Broadcom has taken down the public download pages for the VMware Virtual Disk Development Kit (VDDK). The pages for VDDK 8 and 9, along with the landing page, now return a generic error message.
So far, there has been no formal announcement from Broadcom.
The removal was carried out sometime last month, as people on Reddit and vendor forums started reporting dead links in mid-August. ShapeBlue, an Apache CloudStack services firm, documented the change on August 25. Red Hat followed days later with a support note for its Migration Toolkit for Virtualization.
While existing copies will still be functional, meaning implementations that currently use VDDK will continue working as usual, those who want fresh copies are out of luck.
What's the fuss about?
The VDDK is a library that lets backup and migration tools read VMware virtual disks from outside the hypervisor. VMware launched it in 2008 as an easily accessible SDK for customers building disk utilities, and it soon became the backbone of image-level backups and agentless migrations.
Unfortunately, its license makes things complicated. The library cannot be redistributed, so no Linux distribution provides it, and no open source project can bundle it for users. Everyone has to point to Broadcom's download page, and that page is now gone.
Convenient, not for users but for VMware's owner, Broadcom, who has managed to cut off public access to a tool many relied on to move away from the platform.
The ones who are stuck
Microsoft's Azure Migrate documentation is one example of the disarray caused by the silence. It tells admins to download VDDK 8.0 or 9.0 from the Broadcom portal for agentless migration, and the links embedded there point to a page that isn't accessible.
The docs suggest falling back to agent-based migration if VDDK is unreachable.
Red Hat is in the same boat. Its support note reports customers hitting "not found" or "access denied" errors while trying to access the public download links for VDDK, further noting that it cannot host or redistribute the kit.
They are directing their customers to contact Broadcom support while the Red Hat Engineering team hunts for an alternative, long-term path out of this dilemma.
On Reddit, a user, bobdrakken, already did that, and what they received as a response ought to show you where Broadcom stands on this. 👇
Hi ****,
Greetings from Broadcom Customer Care.
To ensure the highest standard of security, reliability, and product features, the Virtual Disk Development Kit (VDDK) is no longer available for use or download.
Broadcom continues to actively maintain a variety of APIs and SDKs to enable authorized technology alliance partners to build backup and recovery software solutions that are validated and authorized to integrate, interoperate, or be compatible with Broadcom products.
For all backup and recovery requirements, customers should rely on such solutions from Broadcom authorized technology alliance partners."
I hope this helps you.
Please get in touch with your Partner for better assistance, since there is no pending action from our end hence this case will be archived now.
I would be glad to assist you if you have additional support requests.
A pattern unfolds
This takedown fits a pattern running since Broadcom closed its $69 billion acquisition of VMware in November 2023. The subscription-only overhaul followed within weeks, ending perpetual licenses and folding standalone products into bundles.
European customers later reported renewal prices climbing massively, enough to draw formal complaints from industry bodies.
It's not entirely been about extracting the maximum out of VMware; Broadcom has thrown in some goodwill along the way too. Workstation Pro and Fusion Pro went free for everyone in November 2024, and a free ESXi build returned in limited form in 2025.
Each move can be defended on its own; licensing overhauls and price changes are normal business; so is tightening download access.
But taken together, these paint a picture that while VMware itself is running just fine, the ones trying to move off VMware need to jump a few more hoops before they can achieve that.
Seeing all the hype surrounding AI in the Linux ecosystem, you might've asked yourself, What makes a Linux distro "AI-focused"? If you go looking for an answer, you will get all kinds of results depending on which project you look at.
One wires an AI agent into first boot, right next to picking a desktop environment. Another keeps every model running air-gapped with no network access.
There's no established approach here; every project is going at it differently. The distros listed below are each building toward their own idea of what an AI-native desktop should look like.
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The ordering of this list doesn't mean one is better than the other. That decision lies on you, the reader.
1. Omarchy
While Omarchy started off as a simple script to get Hyprland running on a stock Arch install, it has since grown into a full-blown, AI-agent-first Linux distribution with its own foundation and eight-figure funding behind it.
The project markets itself as "the malleable OS for the age of agents," and that framing shows up the moment you boot it for the first time. Setup asks you to pick a default AI agent from a list that spans Claude Code, Codex, Copilot CLI, and several others, then signs you in so it can start working on the system right away.
Once configured, the agent can then help you troubleshoot crashed programs, build out plugins and themes, and put together apps from nothing more than a description of what you want.
And underneath all of that is Arch Linux, so you know you are working on a proven base.
Shadowfetch Linux is built around something it calls "Mission Control," a system for giving an AI agent a task and then actually checking its work.
Nothing from an agent locks in without your sign-off. Once a task is completed, Shadowfetch lays out everything that happened, what changed, which tests ran, what the output looked like, and waits for you to approve it.
It comes with two modes, "Fire," which keeps the system connected to the internet, handing over tasks to cloud agents. While "Ice" works offline, relying on local files and standard media export tools like FFmpeg instead, though it doesn't run local AI models yet.
This distro also limits what an agent can actually touch with a feature called "Firebreak" which keeps the agent inside a defined boundary where it only ever sees the project it's working on and whatever system files that task calls for.
Gnoppix AI Linux, or Gnoppix Linux as it used to be known, traces back to 2002, when its founder Andreas Müller built it on Debian 3.0 "Woody." That work got him hired by Canonical as one of Ubuntu's earliest developers.
Anyhow, Gnoppix keeps AI local and off the network by default. Its homepage showcases a Mistral 7B model running locally, with it being "AIR-GAPPED," meaning that the model has no network access.
That same privacy-focused approach carries through the rest of the OS, with no telemetry, a built-in encrypted messenger, a VPN, and a search tool that strips identifying details before a query goes anywhere.
There's also a space for testing and fine-tuning models like Mistral, Llama, and Qwen on Gnoppix's own servers without needing the hardware to run them yourself, and the project itself is Debian-based.
Official material describes the project being run out of Panama with an AI lab in Japan, and there are many pricing tiers for this one, so choose the one that suits your use case.
MakuluLinux comes with Electra, an AI assistant you control from a floating bar at the top of the screen. Type what you want in plain English, and it figures out whether that means chatting, writing code, drafting an article, or running a system command.
Electra isn't locked to MakuluLinux either. It installs on Ubuntu, Debian, Arch, Fedora, and a few other distros too; MakuluLinux just ships it by default. The developers say that they built and operate the AI backend instead of wrapping someone else's API, and there's no key needed to use it.
If you lose your internet connection, it switches to a local model automatically and can even remember past conversations.
Though the company's pages don't agree on how many models are actually available. The number ranges from the low seventies to over ninety, depending on which page you check.
This distro can be regarded as one of the early adopters of AI in a Linux distro, while most of this list only started moving in this direction over the past year. deepin weaves its AI layer, called UOS AI, directly into the browser, mail client, and system-wide search instead of keeping it in a separate app.
That search piece, branded "Grand Search", is the most visible desktop-focused part of it, and deepin's most recent stable release, 25.2.1, pushed it further with something called Intelligent Search.
Instead of remembering an exact filename, you can type a phrase like "financial spreadsheets modified yesterday" or "videos larger than 1 GB," and the system parses that into filters for time, file type, location, and size on its own.
Ubuntu isn't trying to be an AI-native distro yet, but it's taking the first step toward being one. Ubuntu 26.10, which is scheduled for an October release, is going to feature its first AI-powered feature.
Myna is a dictation tool that runs entirely on the machine itself, triggered via a keyboard shortcut, dropping transcribed text into whatever you were typing into without needing an internet connection.
This comes after Canonical's VP of Engineering, Jon Seager, revealed their plan for splitting AI work across Ubuntu into two categories earlier this year.
Thanks to Joey Sneddon of OMG! Ubuntu, we now know that local speech models for Myna will ship as separate, removable snaps matched to your hardware, some built for NVIDIA GPUs specifically, others CPU-only, with broader language support planned for later.
If you aren't a big fan of AI in your Linux distro, then I recommend going through ZDNet's roundup of the distros that plan to stay that way. There are six of them: AerynOS, MX Linux, Debian, Arch Linux, Slackware, and Void Linux.
There is no dearth of note taking apps for Linux. There are tools like Obsidian that are local first, tools like Joplin that are both local and cloud but not encrypted. There are also collaborative tools like Etherpad that put encrypted notes on a remote server.
And then I come across a new tool this week called Privacy Notes. It mixes several things at once and tries to be the "one note app to rule them all". It is Markdown-first with WYSIWYG editor, vault for storing passwords, ssh keys etc, journal and more.
Privacy Notes
The idea of Privacy Notes is to give you an application that is primarily aimed at keeping your most important documents safe on their server by providing client side encryption.
This means that the notes and files are encrypted on your device first and then they get uploaded to Privacy Notes's servers. Privacy Notes website mentions that their servers are hosted in Switzerland.
This is zero knowledge encryption which means you have to save your key or phrase somewhere safe because if you lose that, not even Privacy Notes can give the data back as everything is encrypted.
Privacy Notes is developed by Lifetime Labs and they have the motto to provide software but NOT as a service.
In that regard, Lifetime Labs offers a lifetime price for Privacy Notes. You get 500 MB of encrypted storage for $48 (early adapter price, and it rises to $89 later). If you want more storage, extra storage is self-serve from $4.80/GB per year.
Note that server storage is a recurring cost, unlike desktop software. That's why extra storage has a recurring subscription fee.
Privacy Notes apps are open source and the source code is available on their GitHub repository. This includes the web, desktop and mobile clients and even their encryption and threat model.
More than just plain note taking
While the name suggests it is another Markdown based editor focused on privacy, it does offer a few things different than most other editors in this category. Let me share them with you.
Store your passwords and keys in vault
Privacy Notes has the option to add sensitive information in a predefined template and in its own dedicated section in the sidebar.
This is a feature password managers like Bitwarden and Proton Pass offer. Merging it in the notes is a good move, especially when the idea is to have secret, encrypted notes. Login passwords, credit card information, SSH/GPG keys are the common secrets people store.
You can also generate and save new Ed25519 SSH keys and passwords in the app. I think it can also store TOTO 2FA keys.
You can also import your passwords from your browser or other password managers:
Since the idea is to provide a full-featured note apps, there are also tasks here. Now, there is no Kanban-styled task board here. Tasks are just regular notes but if you click to create a new task, it starts with a checklist. You can still add text and other markdown formatting in the tasks.
You can add checklists in regular notes as well but when you go into the Tasks view, it shows all the notes that have any kind of checklist in it.
I think the idea to give a separate view for all to-dos in one place. Which is a good thing as to-do list may get buried in the pile of notes.
More note types
There are two more note types. Bookmarks and Journals. Both are evident from their names.
Bookmarks type of notes are for saving bookmarks. It's okay to have such a feature, but to me, the place of a bookmark is in a browser or in a dedicated bookmark manager.
It would have been better to have a quick note field in the bookmarks to quickly know or search what the bookmark is about.
And there are journals. Logseq and some other personal knowledge base tools have the concept of journal entries. Which is like having a personal diary.
Each new note in the journal automatically gets the day and date as its name. You can create a new journal note the same day only when you rename the existing entry of the day.
You can also upload images, audio and any other file type via the Files option. This is good. Important documents can also be in image format. Like, I could save my passport and other official IDs in image format.
Since all the files are client side encrypted, this is better than keeping them in Google or One Drive where the images may be used to train AI (we don't know that for sure).
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Wiki style links are supported in Privacy Notes. This means if you move from a tool like Obsidian, your links will be preserved.
Burn after reading
Privacy Notes allows you to share links to your encrypted files. Anyone with the link can view the file but here is the twist. It can be viewed only once. The link self-destructs after is opened once.
This burn after reading reminds me of both Victorian era love letters and Ethan Hunt in Mission Impossible.
Local markdown files
Privacy Notes desktop application allows you to view and edit local markdown files. If you have personal knowledge base built on Markdown (like Obsidian) or have GitHub repo, you can use it inside Privacy Notes. It edits the files in place, keeps subfolders, and converts nothing.
Keep in mind that these files stay on your systems locally and they are not encrypted. You can choose to add them to the encrypted , though. This way, the notes will be encrypted first and then saved on to your Privacy Notes account in the cloud.
I like this idea. If you have only 50 MB of the free encrypted cloud storage or 500 MB of lifetime Pro version, you cannot dump all your notes in it. You can be selective and only upload the notes and documents that need to be in the (encrypted) cloud.
But do note that the standard features you saw above—like bookmarks, journals, vaults, etc.—are not stored locally. So you cannot create new passwords or ssh keys using the vault template and store it locally, it gets encrypted and gets stored on the server and gets counted in your storage quota.
Local markdown notes remain local. They don't get the fancy templates. But you can use the editor that works great for markdown files.
You can also mix and match. Store only the most important, sensitive data in the encrypted cloud, while regular files can be synced to a Git repo.
Also, you can export your notes any time.
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The free version of the app doesn't allow creating folders in the encrypted section of the app. You will see the pop up to upgrade to Pro if you click on the folder option.
We are not dealing with servers here but personally, I keep multiple backups of my data. Some are in my homelab and some stay in the cloud.
My scanned IDs, warranty papers, insurance documents, and other such important data live in the cloud. They used to be in email 15 years ago.
Privacy Notes can be part of the multiple backup strategy. Since it is especially for notes you cannot use it for dumping GBs of images but you can try using it for storing important documents, notes, passwords, SSH key, 2FA recovery codes etc. The client-side encryption adds a layer of trust.
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Zero knowledge encryption is a double-edged sword. If you forget the recovery phrase, you will lose access to the docs stored in the cloud. That's why I suggest keeping more than one backups.
The free account gives you 50 MB of encrypted storage. Which should be enough for you to try it and also keep on using it if you have limited needs.
The Pro version will give you 500 MB of storage for a single payment of $48. It's a lifetime subscription, something I prefer over a recurring subscription.
The Pro version allows you to use the synced notes on multiple devices (free plan syncs only 2 devices) and keeps upto 20 revisions of a file. You do benefits for the amount you are paying.
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Privacy Notes allows importing from Obsidian, Standard Notes, Evernote, Apple Notes, Bitwarden and a number of other note taking apps and password managers. Mostly, you have to export the files from their respective tools and then you import them in Privacy Notes.
Getting Privacy Notes
If you want to take the feel of Privacy Notes, there is a web-based demo here. That gives you an idea of what the tool is like.
And then, when you decide to use it, you have apps available for Linux, Windows, macOS, iOS and Android.
For Linux users, Privacy Notes is available in AppImage and .deb format for for x86_64 and ARM64 platforms so even SBCs like Raspberry Pi are covered here. Every release is signed and carries a SHA-256 checksum on GitHub.
If you are using Android, you can get the app in APK format from Zapstore or Obtanium, platforms that verifies developer signature. Pure APK can be downloaded from the website, too. Google Play store integration is in works.
You can download the apps from the download section of their website:
iXsystems put TrueNAS CORE into what it called a sustaining engineering phase back in 2024. Under this, the open source NAS operating system would only receive security and stability fixes, with new features going to the Linux-based SCALE branch instead.
Even its maintenance releases got axed when iXsystems marked 13.3-U1.2 as the final release for the 13.3 series (or train as they call them).
SCALE has since been renamed TrueNAS Community Edition, and users who didn't want to move to a Linux-based OS were stuck with CORE and no actively developed FreeBSD-based path forward.
It traces directly back through TrueNAS CORE to FreeNAS, and it's built on the same foundation CORE always used: FreeBSD and OpenZFS. The current stable release is 15.0-U1.3, and it is aimed at TrueNAS CORE holdouts.
Basically for people who rely on features like FreeBSD jails and bhyve virtual machines who have no interest in moving to TrueNAS Community Edition's Debian Linux base.
It's also worth knowing that FreeCORE is a one-person project. Their motivation for creating this was that they needed a FreeBSD way off their own TrueNAS CORE box instead of migrating to Linux.
So they built one, leaning heavily on AI coding agents for the implementation while directing and validating the work themselves.
FreeCORE's FreeBSD 15 base carries along many practical component upgrades with it too!
OpenZFS climbs from 2.1.14 to 2.4.2, Python from 3.9 to 3.11, and the web interface runs on a much newer build of Angular.
WebAuthn security keys now work as a second login factor, and one-time passwords cover console logins. Jails can share the host GPU through a new DRM driver, and rar2fs mounts RAR archives read-only.
FreeCORE also gets rid of vendor telemetry and offers a web interface that lets you manage everything from jails and virtual machines to storage, sharing, and user accounts.
Jails networking runs through VNET, NAT, or DHCP depending on what the setup needs, and an advanced jail creation form exposes every option for admins who want a greater level of control.
Get started
Most of you arriving at FreeCORE are likely running TrueNAS CORE 13.3, and moving is only a matter of taking a backup and running this script:
fetch https://freecore.org/freecore-enroll.sh && sh freecore-enroll.sh
Running it switches the system's update train and certificate away from iXsystems' servers and points it at FreeCORE's.
From there, the upgrade runs through System › Update like any other update. The configuration database migrates on first boot, though not everything makes it across. OpenVPN gets replaced by WireGuard, and enterprise-licensed features don't carry over.
Of course you could always go the fresh install route, where you write the image to removable media, verify it, and then boot from it to install it on a drive.
The official documentation is a handy resource that covers a range of topics related to FreeCORE installation and usage, while the source code lives on Codeberg.
It's been a while since I last wrote about Bottles. For anyone new to it, Bottles runs Windows software on Linux by hiding most of Wine's configuration work behind a straightforward interface.
Its feature list has been growing consistently too. You can pull common Windows components like .NET and Visual C++ runtimes with a single click, or juggle multiple Wine and Proton runners per bottle.
Additionally, UMU support lets you run Proton games outside Steam, and snapshots give every experiment of yours a rollback point.
With its newest offering, Bottles pushes past x86_64 hardware. Bottles 67.4 is a test release aimed at ARM64 on Linux, which is delivered through an experimental cpak package.
And know that the ARM64 rollout actually spanned two releases. 67.3 added the first ARM64 build of the cpak package, and 67.4 followed hours later with a few misc fixes and Soda 11.0-10.
Must-know bits
Placeholder images of Bottles 67.3 running on an x86_64 system.
On ARM64 systems, cpak now fetches the right build for the platform, while Soda, Bottles' Wine-based runner, carries native ARM64 and ARM64EC support. FEX also comes bundled for running x86 and x86_64 Windows software.
All of that makes Bottles genuinely useful on ARM64 Linux hardware, be it single-board computers or Arm-powered laptops.
What surprised me most was the speed at which this was delivered.
The request to add ARM64 (or AArch64) builds was opened a week ago. Within three days, there was a test candidate, the request poster (TCB13) confirmed Bottles launched on their own ARM64 hardware, and the issue was closed and marked as completed soon after.
The tagged releases followed on September 7.
If you were wondering why they chose cpak for the test run, Mirko Brombin from the Bottles team says that:
Cpak is being used for this test because it is the first packaging path where the application, Wine base and native ARM CI are available together.
The other part of the release is the inclusion of Soda 11.0-10, which comes with a range of updates. Battle.net crashing on startup is the issue that some of you will notice first. It has been fixed, and the underlying problem was XInput starting up without a Steam game ID.
For VR workloads, 64-bit Windows OpenXR apps can now connect to a host runtime such as Monado or WiVRn directly without needing to keep Steam or SteamVR running. You can go through the changelog (linked above) to learn more about this Soda release.
Installing it
Currently, the test ARM64 build ships only as a cpak, the OCI-based package format from the Containerpak project. Work is underway on getting the Flatpak release ready for this platform.
That said, you can quickly install the cpak test release on your ARM64 devices by running the following command:
cpak install github.com/bottlesdevs/bottles
If you didn't know, cpak is a packaging format that treats apps as OCI container images, each paired with a small manifest that lists its permissions and dependencies.
How cpak differs from Flatpak is that it does not lean on runtimes and portals the way Flatpak does. The cpak runtime mounts the OCI image directly, the manifest decides what the app can touch, and packages install from a Git origin instead of a central store.
PhoneBuff is a company that built its name by offering lab-tested, standardized reviews for smartphones run by robotic hands. Their YouTube channel showcases a range of assessments that cover speed tests, drop tests, and battery tests.
When viewers started poking them about trying Linux after a recent performance comparison they did between a Dell XPS 13 and MacBook Neo, they responded.
Taking two identical Dell XPS 13s with an Intel Core 5 320 and 8GB of RAM, one on Windows 11 and one on Fedora, the PhoneBuff crew ran the same real-world apps and workflows on each, timed by their robot mouse and keyboard (aka the clanker in question).
By the time testing concluded, Fedora won six of eleven timed tests while four tied, and Windows 11 took home a single win.
Fedora vs. Windows 11 on same hardware
Same settings too! The screens sat at 200 nits, both laptops stood an equal distance from the WiFi point, and the room stayed temperature controlled. Each test was run three to five times, with the median value noted.
Boot from a full shutdown tied at 23 seconds for Windows and 24 seconds for Fedora, too close to call. Restarting did not. Fedora came back in 27 seconds, median; Windows took 61 seconds. Windows' five runs swung 46 to 68 seconds, Fedora's 23 to 34 seconds.
The widest gap was files. Unzipping the same 6GB archive took Fedora's built-in tool 12 seconds. On Windows, using Windows Explorer, it was 57 seconds, and installing 7-Zip only got it down to 17.4 seconds.
Next comes the result that ought to sting Microsoft. Running VS Code, the robot loaded an open source whiteboard project, scanned it for errors, compiled it, and ran close to 1,900 tests. Fedora was done in 2:20.5. Windows 11 needed 3:41.99.
Source: PhoneBuff
The creative apps went the same way. DaVinci Resolve imported two clips, graded one, stabilized the other, and exported in 2:10.9 (Fedora) against 2:49.9 (Windows). A GIMP session on a 4K image, using tools like smudge, heal, and object removal, finished 53.3 seconds against 60.7 seconds.
The everyday apps were mostly a tie. Chrome on a locally hosted page with video, 3D models, maps, and chart math finished in 19.3 seconds on Fedora against 19.8 on Windows.
The same 500-page document opened in ONLYOFFICE in 8.7 seconds against 9.3, while the OCR pass also went to Fedora, 36.6 seconds against 39.8.
Even the Blender render of the same 1080p scene ended even, 44.2 seconds against 43.5.
Idle memory usage was another big gap. Left idle for a minute, Fedora used 32.9% of the 8GB while Windows sat at 85.2%. The video showed 2.27GB being used on Fedora against Windows' 6.47GB.
The lone Windows win was launching Cyberpunk 2077, 54.3 seconds against Fedora's 57.0-second launch. Though remember, that is a launch time number, not a frame rate, and PhoneBuff didn't run any gaming benchmarks.
What do the numbers mean?
Source: PhoneBuff
Do not read too much into it yet. There are no AI workloads here, and as I just said, no gaming benchmarks either.
The presenter for PhoneBuff says at the beginning of the video that Fedora is one of the many Linux distros out there and that "this won't necessarily represent every possible Linux experience."
A different distro running a different desktop environment will definitely move some of the gaps we see here.
The RAM gap comes with an asterisk too. Windows sat at 85.2% with a few Dell utilities, Defender (MsMpEng), and Edge WebView2 running by default, so Windows is not the only thing behind that 6.47GB number. Fedora simply started off with less baggage.
To summarize, the heavy tasks went to Fedora, sometimes by minutes, the everyday ones tied, and idle RAM sat at around a third on Linux against 85% on Windows.
That is all eleven tests can claim, so take them as data points, not a verdict.
Ikey Doherty is out of retirement, and Omarchy's funding is why.
In a video posted on YouTube, the creator of Solus and AerynOS called the money behind DHH's distro absurd and promised to do it better with nothing. His answer is Barney, a Rust-based tool for building Linux distros from source.
Omarchy's Omacom Foundation has already crossed $13 million in pledges since its August launch, when eight tech executives, including Michael Dell, put in a million each.
The run has drawn its share of pushback, most recently when 1Password pledged $300,000 and its own employees objected. Ikey's video arrived a day after the foundation announced $1.95 million in AI tokens from Meta, Anthropic, OpenAI, and Fireworks.
Not a distro, but a stance
Barney is a tool meant to help you build Linux distros; the repo describes it as "yet another feckin' tool to build a Linux distro" and notes that delivering a distro is not the intended goal.
Ikey plans to show how distros get built instead of shipping what he calls a "wallpaper respin" via a series on his YouTube channel.
Everything gets built from source, and the outputs are cached against what produced them. Change a dependency, and anything built on top of it gets rebuilt. Layouts stay stateless, a concept Doherty says he helped pioneer on Intel's Clear Linux team and later pushed in Solus and AerynOS (formerly Serpent OS).
Builds run in containers, and the results are stored by content, so identical files across packages only get stored once. The plan even includes rebuilding the toolchain from scratch.
Everything is written in Rust and released under the MPL-2.0 license. The project's name itself is personal to him, as Barney is his son's name.
Work on it has started already. The first episode of the series is live, titled "Episode 0: Getting Ready." For access to the behind-the-scenes content, Ikey has set up a Ko-fi page where people can directly support him.
An Irish Traveller's reply
Don't assume that this is something Ikey has no business talking about.
Omarchy's creator, David Heinemeier Hansson, better known as DHH, had written a post comparing Denmark's wolf population with Romani people camping in Copenhagen parks.
Naturally, Ikey, being an Irish Traveller, a group that has faced discrimination for generations, was bound to react. On LinkedIn, sharing his video (the one linked at the very beginning), he called DHH's comments "horrific" and said the funding and the views together had dragged him back into the game.
His laptop buying plans have changed too. Michael Dell was among the launch backers, and Ikey has put the company on his avoid list, while also calling out Omarchy:
Gonna be honest I won’t buy another Dell laptop after Michael Dell showing support for DHH. Skipping the point of it being yet another wallpaper-respin distro.. I cannot possibly tolerate the comments made by DHH (on a number of topics)
As an Irish traveller, I strongly condemn his rhetoric surrounding nomadic people.
As a former Linux distro developer, I wouldn’t touch his shit if you paid me.
Will it do well?
Only time will tell. Right now, my read is that the question misses the point. Barney is not here to become the distro everyone installs. Success, by Doherty's own framing, is showing how a real distro gets built while the industry watches.
You already know that he has walked away from big projects before. Solus and AerynOS both carried on without him. Barney could be next, sure.
What stands out to me is the timing of it all. Another Clear Linux member, Auke Kok, is building The Ur Project from scratch, and neither of them is waiting for a foundation to get going.
The optimist inside me says that if the two of them ever collaborated, they could deliver something that shows the Linux ecosystem that pouring absurd amounts of money into a project isn't the only way to build well.
