Ikey Doherty, creator of Solus and AerynOS, is developing Barney, a Rust-based tool for building Linux distributions from source, in response to the funding and views behind David Heinemeier Hansson’s (DHH) Omarchy project. Doherty describes existing efforts as “wallpaper respins” and aims to demonstrate the build process itself, rather than simply releasing a finished distribution.
The impetus for Doherty’s return to development stems from his disapproval of comments made by DHH comparing Denmark’s wolf population to Romani people. Doherty, who identifies as an Irish Traveller, called the comments “horrific” and stated they, along with the substantial funding Omarchy has received, prompted him to begin work on Barney. The Omacom Foundation, backed by Omarchy, has secured over $13 million in pledges, including $1 million each from eight tech executives like Michael Dell, and recently added $1.95 million in AI tokens from Meta, Anthropic, OpenAI, and Fireworks.
Barney is designed to build distros from source, caching outputs to avoid redundant builds when dependencies change. It utilizes stateless layouts, a concept Doherty previously implemented at Intel’s Clear Linux team and in Solus/AerynOS, and runs builds in containers, storing results by content to minimize storage space. The project will also rebuild the toolchain from scratch. The code is written in Rust and released under the MPL-2.0 license. Doherty has named the project after his son. He has launched a Ko-fi page for direct support and has already released the first episode of a planned YouTube series detailing the project, titled “Episode 0: Getting Ready.” Doherty has stated he will no longer purchase Dell laptops due to Michael Dell’s support of DHH and Omarchy.
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