David Heinemeier HanssonModify

Omarchy didn't even exist before this summer. I did much of the pre-release work during the downtime between sessions at the 24 Hours of Le Mans in June. And now, just a few months later, we've delivered a petabyte of ISOs in the past thirty days alone. That's about 150,000 installs of the Omarchy Linux distribution!

I've been involved with a lot of successful open-source projects in the past quarter of a century or so. Ruby on Rails, first and foremost. But nothing, not even Rails, grew as quickly as Omarchy has been growing in the first few months of its life. It's rather remarkable.

This is what product-market fit looks like. Doesn't matter if the product is free or not. The fit is obvious. The stream of people who don't just enjoy Omarchy but love it is seemingly endless. The passion is palpable.

But why? And why now?

As per usual, there are a lot of contributing factors, but key is how Apple and Microsoft have been fumbling their relationship with people who love computers in general and developers in particular.

Microsoft is killing off Windows 10, which in turn cuts off a whole slew of perfectly fine computers made prior to around 2017–2018. They also seem intent on shoving AI into everything, and wavering on whether that might be optional or not. Oh, and Windows is still Windows: decades of patching cracks in a foundation that just never was all that solid to begin with.

Apple too has turned a ton of people off with macOS 26 Tahoe, liquid glass, and faltering software quality. They're also cutting off all Intel-based Macs from future updates. A Mac Mini sold as recently as 2023 is now end-of-life! This is before we even talk about how poorly the company has been treating developers depending on the App Store bureaucracy.

Meanwhile, Linux has never looked better. Hyprland, the tiling window manager at the heart of Omarchy, is a sensation. It's brought an incredible level of finesse, detail, and style to the tiling window management space: superb animations, lightning-fast execution, and super-light resource consumption.

The historic gap in native GUI apps has never mattered less either. The web has conquered all as the dominant computing platform. In the past, missing, say, Photoshop was a big deal. Now it's Figma — a web app! — that's driving designers. Same too with tools like Microsoft Office or Outlook, which are all available on the web.

I'm not saying there aren't specialized apps that some people simply can't do without, that keep them trapped on Windows or Mac. But I am saying that they've never been fewer. Almost everything has a great web alternative.

And for developers, the fact is that Linux was always a superior platform in terms of performance and tooling for most programming environments. With 95% of the web running on Linux servers, all optimization and tuning needed to get the most out of the hardware was done with Linux in mind.

This is why even a $500 Beelink Mini PC is competitive with an M4 Max machine costing thousands of dollars for things like our HEY test suite, which runs on Ruby and MySQL. Linux is just really efficient and really fast.

Finally, I think the argument that owning your computer, fully and deeply, is starting to resonate. The Free Software crowd has been making the argument since the 90s, if not before, but it's taken Apple's and Microsoft's recent tightening of the reins on our everyday operating systems to make it relevant for most.

Omarchy is a beautiful, modern, and opinionated Linux distribution, but it's also yours. Everything is preconfigured, sure, but every configuration is also changeable. Don't like how something works? Change it. Don't like the apps I use? Change them. Don't like how something looks? Redesign it. The level of agency is off the charts.

Turns out that plenty of people were starved for just this. All it took was someone to actually put all the pieces together, ignore the Linux neckbeards who insist you aren't worthy to run Arch or Hyprland without spending a hundred hours setting it up from scratch, and invite everyone to the party!

We're fed an endless stream of consternation over AI slop these days. The content apocalypse is nigh! It'll rot your brain! Okay, sure, maybe, but have you seen the kind of content sludge that perfectly ordinary humans are capable of producing? It's thrice as tragic.

The web is full of it. Garbage writing and brain-dead shorts. Content mills pumping out nonsense pages and gagging videos to appease whatever the high priests of SEO now think they've divined will please Lord Google or Master TikTok. 

It's been infecting websites everywhere with "calls to action", "white paper available upon sign up", and "10 ways to supercharge your productivity". Links stuffed into every crevice to juice rankings, capture "most searched for" keywords, and convert, convert, convert.

It's an affront to humanity to make sentient beings do this work. Turning human potential, creativity, and ingenuity into content sludge is a process no more dignified than turning pink slime into chicken nuggets.

I'll take AI slop over human sludge any day. Let the little robots barf up tokens to unlock the next basis point of incremental conversion. Better them than us, I say. This is exactly the soul-crushing, creative drudgery that machines were made to munch through without complaint.

But couldn't we do without sludge or slop, you say? Sure, right after we reach a shared state of nirvana. As soon as the average 4.5 hours of screen-on time is turned into real reading, real making, real pursuits. So that'll happen exactly never.

Case in point: the most important attribute of a phone for most people is still the battery life. These little content slop and sludge faucets can already spew out nearly an entire day's worth of nonstop eyeball junk, and yet you crave more. More! MORE!

So stop whining about the AI slop. You're already steeped in human sludge. And the door to exit both was always there. But you're not going to open it, are you?

There'll always be more emails in need of reply, more meetings to attend, and more updates to read. A person can fill the entire workweek with these tasks over and over again. But to stay sane and sharp, you must pay yourself first by doing the work that actually means something to you.

I feel this acutely as someone responsible to employees, customers, followers, and readers. I could do nothing all day but check up on projects, people, and posts, but my brain would quickly check out if it was just doing that.

So quite frequently, I just don't. Don't check in, don't check up, and instead dive into the work that checks my own intellectual boxes. Programming for the love of it. Experimenting for the hell of it. Researching for the fun of it.

In another age, I might have been tempted to apologize for such privilege, but screw that. Privilege is wonderful. You should do your best to earn more of it. Even if you have to carve it out of the bare rocks around you.

Ironically, the best way to do that is also to choose to always pay yourself first, however little at first. By solving your own problems, tickling your own interests, chasing your own curiosity. That's where you'll find the motivation to elevate your talent. To turn interest into competency. 

And once you've developed some competency, you'll be rewarded with more privilege to build it further. This is the virtuous circle of merit.

There'll always be an endless list of work that could be done. You'll never get through it all and onto your own priorities, if you continue to put them at the bottom.

Every few years, the same sad contingent of Ruby malcontents tries to cancel me from Rails. At the peak of the woke era, back in 2022, they were actually successful in getting Ruby Central to uninvite me from doing the yearly keynote at RailsConf. But now RailsConf is dead, Rails World is thriving, and the cancellation nonsense is over.

Only I guess nobody told that same sad contingent! Because three days ago, they tried yet again, with the same trite grab bag of accusations: "he holds racist and transphobic views, as well as a number of other traits undesirable". And to add to the outrage theater, they named their little letter after a French resistance action fighting the Nazis during WWII. Subtle!

Except this time, nobody cared. In fact, quite the opposite. Thousands of people have taken to X and elsewhere to reject this nonsense, and that's apparently making one of the organizers very sad:

I guess I would be sad too if I had named my group after THE GOOD GUYS and then it turned out that everyone thought I was THE BAD GUYS. But that's exactly what happened. The outpouring of support from all sides has been overwhelming.

This is what it looks like when preference falsification finally falls. When normal people are no longer afraid to say no to these people. Then it's revealed just how small and isolated these aggrieved individuals actually are.

Tobi from Shopify said it best:

That's exactly what we're going to do. We're going to reject and ignore these nut jobs. Then we're going to keep building.

The last loonies on tech's woke island are getting desperate. It used to be that a wide variety of baseless accusations of racism, misogyny, or white supremacy could inflict grave social and professional consequences for the accused, but that's no longer true. So now they've had to up the ante, and that's why everyone is suddenly a nazi to these people.

Because if you can't intimidate people into silence and compliance with the woke orthodoxies by threatening their job or their social circle, you might be able to threaten them with actual violence or worse. That's what the "nazi" accusation is there to convey: That violence has been authorized.

The slogan has been around for a while: Punch a nazi. It has a sorta quaint, winking phrasing, so you'd be forgiven for thinking that maybe it wasn't actually meant as a real threat. But I think that theory has gone out the window. Just look at what happened to Charlie Kirk.

This is a natural consequence of all the lost terrain. The DEI bureaucracies in tech have been decimated or dismantled. The tone-setting social media, X, can no longer be wielded for narrative control (and Bluesky keeps shrinking from purity purges). And finally, the American administration went from blue to red in 2024.

Lost terrain means lost leverage. Which means the usual threats have stopped working because they relied on that institutional and broad social leverage to be effective. And these loonies know that.

The threat of violence, however, is evergreen. It's the final resort of a movement that has lost a political and philosophical path to victory in the public square. It's sad, it's pathetic, but you're not wrong to be worried when political assassinations are justified and exalted in reference to the "nazi" threat. 

But that's just all the more reason you can't give in, you can't give up. The defeat of wokeism in the workplace should give you comfort. These people are not invincible. The wheels have been falling off their political project for years now. You can and should say "no" when they come with the "nazi" nonsense too.

It takes ten years for the culture of a great company to fall apart once the CEO seat is given to someone without an engineering or product background. That's been the story of Boeing, Intel, and now Apple. Legendary American companies that all got lost when a bean counter, marketing man, or logistics hand took over.

Boeing's troubles started when they were taken over by McDonnell Douglas in 1997, but really accelerated after 2005 when they installed their first CEO with no aerospace background. The result, after ten years of cost-cutting and outsourcing, was the 737 MAX MCAS tragedies, and an organization gutted of ambition and engineering pride.

Intel did the same thing, and almost at the same time. In 2005, they too installed their first CEO without an engineering background. Ten years later, they were stumbling with delayed nodes, stalled progress, and no answers on mobile. Now the entire business is teetering.

Finally, Apple. Steve Jobs handed the reins to Tim Cook in 2011, but such was the strength of the product pipeline and culture that Jobs left behind, that it initially looked like Cook could break the spell. Show that it was possible for a logistics man to steer one of the great ships of American ingenuity and tech supremacy. 

But now the ten-year curse is hitting Apple with an eerily familiar thud. They wasted a decade chasing a self-driving dream without direction, and ended up with the worst possible car interface to show for it. They completely missed the boat on AI, and embarrassed themselves with Genmoji and vaporware ads. And the Vision pro has been an expensive tech demo that nobody actually wanted to wear three months after they bought it. 

The profits still gush from glories past, and the tollbooth operation on the App Store, but the soul has left the machine. 

While these three stories are different, they're drawn from the same archetype: Great companies need bold, hands-on leaders who live and breathe the stuff they make or they'll eventually hollow out. 

It's tempting for boards of public companies to think that all care and competence around product can be delegated down the org chart. That someone who can hit the numbers is all you need at the top. But it's not.

You need an Andy Grove, Phil Condit, or Scott Forstall. You need someone so professionally invested in the work and the culture that they'll refuse to let the search for surface-level efficiencies drain the foundation of its strength. You need an engineer or a product person as CEO.