Gotta say, given the list of security issues that continue to be found in Omarchy, if I were an enterprising explorer, I'd be probing for shopify employees running Omarchy.
Tailwind is basically already EOL in its functional inability to support newer CSS features. Both of these projects seemed like the creator being fine with getting out with a nice paycheck, and that's ok by me, although it's unfortunate DO lied about how it would handle CSS Tricks going forward, and generally abandoned the tech writing aspect it was initially known for.
It's basically an app store and service manager for self hosting. You can deploy databases, auth providers, Git forges, a static site, anything you want with one click in a nice web UI. Hetzner only gives you a base Linux install and everyone knows setting up Docker from scratch is a pain.
Almost all magazines go though an arc of success, plateau and decline. Audiences and writers move on or retire.
I very much like and use CSS-Tricks, however, in itself it reflects a somewhat dated frontend design process and rarely uses any CSS tricks to clothe the Wordpress core that enforces dated design processes.
The racist accusation has been overused so much it's not just having diminishing returns, it's having no effect. If you can't argue someone's point but just throw labels at them, you are going to lose because the labels lose value the more broadly you apply them.
And that will allow the real racists to walk right through your gates because you can no longer identify them when everyone you don't like is a racist.
Because being friendly works doesn't work. Open source maintainers have been screaming about funding for years. One dude comes along, adds some scripts on top of all the work of those maintainers, and gets millions in funding?
You can't expect people to be nice then. It's completely messed up.
In this case CSS-Tricks got paid $4m first, so probably the wrong entity to be complaining about funding. But maybe the lead editor in question who’s not the creator didn’t see much of that?
Got acquired => got paid. CSS-Tricks the entity (up to the point of acquisition) got paid the money. If and how the money was divided between the people involved doesn’t seem be public info.
If Linus Torvalds published it I don't think that would make it worth throwing millions of dollars at. When you stop paying for one thing and start paying for another, you're making a value statement about what you care about.
"people you do like" in this case refers to a website that DigitalOcean owns.
"people you don't like" is a singular (racist) guy who slapped a bunch of scripts on top of Arch and somehow receives hundreds of thousands of dollars for it.
He seems concerned about vagrancy and "shitting in the bushes" rather than the race (Is gypsy even a race?) of people doing it.
Going way back up to what was said above however, if you want funds for css-tricks, complaining about omarchy getting funded is just dumb. Funding tends to go to things that are growing. Omarchy is growing fast. It's going to get funded. If you're not growing, you starve. That's just how capitalism appears to operate.
Based on comments here, it sounds like css-tricks founder got paid and didn't care anymore so the product withered, hence no further funding to be expected.
It really lost something when Chris Coyier stopped writing for it. He just had a way of writing fun and approachable tutorials for this stuff, and the other contributors didn't hit the same style.
(no shade to Geoff Graham, he did good work as well)
Wow, Omarchy is hot right now. Great to see all these companies contributing to a future with Linux on desktop. Good on Digital Ocean for making such a substantial commitment.
It would be a shame if css-tricks went offline after all these years. I can understand it winding down now that we are in the age of agents but I hope to see it preserved in some way so it stays online for a very long time.
> Great to see all these companies contributing to a future with Linux on desktop.
I'm thinking they're merely riding the free publicity wave. Who, in their right mind, would contribute to the super narrow definition of linux desktop preached by DHH?
Was "being agentic" and "being keyboard shortcut oriented" the big gaps preventing the adoption of linux on desktop?
I honestly fail to see why everybody is so convinced that the linux desktop will be "saved" by Omarchy, a set of scripts specifically designed to mostly satisfy a narrow slice of power users and developers.
Also, sponsoring a multi-millionaire's AI generated side project to the sum of many millions of dollars instead of contributing to the dozens or hundreds of thankless developers that have built and maintained most of the current linux ecosystem is pretty disgusting imho.
Omarchy is a highly opinionated distro. For example I remember DHH falling in love with alacritty a few minutes after switching from being a Mac hardcore user-evangelist (Mac users were furious in Twitter!). Now alacritty is in Omarchy as one of the four terminals available.
This is to say that Omarchy is not Linux. Is a very particular vision of Linux that lots of people won't like. Funding should go to projects near the foundation of Linux (say Gnome or Kde or alacritty itself), not to some random re-packager known for having strong and radical takes that might swing without previous notice. DHH is perfectly able to wake up tomorrow saying "fuck Linux, fuck Omarchy, the future is Windows".
I am concerned that what will happen to detailed technical write ups that defined much of the "technical internet space"? There used to be "CodeProject" (still is around probably) that used to have great articles on C, Windows Programming, Windows System programming and what not. Similar other sources on Web as well such as some TutPlus network.
Now with LLMs, they won't gain attention and all knowledge would be stuck in LLMs but there would be no knowledge base to train the LLMs on so... would this all collapse in a decade or two?
PS: Not anti AI rant, just a genuine open question.
FYI, CodeProject.com appears to have been shut down a few months ago. I used to visit (and contribute) to the site regularly through articles and Q&A answers. When StackOverflow took over, I moved most of my Q&A answers there, and I suspect many others did too.
The site languished until a few months ago when it started serving a blank page. Now it appears totally offline. ;-(
> Now with LLMs, they won't gain attention and all knowledge would be stuck in LLMs but there would be no knowledge base to train the LLMs on so...
It's even worse, the internet is getting filled with AI generated slop. All that knowledge stuck in LLMs gets regurgitated out with random errors scattered into it. A few cycles of AI having to scrape and ingest its own slop and it's going to get very ugly.
Aren't all Linux distros ultimately a bunch of scripts on top of the Linux kernel? Compiled scripts, but scripts none the less. If someone made a bash compiler maybe that would help. Reminds me of when I used to compile DOS batch files to .com executables back in the day to make my work look more important lol
I mean, that post says basically nothing of substance, compared to the post linked by OP.
That said, this is a sad situation. If I’m reading this right, essentially digital ocean has just stopped paying the main contributor to css tricks for no clear reason.
> Apparently it is a more pressing matter for them to donate to a collection of scripts and configuration files than to contribute to the projects they’re built upon
The dismissive disingenuousness is tiresome. Omarchy hasn't been a set of dotfiles in a long time, and the money has gone to upstream projects - vaxry got paid to be able to dev Hyprland fulltime for up to five years, outfoxxed who makes Quickshell got hired, they sponsored the developer of mise, and hired a kernel developer.
Tbh I can't see how any site about tooling doesn't go the way of Stack Overflow. I used to follow the latest framework and CSS articles avidly. With agents it's a moot point.
It's sad. But rather than fight it, we should be thinking about what communities we form next, in a world where knowing flexbox tricks isn't a flex.
That's because those AI's were trained on existing "CSS tricks."
If people stop writing new CSS tricks, they will never make it into any dataset, and it won't matter if the AI can search the internet or not, because they won't be posted on the internet either.
I think this assumes AI needs the same kinds of “tricks” humans do.
Flexbox, CSS Grid, etc. are mostly abstractions that make low-level DOM/layout control tractable for humans. But from first principles, an agent doesn’t really care whether the interface is elegant. If it can reliably manipulate the underlying system directly and verify the rendered output, it can just write whatever low-level code gets the pixels where they need to go.
So I don’t really buy that there’s some big missing abstraction layer left to invent for AI here. Once the agent can control and verify the underlying output, better human-facing wrappers mostly stop mattering.
Not talking about design trends, just the mechanics of producing the UI.
What low level code would that be? Position every element manually with JS and position: absolute? Flex and grid are the low level layout mechanics used for any responsive webapp. Even most native frameworks use the flexbox model.
Oddly enough if the scraping is good, AI can find the CSS tricks in the wild. Not as applicable with other technologies but scrapable web is readable for AI much like how some of us old people learned html/css by looking at source of quality websites.
Getting linux to work flawlessly on M Macs is "just a bunch of scripts"? Wow. Since when tech folks judge the open-source projects so harsh and so much just after they only started?
On the off chance this isn't just trolling: Getting linux to work on M-series Macs was a ton of work and basically none of it was done by the folks behind Omarchy. Exactly the point being made in this argument and elsewhere is that the funding would be better off going to the people who really did the hard parts of that work (e.g. Ashai developers among others)
owebmaster | 21 hours ago
EspadaV9 | 21 hours ago
sevenseacat | 21 hours ago
https://omarchy.org/news/2026/08/omacom-foundation-launches-... Founding member, donating a million dollars.
ActionHank | 19 hours ago
threetonesun | 20 hours ago
micromacrofoot | 20 hours ago
jordanscales | 20 hours ago
spiderfarmer | 20 hours ago
Plus, it's an EU company. I don't want to rely on US hosting for my business.
recov | 19 hours ago
rpastuszak | 19 hours ago
I'm moving off Vercel / AWS. I kept DO for a Minecraft server for friends/family but that's dead.
Diti | 17 hours ago
tancop | 16 hours ago
VPenkov | 16 hours ago
Coolify's website [1] explains it better.
But for example, you can call a webhook once new resources have been created, so Coolify can push them to your CDN.
[1] https://coolify.io/
draw_down | 20 hours ago
throwy99864 | 12 hours ago
Theodores | 20 hours ago
I very much like and use CSS-Tricks, however, in itself it reflects a somewhat dated frontend design process and rarely uses any CSS tricks to clothe the Wordpress core that enforces dated design processes.
account42 | 19 hours ago
prinny_ | 19 hours ago
simianparrot | 2 hours ago
And that will allow the real racists to walk right through your gates because you can no longer identify them when everyone you don't like is a racist.
malmz | an hour ago
jakelazaroff | 35 minutes ago
blactuary | 19 hours ago
account42 | 18 hours ago
blactuary | 18 hours ago
ramon156 | 17 hours ago
boredpudding | 19 hours ago
You can't expect people to be nice then. It's completely messed up.
oefrha | 19 hours ago
boredpudding | 19 hours ago
oefrha | 19 hours ago
geoffgraham | 18 hours ago
danieljacksonno | 13 hours ago
bastawhiz | 5 hours ago
mb_thd | 19 hours ago
benatkin | 16 hours ago
dallen33 | 14 hours ago
taikahessu | 12 hours ago
panny | 12 hours ago
Going way back up to what was said above however, if you want funds for css-tricks, complaining about omarchy getting funded is just dumb. Funding tends to go to things that are growing. Omarchy is growing fast. It's going to get funded. If you're not growing, you starve. That's just how capitalism appears to operate.
Based on comments here, it sounds like css-tricks founder got paid and didn't care anymore so the product withered, hence no further funding to be expected.
lioeters | 3 hours ago
Proudly ignorant and supportive of racism. Typical.
ewy1 | 19 hours ago
rkeswick | 19 hours ago
CM30 | 7 hours ago
(no shade to Geoff Graham, he did good work as well)
sintaxi | 19 hours ago
It would be a shame if css-tricks went offline after all these years. I can understand it winding down now that we are in the age of agents but I hope to see it preserved in some way so it stays online for a very long time.
lgl | 19 hours ago
I'm thinking they're merely riding the free publicity wave. Who, in their right mind, would contribute to the super narrow definition of linux desktop preached by DHH?
Was "being agentic" and "being keyboard shortcut oriented" the big gaps preventing the adoption of linux on desktop?
I honestly fail to see why everybody is so convinced that the linux desktop will be "saved" by Omarchy, a set of scripts specifically designed to mostly satisfy a narrow slice of power users and developers.
Also, sponsoring a multi-millionaire's AI generated side project to the sum of many millions of dollars instead of contributing to the dozens or hundreds of thankless developers that have built and maintained most of the current linux ecosystem is pretty disgusting imho.
zorobo | 12 hours ago
Of course not but dhh makes it clear omarchy is not for everybody. And that’s all right.
otherme123 | 19 hours ago
This is to say that Omarchy is not Linux. Is a very particular vision of Linux that lots of people won't like. Funding should go to projects near the foundation of Linux (say Gnome or Kde or alacritty itself), not to some random re-packager known for having strong and radical takes that might swing without previous notice. DHH is perfectly able to wake up tomorrow saying "fuck Linux, fuck Omarchy, the future is Windows".
est | 19 hours ago
bastawhiz | 5 hours ago
wg0 | 19 hours ago
Now with LLMs, they won't gain attention and all knowledge would be stuck in LLMs but there would be no knowledge base to train the LLMs on so... would this all collapse in a decade or two?
PS: Not anti AI rant, just a genuine open question.
phoghed | 14 hours ago
There will probably still be some passionate people dedicated to this kind of thing, but presumably not as many, which is unfortunate.
judah | 14 hours ago
The site languished until a few months ago when it started serving a blank page. Now it appears totally offline. ;-(
piskov | 12 hours ago
autoexec | 14 hours ago
It's even worse, the internet is getting filled with AI generated slop. All that knowledge stuck in LLMs gets regurgitated out with random errors scattered into it. A few cycles of AI having to scrape and ingest its own slop and it's going to get very ugly.
wiesson | 19 hours ago
malmz | an hour ago
timedude | 17 hours ago
ChiperSoft | 17 hours ago
https://geoffgraham.me/why-css-tricks-has-been-quiet/
willio58 | 6 hours ago
That said, this is a sad situation. If I’m reading this right, essentially digital ocean has just stopped paying the main contributor to css tricks for no clear reason.
bsimpson | 17 hours ago
woodpanel | 15 hours ago
soundnote | 15 hours ago
The dismissive disingenuousness is tiresome. Omarchy hasn't been a set of dotfiles in a long time, and the money has gone to upstream projects - vaxry got paid to be able to dev Hyprland fulltime for up to five years, outfoxxed who makes Quickshell got hired, they sponsored the developer of mise, and hired a kernel developer.
kellengreen | 15 hours ago
m3h | 15 hours ago
There were a lot of products and ideas that felt great during ZIRP but stopped making sense post-ZIRP. That's my take.
bilater | 14 hours ago
It's sad. But rather than fight it, we should be thinking about what communities we form next, in a world where knowing flexbox tricks isn't a flex.
AlienRobot | 14 hours ago
If people stop writing new CSS tricks, they will never make it into any dataset, and it won't matter if the AI can search the internet or not, because they won't be posted on the internet either.
Essentially, mass scraping has a chilling effect.
bilater | 14 hours ago
Flexbox, CSS Grid, etc. are mostly abstractions that make low-level DOM/layout control tractable for humans. But from first principles, an agent doesn’t really care whether the interface is elegant. If it can reliably manipulate the underlying system directly and verify the rendered output, it can just write whatever low-level code gets the pixels where they need to go.
So I don’t really buy that there’s some big missing abstraction layer left to invent for AI here. Once the agent can control and verify the underlying output, better human-facing wrappers mostly stop mattering.
Not talking about design trends, just the mechanics of producing the UI.
malmz | an hour ago
abirch | 14 hours ago
veqq | 13 hours ago
droptablemain | 14 hours ago
dallen33 | 14 hours ago
jarek83 | 13 hours ago
legobmw99 | 12 hours ago