David Heinemeier HanssonModify

I've never seen so many developers curious about leaving the Mac and giving Linux a go. Something has really changed in the last few years. Maybe Linux just got better? Maybe powerful mini PCs made it easier? Maybe Apple just fumbled their relationship with developers one too many times? Maybe it's all of it. But whatever the reason, the vibe shift is noticeable.

This is why the future is so hard to predict! People have been joking about "The Year of Linux on the Desktop" since the late 90s. Just like self-driving cars were supposed to be a thing back in 2017. And now, in the year of our Lord 2025, it seems like we're getting both!

I also wouldn't underestimate the cultural influence of a few key people. PewDiePie sharing his journey into Arch and Hyprland with his 110 million followers is important. ThePrimeagen moving to Arch and Hyprland is important. Typecraft teaching beginners how to build an Arch and Hyprland setup from scratch is important (and who I just spoke to about Omarchy). Gabe Newell's Steam Deck being built on Arch and pushing Proton to over 20,000 compatible Linux games is important.

You'll notice a trend here, which is that Arch Linux, a notoriously "difficult" distribution, is at the center of much of this new engagement. Despite the fact that it's been around since 2003! There's nothing new about Arch, but there's something new about the circles of people it's engaging.

I've put Arch at the center of Omarchy too. Originally just because that was what Hyprland recommended. Then, after living with the wonders of 90,000+ packages on the community-driven AUR package repository, for its own sake. It's really good!

But while Arch (and Hyprland) are having a moment amongst a new crowd, it's also "just" Linux at its core. And Linux really is the star of the show. The perfect, free, and open alternative that was just sitting around waiting for developers to finally have had enough of the commercial offerings from Apple and Microsoft.

Now obviously there's a taste of "new vegan sees vegans everywhere" here. You start talking about Linux, and you'll hear from folks already in the community or those considering the move too. It's easy to confuse what you'd like to be true with what is actually true.

And it's definitely true that Linux is still a niche operating system on the desktop. Even among developers. Apple and Microsoft sit on the lion's share of the market share. But the mind share? They've been losing that fast.

The window is open for a major shift to happen. First gradually, then suddenly. It feels like morning in Linux land!

Consent morality is the idea that there are no higher values or virtues than allowing consenting adults to do whatever they please. As long as they're not hurting anyone, it's all good, and whoever might have a problem with that is by definition a bigot. 

This was the overriding morality I picked up as a child of the 90s. From TV, movies, music, and popular culture. Fly your freak! Whatever feels right is right! It doesn't seem like much has changed since then.

What a moral dead end.

I first heard the term consent morality as part of Louise Perry's critique of the sexual revolution. That in the context of hook-up culture, situationships, and falling birth rates, we have to wrestle with the fact that the sexual revolution — and it's insistence that, say, a sky-high body count mustn't be taboo — has led society to a screwy dating market in the internet age that few people are actually happy with.

But the application of consent morality that I actually find even more troubling is towards parenthood. As is widely acknowledged now, we're in a bit of a birthrate crisis all over the world. And I think consent morality can help explain part of it.

I was reminded of this when I posted a cute video of a young girl so over-the-moon excited for her dad getting off work to argue that you'd be crazy to trade that for some nebulous concept of "personal freedom". Predictably, consent morality immediately appeared in the comments: Some people just don't want children and that's TOTALLY OKAY and you're actually bad for suggesting they should!

No. It's the role of a well-functioning culture to guide people towards The Good Life. Not force, but guide. Nobody wants to be convinced by the morality police at the pointy end of a bayonet, but giving up on the whole idea of objective higher values and virtues is a nihilistic and cowardly alternative.

Humans are deeply mimetic creatures. It's imperative that we celebrate what's good, true, and beautiful, such that these ideals become collective markers for morality. Such that they guide behavior.

I don't think we've done a good job at doing that with parenthood in the last thirty-plus years. In fact, I'd argue we've done just about everything to undermine the cultural appeal of the simple yet divine satisfaction of child rearing (and by extension maligned the square family unit with mom, dad, and a few kids).

Partly out of a coordinated campaign against the family unit as some sort of trad (possibly fascist!) identity marker in a long-waged culture war, but perhaps just as much out of the banal denigration of how boring and limiting it must be to carry such simple burdens as being a father or a mother in modern society.

It's no wonder that if you incessantly focus on how expensive it is, how little sleep you get, how terrifying the responsibility is, and how much stress is involved with parenthood that it doesn't seem all that appealing!

This is where Jordan Peterson does his best work. In advocating for the deeper meaning of embracing burden and responsibility. In diagnosing that much of our modern malaise does not come from carrying too much, but from carrying too little. That a myopic focus on personal freedom — the nights out, the "me time", the money saved — is a spiritual mirage: You think you want the paradise of nothing ever being asked of you, but it turns out to be the hell of nobody ever needing you.

Whatever the cause, I think part of the cure is for our culture to reembrace the virtue and the value of parenthood without reservation. To stop centering the margins and their pathologies. To start centering the overwhelming middle where most people make for good parents, and will come to see that role as the most meaningful part they've played in their time on this planet.

But this requires giving up on consent morality as the only way to find our path to The Good Life. It involves taking a moral stance that some ways of living are better than other ways of living for the broad many. That parenthood is good, that we need more children both for the literal survival of civilization, but also for the collective motivation to guard against the bad, the false, and the ugly.

There's more to life than what you feel like doing in the moment. The worst thing in the world is not to have others ask more of you. Giving up on the total freedom of the unmoored life is a small price to pay for finding the deeper meaning in a tethered relationship with continuing a bloodline that's been drawn for hundreds of thousands of years before it came to you.

You're never going to be "ready" before you take the leap. If you keep waiting, you'll wait until the window has closed, and all you see is regret. Summon a bit of bravery, don't overthink it, and do your part for the future of the world. It's 2.1 or bust, baby!

I still remember how the car industry got all excited back in 2017 about how steering wheels would soon be obsolete. Every concept car then was a living room on wheels, seats facing inwards. The self-driving revolution was imminent, they said. Well, it wasn't... but now it actually is!

Humans have a hard time with scenarios like this. If you promise them the moon in eight months, but don't end up delivering until eight years later, most will justifiably be skeptical that it's actually here — even in the face of gushing anecdotes and video evidence. That's the problem with delayed promises.

So when Jason told me Tesla's self-driving tech was finally ready and real, I was indeed skeptical. I tried FSD as late as last year, and I didn't enjoy it much. Impressive in many ways, but too jerky. Too many interventions. How much could it really have improved in nine months or so? A lot, it turns out.

We started the drive from Jason's house, and I watched him not once touch the pedals or steering wheel while we drove half an hour to the other end of town. Then repeated the feat on the way back. But that wasn't even the most impressive part. What really blew my mind was how dramatically better the fluidity of driving with FSD has become.

His new Model Y anticipated the red light with the manners of a drives-for-the-queen-level chauffeur. And the way it knew exactly how to slow down to prevent a jerky movement when taking an incline into an elevated parking lot? Sublime.

Elon, that son of a bitch, seems to have done it again! Proven everyone wrong. Proven me wrong. The self-driving dream has flipped from vaporware to credible near-term reality. All without LiDAR. AI really delivering on this one.

My latest love letter to Linux has been published. It's called Omarchy, and it's an opinionated setup of the Arch Linux distribution and the Hyprland tiling window manager. With everything configured out-of-the-box to give you exactly the same setup that I now run every day. My Platonic ideal of what a developer environment should look like.

It's not for everyone, though. Arch has a reputation for being difficult, but while I think that's vastly overstated, I still think it's fair to say that Ubuntu is an easier landing for someone new to Linux. And that's why this exists as a sister project to Omakub — my opinionated setup for Ubuntu — and not a replacement of it.

Because I do think that Hyprland deserves its reputation of being difficult! Not because the core tiling window manager is hard, but because it comes incredibly bare-boned in the box. You have to figure out everything yourself. Even how to get a lock screen or idle timing or a menu bar or bluetooth setting or... you get the idea.

Omarchy is an attempt to solve for all that. To give you a default set of great, beautiful configurations for Hyprland, and installing all the common tooling you'd normally want. You could setup this, not change a thing, and you'll have exactly what I run every day.

But you can also just use this as a paved path into the glorious world of Linux ricing. The flip side of Hyprland being so atomized is that it's infinitely configurable. You can really, really make it yours. No wonder its the preferred platform for r/unixporn, and even what PewDiePie picked up for his amazing Russian nuclear core build.

I don't know when we'll literally get "The Year of Linux on the Desktop", but I've never been as convinced that its coming as I am now. There's enough dissent in the water. Enough dissatisfaction with both Apple and Microsoft. 

And between Valve going all-in on Steam on Linux (the Steamdeck runs Arch!), major creators (like PewDiePie) switching to Linux, and incredible projects like Hyprland — which offer not just a cheap visual copy of the two major commercial operating systems, but something much more unique and compelling — I think all the factors are in place for a big switch. At least among developers.

But broad adoption or not, I'm in love with Linux, and thrilled to share my work to make it easier to enjoy.

The Copenhagen International School is a wonderful private school located in the North Harbor of the city. It's home to over 900 students from around the world. This is where ambassadors, international executives, and other expats send their kids to get a great education in English while stationed in Denmark. As a result, it's perhaps the most diverse, inclusive school in all of Copenhagen. Lovely.

What's less lovely is the fact that CIS seems to have caught some of the same gender-ideology obsession that has ravaged many schools in America. We thought Copenhagen would offer a respite from the woke nonsense that's been plaguing California — where some schools in our social circle ended up with a quarter or more of the student body identifying as trans or gender nonconformative — but it seems ideological contagions travel as fast as airplanes these days.

It started last week, when the primary school, which includes kindergarten, declared its intention to spend every morning meeting for the entire week focused on gender dysphoria, transgenderism, they/them pronoun protocols, and coloring pride flags. That just sounded a bit odd and a bit much at first, but after reviewing the associated material, it actually looked downright devious. Just look at this example:

Draw yourself in the mirror, then adorn it with trans colors? And the guiding example is a boy who sees himself as a girl?

As you can imagine, many parents at the school were mortified by the idea of their children participating in this kind of overt indoctrination activities, and some of them let the school know. That's when the revisions started rolling out. 

First, the program was revised to no longer apply to kindergarten and first grade, just second through fifth. Then the "draw yourself in the mirror and use trans colors to decorate it" activity was pulled from the program. Then the schedule was reduced from all week to just a single session this Monday while the rest of the material is being "reconsidered". And that's where it stands today.

But that's not all. After talking to a number of other parents, I learned that CIS has other highly objectionable programs in this sphere. Like "Gender and Sexuality Alliances" where primary school students in G3-5, meaning kids as young as eight, are invited to join in lunch and recess meetings to talk more about gender, sexuality, and how to become a good ally to the 2SLGBTQIA+ community.

According to one parent I spoke to (who's considering pulling their kids out over this), CIS hasn't wanted to disclose all specifics about the staff conducting these lunch and recess meetings with the children. Because while it's billed as "student led" on their website, the sessions are actually facilitated by CIS staff on campus. 
I've asked the same question of the school administration, including what qualifications these individuals might have, and have not received an answer either. But ultimately, it shouldn't even matter, because this shouldn't even be happening!

There's simply no responsible explanation for having kids as young as eight, or even as old as 11, in lunch and recess meetings with CIS staff to discuss gender and sexuality on school campus. It's preposterous, if not outright creepy.

The school's mission is no cover either. The commitment to an inclusive school does not offer a license to indulge in this kind of overt indoctrination or inappropriate lunch meetings where minors discuss gender and sexuality with school staff. And it has to stop.

CIS, like any other school, should not be a subsidiary of any specific interest organization. We don't want our kids to get their information about climate change from either Extinction Rebellion or fossil-fuel lobbyists. We expect our school to stay politically neutral on the international conflicts, like the one in Gaza. In higher grades where these topics are appropriate, they should be discussed in a context that also includes things like the Cass Review and the recent UK Supreme Court ruling.

It's the same reason Copenhagen Pride Week saw a massive loss of sponsorship after trying to cajole major companies into a position on Gaza last year. Novo, Maersk, Google, and many others rejected this organization (and they're not returning this year either) for their partisan politics. It's bizarre that those same companies now have the children of their employees programmed by this organization's agenda at school. 

CIS needs to return to its high-level mission of focusing on giving kids an excellent education, teaching them objectively about the world, and upholding general standards for kindness and caring. Not coloring partisan flags during school programs, not facilitating inappropriate meeting forums about gender and sexuality between staff and children.

Update: As a result of feedback from parents, the rest of the proposed material intended for Pride Week will not be used at CIS this semester. I'll make sure to follow-up on what might be considered for next semester, as well as the future of the GSA program. Thanks to all the parents who gave their feedback to the school!

The recent disconnection of the ICC's chief prosecutor, at the behest of the American administration, could not have come at a worse time for Microsoft. Just a month prior, the folks from Redmond tried to assure Europe that all was well. That any speculation Europeans could get cut off from critical digital infrastructure was just fear, doubt, and uncertainty. Then everything Europeans worried could happen happened in Hague. Oops!

Microsoft's assurances met reality and reality won.

That reality is that all American administrations have the power to disconnect any individual, company, or foreign government from digital infrastructure provided by American Big Tech. So in that sense, it's pointless to blame Microsoft for the sanctioning power vested in the Oval Office. But we certainly can blame them for gaslighting Europe about the risk.

What's more important than apportioning blame, though, is getting out of the bind that Europe is in. The continent is hopelessly dependent on American Big Tech for even the most basic of digital infrastructure. If this American administration, or the next, decides to use its sanctioning power again, Europe is in a real pickle. And with the actions taken against the ICC in Haag, Europe would be negligent to ignore the threat.

Denmark even more so. It's no secret that tensions between Denmark and the US are at a historic high. Trump keeps repeating a desire to take over Greenland by fuzzy means possible. The American intelligence services have been directed to increase their spying on Denmark and Greenland. Naturally, the Danes are spooked. They should be!

Regardless of what happens with Greenland, trade negotiations, or geopolitical disagreements, though, it would suit Europe well to become digitally sovereign. That doesn't mean cutting off all American tech, but it does mean rejecting any services that can be turned off from Washington. So in terms of Microsoft, it means no more Microsoft 365, no more Teams, no more Azure.

And that's exactly what the two biggest counties in Denmark have announced plans to do. Copenhagen and Aarhus just declared that they're going to get rid of Microsoft products for all their workers. The Copenhagen county is the largest employer in Denmark with over 40,000 employees. So this is a big deal!

The chairman of the Copenhagen committee who pushed this forward made this comment to Danish media: 

That's an understatement. Denmark is one of the most highly digitalized countries in the world. It's also one of the most Microsoft dependent. In fact, Microsoft is by far and away the single biggest dependency, so it makes perfect sense to start the quest for digital sovereignty there.

But Denmark is also full of unambitious, defeatist bureaucrats who can't imagine a world without Microsoft. Just today, the IT director for The Capital Region declared it to utopian to think Denmark could ever achieve digital sovereignty or meaningfully replace Microsoft. Not even a decade would make a dent, says the director, while recognizing that if we'd done something 15 years ago, we wouldn't be in this pickle. A remarkable illustration of cognitive dissonance!

Sadly, this is not an uncommon conclusion from people who work inside the belly of bureaucracies for too long. Whatever has always done too often seems like the only thing that ever could be done. But, as Mandela said, it always seems impossible until it's done.

So let's get it done. Digital sovereignty isn't easy, but neither was securing a sovereign energy supply. Nor will it be to rebuild a credible defensive military. Europe needs all of it, yesterday. The bureaucrats who aren't interested in making it happen should find employment elsewhere.