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?

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.

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.

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.

Two more prints off the A1 Mini this week, both picked more for how they feel in the hand than how they look on a shelf.

First up is a fidget cube — small, and surprisingly satisfying to fiddle with. It’s easily become the thing I pick up and turn over without thinking while I’m reading or on a call.

The second is a Truchet tile pattern, generated from an SVG file rather than modelled by hand. Truchet tiles are simple square tiles with a repeating pattern on them — usually a pair of arcs or diagonal lines — that combine in interesting ways depending on how each tile is rotated when they’re laid out in a grid. Generating the layout as an SVG first meant I could experiment with the tiling arrangement in 2D before ever committing to a print.

Our two dogs, Sidney and Betty.

Finally got round to inking the sketches in one of my sketchbooks.

I really need to draw more, but it’s hard finding the time with all my other hobbies and work.

Took this walking to the swimming pool this morning. The fog was sitting low over the field, backlit by the rising sun and cutting the trees off at the knees. Found it very atmospheric, almost other worldly.

After designing a case for my ESP32 WiFi scanner I’ve picked up some new parts to play with: a WeAct Studio ESP32-S3-N16R8 dev board — 16MB of flash and 8MB of PSRAM, dual USB-C, RGB status LED, sat in a little printed case I already had lying around — paired with a WeAct Studio 4.2 inch e-paper module, 400x300 resolution over a simple SPI header (GND, SDA, SCL, CS, D/C, RES, BUSY, VCC).

Inktober starts next month, and this year’s prompt list is out! Very excited to get started on this year’s topics.