@omarchy.org.

If you’ve used Omarchy, you’ve used mise, whether or not you noticed. It’s what manages the language runtimes, so mise use -g ruby gets you Ruby without a single line of PATH archaeology. But the part I care most about right now is the agents.

Every major coding-agent CLI in Omarchy ships as a lazy-loading mise stub in ~/.local/bin/. Claude Code, Codex, OpenCode, Antigravity, Copilot, Crush, Grok, Pi, Oh My Pi — all sitting there, costing you nothing until the first time you actually type one. Then it installs itself and you’re working. No package to hunt down, no version to pin, no toolchain to reason about. omarchy-mise-install <package> wraps any other CLI the same way, and omarchy update keeps every last one current.

That’s the fast track. In The Age of Agents, the gap between hearing about a tool and running it needs to be about four seconds, and mise delivers that. Nobody had to package anything for a distro first.

The interest runs both ways, too: traffic to mise is up 24% since Omarchy launched! A lot of people are meeting this tool for the first time through us, which is exactly the kind of thing a sponsorship should recognize rather than take for granted.

Once again, special thanks to Tobi Lütke, Patrick Collison, Michael Dell, Jack Dorsey, Matthew Prince, Brendan Iribe, Jason Fried, Drew Houston, and Peter Steinberger for making this possible. If it wasn’t for Oligarchy, we wouldn’t be able to fund open-source developers like this!

These are community-run events. You don’t need permission to organize one, nobody owns a city, and anyone can put one together anywhere. Talk about Omarchy, Linux, open source, programming, customization, or whatever adjacent hacker culture gets people excited about making computers fun again.

Keep it open to everyone, disclose any sponsorships, and don’t turn the Omarchy name into an events business or a sales pitch. Beyond that, behave like civilized adults (with child-like wonder), and have a great time.

Bring your laptop. Show off your setup. Swap themes and plugins. Help someone through their first installation. The point is to get the people who care about personal, programmable, beautiful computers together in the same room.

You can find an upcoming meetup or submit your own through the global Omarchy calendar on Luma. Let’s make this a worldwide movement!

The proof is in the plugins! Over one thousand plugins have been created in the week that Quattro has been out. That’s an absolutely astounding testament to the technical flexibility of Quickshell, and how much agents love to write QML code.

This sponsorship thus rewards outfoxxed for his outstanding contribution to Omarchy, and helps cement the connection to our long-term plans for The Age of Agents (don’t post that on Bluesky, they’ll go nuts!). It’s termed for three years out the gate.

A special thanks to Tobi Lütke, Patrick Collison, Michael Dell, Jack Dorsey, Matthew Prince, Brendan Iribe, Jason Fried, Drew Houston, and Peter Steinberger for making this possible. If it wasn’t for Oligarchy, we wouldn’t be able to fund open-source developers like this!

Like the original eight Founding Patrons, Drew and Peter are each contributing $1 million. That gives the foundation ten patrons and a clean TEN MILLION DOLLARS to propel our audacious mission to make Linux on the desktop happen in a much bigger way.

It’s extra sweet to have Drew and Peter on board because I’ve personally been such a big fan of both of them and their accomplishments. I’ve been an enthusiastic customer of Dropbox for nearly two decades, and it’s central to how I’m able to live with no backup, no cry yet constantly switch computers.

That’s why Omarchy ships with great Dropbox integration out of the box. Just go to Install > Service > Dropbox, and you’ll have file manager integration and a bespoke menu panel for controls.

And OpenClaw has essentially provided the roadmap for how Omarchy should tackle its explosive growth. How do you deal with PR backlogs that suddenly go parabolic? What about security around plugins? How should meetups in the project’s name be handled? I’ve already had the pleasure of drawing on Peter’s advice and experience on several of these topics.

Beyond that, they both represent exactly the kind of technical ambition I want around Omarchy. Drew turned a personal itch about moving files between computers into Dropbox. Peter turned a weekend project into OpenClaw, and in the process reminded everyone just how much appetite there is for computers that feel personal, programmable, and fun.

That’s the spirit behind the Omacom Foundation too. We’re here to fund the infrastructure, open-source projects, and developers needed to make the Linux desktop a delightful home for the next generation of computer users.

Welcome, Drew and Peter. Ten Founding Patrons. Ten million dollars. The prophecy just got another $2 million closer!

As the creator of Hyprland, he’s responsible for one of the three core technologies in Omarchy (Arch Linux/Hyprland/Quickshell), and I’m thrilled to announce an exclusive sponsorship that lets him focus fully on developing it further without any need to think about commercial development or fundraising.

We’re signing up for the long term with Vaxry to support the long term future of Omarchy. Our exclusive sponsorship deal is set for three years, with an option for another two.

The deal also allows for Hyprland’s existing Hyprperks program to be released for free, for everyone, as the paid subscriptions will end. But Hyprland will still accept personal donations to let individuals buy into the project’s development and to support Vaxry and the team.

Many thanks to 37signals (hello self! 😂), Butterfly, and Framework for helping Hyprland get to this point. Thrilled that the Omacom Foundation can take over from October 10, and give one of the best developers in this new Linux moment the chance to go all-in.

(* This deal does not include any direct assistance in getting Vaxry a girlfriend, but I’ll personally be available as a reference for any inquiries on the matter.)

To do just that, I’m incorporating the Omacom Foundation to ensure that this mission is fully funded, durable, and ready to accelerate.

This nonprofit foundation will hold the trademarks, fund the infrastructure, promote the work, and support the open-source projects and developers Omarchy depends on.

These twelve Founding Patrons are each contributing $1 million to this mission:

• Tobi Lütke, CEO of Shopify
• Patrick Collison, CEO of Stripe
• Michael Dell, Chairman and CEO of Dell Technologies
• Jack Dorsey, Block Head and Chairman of Block
• Matthew Prince, CEO of Cloudflare
• Brendan Iribe, Cofounder of Sesame and Oculus
• Jason Fried, CEO of 37signals
• Drew Houston, cofounder and co-CEO of Dropbox
• Peter Steinberger, creator of OpenClaw
• Brian Armstrong, CEO of Coinbase
• Yunjie Dai, cofounder of TapTap
• Yours truly

These Distinguished Patrons are each contributing $100,000 to the mission:

• Ryan R. Hughes, partner at Oodle
• Ed Huang, cofounder and CTO of PingCAP
• Adrien Treccani, founder of Metaco
• Max Schoening, Head of Product at Notion

And these Distinguished Corporate Patrons are each contributing $100,000 a year for three years:

• 1Password
• 37signals

This is a ridiculous sum of money, so I intend to make sure it lasts a long time, and that we make the most of it. But just as important as the incredible cushion is the vote of confidence delivered by these pledges.

We’re going to make the prophecy of The Year of Linux on the Desktop come true. All the pieces are now in place. Time to go all in!

UPDATE: Drew and Peter joined as Founding Patrons on August 24.

UPDATE: Brian and Yunjie joined as Founding Patrons on August 31.

UPDATE: 1Password and 37signals joined as Distinguished Corporate Patrons on August 31.

UPDATE: Ryan, Ed, Adrien, and Max joined as Distinguished Patrons on September 2.

Allow me to present the inaugural Core Team:

Ryan Hughes has been my wingman on Omarchy since day one. We fought the 3am emergency AUR outages together in the early days, and we conspired to build our own package repository. Ryan’s contributions span every layer of the distro: installation, packaging, hardware support, gaming, theming, CLI tooling, and now Quattro. He helped drive the move to Quickshell, the plugin system, and much of the infrastructure that turned Omarchy from a carefully assembled Linux setup into a proper operating system. When he’s not hacking on Omarchy, Ryan is a partner at Oodle.

Tobi Lütke is the only person who’s made both of my core teams! As a member of the first Rails Core Team started in 2004, he drove not only a serious record of contributions to the framework, but also authored Liquid, Delayed Job, and Active Merchant. That work eventually turned into a little company called Shopify, have you heard of them? Now he’s a prolific contributor to Omarchy with projects like try, Omasnap, Wi-Fi QR codes, and the Quake-style agent console. He also happens to be my co-driver in the #11 Shopify Racing LMP2 car racing in IMSA.

Bjarne Øverli is the CTO of Unite AS and the creator of Aether, the visual theme builder we ship in Omarchy, and cliamp, our TUI-based music player. He’s helped turn our theming system from a collection of configuration files into something far more systematic, with semantic colors and generated themes across Neovim, VS Code, btop, and the rest of the stack. He’s also responsible for themes like Ethereal, Hackerman, and Lupine. Bjarne has that rare combination of programmer rigor and visual taste that fits Omarchy perfectly.

HANCORE is a mechanical engineer who somehow ended up becoming one of the defining aesthetic forces in the Omarchy community. He’s produced an absurd number of themes, including Last Horizon and Solitude, which ships by default in Omarchy. Now he’s helping steward the plugin ecosystem around Quattro. Omarchy has always insisted that a computer should be beautiful as well as useful, and HANCORE has pushed that premise further than almost anyone.

Spencer Bull is a Distinguished Engineer at Dell working on Linux client enablement, AI, and platform software. He’s been our bridge into the messy reality of brand-new hardware, helping Omarchy work properly on Panther Lake and the latest XPS machines before the usual Linux lag could set in. Kernel issues, drivers, displays, Wi-Fi, speakers, power management: Spencer operates in the layer where software meets atoms, and having that expertise inside the Core Team is invaluable.

These five have already been doing the work. This just makes it official. Together with me, it’s a phenomenal inaugural Core Team. But it’s also not going to be the only team. Stay tuned for an announcement on Omarchy Rangers!

Together we’re going to build Omarchy into the premier Linux distribution for people who are excited about the age of agents, the malleable computer, and beautiful, modern, opinionated computing.

To infinity and beyond!

So in celebration of this huge outburst of creativity, we’ll be hosting the first plugin competition using the four grand that I received from yapping endlessly about Omarchy on X last week.

The rules are as follows:

1. All plugins submitted to the repository before Monday August 24 at 9am CEST are eligible (including the ones already listed).
2. The winners will be selected by the new Omarchy Core, which will vote to find a podium.
3. The prize money will be $2,500 for first, $1,000 for second, and $500 for third.
4. You must be able to receive payment by Zelle, Venmo, PayPal, or EU IBAN to collect the prize money.

The winners will be announced next week when we’re done reviewing all submissions, but no later than Friday, August 28.

Have fun and may the best ideas and execution win!