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.
i got burnt twice by Ikey when he shutdown his OS’s servers overnight. Never again.
Hard pass from me.
Don’t forget Lispy Snake.. he walked away from that too and the promises he made to people who had sponsored it.
I must say Ikey’s ‘new new idea’ sounds uncannily like aerynOS but it will be interesting to see if he actually comes up with something innovative.
I respect Ikey Doherty a great deal, but this guy isn’t serious. He always vanishes leaving people coping, he can’t stick to something and be fine with it.
Omarchy is doing just that, sticking to what they created, with healthy meritocracy and political views openness (everybody is welcome as long as they don’t force their views). So Ikey should actually learn from it rather than feigning woke disgust.
Ahh, feigning a projects political view openness whilst using rw chant lingo. fully on brand for Omarchy disciples..
Linux? Too much fragmentation of distributions and developers.
I remember responding to a post on softpedia some 10+ years ago about a Solus update. I commented on the clock (lower-right corner) being “military time” and that there should have been an easier way to make it AM/PM. Ikey came out of nowhere, angry, fuming, defensive, victimized…
I did not expect that the developer of a project would chime in on an innocent comment about a clock. I didn’t meet his energy. Told him I appreciated the work he was doing on Solus and kept it professional, courteous. He remained angry, belligerent, accused me of making “bold” statements. LOL
I think he walks away from projects because he’s too thin-skinned about even the slightest perceived criticism and it just builds up to the point that he doesn’t feel he owes anyone anything because they were mean. Waiting for Ikey’s response in 3, 2, 1… (ducking)
Definitely adds up with his dumb views on Omarchy. Too thin-skinned for healthy critics, and too thin-skinned for political openness.
Says the disciple peddling rw chant lingo. Too hilarious.