Musings of an aging computer nerd hitting 0x32.
Zazzle Shop Prints, Tshirts and mugs
(c) Alastair Montgomery
Building It the Boring Way: Arch + Hyprland From Scratch
Follow-up to The Politics I Never Noticed Were There — this one’s the practical half. After all the reading about Omarchy’s baggage, I landed on the least dramatic option available: a plain Arch install, built up by hand, with someone else’s dotfiles layered on top rather than baked in.
The machine is an old Lenovo laptop that’s been kicking around doing not much — Intel i5-4300M, 16GB RAM, and (crucially) an SSD I fitted before starting, which turned out to remove basically every hardware worry from the list. I’m laying down LinuxBeginnings/Hyprland-Dots — the community-maintained continuation of the well-regarded JaKooLit dotfiles, handed off cleanly in early 2026 — via its companion installer, LinuxBeginnings/Arch-Hyprland.
The Politics I Never Noticed Were There
This follows on from my post about the Omarchy/DHH controversy — I went down a much longer rabbit hole than I expected.
I went looking for a Linux distro. I came back with a headache and a much longer reading list.
It started simply enough. I’d been eyeing my old Lenovo laptop — an i5-4300M, 16GB RAM, nothing special — as a candidate for a proper Arch + Hyprland setup. Omarchy kept coming up: slick, popular, well-documented, built by David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH), the guy behind Ruby on Rails. Obvious choice, right?
An Update on Omarchy, and the Controversy Around Its Creator
A few people on Mastodon pointed me at something about Omarchy I’d completely missed: real controversy around its creator, DHH, and his views.
This is a follow-up to my previous post on Omarchy. If you haven’t seen the background, this article lays it out well: The Ruby community has a DHH problem.
I’ll be honest, this had totally bypassed me. I was looking at Omarchy purely through the lens of “is this a good tiling window manager setup,” and hadn’t clocked the wider context around the person behind it. That’s on me, and it’s a decent reminder that it’s worth stepping outside our news bubbles every so often and looking at the bigger picture, not just the interesting tech side of something.