Made Basecamp and HEY for the underdogs as co-owner and CTO of 37signals. Created Ruby on Rails. Wrote REWORK, It Doesn't Have to Be Crazy at Work, and REMOTE.
Over the years, I've learned not to question inspiration. To simply let it drive when it shows up with a full tank. Quite often, I don't exactly know where we're going or even why we're going, but it's repeatedly taken me to just the right place at just the right time, so now I just hop in and say: Let's go!
Case in point: Arch + Hyprland. It's been over a year since I created Omakub to smooth out my own exit path from macOS to Linux, and in the process, helped thousands of others enjoy a beautiful, preconfigured, and relatively familiar desktop experience with Ubuntu. And I continue to think this is an excellent choice for Linux, especially for first-time Mac and Windows defectors.
But this weekend, I just happened to be home alone, and the hypearound Arch + Hyprland got the better of me. While Ubuntu is all about being a friendly place for newcomers to Linux, Arch + Hyprland is the exact opposite: It's Linux on hard mode!
At least that's the reputation, and there's certainly something to that. The Arch ISO literally just dumps you into a terminal with scarcely any direction. Just getting on the Wi-Fi requires learning the arcane command-line options for the iwctl terminal configurator.
But besides iwctl, it's actually not that bad anymore. We now have a cheat code for installing Arch in the form of archinstall. It's a terminal interface for getting all the bits like picking a disk and creating the first user done in the correct order, without having to set aside an entire evening just to get the OS installed. So it didn't take long to get Arch up and running.
That doesn't get you much further, though! By default, Arch is about as minimal as it gets. There's no default graphical interface. There are no niceties. Not even wget or curl by default! It really is just a bare-bones installation of Linux.
But on the other hand, Arch is blessed with the AUR — a Wikipedia-style, community-maintained package management system that seems to have literally every piece of software ever released on Linux, and always in the latest version.
A quarter of Omakub is trying to work around the fact that helpful tools like Alacritty or LazyGit or whatever rarely have official packages for Ubuntu, so you're left doing a lot of manual scripting to get everything a developer would want from a modern Linux setup. Not so with the AUR!
So that's Arch. But Hyprland is even more hilarious. It's a tiling window manager with something as rare in the Linux world as a keen focus on aesthetics! It looks like it was written by visual artists rather than neckbeards. And it's at the core of the modern r/unixporn Linux ricing subculture.
That's not the funny part, though. The funny part is how ridiculously atomized the entire thing is. Hyprland comes with absolutely nothing out of the box. No login screen, no menu bar, no notification system, no file manager, no visual settings application. Just a text-based configuration file, a wiki, and an outline on a map for how to design your own adventure.
This means that if you're interested in running Hyprland, and you intend to set it all up from scratch, you're probably signing up for at least a good 10+ hours — just to install and configure everything! Now, there are some precompiled setup scripts out there already, but most of them still require you to do a ton of manual legwork before you reach that beautiful summit of a complete system.
So while the downside of Arch + Hyprland is that literally every last detail requires you to make a choice and a config file to move on, it's also its upside: you can change EVERYTHING! And the core window tiling magic of Hyprland is one of the most intoxicating ways of using a computer that I've ever experienced. It looks amazing; it feels amazing (if you prefer using a keyboard instead of a mouse!).
I've poured hours and hours into this quest over the weekend, and yet I'm still not even done with my first Arch + Hyprland build! My login screen looks like shit. I haven't decided on a final menu bar configuration. But what is working — the basic tiling flow and look — is so nice that the inspiration keeps driving the project forward.
Which, of course, I've already decided to codify. I'm not going through all this work to set up a beautiful, preconfigured, fully-functional, out-of-the-box Arch + Hyprland combo and then not share it with anyone who's curious (and might not have 10–20 hours for this kind of side quest available in their schedule). So of course I registered a domain and found a way to draw some ASCII art: Omarchy is on the way!
Credit for this amazing turn of events goes to Epic Games founders Tim Sweeney and Mark Rein, who did what no small developer like us could ever dream of doing: they spent over $100 million to sue Apple in court. And while the first round yielded very little progress, Apple's (possibly criminal) contempt of court is what ultimately delivered the resolution. Thanks to their fight for Fortnite, app developers everywhere are now allowed to link out of apps to their own web-based payment system in the US store (but, sadly, nowhere else yet).
This is all we ever wanted from Apple: to have a way to distribute our iPhone apps and keep the customer relationship by billing directly. The 30% toll gets all the attention, and it is ludicrously egregious, but to us, it's just as much about retaining that direct customer relationship, so we can help folks with refunds, so they don't tie their billing for a multi-platform email system to a single manufacturer.
Apple always claims to put the needs of the users first, and that whatever hardship developers have to carry is justified by their customer-focused obsession. But in this case, it's clear that the obsession was with collecting the easiest billions Apple has ever made, by taking an obscene cut of all software and subscription sales on the platform.
This obsession with squeezing every last dollar from developers has produced countless customer-hostile experiences on the iPhone. Like how you couldn't buy a book in the Kindle app before this (now you can!). Or sign up for a Netflix subscription (now you can!). Before, users would hunt in vain for an explanation inside these apps, and thanks to Apple's gag orders, developers were not even allowed to explain the confusing situation.
It's been the same deal with HEY. While we successfully fought off Apple's attempt to extort us into using their in-app payment system (IAP), we've been stuck with an awkward user experience ever since. One that prevented new customers from signing up for a real email address in the application, and instead sent them down this bizarre burner-account setup. All so the app would "do something", in order to please an argument that App Store chief Phil Schiller made up on the fly in an interview.
That's what we can now get rid of. No more weird burner accounts. Now you can sign up directly for a real email address in HEY, and if you like what we have to offer (and I think you will!), you'll be able to pay the $99/year for a subscription via a web-based flow that it's now kosher to link to from the app itself.
What a journey, and what a needless torching of the developer relationship from Apple's side. We've always been happy to pay Apple for hosting our application on the App Store, as all developers have always needed to do via the $99/year developer fee. But being forced to hand over 30% of the business, as well as the direct customer relationship, was always an unacceptable overreach.
Now that's been arrested by Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers from the United States District Court of Northern California, who has delivered app developers the only real relief that we've seen in this whole sordid monopoly affair that's been boiling since 2020. It's a beautiful thing.
It also offers Apple an opportunity to bury the hatchet with developers. They can choose to accept the court's decision in full and worldwide. Allow developers everywhere the right to link to their own billing flow, so they can retain their own customer relationship, and so business models that can't carry a 30% toll can flourish.
Besides, Apple's own offering will likely still have plenty of pull. I'm sure many small developers would continue to consider IAP to avoid having to worry about international taxes or even direct customer service. Nobody is taking that away from Apple or those developers. All Judge Rogers is demanding is that Apple compete fairly with alternative arrangements.
In case Apple doesn't accept the court's decision — and there's sadly some evidence to that — I hope the European antitrust regulators watch the simple yet powerful mechanism that Judge Rogers has imposed on Apple. While I'd love side loading as much as the next sovereign techie who wants to own the hardware I buy, I think we can get the lion's share of independence by simply being allowed to link out of the apps, just like has been so ordered by this District Court.
I do hope, though, that Apple does accept the court's decision. Both because it would be a stain on their reputation to get convicted of criminal contempt of court, but also because I really want Apple to return to being a shining city on the hill. To show that you can win in the market merely by making better products. Something Apple never used to be afraid of doing. That they don't need these gangster extortion techniques to make the numbers that Cook has promised Wall Street.
Despite moving on to Linux and Android, I have a real soft spot for Apple's taste, aesthetics, and engineering prowess. They've lost their way and moral compass over the last half decade or so, but that's only one leadership pivot away from being found again. That won't win back all the trust and good faith that was squandered right away, but they'll at least be on the long road to recovery.
Who knows, maybe developers would even be inclined to assist Apple next time they need help launching a new device in need of third-party software to succeed.
Have you thought about doing the opposite of whatever you're doing or considering? It's a really helpful way to test your assumptions and your values. What does the opposite look like, how would it work?
It's so easy to get stuck in a groove of what works, what you believe to be right. But helpful assumptions have a half-life, just like facts. And it's ever so easy to miss the shift when circumstances change, if you're not regularly stress-testing your core beliefs.
That doesn't mean you're just a flag in the wind, blowing whichever way. But it does mean having enough intellectual humility and creative flexibility to consider that what you believe to be true about your business, about your team, about your technology might not be so.
We did this a while back with full-time managers. We'd been working for nearly two decades without any, but exactly because it'd been so long, we were drawn to try the opposite, just to see what we might have missed. So we did. Hired a few full-time managers to help us test that assumption for a few years.
In the end, we decided that our managers-of-one culture worked better, but it wasn't a given at the outset. To try the opposite, you really have to believe that you might have been wrong.
Because you're wrong about something. I guarantee it. We all are.
For the past week, I've been working off the Minisforum UM870. A tiny mini PC with an 8-core/16-thread AMD 8745H CPU, which retails for $343 (or €379) as a bare-bone unit, and stays below $550, even after adding 48GB of RAM and 1TB of storage. I'm shocked to report that I really don't need more than this!
I mean, I knew that Apple's Mac Mini, which is equally petite to the Minisforum, had plenty of power for macOS. But somehow I thought Apple had some special sauce that made this possible, and that PCs were forever condemned to be bigger, louder, and slower. How 2020 of me.
The UM870 is a little beast. It runs our full HEY test suite in just 2m28s. In comparison, it takes a 14-core M4 Pro 2m49s, and such an Apple costs $2,199, once you've given it 48GB of RAM and 1TB of storage.
Now, that M4 Mac Mini can probably do things with, say, 8K video editing that the UM870 can't touch. But on the other hand, the UM870 can play the latest video games. Everything from Fortnite to Cyberpunk 2077 to Forza Horizon. It won't trouble a modern, dedicated Nvidia card for max FPS, but it's perfectly playable at 1080p at medium settings in a ton of games.
In raw CPU power, the AMD 8745H will match a regular M4 in multi-core. They both clock in right around 13,000 points on Geekbench 6. Though the M4 is a fair bit quicker in single-core. The AMD is also far behind an M4 Pro in raw multi-core power (13K vs 22K), but at less than a quarter the cost, it's hard to complain.
But as with the example of video games, it's often deceiving just to compare the Geekbench numbers, because it all depends on what you're doing. If you're really into video games, it's no use to have extra grunt, if your favorite games won't run. The same is true if you're a developer working with Docker containers and a Linux toolchain. As quoted above, the UM870 handily defeats the M4 Pro in our all-cores-buzzing HEY test suite.
That's partly because we run databases and accessories, like MySQL, Redis, and ElasticSearch, in Docker containers. Even though we run the Ruby code natively on both platforms, the Docker dependencies put the Mac further behind than it otherwise would have been, because Linux runs Docker natively, and the Mac has to deal with the file-system tax and other drawbacks.
The irony is that it was partly Apple's volume with and investment in TSMC that got us these incredible AMD chips, as they're riding the same improvements in TSMC manufacturing prowess as Apple's M chips. The Zen 4 cores in the 8745H are all forged on the same 5nm process as the M2, so it's no surprise that the AMD cores are dead-on-the-money for Apple's in Geekbench single-core performance.
And Zen 4 is even the last generation! The insane new (and insanely named) AMD Ryzen AI Max 395+ chip that's used in the upcoming Framework Desktop runs on Zen 5 cores. And with 16 of those, the 395+ is faster in Geekbench multi-core than an M4 Pro, and only ever so slightly behind the M4 Max. On my HEY test suite, it completes the run in an insane 1m21s — more than twice as fast as the 14-core M4 Pro!
But I digress. The 395+ chip isn't cheap, even if it's still a great deal. The Framework Desktop with 64GB/1TB, which is twice as fast as the M4 Pro with our HEY tests, is $1,744. That's still less than the $2,199 Mac Mini, which only has 48GB of RAM. But obviously way more than a $550 Minisforum! And while it's quite small, it's not tiny, like the UM870.
Regardless, this is what I love about technology. I love when our assumptions are tested: just how small and cheap can an awesome developer machine become? I love that open-source Linux is able to run laps around Apple in the workloads that many developers need (like working with Docker containers). I love that this tiny little silent $550 mini PC on my desk is capable of putting out computing power that only a decade ago would have been reserved to loud, honking metal in a data center.
Mini PCs have gotten really good. AMD is on a roll. Linux is a blast. These are my conclusions. Check out the Minisforum UM870 or the Beelink SER8. Anything with an AMD 7745H and up to an 8945HS should be a great deal. If you want to splurge (yet still get a bargain compared to the macs), you could have a look at the new HX370 in the Beelink SER9 or Minisforum X1, but I'd save my money, buy a Lofree Flow84 keyboard to go with the new mini rig, and put the rest of the money towards a KEF LSX II savings fund!
Update: The MediaTek Wifi + Bluetooth card used in the UM870 isn't compatible with Ubuntu out of the box. I run everything hardwired for performance, so didn't notice during my testing, but a reader caught it, and I confirmed it.
If you need wireless out-of-the-box on Ubuntu, I found that the card in the Beelink SER9 works great with both. If you already have a UM870 or still want one, and you need wireless, you could buy the AMD RZ616 Wi-Fi 6E card from Framework or Amazon for around $20 — that works and slots right in.
The appeal of "vibe coding" — where programmers lean back and prompt their way through an entire project with AI — appears partly to be based on the fact that so many development environments are deeply unpleasant to work with.
So it's no wonder that all these programmers stuck working with cumbersome languages and frameworks can't wait to give up on the coding part of software development. If I found writing code a chore, I'd be looking for retirement too.
But I don't.
I mean, I used to! When I started programming, it was purely because I wanted programs. Learning to code was a necessary but inconvenient step toward bringing systems to life. That all changed when I learned Ruby and built Rails.
Ruby's entire premise is "programmer happiness": that writing code should be a joy. And historically, the language was willing to trade run-time performance, memory usage, and other machine sympathies against the pursuit of said programmer happiness. These days, it seems like you can eat your cake and have it too, though. Ruby, after thirty years of constant improvement, is now incredibly fast and efficient, yet remains a delight to work with.
That ethos couldn't shine brighter now. Disgruntled programmers have finally realized that an escape from nasty syntax, boilerplate galore, and ecosystem hyper-churn is possible. That's the appeal of AI: having it hide away all that unpleasantness. Only it's like cleaning your room by stuffing the mess under the bed — it doesn't make it go away!
But the instinct is correct: Programming should be a vibe! It should be fun! It should resemble English closely enough that line noise doesn't obscure the underlying ideas and decisions. It should allow a richness of expression that serves the human reader instead of favoring the strictness preferred by the computer. Ruby does.
And given that, I have no interest in giving up writing code. That's not the unpleasant part that I want AI to take off my hands. Just so I can — what? — become a project manager for a murder of AI crows? I've had the option to retreat up the manager ladder for most of my career, but I've steadily refused, because I really like writing Ruby! It's the most enjoyable part of the job!
That doesn't mean AI doesn't have a role to play when writing Ruby. I'm conversing and collaborating with LLMs all day long — looking up APIs, clarifying concepts, and asking stupid questions. AI is a superb pair programmer, but I'd retire before permanently handing it the keyboard to drive the code.
Maybe one day, wanting to write code will be a quaint concept. Like tending to horses for transportation in the modern world — done as a hobby but devoid of any economic value.
I don't think anyone knows just how far we can push the intelligence and creativity of these insatiable token munchers. And I wouldn't bet against their advance, but it's clear to me that a big part of their appeal to programmers is the wisdom that Ruby was founded on: Programming should favor and flatter the human.
The web will be far worse off if Google is forced to sell Chrome, even if it's to atone for legitimate ad-market monopoly abuses. Which mean we'll all be worse off as the web would lose ground to actual monopoly platforms, like the iOS App Store and Google's own Play Store.
First, Chrome won the browser war fair and square by building a better surfboard for the internet. This wasn't some opportune acquisition. This was the result of grand investments, great technical prowess, and markets doing what they're supposed to do: rewarding the best. Besides, we have a million alternatives. Firefox still exists, so does Safari, so does the billion Chromium-based browsers like Brave and Edge. And we finally even have new engines on the way with the Ladybird browser.
Look, Google's trillion-dollar business depends on a thriving web that can be searched by Google.com, that can be plastered in AdSense, and that now can feed the wisdom of AI. Thus, Google's incredible work to further the web isn't an act of charity, it's of economic self-interest, and that's why it works. Capitalism doesn't run on benevolence, but incentives.
We want an 800-pound gorilla in the web's corner! Because Apple would love nothing better (despite the admirable work to keep up with Chrome by Team Safari) to see the web's capacity as an application platform diminished. As would every other owner of a proprietary application platform. Microsoft fought the web tooth and nail back in the 90s because they knew that a free, open application platform would undermine lock-in — and it did!
But the vitality of that free and open application platform depends on constant development. If the web stagnates, other platforms will gain. But with Team Chrome pushing the web forward in a million ways — be it import maps, nested CSS, web push, etc. — is therefore essential.
This is a classic wealth vs. riches mistake. Lawyers see Chrome as valuable in a moment's snapshot, but the value is all in the wealth that continued investment brings. A Chrome left to languish with half the investment will evaporate as quickly as a lottery winner's riches. Wealth requires maintenance to endure.
Google should not get away with rigging the online ad market, but forcing it to sell Chrome will do great damage to the web.
