Previously:

> March 7, 2024: Committing to Windows

https://world.hey.com/dhh/committing-to-windows-2d6388fd

> June 6, 2024: Introducing Omakub (based on Ubuntu)

https://world.hey.com/dhh/introducing-omakub-354db366

Place your bets on what is next: nixOS? Haiku? OpenBSD?

I love dhh and I applaud his manic obsession with Linux over the 18 months or so that I've seen on my twitter feed. I still don't exactly understand what the purpose of all of this is.

I'm sure it is very configurable, but every visual I've seen of this thing looks awful and not something I'd want to look at while working. But I understand we all have different tastes.

But even in the blog post I'm struggling with 'why?' here. Am I to understand the primary benefits here are improved battery life and increased developer productivity by tests running faster? Is that it?

I travel an inordinate amount and have never found a Macbook's battery life to be insufficient. I struggle to even remember the last time I've used my computer long enough to drain the batter and not be near a power outlet. I work from ski lodges, planes, my car. This has never been a problem for me. Not once. This just feels like a really bad metric to optimize for given a typical developers' schedule and work arrangement.

> On the flip side, we'll get a massive boost in productivity from being able to run our Ruby on Rails test suites locally much faster.

Is this not just a Ruby issue? I don't know what's basecamp or HEYs codebase looks like on the inside, but they don't feel like projects whose tests suites should require a completely different OS or hardware arrangement. I haven't used Ruby in a decade but I do recall it being frustratingly slow. This seemed to be an understood and accepted reality amongst teams that adopt it.

Anyway, I feel like a better 'why you should do this' in order, especially if it is being mandated amongst developers in a company.

This has been one of the most surprising developments of late, given DHH's and Rails devs historical preferences for Apple products. I'd love to see some stats on the impact of this change.

After many years using Ubuntu, I migrated to Omarchy this weekend (Arch Linux + Hyperlnd, a tiling window-manager). Looking great so far!

The timing on this sucks. I would love to see what DHH would do with the new https://github.com/apple/container thing coming in OSX26

I've been running Omarchy since last week. The theming is fun.

Getting used to hyprland and walker has been a short and eye-opening experience. I've had tiling before on Windows, but I've never been forced to use the tiling exclusively.

I'm all in on the vision behind Omarchy. I recognize DHH has a bit of an enthusiastic bent - He's been obsessive about Omarchy for the past month, and his opinions change. In some ways, he lives by the mantra "strong opinions, weakly held". I don't think that's a flaw.

I get the sense that this one is "the one" -- It's a foundation of linux that is entirely dependent on opinions, and DHH has them.

But, I think more importantly, the groundswell around the project highlights that there's a general dissatisfaction with the state of operating systems. The move to Linux has long been overdue for me personally. I'm incredibly tired of Windows and the Microsoft shenanigans. The adware on what should be a personal computer is an abomination.

I see Omarchy as an opinionated way of composing Linux in such a way that it offers a uniquely different premise of what an OS can be.

So far, I'm loving it, but am still tethered to Windows for some work stuff.

DHH and 37Signals fall into the same traps as so many libertarians: in trying to avoid control of others, they exert undue control over people themselves (we won't be beholden to Apple, because our employees must use Linux), in trying to be in control of their own destiny they end up with home-grown but worse options unless the only goal is control (not using the cloud or cloud tooling and instead writing their own). In trying to remove politics from their workplace they end up making a very strong political statement in support of exclusion.

I'm not anti-libertarian, I share some of the values, and I don't even disagree with some of the technical choices at 37Signals. However I think there's a lot of hypocrisy in the space, and DHH frequently comes across as being very tone-deaf and unaware of the impact his decisions have on others, basically an extreme lack of empathy.

I started seeing a lot of dhh talking about Omarchy on twitter. It's been a joy to see fellow hyprland user, vocal about hyprland and linux. Linux users have been talking that every year that it's going to be the year of linux desktop, but now it feels so close when a person with big influence talks loud on social media.

I checked my git-log from my dotfiles. It says I installed hyprland 2023-07-23.

> 319649c 2023-07-23 (sbinnee) install(hyprland): wayland wm tag: hyprland

I used to run i3, dwm, bspwm (my favorite on X11) and tinkered with other wms. Since this commit, I have been full-time on Wayland. When Hyprland were young, it certainly had rough edges. But these days I don't feel overwhelmed even when I update several releases at once. It is stable and just works. The creator of hyprland, vaxry, is an incredible developer and maintainer. He's made so much progress on usability of Wayland.

Good point about no one batting an eyelid over Mac or Windows laptop mandate but people are shocked at a Linux mandate... But imagine their second shock when they realize how good Linux is nowadays. I always had the sense that Linux has been the victim of a conspiracy between other OS makers since its inception. It's been suppressed within enterprise environments and rarely discussed anywhere. Linux's success on the server side has been entirely organic, working against all media narratives and vested interests.

As a developer, I am much more productive with Linux than any other OS. The workspaces feature is better (on most distros I tried), the commands more closely align with the prod environment, no need for complex virtual machine setups, no weird delays or missing critical commands when using bash. Everything just works and performs.

IMO, this is the payoff of having architected the system properly from the ground up, it's more stable. You don't get so many weird glitches as you do on Windows.

going all-in on Linux is one thing, but going all-in on a specific window manager? with specific keybinds? idk, individual workflows are too specific to be prescribed like this imo.

As a non-obsessed Linux user I can scarcely notice the difference between different distros. Every place I've worked needed macs because we had to target iOS for at least some percentage of products.

> I get about 6 hours of mixed use from my Framework 13, so whenever I suspect that might be a problem, I bring a small 20K mAh Anker battery in the bag, and now I have double the capacity.

Maybe I’m just getting old but I’ve long since moved past thinking it’s ok to be inconvenienced due to what I’d consider a product deficiency.

Note: I’m not hating on Framework. I’m assuming this is an inconvenience due to running Linux on the desktop.

That power bank is 1.2lbs, and the laptop is 2.9lbs. Carrying around 4.1lbs ain’t light.

His ego never ceases to amaze me. He’s quite convinced everything he does is important and other people can’t wait to understand.