New Anti-Woke Operating System Takes A Bite Out Of Apple

A new, free computer operating system could topple the Windows and Mac duopoly — and it’s all because some of tech’s biggest names got tired of far-left programmers putting their politics over writing code.

Omarchy, a stylish version of Linux, was created by David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH), the Danish creator of the Ruby on Rails programming framework, after he concluded that leftist extremism had turned existing efforts to create free operating systems into toxic environments.

The existence of a single piece of software created by a non-liberal has created a schism in the tech world, with left-wing programmers viciously attacking it due to DHH’s opinions on mass migration and other issues. But hundreds of thousands have downloaded it in recent weeks, and 12 major tech magnates have donated $1 million each — a gesture that seems to send the message that the age of left-wing groupthink in Silicon Valley is over.

The patrons include Michael Dell, who recently pledged more than $6 billion to children through the Trump Accounts program; Stripe’s Patrick Collison; Shopify’s Tobi Lütke; and even Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey.

“The guy that created Twitter and got blamed for far-left censorship, he’s now saying we’ve got to stop with the woke nonsense and get back to meritocracy. It’s amazing how much has changed. Most of these companies would not have felt comfortable doing this even a couple years ago,” Brian Lunduke, a technology journalist, told The Daily Wire.

That money is sponsoring Artists in Residence and paying non-woke developers who have been ostracized from the tech community to continue their labors of love full-time. DHH offered money to support all the main technologies Omarchy is built upon, but some apparently refused it because of politics — though the nature of open source means there is nothing they can do to stop him from using their code anyway.

DHH was red-pilled after his own company, 37signals, survived an attempted hijacking by woke employees more interested in pushing personal politics than serving Basecamp software customers.

He initially tried to appease the employees, permitting them to create diversity working groups, agreeing to make changes such as avoiding the technical term “master” because of its purported racism, and condemning a list of funny names that some employees had created after it was deemed offensive. But in 2021, he concluded that appeasement only led to more extreme behavior, after employees said the list of funny names was not just offensive, but at the bottom of a “pyramid of hate” that culminated in “genocide.” DHH blasted the employees for irrationality and performative virtue-signaling, pointing out that one of the loudest critics of the list had actually helped make it.

His co-founder, Jason Fried, told employees in a public post the workplace wasn’t the place for personal politics, writing, “We make project management, team communication, and email software. We don’t have to solve deep social problems, chime in publicly whenever the world requests our opinion on the major issues of the day, or get behind one movement or another with time or treasure.” Employees who couldn’t abide by that simple rule were given generous buyouts — and one-third took it.

But in open-source projects, where volunteers collaborate to make free software, there was no CEO to put his foot down. In the last several years, seemingly most major open-source projects — including basic technology layered upon by commercial software used daily by millions — have been taken over by activists who deliberately make it intolerable for centrists and conservatives to participate.

They adopted “codes of conduct” that allowed moderators to ban volunteers who didn’t agree to accept certain political opinions, even banning people for their political speech in forums totally unrelated to the project. During the same period, Linux distributions never caught on with everyday Americans, who kept paying for Mac and Windows, even as those operating systems increasingly seemed phoned-in.

“The Contributor Covenant was created by a trans-man who specifically created it for the purposes of forcing projects to push out people who are not pro-trans. To change the culture of individual projects. It’s been largely successful,” Lunduke said, referring to Coraline Ada Ehmke, a man who identifies as a woman, who created the code of conduct in 2014.

In the 1970s, hackers were known for being libertarian. But in the 2010s, a new culture came to dominate the gatekeeper roles. Many of the new gatekeepers were autistic, a trait that coincides with transgenderism. Those who gravitated towards free software also tended to be Marxist.

“Marxist, autism, trans, it all gets swished together in a bubble where people wear cat ears,” Lunduke said. Merely saying that coding groups should stay focused on coding, rather than hunting for microaggressions, was enough to get someone deemed a “fascist.”

Major tech projects descended into hyperbole and delusion, where the world was filled with “oligarchs” and “fascists.” Many decided that artificial intelligence fell under both banners, and banned it as a matter of political orthodoxy. “It’s all gotten wrapped up together somehow,” Lunduke said. That permitted projects like Omarchy to build hundreds of times faster than the projects they left behind. The others “are gonna screw themselves,” he said.

Linux has traditionally not been adopted by non-techies because it has a reputation for being tricky to use or having bugs. But DHH believes AI has solved that problem: If you have a problem running Omarchy, you can just bring up an agent that will fix it for you. But the real potential goes beyond fixing bugs: Non-proprietary code means AI can modify the operating system to give users complete control and customization, whereas Mac and Windows lock users into their environments.

DHH believes Apple’s ecosystem is drastically slowing innovation because software must be accepted into its marketplace, with Apple taking as much as 30% of the sale price. In Omarchy, downloading a piece of software is as simple as typing a command or asking an LLM to do it.

He has been right before, as an early proponent of remote work. On his blog, his philosophizing has increasingly extended to politics, as he has watched how immigration and censorship have changed Europe.

“When gypsies take over public spaces, you deport them. This isn’t hard, it isn’t cruel. It’s the basic logic of self-preservation,” he wrote.

Outspoken gatekeepers in the tech world call center-right people “Nazis” because it is a “permission slip for violence,” DHH wrote. “But that’s just all the more reason you can’t give in, you can’t give up. The defeat of wokeism in the workplace should give you comfort. These people are not invincible. The wheels have been falling off their political project for years now. You can and should say ‘no’ when they come with the ‘nazi’ nonsense too.”

Users can try the Omarchy operating system without disturbing their existing OS using TryOmarchy for Mac or Windows. Anyone with a Windows machine or an older Mac can permanently switch by installing it in about one minute after flashing the installer to a USB. The system is so much more efficient than Mac and Windows that it can easily revive even a decade-old machine, DHH says.

Related: Federal Computer Agency Focused On Leftist Politics And Pronouns As ‘Gross Mismanagement’ Put Cybersecurity At Risk