> A desktop that loves you back has to know you. Personal AI has crossed the threshold where the desktop itself can be compiled per user, per device, per moment, from a small portable model of the user – what we are sketching as Kadai: an encrypted, vendor-agnostic personal kernel from which Plasma assembles each Activity.
Sounds like a gimmick that will be annoying after a week. Users who aren’t KDE developers don’t want a desktop to love them back, in fact they don’t care or want to think about their desktop beyond launching their apps and window management.
That was my thought exactly. I don’t even remember last time I looked at the desktop because I always have some app open full screen.
I kind of understand the intention like show a custom compiled widget stuff, but then that would be a custom dashboard and not a desktop. Even if it was a dashboard, I don’t wanna burn tokens to create gimmicky widgets
To be fair i think in KDE terms, the desktop refers to the whole experience: the panels, the notifications, the menus, the decorations, the file manager, etc. Also to be fair i think widgets are still mostly focused on the actual desktop part of the "desktop environment"
Sorry to be annoying, i do think the idea in general is bad, i just think i have a better idea of what the devs are thinking if i consider the idea where the entire desktop environment as a whole reacts to how you use it instead of making every single nanoscale decision user-configurable (KDE) or deciding you know better than the user, your way or the highway (Gnome). I don't think they mean the actual like desktop view specifically, or building a dashboard
KDE does a lot more than launching apps and window management. Mounting storage devices, settings, widgets for managing a whole lot of stuff (power, printers, networks...), managing remote file systems, a huge integrated set of apps (from PDF reader to file manager), managing switching displays....
This is a proposal to be discussed. KDE activities are a useful feature few people use because its different and a pain to set up so something that might benefit from a but of automation. Given KDE's approach it will be configurable and optional. The people behind i seem to be drawing on past work on looking at what users actually liked.
I still remember opening Firefox one day to test something (I primarily use Vivaldi), and since it had recently updated itself, it showed its "what's new" page, with the big words "Thank you for loving Firefox!".
Although Xfce 1.0 appeared slightly earlier, its initial releases were proprietary, making what was originally known as the Kool Desktop Environment one of the earliest entirely FOSS desktop environments for Linux. Version 1.0 was released in July 1998.
What a weird opening.
Also, both projects were started late 1996. A lot of people were already running KDE alphas/betas before the 1.0 release, because as a desktop it was vastly better than any of the window managers at the time.
I remember installing beta 1 in 1997 was a big relief for me. It felt like the last barrier was broken for Linux taking over the desktop, now that it finally had a desktop that could compete with Windows 95. Of course, I was terribly naive, but I blame it on only being 15yo.
I don't recall Xfce being used much at all. It become more popular until 5-10 years later because people were complaining that KDE/GNOME became too heavy and they were looking for more lightweight alternatives.
A desktop is a tool, and the last thing I want from my tools is intelligence. Tools need to be predictable. My desktop should respond to my commands the exact same way every time so I can use it without conscious thought.
If you want to introduce AI to a desktop, the best way is to add an interface for automating that desktop and add a separate AI agent that can use that interface. This also benefits accessibility tools that can use the same automation interface.
A desktop is many things to many people, some of which use computers very differently from how engineers use them. If a desktop was only a tool, background images, Xeyes, theming, and many other standard features wouldn’t exist. There are no themes for power drills.
Those kind of cosmetic features actually do have a functional use because they let you distinguish virtual desktops at a glance. I'd like to be able to specify different window manager themes for each virtual desktop.
So a few months ago for various reasons I started to use ubuntu/gnome again (after 15 years on MacBooks / OS X / MacOS) on my home PC. I have to say, in my case, command line llm made the desktop so much more enjoyable.
Sadly still a lot of things did not work correctly out of the box, and everything was kinda fixable, but would have needed some bigger time investment from my side.
Instead just telling llm cli that something does not work correctly, and waiting a few minutes until it fixes it is just so much better for me.
Do I want LLMs all over the place in my desktop? Probably not. But having an LLM fixing all kind of broken or miss-configured software is just so convenient.
The best way that my desktop can show me love is by being a glorified application launcher and nothing more. Also, the less meta/data that it sends back to its vendor the more love I feel that I am receiving.
It’s going to happen in windows and most likely Mac too. In both cases, all your data will be shipped off to the model providers and then out into the panopticon.
The open source desktop environments don’t have the profit motivator that drives the commercial alternatives. They’re driven to deliver their interpretation of great UI. We can each debate whether we agree with the vision or execution but that’s the motive.
If they can employ AI to help remove desktop friction - and it’s local and not shipping my data off to the surveillance machine - I’d be open to it.
In fact, if it could sort out KDE wallet’s amnesia for my wifi password, I’d give it a roll now…
And in Windows it will doubtlessly be implemented such that the AI will be very helpful and make subtle UI changes based on your usage patterns, without telling you, so that your muscle memory becomes useless. And insert ads, obviously. Also, the AI should definitely have a cute animated avatar that pops up when you don't need it and offers useless advice.
Is this another downstream consequence of the COVID lockdowns?
Do people need a hug?
___
Hmm. So from the actual talk description, these seem to be UX people that might have interesting ideas to share but also have completely lost the plot when it comes to the overarching narrative.
Which is unsurprising, given that their summary is clearly written by AI (albeit with human editing, but barely)
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.
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
The editor is Liam Proven, a notorious liar who doesn't care about facts and has a massive hate-boner for AI, what do you expect? I'm surprised he is still allowed to write for The Register.
the register has a red masthead for a very good and intentional reason. i think that people, especially americans, are into a bit of the british snark, but the site is by and large taken way more seriously than it deserves to be.
From what I've read on the Qt blog, this is something they're tackling with their own models and tooling. GenAI is banned where I work and I'd picked up QML pretty quickly and got productive faster than WPF/XAML
>In 2003, they conducted a usability study of the then newly released KDE 3.1.
>The talk has three parts: what KDE learned – or failed to learn – from that study;
This caught my eye, seems in many forums people still say 3.1 was the best KDE.
But I remember trying out KDE 3.1 on Slackware at the time. All it did was give me extremely severe eye strain after about 1 hour of use. GNOME, XFCE and various Window managers did not give me eye strain of any type.
New releases of KDE still caused that issue with me, but I found a color theme that I can use with KDE 5 that holds off eye strain after about 4 or 5 hours. Again all other DE and WMs, no issues. FWIW, I really like KDE 5, but it can still hurt my eyes :(
I have not tried 6.x and will not see it until Slackware 16 is released. I will give it a shot but with my history, I am sceptical it will be fine for me.
Is it going to just be an Omarchy + KDE iteration? The article was very light on content but DHH is definitely driving more results and new contributions which is great for free software.
The desktop is a solved problem. Now we are moving into the era of agents using the mouse and keyboard and interacting with the windows manager.
When I see stuff like this, I think it's clear that Linux is not going to be part of that era outside of the CLI. The Linux desktop is never going to recover from this.
Gnome and KDE just keep messing. That's why I stuck to openbox/labwc.
Because, these are not solving problems they are inventing them. Everything that makes Linux great, simply hasn't translated to the desktop GUI. And I can see that will not change. Sure there are things like Niri and thats cool, but for agent use. It's redundant.
We are done with desktops. They will be handed off to ai. Humans will use them less and less. Because they will have better things to do. And likely better interactions. After all a mouse and keyboard while I still prefer it over voice, is still from an era where that was the best we had.
Now, I actually think I prefer tmux in a terminal on my phone on a software keyboard. Over a desktop with mouse and keyboard. As clunky as it is. Because I can use that anywhere, anytime to talk to agents.
CLI is the era and likely gonna be until some more LLM/AI-focused interfaces appear, and they are not gonna look like human UIs. There's a reason all models use bash and code, not a GUI shell, for their internal sandboxen.
Making LLM/AIs use mouse and keyboard makes no sense. They are a human interface tailored to human strengths and limitations, and arguably even for humans CLI is a superior interface for many tasks.
Can't agree with this, there's clearly room for improvement
>Everything that makes Linux great, simply hasn't translated to the desktop GUI.
Do agree with this though. Fragmentation is not ideal for having a consistent UI and a consistent UI is needed to develop muscle memories so it can be used effectively.
>We are done with desktops. They will be handed off to ai.
I don't think that will happen while AI costs dollars per minute of actual use. Being able to use a computer for free will be valuable for a long time still I think.
> A desktop that loves you back has to know you. Personal AI has crossed the threshold where the desktop itself can be compiled per user, per device, per moment, from a small portable model of the user – what we are sketching as Kadai: an encrypted, vendor-agnostic personal kernel from which Plasma assembles each Activity.
Sounds like a gimmick that will be annoying after a week. Users who aren’t KDE developers don’t want a desktop to love them back, in fact they don’t care or want to think about their desktop beyond launching their apps and window management.
Yeah, this may be a case of "this project is really important to me so it must be really important to the users, too".
That was my thought exactly. I don’t even remember last time I looked at the desktop because I always have some app open full screen.
I kind of understand the intention like show a custom compiled widget stuff, but then that would be a custom dashboard and not a desktop. Even if it was a dashboard, I don’t wanna burn tokens to create gimmicky widgets
"Desktop" here means "desktop environment" aka the whole shell, not just the literal desktop part of the desktop metaphor.
To be fair i think in KDE terms, the desktop refers to the whole experience: the panels, the notifications, the menus, the decorations, the file manager, etc. Also to be fair i think widgets are still mostly focused on the actual desktop part of the "desktop environment"
Sorry to be annoying, i do think the idea in general is bad, i just think i have a better idea of what the devs are thinking if i consider the idea where the entire desktop environment as a whole reacts to how you use it instead of making every single nanoscale decision user-configurable (KDE) or deciding you know better than the user, your way or the highway (Gnome). I don't think they mean the actual like desktop view specifically, or building a dashboard
KDE does a lot more than launching apps and window management. Mounting storage devices, settings, widgets for managing a whole lot of stuff (power, printers, networks...), managing remote file systems, a huge integrated set of apps (from PDF reader to file manager), managing switching displays....
This is a proposal to be discussed. KDE activities are a useful feature few people use because its different and a pain to set up so something that might benefit from a but of automation. Given KDE's approach it will be configurable and optional. The people behind i seem to be drawing on past work on looking at what users actually liked.
I still remember opening Firefox one day to test something (I primarily use Vivaldi), and since it had recently updated itself, it showed its "what's new" page, with the big words "Thank you for loving Firefox!".
Eww.
Although Xfce 1.0 appeared slightly earlier, its initial releases were proprietary, making what was originally known as the Kool Desktop Environment one of the earliest entirely FOSS desktop environments for Linux. Version 1.0 was released in July 1998.
What a weird opening.
Also, both projects were started late 1996. A lot of people were already running KDE alphas/betas before the 1.0 release, because as a desktop it was vastly better than any of the window managers at the time.
I remember installing beta 1 in 1997 was a big relief for me. It felt like the last barrier was broken for Linux taking over the desktop, now that it finally had a desktop that could compete with Windows 95. Of course, I was terribly naive, but I blame it on only being 15yo.
I don't recall Xfce being used much at all. It become more popular until 5-10 years later because people were complaining that KDE/GNOME became too heavy and they were looking for more lightweight alternatives.
A desktop is a tool, and the last thing I want from my tools is intelligence. Tools need to be predictable. My desktop should respond to my commands the exact same way every time so I can use it without conscious thought.
If you want to introduce AI to a desktop, the best way is to add an interface for automating that desktop and add a separate AI agent that can use that interface. This also benefits accessibility tools that can use the same automation interface.
A desktop is many things to many people, some of which use computers very differently from how engineers use them. If a desktop was only a tool, background images, Xeyes, theming, and many other standard features wouldn’t exist. There are no themes for power drills.
Those kind of cosmetic features actually do have a functional use because they let you distinguish virtual desktops at a glance. I'd like to be able to specify different window manager themes for each virtual desktop.
Xeyes is a useful diagnostic tool. (This isn't even just a joke.)
So a few months ago for various reasons I started to use ubuntu/gnome again (after 15 years on MacBooks / OS X / MacOS) on my home PC. I have to say, in my case, command line llm made the desktop so much more enjoyable.
Sadly still a lot of things did not work correctly out of the box, and everything was kinda fixable, but would have needed some bigger time investment from my side.
Instead just telling llm cli that something does not work correctly, and waiting a few minutes until it fixes it is just so much better for me.
Do I want LLMs all over the place in my desktop? Probably not. But having an LLM fixing all kind of broken or miss-configured software is just so convenient.
The best way that my desktop can show me love is by being a glorified application launcher and nothing more. Also, the less meta/data that it sends back to its vendor the more love I feel that I am receiving.
It’s going to happen in windows and most likely Mac too. In both cases, all your data will be shipped off to the model providers and then out into the panopticon.
The open source desktop environments don’t have the profit motivator that drives the commercial alternatives. They’re driven to deliver their interpretation of great UI. We can each debate whether we agree with the vision or execution but that’s the motive.
If they can employ AI to help remove desktop friction - and it’s local and not shipping my data off to the surveillance machine - I’d be open to it.
In fact, if it could sort out KDE wallet’s amnesia for my wifi password, I’d give it a roll now…
And in Windows it will doubtlessly be implemented such that the AI will be very helpful and make subtle UI changes based on your usage patterns, without telling you, so that your muscle memory becomes useless. And insert ads, obviously. Also, the AI should definitely have a cute animated avatar that pops up when you don't need it and offers useless advice.
> A desktop that loves you back has to know you.
Is this another downstream consequence of the COVID lockdowns? Do people need a hug?
___
Hmm. So from the actual talk description, these seem to be UX people that might have interesting ideas to share but also have completely lost the plot when it comes to the overarching narrative.
Which is unsurprising, given that their summary is clearly written by AI (albeit with human editing, but barely)
https://conf.kde.org/event/11/contributions/314/
I love making kustom KDE widgets with LLMs[0][1]. If you like customizing your desktop, I highly recommend you take advantage of this new era.
[0] https://github.com/dginovker/KDE-Mouse-Click-Counter-Widget [1] https://github.com/dginovker/KDE-AI-Usage-Tracking-Widget
Nowhere is safe, is it? All that is holy is profaned.
News piece with unnecessary annoying editorializing.
I think the idea of plasma widgets and rails fully being customized per user giving them material control on ones desktop is a good idea.
We need good ideas to counter and take on the omarchy nonsense.
When you say omarchy, are you talking about this https://omarchy.org/ ?
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. :)
I wouldn't exactly call Omarchy "good taste". Not that it's terrible, but pretty much the only reason it caught attention is because of the creator.
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.
[0]https://regolith-desktop.com/
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.
[1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F7fe9pa8OeE
...Things like not effing up the formatting of a list... :D
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].
[1] https://social.treehouse.systems/@barthalion/117241534134006...
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
You are arguing a point that I'm not even making. I will just stop here.
Omarchy Dragon is an example of it being more than dotfiles.
Omarchy is for nerds. Its a distro for developers. Read their own site. There have long been better distros for non-nerds.
>with unnecessary annoying editorializing
The editor is Liam Proven, a notorious liar who doesn't care about facts and has a massive hate-boner for AI, what do you expect? I'm surprised he is still allowed to write for The Register.
the register has a red masthead for a very good and intentional reason. i think that people, especially americans, are into a bit of the british snark, but the site is by and large taken way more seriously than it deserves to be.
Guess they never used QtQuick with LLM. LLMs are really bad at QML/QtQuick, they often use older APIs/syntaxes and generate total garbage.
From what I've read on the Qt blog, this is something they're tackling with their own models and tooling. GenAI is banned where I work and I'd picked up QML pretty quickly and got productive faster than WPF/XAML
Pretty sure KDE said no AI period. This won’t stand.
>In 2003, they conducted a usability study of the then newly released KDE 3.1.
>The talk has three parts: what KDE learned – or failed to learn – from that study;
This caught my eye, seems in many forums people still say 3.1 was the best KDE.
But I remember trying out KDE 3.1 on Slackware at the time. All it did was give me extremely severe eye strain after about 1 hour of use. GNOME, XFCE and various Window managers did not give me eye strain of any type.
New releases of KDE still caused that issue with me, but I found a color theme that I can use with KDE 5 that holds off eye strain after about 4 or 5 hours. Again all other DE and WMs, no issues. FWIW, I really like KDE 5, but it can still hurt my eyes :(
I have not tried 6.x and will not see it until Slackware 16 is released. I will give it a shot but with my history, I am sceptical it will be fine for me.
Sorry, but a string of ones and zeroes will never "love you back".
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I'm good, thanks. AI bros can all gather at Omarchy if they want slopOS experience.
Is it going to just be an Omarchy + KDE iteration? The article was very light on content but DHH is definitely driving more results and new contributions which is great for free software.
This article has no content whatsoever... Just sending the links of relevant materials to AI would produce a better-organized result than this.
The desktop is a solved problem. Now we are moving into the era of agents using the mouse and keyboard and interacting with the windows manager.
When I see stuff like this, I think it's clear that Linux is not going to be part of that era outside of the CLI. The Linux desktop is never going to recover from this.
Gnome and KDE just keep messing. That's why I stuck to openbox/labwc.
Because, these are not solving problems they are inventing them. Everything that makes Linux great, simply hasn't translated to the desktop GUI. And I can see that will not change. Sure there are things like Niri and thats cool, but for agent use. It's redundant.
We are done with desktops. They will be handed off to ai. Humans will use them less and less. Because they will have better things to do. And likely better interactions. After all a mouse and keyboard while I still prefer it over voice, is still from an era where that was the best we had.
Now, I actually think I prefer tmux in a terminal on my phone on a software keyboard. Over a desktop with mouse and keyboard. As clunky as it is. Because I can use that anywhere, anytime to talk to agents.
CLI is the era and likely gonna be until some more LLM/AI-focused interfaces appear, and they are not gonna look like human UIs. There's a reason all models use bash and code, not a GUI shell, for their internal sandboxen.
Making LLM/AIs use mouse and keyboard makes no sense. They are a human interface tailored to human strengths and limitations, and arguably even for humans CLI is a superior interface for many tasks.
>The desktop is a solved problem.
Can't agree with this, there's clearly room for improvement
>Everything that makes Linux great, simply hasn't translated to the desktop GUI.
Do agree with this though. Fragmentation is not ideal for having a consistent UI and a consistent UI is needed to develop muscle memories so it can be used effectively.
>We are done with desktops. They will be handed off to ai.
I don't think that will happen while AI costs dollars per minute of actual use. Being able to use a computer for free will be valuable for a long time still I think.
XFCE is also a good option.
It would be great if Windowmaker was still being actively developed as in the 2000's, but yeah devs moved on.