Hope this doesn't end up political... Last time the entire Framework Discord's mod team went on strike because of a controversial sponsorship, and ended with the closure of the discord.
I hadn't heard about this before, so in case anyone else is also curious and wants to save some googling, it sounds like was a few months ago when they sponsored Hyprland[1]. I hadn't heard about controversy with Hyprland before, only being vaguely aware of it, but the forum thread I linked to further links to this blog post[2] with more details.
I have more of an Issue with the Omarchy sponsorship. While i disagree with Hyprland's maintainer at least Hyprland is actually engineering something great and making it free software. Omarchy is basically just a script.
Not a fan of either but I feel obligated to point out they don't appear to be sponsoring Omarchy, they just posted about it on their social media account(s). Hyprland they actually did do a small sponsorship for.
Sometimes Discord is still pretty helpful with real-time support. It indeed has its flaws, but some of the best real time help is still given there. I love the C++ discord, it's just filled with gems.
Nothing of value was lost. Discord is the worst way to engage with any kind of serious community. It's a firehose of prematurely fired off messages, badges, emojis, banners, nitro upgrades, flags. Threading sucks. Ten conversations are usually happening at once. It's like if you had a 100gig connection to the WAL of 4chan plugged directly into your brain. It's no wonder kids these days are all autistic or ADHD.
Dabbled in CachyOS as a replacement fo my main OS recently it worked well, was trying to do the omarchy on cachy for the kernel improvements but ended up bricking things when trying to update so ended up swapping to omarchy mainline. I am seriously considering swapping back over to cachyos though, seems like it's going in the right direction.
It completely blew up for me as well (unbootable) during an update that included the linux-firmware package split from earlier this year. Fortunately this occurred during a testing period in a VM.
How is project like Framework Laptop able to sponsor anyone? Are they profitable? Had an impression they're more of a startup stage project far from profitability.
Me and a buddy have bought 3 Framework Desktops between us, they are just otherworldly awesome machines, and a good bit more expensive than the other Strix Halo models. I haven't been this excited about a computer since my i7 920 (Nehalem) in 2008, it's absolute alien technology.
I've also finally made the switch from a lifetime of Windows to Linux, and it just so happened to be CachyOS. The snappiness is just infinitely refreshing, to say nothing of not constantly submitting to Microsoft's dark patterns, so I'm super happy to see this news <3 Go Framework and AMD, go CachyOS and Linux!
Poll: Can Microsoft gargle my whole balls?
[A] Yes.
[B] Maybe later.
Now, if you'll excuse me, I have the rest of the month to spend on vacation in my pyjamas coding ultra high precision N-body simulations and rendering them in 8K 60Hz entirely on CPU: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wz1Od_jkkFg
Framework is a not a huge organisation. This sponsorship consists of a few laptops and committing to a $250 monthly donation. There’s no contradiction here. CachyOS is also not a huge project.
> in my twittersphere that made way more noise lately
Its because while CachyOS does novel things, Omarchy is basically just an opinionated Arch Linux install script made from a racist. Thats why some people mistrust the intention from Framework.
Even leaving aside the (IMO justified) controversy around Omarchys creator, surely there are better ways to allocate OSS funding than sponsoring a multi-millionaire executives pet project. He can afford to bankroll it himself.
I think drumming up interest in getting users to run Linux on frameworks is a way for them to go back to vendors and try to get them to fix issues like power consumption that bugs the hell out of users (looking at you AMD)
> Framework has not only provided us with a Framework Laptop 16 to help us optimize our kernel and packages on modern hardware, but they have also committed to a $250 monthly donation.
I'm gonna guess a laptop and a few thousand dollars (over years) isn't exactly breaking the bank.
I think they are doing quite well, the CEO mentioned in a town hall video somewhere that they have strongest growth in the business segment where there are a lot of buyers who like the idea of a computer that their IT department can repair.
I also don't think these project sponsorships cost a whole lot in the grand scheme of things. I imagine they are basically part of the marketing budget.
When one of your main customer targets is Linux users, spending 5 figures on sponsoring a Linux project might be more effective than spending 5 figures on ad impressions.
They've raised about $45M in venture capital to date. I don't think they are profitable yet, but they at least have other people's money to throw around for now.
It looks a little bit like a tempest in a teapot to me, but I'm impressed with their community guidelines. That thread got an exception to allow for more discussion, and it even permits "Critiques of Framework as a company" and "Calls for boycotts or product criticism".
Very interesting that Valve and Framework seem to be throwing their eggs in the Arch basket over Debian/Ubuntu. When I got my first computer, I installed Ubuntu because it was dominant. Maybe it still is for the average Linux downloader, but why are the Hardware companies more into Arch?
I'd think it's because they're introducing updates to address issues w/ the hardware quickly and want a rolling-release distro so users can get the updates faster.
Debian testing is about as stable as it gets while also being a rolling distribution. The promotion of package updates from unstable to testing does not take that long either depending on the severity. I would venture a guess that there is more to it.
And over Fedora/RHEL. If I had to guess, it could be that new entrants find it easier to submit changes to Arch Linux packages [1]. ChromeOS also steered away from Debian-based distributions, choosing a Gentoo base.
Personally I'd also think it would be a better engineering choice for Valve to base SteamOS on Fedora Atomic, as it supports the immutable OS paradigm a lot better imo. Especially now with progress in bootc/oci/ostree.
I am very happy to see it on HN today as I procrastinated half of my day reading about CachyOS, filesystems and then looking at Linux laptops including Framework.
A laptop that's tested/shipped with CachyOS would be great. If only I could get a trackpoint/no touchpad version one day :)
They did look into putting a trackpoint in there, but there wasn't enough depth in the keyboard cover to support it. Making it work would take re-doing the whole bottom shell (apparently).
I'm tempted to make a thicker bezel so the screen won't close all the way anymore. Pick up the room for a trackpoint by going wedge shaped! (edit, obvious downside: the screen would be a lot weaker when closed)
I just wiped my gaming rig (win11, 12700k, 7900xtx) and installed CachyOS a few days ago. KDE Plasma doesn't work, but Hyprland and Gnome do. I was playing Arc Raiders with a friend within an hour of starting the install. So far everything works, and it even sleeps and wakes without issue.
I did _exactly_ this 3 days ago after I hit a random keyboard chord on accident and brought up CoPilot (which I don't recall installing). I had held on to Windows for gaming just because I didn't want to fuss with Linux, but it was the straw that broke the camel's back. Instantly installed CachyOS onto a USB stick and formatted my entire drive.
I use KDE Plasma and it worked just fine. In fact all of my games (including Arc Raiders) are working just fine on Proton 10, maybe running slightly worse. The only issue I've run into is getting battle.net working through Lutris; I ended up manually installing it through Proton 10 on Steam and it worked just fine. Wish I made the switch earlier.
Lutris by default will use an older WINE version (something based on WINE8 IIRC) by default for reasons I don't quite understand. You can, however, configure Lutris to use proton-cachyos by default, to which I was able to get Battle.net to install and work correctly without issues. Not sure what feature was implemented in later WINE to make that work better, but it works.
I got Battle.net working through Steam. The way I have it is I add the battle.net installer into steam, add proton compatibility, once you run it it installs, but next time you run it, it just opens the launcher unless it needs an update. Then you can install World of Warcraft and other games there and run.
I love KDE, but it's too buggy for me. About once a day the bottom dock would just disappear. I really wish they'd focus a little more on stability.
I use Sway on CachyOS, and to me it's the perfect DE. Being able to switch between windows in under a quarter of a second indispensable once you've experienced it.
This has not been my experience. I've an Nvidia desktop and AMD HTPC, both running Wayland and a wide variety of games. What's more, they both do variable sync and HDR.
This is great news, I migrated from vanilla Arch to CachyOS on my Framework 13 AMD a few months back since I primarily use it for Steam gaming, and it's worked great and netted me around 3fps on average across the games I play. I'm glad to see Framework supporting them directly.
I recommend installing proton-catchyos for faster shader compilation as well, but you might run into stability issues if you are on an unstable overclock due to how hard it is able to push the cpu with intrinsics.
Normal stress-ng I barely see 85 degrees while I saw shader compilation clock in 105c.
I am pretty sure this already got installed, but I will double-check. I got a nice speedup for shader compilation afterwards. I am not overclocking my Framework 13.
How does it do with scaling? That's been one of my main pain points with different Linux distros on my Framework (well, that, the trackpad scroll speed, and battery life/suspension)
Hope this doesn't end up political... Last time the entire Framework Discord's mod team went on strike because of a controversial sponsorship, and ended with the closure of the discord.
I hadn't heard about this before, so in case anyone else is also curious and wants to save some googling, it sounds like was a few months ago when they sponsored Hyprland[1]. I hadn't heard about controversy with Hyprland before, only being vaguely aware of it, but the forum thread I linked to further links to this blog post[2] with more details.
[1]: https://community.frame.work/t/framework-supporting-far-righ... [2]: https://drewdevault.com/2023/09/17/Hyprland-toxicity.html
drewdevault should be the last person anybody uses as a judge of character or facts
https://dmpwn.info/
I have more of an Issue with the Omarchy sponsorship. While i disagree with Hyprland's maintainer at least Hyprland is actually engineering something great and making it free software. Omarchy is basically just a script.
Not a fan of either but I feel obligated to point out they don't appear to be sponsoring Omarchy, they just posted about it on their social media account(s). Hyprland they actually did do a small sponsorship for.
Yeah I think there might be a mixup with Cloudflare, who are sponsoring Omarchy.
>ended with the closure of the discord
oh no anyways. Discord user and there mods are probably the last people anybody in the FOSS or real world should care about or associate with.
Sometimes Discord is still pretty helpful with real-time support. It indeed has its flaws, but some of the best real time help is still given there. I love the C++ discord, it's just filled with gems.
>it's just filled with gems
gems not sorted or indexed at all gated behind a account requiring personal information to just view them.
hopefully those people already left last time
Nothing of value was lost. Discord is the worst way to engage with any kind of serious community. It's a firehose of prematurely fired off messages, badges, emojis, banners, nitro upgrades, flags. Threading sucks. Ten conversations are usually happening at once. It's like if you had a 100gig connection to the WAL of 4chan plugged directly into your brain. It's no wonder kids these days are all autistic or ADHD.
Dabbled in CachyOS as a replacement fo my main OS recently it worked well, was trying to do the omarchy on cachy for the kernel improvements but ended up bricking things when trying to update so ended up swapping to omarchy mainline. I am seriously considering swapping back over to cachyos though, seems like it's going in the right direction.
It completely blew up for me as well (unbootable) during an update that included the linux-firmware package split from earlier this year. Fortunately this occurred during a testing period in a VM.
It was an Arch-wide thing, there was an announcement on their site about it.
I'm enjoying CachyOS so far. I've been running it for a while without issue.
Was also looking to see if that was possible recently. Wonder if either party would consider supporting that officially?
How is project like Framework Laptop able to sponsor anyone? Are they profitable? Had an impression they're more of a startup stage project far from profitability.
Me and a buddy have bought 3 Framework Desktops between us, they are just otherworldly awesome machines, and a good bit more expensive than the other Strix Halo models. I haven't been this excited about a computer since my i7 920 (Nehalem) in 2008, it's absolute alien technology.
I've also finally made the switch from a lifetime of Windows to Linux, and it just so happened to be CachyOS. The snappiness is just infinitely refreshing, to say nothing of not constantly submitting to Microsoft's dark patterns, so I'm super happy to see this news <3 Go Framework and AMD, go CachyOS and Linux!
Poll: Can Microsoft gargle my whole balls?
[A] Yes.
[B] Maybe later.
Now, if you'll excuse me, I have the rest of the month to spend on vacation in my pyjamas coding ultra high precision N-body simulations and rendering them in 8K 60Hz entirely on CPU: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wz1Od_jkkFg
Framework is a not a huge organisation. This sponsorship consists of a few laptops and committing to a $250 monthly donation. There’s no contradiction here. CachyOS is also not a huge project.
Thanks, it makes at least some sense then. I'd expect them to sponsor Omarchy similarly then, in my twittersphere that made way more noise lately
> in my twittersphere that made way more noise lately
Its because while CachyOS does novel things, Omarchy is basically just an opinionated Arch Linux install script made from a racist. Thats why some people mistrust the intention from Framework.
Some people mistrust the intention from Framework because Omarchy is made by a racist?
Even leaving aside the (IMO justified) controversy around Omarchys creator, surely there are better ways to allocate OSS funding than sponsoring a multi-millionaire executives pet project. He can afford to bankroll it himself.
I think drumming up interest in getting users to run Linux on frameworks is a way for them to go back to vendors and try to get them to fix issues like power consumption that bugs the hell out of users (looking at you AMD)
https://frame.work/hu/en/blog/framework-sponsorships
> Framework has not only provided us with a Framework Laptop 16 to help us optimize our kernel and packages on modern hardware, but they have also committed to a $250 monthly donation.
I'm gonna guess a laptop and a few thousand dollars (over years) isn't exactly breaking the bank.
I think they are doing quite well, the CEO mentioned in a town hall video somewhere that they have strongest growth in the business segment where there are a lot of buyers who like the idea of a computer that their IT department can repair.
I also don't think these project sponsorships cost a whole lot in the grand scheme of things. I imagine they are basically part of the marketing budget.
When one of your main customer targets is Linux users, spending 5 figures on sponsoring a Linux project might be more effective than spending 5 figures on ad impressions.
Yeah, I recommended we buy Framework Laptops for the Linux users in my company and we are quite happy with it.
I imagine I'm not the only one doing that.
They've raised about $45M in venture capital to date. I don't think they are profitable yet, but they at least have other people's money to throw around for now.
Nice, they will probably be able to buy like 128GB of ram in 2026.
> They raised about $45M in venture capital
Impressive for a hardware upstart (which are usually relatively capital intensive), no?
> at least have other people's money to throw around for now.
Speaking of other people's money... Framework's been sponsoring many a project, some of which are controversial on their forums: https://community.frame.work/t/framework-supporting-far-righ...
It looks a little bit like a tempest in a teapot to me, but I'm impressed with their community guidelines. That thread got an exception to allow for more discussion, and it even permits "Critiques of Framework as a company" and "Calls for boycotts or product criticism".
https://community.frame.work/t/framework-supporting-far-righ...
Very interesting that Valve and Framework seem to be throwing their eggs in the Arch basket over Debian/Ubuntu. When I got my first computer, I installed Ubuntu because it was dominant. Maybe it still is for the average Linux downloader, but why are the Hardware companies more into Arch?
I'd think it's because they're introducing updates to address issues w/ the hardware quickly and want a rolling-release distro so users can get the updates faster.
Debian testing is about as stable as it gets while also being a rolling distribution. The promotion of package updates from unstable to testing does not take that long either depending on the severity. I would venture a guess that there is more to it.
> over Debian/Ubuntu
And over Fedora/RHEL. If I had to guess, it could be that new entrants find it easier to submit changes to Arch Linux packages [1]. ChromeOS also steered away from Debian-based distributions, choosing a Gentoo base.
[1] https://gitlab.archlinux.org/archlinux/packaging/packages
They're not though. They're supporting debian and bazzite which is fedora based and have worked with fedora extensively. See https://frame.work/de/en/blog/framework-sponsorships
If only Arch supported Arm.
I run Arch Linux on my M1, is that not arm?
Core arch linux doesn't support it, it's an offshoot.
Personally I'd also think it would be a better engineering choice for Valve to base SteamOS on Fedora Atomic, as it supports the immutable OS paradigm a lot better imo. Especially now with progress in bootc/oci/ostree.
Funny thing, taking into account the state of affairs in the country: CachyOS mirror for Russia is https://archlinux.gay
(I am Russian; left the country in 2022)
What exactly does sponsoring CachyOS mean? Bandwidth and hosting? Money going upstream to the actual developers who make the packages?
Wait, I swore Framework was on the sponsor list to begin with when I learned about CachyOS a couple days ago from HN
If it was just a few days ago, maybe they had already added the logo but hadn't posted the announcement yet?
Sounds plausible - looks like it wasn't there in October, but was there yesterday: https://web.archive.org/web/20250000000000*/https://cachyos....
I am very happy to see it on HN today as I procrastinated half of my day reading about CachyOS, filesystems and then looking at Linux laptops including Framework. A laptop that's tested/shipped with CachyOS would be great. If only I could get a trackpoint/no touchpad version one day :)
They did look into putting a trackpoint in there, but there wasn't enough depth in the keyboard cover to support it. Making it work would take re-doing the whole bottom shell (apparently).
I'm tempted to make a thicker bezel so the screen won't close all the way anymore. Pick up the room for a trackpoint by going wedge shaped! (edit, obvious downside: the screen would be a lot weaker when closed)
I just wiped my gaming rig (win11, 12700k, 7900xtx) and installed CachyOS a few days ago. KDE Plasma doesn't work, but Hyprland and Gnome do. I was playing Arc Raiders with a friend within an hour of starting the install. So far everything works, and it even sleeps and wakes without issue.
I did _exactly_ this 3 days ago after I hit a random keyboard chord on accident and brought up CoPilot (which I don't recall installing). I had held on to Windows for gaming just because I didn't want to fuss with Linux, but it was the straw that broke the camel's back. Instantly installed CachyOS onto a USB stick and formatted my entire drive.
I use KDE Plasma and it worked just fine. In fact all of my games (including Arc Raiders) are working just fine on Proton 10, maybe running slightly worse. The only issue I've run into is getting battle.net working through Lutris; I ended up manually installing it through Proton 10 on Steam and it worked just fine. Wish I made the switch earlier.
Lutris by default will use an older WINE version (something based on WINE8 IIRC) by default for reasons I don't quite understand. You can, however, configure Lutris to use proton-cachyos by default, to which I was able to get Battle.net to install and work correctly without issues. Not sure what feature was implemented in later WINE to make that work better, but it works.
I got Battle.net working through Steam. The way I have it is I add the battle.net installer into steam, add proton compatibility, once you run it it installs, but next time you run it, it just opens the launcher unless it needs an update. Then you can install World of Warcraft and other games there and run.
So far so good running CachyOS and KDE Plasma.
I've been using CachyOS with Plasma desktop for a long time now. Including my gaming PC. Zero problems. But I don't play any online games.
I love KDE, but it's too buggy for me. About once a day the bottom dock would just disappear. I really wish they'd focus a little more on stability.
I use Sway on CachyOS, and to me it's the perfect DE. Being able to switch between windows in under a quarter of a second indispensable once you've experienced it.
> switch between windows in under a quarter of a second
I would hope so! 250ms is an extremely long time to switch windows.
You'd probably want to use an X11-based DE like Cinnamon instead, many games still don't play well with wayland.
This has not been my experience. I've an Nvidia desktop and AMD HTPC, both running Wayland and a wide variety of games. What's more, they both do variable sync and HDR.
This is great news, I migrated from vanilla Arch to CachyOS on my Framework 13 AMD a few months back since I primarily use it for Steam gaming, and it's worked great and netted me around 3fps on average across the games I play. I'm glad to see Framework supporting them directly.
I recommend installing proton-catchyos for faster shader compilation as well, but you might run into stability issues if you are on an unstable overclock due to how hard it is able to push the cpu with intrinsics.
Normal stress-ng I barely see 85 degrees while I saw shader compilation clock in 105c.
what changes did they make to make the shader compilation faster?
it's compiled with similar optimizations as the kernel and has access to fast instrinsics (sse, avx)
I am pretty sure this already got installed, but I will double-check. I got a nice speedup for shader compilation afterwards. I am not overclocking my Framework 13.
it does not come pre-installed and you have to select it.
I thought that got installed by default anyway
me too, until I realized it was a completely independent thing that you can install on any distro
How does it do with scaling? That's been one of my main pain points with different Linux distros on my Framework (well, that, the trackpad scroll speed, and battery life/suspension)
Everything is "blazingly fast" now. What does it even mean.
Start menu loads in under 250ms seconds
Oh man, now another distro will be labeled nazi... just not that, oh no :) haha!
I love Omarchy, I am sure Cachy is great, just don't feel the need to change much of anything.
No Omartchy?