Musings of an aging computer nerd hitting 0x32.
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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.
My Addiction to Second-Hand and Refurbished Computers
I’ll admit it: I have a problem. Every time a second-hand or refurbished machine turns up cheap, I find a reason to buy it. The result is a small fleet of computers accumulating around the house, most of which I didn’t strictly need.
It’s not really about the hardware itself, though. It’s an enjoyable side hobby — each new (old) machine is an excuse to play around with a different operating system, distro, or desktop environment without any risk to the computer I actually rely on day to day. Recently that meant putting Omarchy Linux on an old laptop just to see how it held up.
Trying Omarchy Linux on an Old Laptop
I had an old laptop sitting around doing nothing, so instead of letting it gather dust I decided to put Omarchy on it and see how it held up.
Omarchy is DHH’s opinionated Arch Linux + Hyprland setup — essentially Arch with all the tedious post-install decisions already made for you: a tiling window manager, a curated set of themes, and a sensible default toolset out of the box rather than a blank Arch install you have to build up from scratch yourself.