I won’t hide it: this guy never stops surprising me. I’m talking about Ikey Doherty. If you’ve been around open-source circles long enough, there’s no way you haven’t heard of him.
The man and visionary behind brilliant projects like Solus and aerynOS (formerly Serpent OS). Unfortunately, he also walked away from them with remarkable ease, leaving the consequences (and the work of keeping them alive) to the people who trusted him enough to become part of those projects.
And now, a year after seemingly vanishing without a trace from aerynOS, Ikey is back completely out of nowhere… with a new project. This time, it’s called Barney. These days, Doherty also describes himself as “The Travelling Engineer,” a name reflected in his GitHub handle as well.
Barney is, in Ikey’s own words, “yet another [censored] tool to build a Linux distro.” Despite that description, he says the goal is not actually to create another general-purpose Linux distribution.
Instead, Barney is meant to be part of his YouTube series, where he plans to walk through the concepts, design decisions, and theory behind building what he considers a real Linux distro from the ground up, rather than simply producing another “wallpaper respin.”
The plan is to build (again) fully optimized, source-based, immutable, and update-friendly operating system images, with the tooling itself written in Rust. Barney will use a meta-recipe approach and, according to Doherty, should also provide useful ideas for people maintaining tooling in existing Linux distributions.
What makes the whole thing even more unusual is the motivation behind it. Doherty makes little effort to hide his hostility toward David Heinemeier Hansson (better known as DHH), the creator of Ruby on Rails, co-founder of 37signals, and the man behind Omarchy.
Ikey says he was effectively dragged “out of retirement” by what he calls “disgust and astonishment” over Omarchy receiving around $13 million in funding, along with his reaction to DHH’s public views.
Barney, then, is not just another technical experiment. Doherty is openly presenting it as a way to prove that people like him can build something better without that kind of financial backing, and, judging by his own words, to take a very public shot at DHH and the wider tech industry.
And if there was any doubt about how Doherty sees this comeback, his own LinkedIn posts make it pretty clear. He literally frames it as “Me vs the tech industry,” presenting Barney less as a simple technical experiment and more as a personal showdown with an industry he clearly feels deeply frustrated with.
So, how will Barney develop from here? Well, only time will tell. But Ikey’s track record so far, despite the undeniably brilliant engineering mind behind it, certainly does him no favors when it comes to attracting people willing to put their trust and effort behind yet another project.
Or maybe that is not the point this time. As he himself puts it, “Me vs the tech industry.” Perhaps this time, he simply won’t need anyone else.
