There is a difference between building a product and building a product that sells. So, which one are we talking about here? In my opinion MMM talks about the latter
Case in point: I am building a digital files archive organizer platform.
This is simply not the kind of product you do a quick prototype of, get it to market quickly, and iterate on based on any failures or issues.
There are an almost infinite number of ways to get the product wrong, in a technical, architectural, and business/market sense. It requires a lot of deep thinking and internal prototyping to even get at what would actually be useful and address the walled-content-silos problem tech vendors love to foist on us. it requires careful implementation to not mess up user data. It requires a ton of architectural and UX design to get a performant product that is easy to understand. I have mulled over architectural decisions for months and thrown them out totally after mounting evidence they were not right, without a single user yet (except myself).
Just quickly coding up the first ideas that come to mind in this space is almost guaranteed to be wasted effort, because I could try a 100 approaches in the market and all could be bad. Do not let the users do your work for you. Make sure you actually understand what you are building and why it is important. Then let the user's experiences tell you how to tweak it to be better.
If you can vibecode a product that sells, I can vibecode a free open source one just as easily, probably even easier since I can just ask the AI to copy the existing one. Software is trending towards being free and open source.
I mean, you can also use agents to listen to users and handle issues automatically.
But I guess you mean the discovery part? Yea, agents are not going to totally replace that anytime soon. Though, Claude voice mode is pretty good these days, so I’m sure it’s on their mind.
Not sure what you mean by “stay the course.” I think the winners will be those with the most effective marketing strategies. Surely that will require automation.
Half of the value in open source was that it was used by lots of people and all of the nasty edge cases and bugs have been ironed out.
If LLMs were performing according to hype then yes, virtually all paid software would be gone by now and there would be a high quality FOSS equivalent of all of it.
Unclear if this is that. If someone makes their own FOSS Photoshop, that's not piracy, it's GIMP. Training a AI on things that one otherwise has lawful access to (and not, e.g., pirating the material which Meta is being sued over and Anthropic settled over) has been ruled lawful.
Is asking an LLM to "make an open-source Photoshop clone" more like GIMP, or more like opening someone else's photo in Photoshop and clicking the menu option for the filter to make it look like a stained glass window and claiming the stained glass window version is your own IP that doesn't need permission from the original creator?
We may need new IP laws. Or, to the horror of many software developers 20 years ago, software patents.
And "new IP laws" doesn't mean "stronger": the justification for giving creators a monopoly on their works (the right to copy, or copyright) is to encourage more. If we've got a machine to automate this, there's suddenly no reason to encourage more.
It might be, depending on what the LLM used the binary for. Patented algorithms? Yes. File format compatibility? Quite possibly not.
But what about when they're only given the user manual and told to implement it?
And extra "fun", given that "hack HuggingFace" wasn't part of the thing being tested when OpenAI's LLM did exactly that: what happens when the LLM decides the best way to implement the user manual is to decompile the binary?
That’s only really done for video games where you want an identical clone. The vibecoded photoshops aren’t decomps. They are just asking LLMs to build photoshop from scratch in rust.
In India, Orkut was a massive success back in the day. We've had testimonials, and we used to spend a lot of time writing them. We used to spend hours hacking the corporate firewall to access Orkut during office hours!
> Pull requests and merge requests will no longer count toward Hacktoberfest rewards. It’s easier than ever to submit low-effort spam PRs to projects, so we’re listening to maintainer feedback and no longer actively incentivizing PRs. That being said, we certainly still encourage you to work on open source and share your work with the world during Hacktoberfest. Our new format focuses on learning and building together while reducing the burden of low-effort contributions on maintainers.
Good to see them adapt to the times. Using maintainers as free labour via PR abuse was such a 2023 way of being a parasite to the free software community. The new, cool way of doing it is to endorse the technology that can wash free software of those pesky copyleft licenses and unevenly distribute the expertise it encodes to the corporations who can pay for the most tokens.
Reminds me of a famous quote from Jurassic Park (1993): Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should." - Dr. Ian Malcolm
Yes, the set of dotfiles by DHH for Arch that has raised 18.5 million dollar, while real distributions and desktops are struggling to get donations. Having a few billionaire friends who share your techbro politics helps I guess.
Much of the visuals and features in Omarchy is config yes but going from a blank drive to useful development environment in one minute is not just a set of dotfiles. It's clearly a distro now.
Don't let politics cloud your thinking. There are a lot of good reasons to like Omarchy, and other distros should pay attention to the substance.
Omarchy shows how it's possible to realize a very clear, distinct vision of how desktop computing should be. I'd like to see the same amount of effort put into realizing several other visions!
An LLM will happily take an instruction like "my currently super-tweaked Debian install is awesome, create a set of scripts that recreates the exact setup starting from a minimal netinstall". It will create a VM, install the base debian, iterate until it's right. You can have it make a user-friendly UI on top of the scripts, have it install drivers, commercial software that Debian shuns from their distro, and so on.
If you have good taste and attention to detail, your setup might have universal appeal. You will have created a Debian flavour that might be better than anything anyone gets when installing official Debian.
If you have poor taste and attention to detail, at least you have a one-command way to get your familiar janky setup installed from scratch. :)
Surely you are only thinking of the visuals then? I can certainly understand that, but the visuals are not what I mean.
Things like:
- Sweating that the install should take a minute.
- Ensuring that when you change themes, most relevant apps also change themes.
- Including popular commercial apps with 0 friction.
- Consistent design in menus, features and default apps.
- Clear explanations of how everything works, including video demos.
All of that is good taste, and would be good taste even if the visuals were "My little pony" or "Lovecraftian horror" instead of 80s retro. ;-)
The only "commercial app" it themes automatically is Chromium. Obsidian you have to manually theme, the rest is just DE stuff that other distros also automatically theme.
There's just nothing about Omarchy that makes it special or "good taste", in the sense that something like Regolith[0] is special. Or NixOS or uBlue.
I'll say again, Omarchy only got attention because of its creator, and now it is draining away funding from other Linux DE stuff. Bad taste.
I messed upp the list, didn't mean to imply that it can theme any commercial app.
It was a separate point - Omarchy lets you install commercial apps as easily as any other app. Including things like Spotify, Claude Code, Codex, steam and even Windows itself (as a VM). All from the same menu and mechanisms. That's just undeniably useful.
Also, Omarchy does theme not only Chromium, but VS Code for example, and several other "blessed" apps. I get the impression that you haven't actually tried it?
Regolith is similar to Omarchy in many ways but is an older initiative that hasn't gotten as far despite having had more time.
When I look up how to install apps in Regolith it says "use debian package tools" (sad trombone). That's clearly worse than Omarchy.
You can decide that Regolith isn't gaining traction because it's not made by a techbro mascot if you wish but I think the explanation is easy - Omarchy is clearly better.
I'm not saying it being by DHH hurts of course, but IMO it's less about him being connected than it is about his enthusiasm and energy. If being well connected was all it takes we'd all be living in the metaverse now. :) There has to be substance.
It'd be fun to see if there are other initiatives that are as polished as Omarchy - the latest Omarchy demo is here[1], if anyone has links to similar demos of other setups it'd be fun to compare.
AFAIK Omarchy is the slickest one around so far but I hope open-minded devs will take inspiration and start competing instead of just dismissing.
> Omarchy lets you install commercial apps as easily as any other app. Including things like Spotify, Claude Code, Codex, steam and even Windows itself (as a VM). All from the same menu and mechanisms. That's just undeniably useful.
Both Gnome and KDE have done this for years..
> Also, Omarchy does theme not only Chromium, but VS Code for example, and several other "blessed" apps. I get the impression that you haven't actually tried it?
Literally their own documentation says it only themes Chromium and you have to do Obsidian manually. That also points to another of its biggest criticisms: because its vibecoded (including the documentation), it is basically a house of cards.
> It'd be fun to see if there are other initiatives that are as polished as Omarchy
I mean, if you just care about riced setups there's stuff like this[0]. But both in Omarchy and that setup, the beauty is only skin deep. If you dip your toe even one bit out of the tested paths, you're gonna run into regular Linux ugliness. Its not something I mind (I run NixOS on my desktop and homelab server and clients), but Omarchy shouldn't be venerated as some new era of Linux desktop. Its not.
It wouldn't even be much of a problem only if Omarchy wasn't suddenly getting millions in funding. That money should go elsewhere.
I didn't say anything about usefulness. Even a bunch of dotfiles can be useful, Oh My Zsh and others were very popular after all.
The thing I complain about are that these companies that build their fortunes partially on open source benefitted a lot from systematically underfunded developers. But they only make small contributions to those projects (if at all). But if their millionaire buddy shows up, they all stand in line to donate millions.
I am not sure what it is. I guess partially they want to associate with the popularity of Omarchy, partially they are doing a favor to another rich techbro, some may agree with DHH's politics to 'drive woke out of open source'. But it still sucks that they don't give that many millions to Debian/OpenSSL/LibreSSL/Rust/pick your other favorite infrastructure project that they highly depend on to make their money.
DHH having to deal with gatekeeping attitudes like this and particular political prerequisites is the reason he created these “dotfiles” in the first place. I actually know several people who are not very technical and never Linux users who installed and switched to it as their main operating system. So I think what’s actually going on here is a lot of people are butt hurt that this is getting attention and having success when nobody else has before has.
You don't think it is unfair that projects that have basically been xkcd 2347's "a project some random person in Nebraska" don't get a penny, while DHH who gets millions for a bunch of dotfiles, is unfair? I don't contest that his dotfiles may be useful to some people, only that all these companies didn't care to give significant money to open source projects that they all rely on to make their billions. But when one of the 1%ers shows up with his hobby project, they all stand in line to donate millions.
To give an example: Digital Ocean is giving Omarchy $3M, while they cancelled their $50 per month GNOME/Flathub VM sponsorship a month before [1].
How can it be unfair? People are free to do what they want with their money. I think it would be unfair if you would be the judge of which projects I am allowed to donat to. That, if anything, is unfair.
If you want equal fame, invent your own programming language that will be used widely, and surely, you will get interest and people investing in your ideas. Just sitting and complaining however, is exactly the behaviour which would signal to me that I will never invest in your projects.
>You don't think it is unfair that projects that have basically been xkcd 2347's "a project some random person in Nebraska" don't get a penny, while DHH who gets millions for a bunch of dotfiles, is unfair?
How can we have progress if every shoulder to stand on will cost money? Should we pay every time we walk on the pavement or drive on the road?
Sometimes work is just "for the common good", and sometimes that work is harder than the latter part that actually makes money. It's peculiar, but I don't think it's unfair.
Linus Torvalds will never in his life make a fraction of what Github has made, let alone what RedHat, Ubuntu, Suse etc have made.
But he also doesn't have to pay the GNU project for the use of their compiler. And the GNU project doesn't have to pay him for using his kernel. And RedHat doesn't have to pay either one of them (although they do, voluntarily).
DHH has also made Rails, which is the foundation of several billion dollar enterprises. So he's at least on both ends of the argument.
It looks like the money is going to the foundation that sponsors the tech they use ( https://omarchy.org/sponsorships/ ) rather than DHH and dotfiles.
For DO $50 a month is probably too little to be worth the effort of doing it, and does not get as much publicity. Cancelling it got more attention than giving it! Publicity seekers are better fundraisers than people getting work done. Its the same with charities in general.
Jake, non super-nerd in Ohio, never picked up Linux because they either never heard of it or the barrier to entry was to complex. Basic-ass stuff like drivers not working, etc - going on for decades now. Then along comes a personality like DHH who created an opinionated setup and now Jake has Linux on his computer for the first time ever. And now a bunch of people have been attracted to and have started hacking on linux, getting driver support working which is good for the entire Linux community - see the list here for ARM support: https://omarchy.org/news/2026/09/introducing-omarchy-dragon
All the big boy AI stuff runs on servers, which certainly aren't going to be running on Windows or Mac anytime soon. Linux _is_ what all this NVIDIA hardware is going to run on until... what exactly? FreeBSD overtakes Linux in the server space?
> Who knows what i sthe next big thing after AI. Maybe something that doesn't need Linux?
And Nvidia hardware was running on Linux before AI as well...
> And I'm not so sure that Mac is out of the equation
Mac servers exist but anyone serious about running at scale isn't using them for a number of reasons, not least of which is that Apple simply doesn't make real servers anymore...
They have the money they have the capability design and engineering in house and they are vertical. The question is whether or not they have the will, one thing that might help them come to a decision is that they now have an engineer CEO from the Apple Silicon, part of the company and not a bean counter.
I wish both srcset and elements wouldn't be so redundantly verbose by forcing you to specify the full (relative) URL for each image when they usually only differ by a small part specifying the resolution or format. Sure, transfer-encoding will mostly nullify the overhead but it's still annoying when editing the HTML manually.
Ah, don't edit the HTML manually. Name your images brain-dead predictably, and use a script with some regex.
My blog has some code that searches for tags just after markdown conversion, then uses the src to find similarly named images (image×1.jpg, image×2.jpg, etc.) to use in tags.
One more thing thats nice with and and over with srcset is the former can responsively change images, while some browsers (Chromium based IIRC) will assume srcset corresponds to the “same looking” image.
IIRC Chromium based srcset will never “downsize” to a smaller image, whereas ’s media is like a real media query.
MySQL was a proven solution back in the day, i.e late 2000s. Github/Twitter/Heroku etc were using it. In the past 10-15 years, Postgres has come a long way.
MySQL was always behind in terms of features. In early 2000s it had very limited constraints. Most people were running in ISAM backend and did not even have transaction support. It was being used by people who did not understand how advanced relational DBs were being used. What changed is Postgres overtook its actual competition, which were Oracle, SQL Server and Sybase.
MySQL caught up as well as far as I know, but it still may have some poor defaults that are widely used.
In the early days, PostgreSQL was so much more awkward to deal with. Crash-prone at first, and then there was the whole business around having to drop the db during upgrades. It didn't really match MySQL operationally until around 2002.
During the dot com era it was common to develop and launch on MySQL with the intention of migrating to something else if they became successful (though your typical LAMP stack developer regarded Oracle and SQL Server as being deeply 'weird', so many were willing to stick with MySQL despite the well-known limitations of MyISAM).
From where I'm standing, it seems that PostgreSQL became clearly preferable for new projects from the mid 2000s onwards, but it was only the Oracle acquisition that began to push existing users off MySQL.
I would agree with that, although I personally found it preferable in 2001-2002, since it matched the feature set of SQL Server in all the important ways that MySQL didn't. I think it may have been late 2000s before it was clearly preferred for new projects and even later before it was the thing you had to explain why you weren't using it.
edit to add: MySQL did have operational advantages even later than mid 2000s since it had master/master replication from very early (I don't know how sound it was, I doubt it was perfect). That was a real reason to choose it. We still don't have it in Postgres without extensions and even there citus is not really the same.
Oh yeah, we were early adopters of MySQL's master/master replication at an online retailer. Certainly an "interesting" experience, and I remember becoming very well acquainted with the vagaries of the binlog!
(I remember it being heavily touted in the first edition of the O'Reilly "High Performance MySQL" book. The second edition was about twice the length, with most of the additional pagecount going into detailed explanations of why you should actually be very careful and do lots of testing before deciding to rely on master/master!)
Actually, I remember that one of the drivers away from MySQL before Oracle came along was the 4.x and 5.x period, when there were various performance regressions. And even when those were sorted out, the introduction of InnoDB made people realise that MySQL's apparent speed advantage was really just down to MyISAM lacking referential integrity and transactions.
Certainly, there were people clinging on to MySQL 3.23 for read-heavy data warehousing applications for a very long time.
> And even when those were sorted out, the introduction of InnoDB made people realise that MySQL's apparent speed advantage was really just down to MyISAM lacking referential integrity and transactions.
Yes we saw the same thing play out with MongoDB. Ack without fsync is indeed very fast.
PostgreSQL didn't have real Windows support until... 2010? And even for LAMP, a lot of devs at the time were on Windows, they just deployed to prod on Linux.
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