It gets talked about a lot. It’s not some obscure thing Framework had to pull out of a gutter somewhere. And knowledge about their racist exploits isn’t necessarily common. A lot of people might not have heard of these things, or ignore them…
The inverse of this statement is also true, depending on what circles you follow. I’d never heard of Omarchy until seeing frequent posts from framework about it, very shortly before this whole issue started gaining attention. I’ve heard far, far more about projects like NixOS (along with the obvious big players: Arch, Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, etc). Those projects have been mentioned on social media far less than Omarchy has been, recently, that’s the weird thing I think a lot of people find eyebrow-raising. From that xcancel search linked by @Foxboron above, I see exactly, in total
- 3 mentions of Debian (going as far back as 2023),
- 3 mentions of NixOS since 2024
- 34 mentions of Ubuntu since 2021
- Along with one that specifically was retweeting to promote another project from DHH, for customizing ubuntu
- 30 mentions of Fedora since 2021
- 10 mentions of Arch since 2022
- a few of which are mentioning it only in the context of explaining Omarchy
- 7 mentions of Bazzite since 2024
- 23 mentions of Omarchy since July 2025
- nearly as many mentions as only 2 of the other biggest linux projects managed to achieve over years, in just a handful of months.
It’s just odd and uncomfortable, a very unusual pattern to fixate on one small distro so strongly, even if it weren’t for the controversial political aspects. It could very well be an innocent mistake, where they were unaware of the controversies, in which case they should just say that, and apologize, along with a pledge to do better going forward.