// ITS FOSS — LINUX & OPEN SOURCE
Ikey Doherty vs Omarchy: Why He’s Building Barney Instead of Another Distro
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.
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.