937: Is The Omarchy Hype Real?

Scott takes Wes on a tour of Omarchy, DHH’s polished Arch + Hyprland Linux setup that promises speed, beauty, and endless keyboard shortcuts. From first impressions to daily workflows, Scott debates whether it’s good enough to pull him out of the Apple ecosystem for good. Show Notes 00:00 Welcome to Syntax! 02:31 Brought to you by Sentry.io. 02:55 What is Omarchy? 02:57 Arch-based distribution. 03:42 Hyprland window management. 05:08 Wayland Display Server Protocol. 06:27 Installation Defaults. 06:53 System-wide shortcuts. 09:01 My first impressions. 09:41 Connecting to my NAS. 10:54 Gigantic UI. 12:21 Day 2 Experiences. 13:22 Resizing window challenges. 16:11 Neovim and Lazyvim. 16:49 Lazygit. 19:07 How do you use it and why is it good. 19:14 Command Palette. 19:49 Raycast. Recreating Raycast. 20:50 Using the app launcher. 21:25 Screensavers. 21:59 OS Style. 22:55 My apps, my apps, my apps, check it out. 25:07 Is the hardware comparable to Mac’s M processors? 27:24 Installing new apps. 29:26 Web apps as first class citizens. 32:47 What I’ll miss. 35:56 What’s going on with MacOS UI? 38:37 Annoyances. 39:31 My advice. Read the Manual. 44:39 Sick Picks & Shameless Plugs. Sick Picks Scott: Omarchy Manual. Wes: Ugreen 200w Charger, Silicone USB C. Shameless Plugs Scott: Syntax on YouTube. Hit us up on Socials! Syntax: X Instagram Tiktok LinkedIn Threads Wes: X Instagram Tiktok LinkedIn Threads Scott: X Instagram Tiktok LinkedIn Threads Randy: X Instagram YouTube Threads

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Scott Tolinski?

  Welcome to Syntax. Today, I'm going to be talking about Omarchi. And I'm going to say Omarchi. I believe that's how it's spelled. If that is a wrong pronunciation, please correct me. Omarchi is a much hyped new Linux install from DHH and the Basecamp folks. And if you're around tech Twitter, you may have seen a lot of people talking about this. It being great, wanting to buy a framework computer and just being like, wow, this is really, really, really exciting. So you may have seen some chatter about it. And if you haven't, this would be a good opportunity for you to check out and learn something new.

• 0:43Scott Tolinski?

  I'll be showing some video for this. If you're a video watcher, you'll have a lot to see. If you're an audio listener, we will still make sure we're describing things and make it not too visual. But always, again, check us out on YouTube at Syntax FM. Smash that subscribe button because we release a lot of great stuff or Spotify where there is videos. Well, my name is Scott Tolinski. I'm a developer from Denver. With me as always is Wes Boss. What's up, Wes?

• 1:06Wes Bos?

  Hey, I knew that you would be into this as soon as everybody started talking about like, oh, an entirely different Linux distribution. And I know you've dipped into using Linux several times in the past and you have some hardware as well. But I was like, I'm, I'm counting the clock until the days that Scott says he's going to try this and say it's the best thing ever. And it was, it was probably hours.

• 1:31Scott Tolinski?

  It is interesting. I'm not necessarily a huge fan of working on Linux in the past. And even through this, there was some growing pains, but you know, having a long holiday weekend, it gave me a chance to like actually explore some things or just like get a feel for it. And my troubles with Linux have often been the moment something doesn't work. I'm like, I'm so annoyed. Something doesn't work here. Or like, why is this so janky? Why is this experience like not feel great? And I think the thing I really have liked about Omarchi is that once you understand the philosophy and the UI and you understand the flow of working in it,

• 2:15Scott Tolinski?

  it feels like nothing else and It feels very polished and that's like a really great thing for me. I do like polish and I'm not talking like UI polish necessarily. It's experiential polish, which we'll get into quite a bit. And if you want to see all of the errors in your application, you'll want to check out Sentry at sentry.io/syntax. You don't want a production application out there that, well, you have no visibility into in case something is blowing up and you might not even know it. So head on over to sentry.io/syntax. Again, we've been using this tool for a long time and it totally rules. All right. So Omarji, what is it?

• 2:57Scott Tolinski?

  It's an opinionated Arch and Hyprland setup. Okay. One thing you'll know about Linux and the world of Linux is that there's a thousand different names for things and different installs of all kinds of different systems and it's tough to get it all, you know, like, there's not one Linux, right? It's not like you're installing Linux. There's all these different distributions. They're all built on different things. They're all built on different foundations. And this particular one is Arch, which is a intentionally super lightweight distribution that was first released in 2002, very CLI based rather than UI based, which that doesn't mean there's no good UI for this. There certainly is, but that's just something to know here.

• 3:42Scott Tolinski?

  It is Hyprland. It's a Hyprland setup. What is Hyprland? Hyprland is window layout management, so to say. It's like how the windows are managed on the desktop, which is like, kind of just like a tiling manager, but there's, there's more than that. It fundamentally changes like how you interact with your computer compared to how you're used to using it on like a Mac or any of that stuff.

• 4:05Wes Bos?

  And it, it seems, it seems nice. I'll say I haven't given it a dip just yet. I, my sister gave me her old Mac Pro, which has like a pretty good, like it has SSD in it. It's been updated, has a pretty good Intel Xeon processor in it and.

• 4:24Wes Bos?

  Everybody's like, "Throw this on it, that would be sweet." But I just, I don't know if I've got time for that.

• 4:29Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, I know, I feel the same. Uh, but that said, I do think, I have heard that the, like, the Mac install for it, it maybe isn't like, as effortless as something like this. I'm running mine on a System 76 Lemer 14-inch laptop that I've had for a while. I mostly ran Pop OS on it, but I just really hated Pop OS. There were so many things, like, nothing felt good on it. It always felt kind of janky. So it ultimately, um, you know, I used it, but it never became like my main thing. So, uh, what is Hyprland? It's the window tiling and management. You'll see that a lot. I'll show it off a lot in this. We'll talk about what makes it interesting. That is built on top of something called Wayland. Uh, you know what Wayland is?

• 5:12Wes Bos?

  No.

• 5:13Scott Tolinski?

  Okay. Wayland is essentially the modern Linux display server protocol. It was a big shift over that the Linux ecosystem is still kind of undergoing, whether or not, uh, something is Wayland-based or not. And many of the distros are like making Wayland, uh, the new default. Previously, things were based on X11, and this new architecture makes it more streamlined. There's less, uh, historical baggage in the software. Things are more performant, faster, efficient, secure. So it's basically a new way of, my understanding of this, and folks, there are so many, like, I feel like I'm gonna get skewered by Linux folks on this. My understanding, it's basically the protocol for how Linux is interacting with drawing

• 5:58Scott Tolinski?

  Windows into the browser. That is my understanding of it, folks. Please leave comments below on how, uh, wrong I am, if that is in case of fact. So, basically, OMARCHY is this pre-configured set of Linux tools. It's all set up for you, that feels nice and polished. It looks great, it's fast as hell, and it's easy to use as long as you have a tolerance for managing and learning keyboard shortcuts. It also comes with a lot of stuff pre-installed, which... When I say a lot of stuff pre-installed, what I mean is like when you set up a Mac computer, like you're installing apps for hours. You're getting going for hours and hours and hours.

• 6:41Scott Tolinski?

  You're getting things set up. And this, you do not have to do that, which was like sincerely a wonderful experience. There's just so many things that I use every single day that came pre-installed on this thing. Not only just pre-installed, but it had system-wide shortcuts already enabled. So like, for instance, out of the box from this thing, if I wanted to pop open a, let's say, what's an app I use? I want to pop open ChatGPT. All I have to do is hit Super or Mac folks Command A. So like Super A and it pops open ChatGPT right here. It, it, it just pops it right open. And, and those kind of system-wide shortcuts for opening

• 7:24Scott Tolinski?

  these types of things exist and all kinds of stuff. I, you know, and you can add your own just so easily. So, yeah.

• 7:31Wes Bos?

  That's, that's interesting because like generally the, like a power user, right? You're a power user sets up a MacBook and you're, you're forever fussing with stuff. You're, you're forever getting it dialed in. And it's same with your, your editor as well, right? And

• 7:47Scott Tolinski?

  Yes.

• 7:48Wes Bos?

  Just having something sort of like, like pre-made, ready to go. Someone's figured it out. I don't mind relearning keyboard shortcuts if I know that it's been like thoughtfully done ahead of time.

• 8:00Scott Tolinski?

  And they make sense. So like one thing that I've gotten really used to with Omarchi in general is that, and then, and people who don't use Mac, this will make less sense to you. The Super key or Command key for Mac users, I'll just say Super for the rest of this. The Super key manages mostly system things. So if I hit like Super W, it's going to close the window, right? Where Control W is going to close the tab in a browser or something, right? So like you use Control to manage shortcuts within an app and you use Super to manage shortcuts system-wide. Where like on Mac, you kind of just use Command inside of apps, outside of apps for system stuff, all kinds of stuff. Where this, that

• 8:44Scott Tolinski?

  little distinction, once I understood, all right, like Super is primarily for system stuff, Control is inside of apps, like that to me like changed things quite a bit in terms of like. You know, getting the control verse, I'm so used to command, my hands are so used to doing command C, command whatever. So, so my very first initial thoughts when installing this thing, and I'm sure many of you, if you give this a try, will have some same things. I'm overwhelmed at first by all of the shortcuts, right? You install it, it drops you off kind of like in a blank window, whatever, and you're like, okay, it did tell me that I could do super alt and hit spacebar to open up this and then go down to learn to learn more. You go to learn and there's just like, all right, what

• 9:26Scott Tolinski?

  do I even do here? You're trying to figure out what to do. And that was definitely super intimidating for me to get started. But again, you get little by little and once, I bet if I had a coach working me through this, I'd be fine in like 10 minutes, right? You know what to do first. The very first thing I tried to do is I want to connect some of my files that I have on my Linux server. So then I go to the files app, right? You go to connect to your SMB. I enter my address and it just shows up as red. There's no error, there's no nothing. I'm just like, okay, it's great. It's red. What does that mean? Turns out I needed to install SMB, which again, classic Linux thing where like the UI doesn't even tell you that something's wrong, doesn't tell you what's wrong. You

• 10:07Scott Tolinski?

  gotta go to Google. And I'm, I'm initially super annoyed by this. I'm like, this has gotta be the worst experience, right? I already don't know what I'm doing. I can't even get into my SMB. I will say that that's the last time I had that specific type of issue. Everything else has just worked, which has been great.

• 10:26Wes Bos?

  But like, it comes with one password, but not SMB?

• 10:29Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah.

• 10:30Wes Bos?

  What, what's the, the idea behind that? Like people are, like, that's a, like a low level network protocol.

• 10:37Scott Tolinski?

  I couldn't tell you. I think it's an Arch Linux thing.

• 10:40Wes Bos?

  Okay.

• 10:41Scott Tolinski?

  You know, I honestly have no idea. Maybe they're just trying to keep it streamlined to the stuff that DHH uses all the time. And maybe it was just a configuration thing. Maybe it does come with SMB and that's a bug and I just needed to reinstall it. You know, who knows? Another issue I had when I first started, the UI felt giant. This computer, again, is not great. A number of my complaints about this experience have been of on this computer specifically. So Omarchi, out of the box, isn't like intended for computers with a higher pixel density. So I had to go into monitor config and adjust the UI scaling right out of the box because mine was just like, wow, everything feels like it's taking up so much space here.

• 11:25Scott Tolinski?

  Only did I realize like, oh, this, it's just this laptop shitty screen that's giving me guff. Well, it wasn't like you needed like proper drivers for like the high resolution. It was just a config, a one line in a config. So like, I ended up having to go to the system menu. I had to go to, I believe, setup, went to monitors. And then that pot, like you go to monitors and this is, this is this experience in Omarchi. You think you're going to a menu to do something, right? And then it pops you into a text file inside of Neo Vim. And I think I had to change, it was set up to like one auto one or something. I don't know. I went online and I just, or I read the manual and set this to preferred auto one and that made it fine.

• 12:08Scott Tolinski?

  So that's the kind of experience you might have. That said, it did feel fast, right? Things felt very fast and it feels very cool looking to use, right? The whole thing feels very cool, just very nice. So that was my first experience. Day two, I'm moving around better. I kind of understand moving from space to space. I'm hitting my keyboard shortcuts, doing super one, two, whatever to change the window. Because there is no window layering. I mean, there is window layering, but it sucks. So everything kind of tiles. So instead of layering windows on top of each other, you have a tile and then you want to set up a new space. Whatever, you go to a new, let's even close this.

• 12:52Scott Tolinski?

  When you go to a new space, you hit super enter, it opens up a terminal, right? So that's kind of the flow for this. Oh, I want to move this to another space. I do shift, super three, and it moves it to this space. Okay, now I actually want to close that, it's gone. So you end up getting this like really nice flow going. And part of that just like, once your fingers get used to that, you're like, I'm gonna go open a new browser. Okay, there's enough space. Move it to a new space, type and go, you know, it all feels very nice.

• 13:22Wes Bos?

  Yeah, that's I tried. I've talked about this in the past, but I tried using aerospace for probably about two weeks and I was

• 13:31Scott Tolinski?

  That was brutal for me.

• 13:32Wes Bos?

  Pretty no, I was pretty into it. Like I got past the initial hump of it and I really liked it. It just didn't as as someone who has to like record their screen and explicitly place things. It was just a little bit short, but I have a couple of issues on aerospace's GitHub of like things that I would like to see and I could get updates every now and then if they're talking about fixes. So I might give it a dip again, but it just was is a little bit too rigid. I want it to be rigid and opinionated, but I also want to be able to break out of stuff like that. Like you can't is can you just manually resize a window here? Is it is are you all in on this tiling manager?

• 14:13Scott Tolinski?

  Check it out. Okay, so let's say I wanted to resize Neo Vim over here. I would hold super hit left to highlight this window. You can see like the highlight of which window you're currently acting on.

• 14:24Wes Bos?

  That setup too.

• 14:25Scott Tolinski?

  And you hold a hold super still and at this point I would hit plus or minus and like that's it. Yeah. So plus or minus or whatever. And then this maintains this layout, though. If I want to then move this down here, I can hit J, I can hit J again. I can hold shift super and swap the position of this one to that one. And if this looks like low FPS to you, it's not. It's super clean on my end. And then the whole thing just feels like snappy, super snappy. I think that to me was like, one of the most surprising things is how polished it all felt. But yeah, no, once you get those keyboard shortcuts or whatever where you're moving it and I had such a hard time with the arrow. Was it aerospace? What was it?

• 15:05Wes Bos?

  Yeah, aerospace is the one that I was using.

• 15:07Scott Tolinski?

  I had such a hard time picking that up, but for some reason this required no config. I didn't have to config it and everything just like made sense.

• 15:14Wes Bos?

  Yeah, see, that's the thing is I spent maybe an entire day getting my aerospace dialed in and like, like looking up what like other power users were doing.

• 15:23Scott Tolinski?

  Right.

• 15:24Wes Bos?

  And there, there wasn't like a decent config out of the box, but once I got it and that, that whole like resize one window and then the rest of them will also resize is, is ideal. That's what I want.

• 15:36Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, it all feels very nice. I feel like I could have a good setup. I mean, I feel like I do have a good setup. Like, keep in mind, I've been using this computer, this Linux computer pretty much exclusively for like five days now. And I have been feeling good. Like I haven't had to open my MacBook. My MacBook has been sitting closed, uh, which is like very wild for me.

• 15:55Wes Bos?

  Have you done any real work on it though? Do people who use Linux do any real work?

• 16:00Scott Tolinski?

  I did lots of real work. Um, and that kind of comes down to the way that this is set up with the apps that are on here. No, no, you're, you're, and you're, you're entirely obviously making a joke about that. But for me, some of this stuff has been, is hard because I'm not a good Neo Vim user. Neo Vim is the preferred and setup editor in here and it is done so via something called Lazy Vim. What's nice about Lazy Vim and Neo Vim is that it is definitely very set up. Like I don't have to fuss with a lot to get this like working and feel nice. Like even for instance, if I hit this key, it does give you like a guide down here on different stuff you can do. And for me, like, I don't know how to do anything in this stuff.

• 16:42Scott Tolinski?

  So I, I'm like needing these guides or, or, uh, trying to understand. So yeah, I've been able to actually dev really well. And actually something that's nice on here is it also comes with Lazy Git. Lazy Git is a like a TUI, Terminal UI version of Git. And this Lazy Git, when I saw this repo months ago for the Mac, I was like, I don't understand why this is better than anything that I use. This is great. This is a great little interface for managing, uh, managing Git. Like from here, you just hit, you know, C to commit, S to stash, G to reset. There's all these different key bindings, again, like everything and you learn them and you get good at it.

• 17:20Wes Bos?

  It gives you a bit of a UI in the terminal where you can kind of see what's up, right? Similar to like the you'd get in VS Code.

• 17:27Scott Tolinski?

  And you don't have to do everything with your keyboard all the time. What's cool about this is I can actually like click on stuff. Like I don't.

• 17:35Wes Bos?

  Click on stuff. Wow.

• 17:36Scott Tolinski?

  You can click on stuff.

• 17:37Wes Bos?

  Linux has come a long way.

• 17:38Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, it's actually kind of wild that I can click on stuff. But also too, like this is something that's really nice about this UI. So if I want to manipulate something like, let's say I want to be done with this window. I don't have to do super and paw around to it or whatever. I can just have my mouse over it and hit super W. So your mouse highlights whatever window it's on top of. And I don't, yeah, it ends up feeling like a really nice kind of like, you feel kind of like a superhero using this thing.

• 18:05Wes Bos?

  Yeah, that's, you want to be like a keyboard master, right? Like I had spent so much time getting all my keyboard shortcuts dialed in and being as efficient as possible. But all other times you simply just wanna, you just wanna click on things and even like I just, I was talking to John Lindquist about his setup and he has like a whole like mouse setup where like when he clicks on something and he holds different keys, they do different items and like his mouse is just as important as his keyboard shortcuts. Um, because your mouse, you can indicate specifically which item you want something to happen on. So he's, he was, as, as somebody who is like so into

• 18:46Wes Bos?

  productivity, efficiency, he's, he's not gone away from the mouse, which is as often what you see with these guys. But he's gone into the mouse and, and made the, a mouse click mean a lot more.

• 18:57Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah. And with the, uh, what is it? The Logitech mouse that is so good. Like there's like so many buttons on that thing. Yeah. Uh, you could do all kinds of stuff with it. So let's talk about OS stuff like, like polish and experience. Like, how do you end up using it? It's if you're a Mac user who uses Raycast, you're going to feel right at home because the command palette, like the app launcher is again, is super spacebar by default. And there's a ton of stuff pre-installed on here, like one password, Chromium, Discord. Like all this stuff, Figma comes pre-installed, like all this stuff comes pre-installed. So like when you first open this, you know, you can do, you know, super S or super spacebar, type in Figma and it'll open. It's like,

• 19:42Scott Tolinski?

  it's really great that that comes out of the box. So this app launcher is baked in. And that's again, just super space.

• 19:49Wes Bos?

  Can we talk about the rest of Raycast really quickly because?

• 19:52Scott Tolinski?

  Oh, yes, it is not the rest of Raycast for sure.

• 19:54Wes Bos?

  Yeah, that's like, is it is you? You can't do like adding, or you can't do all the extensions and things like that. And that is like, I'm trying to think like, what would be the things that I would miss if I were to move over to that? And and Raycast would certainly be one of them, although there there was a post on on Hacker News, I'll link it up. This Byte at a Time, he's recreating Raycast for Linux, but trying to like recreate the entire API so that you can just use Raycast extensions in Linux.

• 20:27Scott Tolinski?

  That's great. Yeah, I think that the the things that I would like, I use Raycast as my clipboard manager, which I would find some other way to do. I haven't added a clipboard manager to this just yet. You don't really need it as much. I guess there's some stuff in Neo Vim to help with that. But yeah, I will. I would want a clipboard manager in this. It is. It is like, yeah, this is strictly an app launcher. That said, installing things is or even like getting around managing things. If you do super alt space, you saw this menu, which is like the system wide command prompt. And from here, you can do so much from this thing, whether it is like learning about the system or opening apps,

• 21:09Scott Tolinski?

  screen capture and screen record. So if I hit capture, you can do a screenshot or a screen record. If you hit screen record, you can do window or hold monitor, all that stuff. Saves it right as MKV in your your documents instantly. So it that that has been super nice. I don't know why this is just listed as toggle, but these are things you might want to toggle, like a screensaver, idle lock, top bar, Nightlight, which is, yeah. But this, oh, it won't show me screen. The screensavers are dope on this thing. It won't let you see them in Riverside, but.

• 21:39Wes Bos?

  Man, screensaver. Haven't had, we gotta bring back screensavers, man.

• 21:43Scott Tolinski?

  Like, this thing is bringing back screensavers. It's essentially just text and then it does like matrix style or things hitting it left and right. I want to know how they built them because they're incredible. My, and there's, I, there's so many different ones that they're just constantly looping. They're so cool. Okay, next one is style. You can change the style of the OS, whether you want to change the entire OS system font, you want to change the background, you want to change the, the screensaver, which again is just changing a text file because it will modify, like if we wanted to do the syntax logo as ASCII art, it would use that and do all the same stuff with the screensaver. Or even theme, which there's a ton of built in themes about this thing. So like the built in themes, they change a lot.

• 22:26Scott Tolinski?

  So if I wanted to, what's a, a good one to try, the, um, just a green one I had installed that's ridiculous. Yeah, hacker green. If we install, if we do hacker green, watch how much it changes things. It changes like your colors, it changes the spacing, it changes the borders, it changes all that stuff. Um, and you can install new themes super easily. You can build new themes. And so I've had a lot of fun just like, just trying that new stuff, you know, just seeing and being able to mess with the stuff myself.

• 22:54Wes Bos?

  And like, like what about like, like media and stuff like that? Like I'm assuming most of the apps you use either have a Linux version or are just like web apps, right?

• 23:04Scott Tolinski?

  Yes. So I have a whole section on here on the apps that I use every day that work just fine inside of this are OBS, Obsidian, Chrome, Discord, Figma, Google Photos. That stuff all comes on this and I didn't have to install it. Works fine. And then easy to install anything, VS Code, whatever else I install. I mean, I've installed a bunch of stuff on this, but the one thing that you'll learn about this is that, man, we probably use and install more web apps or could than we're, when we'd expect. So much of the stuff that we do is available as a web app that I've installed most things on this as a web app.

• 23:46Scott Tolinski?

  Oh, I'm sorry. Here's another one I've installed that doesn't come on it, but works. DaVinci Resolve works for Linux is on here.

• 23:54Wes Bos?

  That's what I was gonna ask you. Like, like video editing is, is a huge one for people, right? You need to be able to. A lot of people are on the Mac because they need either some of the Adobe apps or like a video editor.

• 24:07Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, there is a built in video editor for this, but it looks very Linuxy. It looks very like InkScape, you know, like.

• 24:13Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 24:14Scott Tolinski?

  I know those people, the Linux folks have been like, oh, it's what I edit my videos on. No, it's not going to do it for me. I but.

• 24:19Wes Bos?

  Yeah, what's the audio one? Audacity is like, man, you open that thing and you're like, oh, man, that's great that this is open source, but like, holy hell. Actually, I think last time I complained about Audacity, somebody told me that there's a new skin for it. Is that true? No, it still looks. Oh, no, no, it looks, it looks a little bit more modern now. Okay.

• 24:40Scott Tolinski?

  So I haven't, I will say I have not done any editing on DaVinci, but it, it should work just fine. There, there's no concerns there. Some of the concerns for me are more hardware related than they are software, like, getting my Cam Link running with my audio setup running on this thing is going to be a pain in the ass because this computer has one USB C port and.

• 25:02Wes Bos?

  Oh, yeah.

• 25:02Scott Tolinski?

  Like, yeah, there, it's just the computer is like not capable of running a lot of media, I don't think.

• 25:07Wes Bos?

  I'm not, I'm not up to date on like, like people building like machines. Can you get like a, like a AMD 64 Linux? I'm assuming, right? Like that's what's running on, on all these phones. So are, are people building like an app, like an M whatever equivalent?

• 25:23Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, there's, there's several.

• 25:26Wes Bos?

  ARM 64. That's what I'm thinking here, not AMD.

• 25:28Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, there's several different computer manufacturers that are making some computers. The one that seems to be the most popular right now with those folks is the framework computer, which is, a computer where you can replace everything. It does use AMD, uses Ryzen, it doesn't use ARM.

• 25:46Wes Bos?

  Okay.

• 25:47Scott Tolinski?

  And these computers are.

• 25:50Scott Tolinski?

  I've done a lot of reading about these computers lately. It's that they are not the cheapest, best options available for like, you're not getting the best bang for your buck, but you can replace literally anything in them. And this 16 inch computer can be seriously specked out. So the 16 inch one can have, yeah, this Ryzen A9, 730, 12 cores, 24 threads, CPU of 50 tops. It has a external graphics processor that you can just plug in 16 graphics cores. And then you could load this thing with like a billion gigabytes of RAM. So,

• 26:30Wes Bos?

  Yeah, you don't have to pay the stupid Apple tax on that where they screw you when you want a couple more gigs. Hey, 128 gigs on your laptop? That seems like a good idea.

• 26:39Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, she's up to 96. Yeah, right. And that's the whole thing. You could have terabytes at like this. This is so enticing, especially because it is just normal stuff that you can just, you know, put on a motherboard. To me, that is like, I am, I am swayed by this. I'm like interested in this. What's so cool about even the graphics processor on this, this is a little aside here, is that let's say I was going on a business trip and I didn't want to have, I wanted to have my battery last longer. You could just pull off the graphics processor and just slide in a spacer that fills it in and that's it.

• 27:12Wes Bos?

  Well, that's cool.

• 27:13Scott Tolinski?

  Like, you don't, you don't have to do anything crazy. Like you could just adjust the specs of it and increase your battery life.

• 27:20Wes Bos?

  Just leave your processor at home.

• 27:22Scott Tolinski?

  Right. It is, it's wild. So let's talk about, we talked about apps that, you know, that there are, like I said, OBS is built in and, and all that stuff is built in. Installing any of my dev stuff, you could install it via the command line if you want, right? But if you come in here and do install from the system prompt, there's all kinds of stuff you could install. So AUR is like ARC packages. So like when I installed Molvad, which is my VPN, I did it through this. But then you can install web apps. You can install terminal UIs from here. You can install services. You can install new style things like new fonts. And if we go to like development, you could install Docker from here or a Docker comes pre installed, but you could install from JavaScript.

• 28:06Scott Tolinski?

  You could then install Bun. Bun's on. So you don't have to go to the terminal for everything, right? You can come in here and just quickly install these things as you need them. And likewise, like same with like VS Code is under here under editor. Yeah, you want to install any of this stuff. It's just here. Boom. You don't have to go hunting for it.

• 28:22Wes Bos?

  So what if you need to like install something via the CLI? Is that with AUR? Or do you gotta like app get whatever? Cause like even Discord, you know how we we whine about Discord updating itself every time you open it? On Linux, I've heard that you have to like literally app get install the thing every time there's an update.

• 28:42Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, I don't know about that necessarily about the updates, but the equivalent of app get here is Pac-Man, which gets packages. Or you just do R and like if I was searching for a package, I don't know why this is taking a long. It doesn't normally take this long. You would just search for whatever you want and it would pop up in this list. Everything is kind of like a terminal UI for these types of things. There isn't like, you know, like normal Linux distros. There's the whole, you know, I'm used to this in like Steam Deck if I'm installing packages. So yeah, typically you would just install AUR and if you're a power user, you could in fact just come to the command line. I don't know why that's not working. It hasn't ever failed for me before, but that's, that's the game, right?

• 29:26Scott Tolinski?

  Web apps. So web apps on this system are a first class citizen. It is awesome. Like if, if I wanted to install a web app on this thing and I do install and I do web app and it asks me for that app name, app name, whatever, it asks for its URL. So HTTPS syntax.fm. Okay. And then it needs an icon. Shoot, it needs an icon. I don't know if I have an icon.

• 29:59Wes Bos?

  Okay, in the link.

• 30:00Scott Tolinski?

  Okay, so syntax has been installed. So now from the launcher, you could just say, get me syntax.

• 30:08Wes Bos?

  I saw it.

• 30:09Scott Tolinski?

  Oh, did I?

• 30:10Wes Bos?

  Oh, it's App Anime. It's called.

• 30:14Scott Tolinski?

  App name? Oh, I just typed in app name. I didn't give it a name. That's my fault. That was my bad, folks. It just shows up. It has the logo. You would enter. It pops it open as a web app. Sorry, I'm running like recording in eight tabs like this. So everything's gonna feel way more sluggish. This thing is normally extremely fast. And I think it's just because I'm doing screen recording while we're doing this. So this is primarily how you install anything. Like, I've installed my to-do list here, like Tweak. I changed my mail to be Superhuman. Or I can do, for my mail, I actually named it email. I can do command E and it pops open my email. And web apps then become, like I said, a first-class citizen and you use these things as if they're apps.

• 30:57Scott Tolinski?

  I mean, this is just a straight-up app. It exists, right, for all I know. So so many of the things that I thought I would install a normal app for, you'd go for, you'd download the DMG and drag the thing over. No, they're just web apps. Slack, I installed it as a web app. Reddit, at web app. Superhuman, web app. Tweak, web app. And it's been great. It's like, why am I installing an Electron app when I can just use the web app without, you know? Like, why? What's the point? Yeah.

• 31:22Wes Bos?

  That's, that's the thing is that like, why do we install so many of these silly Electron apps? Simply just because we want them in our dock? And or we want some sort of like native integration. But like, the most of that could probably suffice with just a docked web app. And Safari lets you do that now.

• 31:45Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, I know, you know, but like, the process for it all is such a pain. I think this process could be smoother, too. One thing I really don't like doing is having to hunt for a logo PNG. Like, yeah, give it a name, give it an address. Now I gotta hunt for a PNG. Like, that kind of thing kind of bugs me. But the fact that these just pop up and they're, they're apps like this, that to me is like, wow. It really drives home the fact that these are not web apps. They are apps. They are apps that we use, like... It just, to me, it was such a good moment of like celebrating the web because there's no distinction made. This is not an app opening up in Chrome as a progressive web app. This is just straight-up how it is. Like I said, I've been using all kinds of stuff from Slack. I installed Notion that way.

• 32:29Scott Tolinski?

  Notion is just a straight-up web app here. I could give it a keyboard shortcut if I wanted to. Yeah, it's it's really pretty cool. The keyboard shortcut again is like is super easy to manage all this stuff. You just set up key bindings, opens it up, add it yours, you know? So, um, that's something I love about this. I think it's really great. The apps that I'm going to miss the most from using this full time. Going to be the Comet browser for sure. Man, I've really grown to love Comet browser. That thing rules. I I use it all the time for automating things for me. So like not having that, I don't feel like I'm going back in time. That just means I'll need to like find a new agentic solution for working with a browser, whatever that may be.

• 33:12Scott Tolinski?

  iMessage, I'll miss iMessage because, you know, I'll text my wife from my computer. But maybe it's like a better distraction free thing at work and I have my phone sitting next to me all the time anyways.

• 33:24Wes Bos?

  Having it in like airdrop, holy hell, airdrop's the best, you know?

• 33:29Scott Tolinski?

  I never use airdrop.

• 33:30Wes Bos?

  No? Oh, man, I I send stuff from my phone to my desktop all the time. You know, like little video clips or or photos that need to be emailed to somebody. I don't know. I I could. There's probably some, everyone's probably been like, use this Android version, you know? There's, there's gotta be that, but just the the built in integration of airdrop is really nice. But I've been thinking about that as well. It's like, what things am I still loving iOS for? And it's it's airdrop and like iMessage not even that much anymore.

• 34:07Scott Tolinski?

  No, iMessage not that much. It's mostly just so I like and like do it from my computer like.

• 34:11Wes Bos?

  Yeah, I I'm trying to make like, like, why is everybody not just moving to like WhatsApp or or Telegram or things like that? Like a lot of my group chats are no longer on. I don't think I have a single group chat on iMessage anymore. It's all they're all on like third party platforms, which is the best.

• 34:29Scott Tolinski?

  I've been thinking about this a lot and this whole whole Omarchi thing has been like really kind of throwing me for a loop here because this feels like, yeah, I, you know, I'd have a hard time giving this to a non power user and having the music. But this feels like a next generation operating system to me. This feels like a step forward, not a step back. And Linux has always felt like a step back. Just because the sheer amount of speed and productivity and smoothness of the experience and like, I'm not like, I come back to Mac and I'm like, man, this thing feels. Clunky. One thing that I really bugged me about modern Mac is that they've added so many

• 35:10Scott Tolinski?

  useless features and then they don't maintain them. They don't improve them and they just let them rot like Stage Manager. Who cares about Stage Manager? Uh, that's gotta be the worst way to manage your Windows. But yeah, they added it in here and they're not gonna improve it. It's just gonna exist.

• 35:27Wes Bos?

  Yeah, they just half ass it. Enough that-

• 35:30Scott Tolinski?

  They half ass it.

• 35:31Wes Bos?

  Like, regular people are not using a Window Manager. And then like, power users are not using it because it's like, there's no way to do like, like, stuff like, put three windows stacked on top of each other, you know, like, power user stuff. Like, the Shortcuts app is a great example of like, they went all in and you can literally do anything. But then, like, I don't know a ton of people using that either.

• 35:56Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, you know, it does feel like large portions of macOS have just completely rotted and they're not being touched. And this latest operating system upgrade, which I'm on the latest beta right now, I will tell you, Tahoe, is that what it is? I will tell you that the, that this update has made it very apparent to me that things are getting worse, not better in that regard. Because not only does it not do anything, but make, like, it changes the UI, which sure, the new UI looks nice, but it also has really bad, uh, screen real estate management. Like, there's so much empty space and there's so many things that are like, UI deficient. Like, if you make the window too small, it's just hiding, uh, some menu options that you can't even

• 36:41Scott Tolinski?

  access them. They're not in the, like, yeah.

• 36:44Wes Bos?

  Can we talk about the, I have the MacBook and it has the little cutout for the-

• 36:49Scott Tolinski?

  The cutout, yeah. That's so lazy.

• 36:51Wes Bos?

  If you have too many menu bar icons- They're inaccessible. There's no way to get to them. And then everyone's like, well, install bartender. I'm not installing a third party. I have it installed and I use it, yes, but like regular people should not have to install a third-party app. That like, this is a problem that you, you literally are just hiding menu bar items and menu items and giving the user no way to access them.

• 37:17Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah. To me, there was like some crazy stuff with the, the new, the new Mac UI where it feels like they made a coat of paint and just said, apply to all, and then didn't test or use half the apps. Because everything is so much bigger and takes up so much space now that things do not fit well. It is so much more cluttered. And man, I really don't mind necessarily the way it looks, but it doesn't feel like any sort of UX expert has had any hand in this thing. It feels like they slapped, slapped a coat of paint over it. And it's further made apparent because the system windows have this massive like 25 pixel plus border radius on it.

• 38:00Scott Tolinski?

  But your normal windows like Notion have the normal border radius. So when you set multiple windows on top of each other, the border radiuses all don't line up. Like, it feels so lazy and just bizarre. So like for me, I'm like, felt like Mac OS is rotting so much. And it feels clunky. This feels like, it feels like a cheetah, man. It feels like a Ferrari. It is, it is, and I'm so used to Linux being so unpolished. And sure enough, there are little things here and there. And you know, you having terminal UIs for everything isn't my favorite thing in the whole world. But like, this usage of it just feels great. That's it. There's annoyances for me. A lot of little annoyances. DHH, I would like this. I don't know if anybody else cares.

• 38:43Scott Tolinski?

  But when you do a command prompt and the system prompt, I don't, I don't know why, like I can't search for font, but I have to search for style or system style then font, you know, like why do I have to go to style?

• 38:53Wes Bos?

  Yeah, you need some like fuzzy searching.

• 38:56Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, let's, let me go deeper with that. Dude, there's lots of names for stuff. You gotta, it's not like the Omarche system. It's the Hyprland Window Tiling System. It is the, whatever the tat, the top bar is called. There's names for everything and they're different packages, which I understand. That's just like the, there's the package, right? But because of that, I gotta learn, all right, what is this thing? What does it do? I gotta get in the config. I gotta go to that specific website to learn the config. I gotta like, understand all these different parts, which is not like unified, but it's the Linux way. So, you know, just, just little annoyances from a Mac user, right? So my advice to you with Omarche is to try it. If you have a machine sitting around

• 39:37Scott Tolinski?

  that you can install it on, man, it's a hell of a lot better than Windows. I'll tell you that. macOS, yeah, I don't, I think it might be a little bit harder to install on a Mac, but install it. Even if you can try it in a virtual box, if you can, I don't know if that's a thing, try it. And if you want to spend some serious time on it, read the manual. The manual is, is like, that was my biggest thing that I, I regret not doing. I regret not immediately going to the manual and reading every page of this. Because by the end of the first day, I opened up the manual, I started reading the manual, I was like, oh, that makes so much sense. That's how I learned about installing the web apps. That's

• 40:21Scott Tolinski?

  how I installed about, or learned about lazy git. And, and like, we didn't even talk about, like, there's a lot of shell tools that come built into this, like the fuzzy finder in shell, Ezo, which is like a replacement for ls, that is really great. The replacement for cd is so good, was it zoxide? All this stuff is great. I'm gonna install all of these on my Mac, because I've gotten really used to them. And then same like, you know, they common shell functions, like, oh, just compress, decompress. Like, they just added a bunch of stuff, image to PNG, whatever. Lazy git, lazy duck, or all of these little things that come on this. Once I like dove through here and like really understood it, I was like,

• 41:02Scott Tolinski?

  Wow, this is really fantastic and it really removed a lot of the concerns I had with it. It's just like, it's really, really nicely put together. So read the manual, give it a try. And is it worth, is it worth your time? You know, if this is the type of, if this episode spoke to you at all? Hell yeah, it's worth it. Uh, I've been really liking this to the point where like, I've gotten such renewed use out of this crappy old laptop. I don't even know, it's not super old, but it's not like specked out like this MacBook Pro is. And when I'm working in the two of them, this feels faster to use. And it might not seem like that with the screen recording, what you're seeing here. But like, in practice, man, this thing feels so much more lightweight to you.

• 41:45Scott Tolinski?

  So I found myself walking away from this whole experience the past few weeks, heading over to the framework laptop page and pricing out a laptop 18 times. Um, that's kind of like, just like seeing if there's some possible way I can justify it. Because yeah, I, I found this to be so nice that I would not mind. If, as long as I could get and be assured that my audio interface, which should by all intents and purposes work just fine. As long as the audio interface works just fine, my CamLink works just fine, and DaVinci works just fine, there's nothing that would stop me from using this full time, for sure.

• 42:22Wes Bos?

  All right, let's, let's check in in, in like a month's time and see how you're doing.

• 42:28Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, no, I, I'm down for that. I, I think some of the, like, the hardest things for me be, like, have not even been Omarche or Linux based, they've been NeoVim based, which, like,

• 42:37Wes Bos?

  But like, yeah, just use VS Code. Like, nothing's stopping you from using VS Code, is there?

• 42:41Scott Tolinski?

  No, no, no, I'm, I'm doing that, I'm doing the, um, Omarche thing because it's like, oh, I, uh, or the NeoVim thing, because it's like, oh, I want to just go all in. In fact,

• 42:51Wes Bos?

  You just want to go, ah, yeah.

• 42:52Scott Tolinski?

  Shout out to friend of the show, Dax Rad. Uh, open code is the Claude Code Open Source Terminal User Interface Alternative. Man, this thing rips. Uh, this thing rips. I logged in with my Copilot. I'm using my Copilot, I'm using GPT-5 or whatever, and I'm using Just like Claude code and I'm having it build. There's build mode and agent or build mode and plan mode. And like, I've been using that and I'm building a super whisper alternative that uses terminal UI. Because I've like, I've gone so far into the thing. I'm like, oh my gosh, terminal UI super. Even has like an audio level meter and stuff in it. It's ridiculous.

• 43:35Scott Tolinski?

  Because I wanted a, I wanted a little project to build on this thing. So I've been building this and it actually, I, you know, I may, may make this public if it ends up working really well, but it works, works pretty fine right now. Wes, it, it actually, right now. This app system wide has a system wide keyboard shortcut. I hit it. It records, I hit it again to stop and then it uh, outputs into a text file. So you could go back in history and to your clipboard, whatever you just dictated and it uses, it uses whisper to do so. So it should be theoretically good. Now there's no configure anything in it yet. It's not like replacing words, but uh, not been, I've been goofing around with it. It's been a lot of fun to learn. I'll tell you that. Bring in JavaScript. Cool.

• 44:17Scott Tolinski?

  Uh, that's all I got to say. This has been greatly making me reconsider the Apple ecosystem overall, as we've talked about. I've been thinking about Android. I've been thinking about my Apple watch. I've been thinking about all this stuff. Yeah. Let us know what you think. Use it, not whatever. Try it. What are your thoughts? Omarchi, Linux, overall. Uh, what, what do you think? Leave a comment below. Um, as always, do you want to get into sick picks?

• 44:41Wes Bos?

  Yeah, let's jump on into it. Um.

• 44:45Scott Tolinski?

  Sick picks are the things that we pick that are sick, that we enjoy, things that we like, uh, things that could be anything from a podcast, a movie. All kinds of stuff.

• 44:55Wes Bos?

  I got one for you. Uh, I don't have it right here, but I redid on the weekend. I did our kids like whole charging infrastructure. Um, probably, I don't know, maybe six, seven years ago, I sick picked a Anker charging brick. And it was, I think it had like eight USB As in it and, and as the, the new iPhone's about to come out and I'm so close to just getting rid of all the lightning stuff in our house and, and with that, a lot of the USB A stuff. So I bought, we have, I bought a new charging brick from Ugreen. It's an eight, 200 watt with, I don't know, eight ports on it. It has five USB Cs and two USB As.

• 45:38Wes Bos?

  And this thing is, is awesome. It charges so nice and fast. There's a couple of them that charge at like, I forget what it is, but there's different combinations, but you can charge your laptop on it. No problem. And it charges the iPads and, and phones nice and fast. And, and with that, I also got silicone USB C cords, which are awesome. They're like,

• 45:59Scott Tolinski?

  Where'd you get them from?

• 46:00Wes Bos?

  Have you ever had those like silicone monkey noodles that you play with? It's kind of like that, but it's actually a USB cord. They're really thick. And our problem is that the kids get them tangled all the time and, and they, they've like snapped the ends off and everything like that. So these are like super beefy, really, really neat cords. And I've been really happy with them. They charge, they charge wicked fast. They're only, they're not USB three. They don't, they don't do the speeds, which I don't, I don't care about. I just, I just care that they charge fast enough and, and these are great.

• 46:33Scott Tolinski?

  I'm not playing with no monkey noodles over here. That's not something I've done.

• 46:37Wes Bos?

  You've not played with monkey noodles before? Oh man. I highly recommend getting a monkey noodle or two as well.

• 46:43Scott Tolinski?

  All right. I'm gonna have to figure that out. That sounds dope. Cool. Yeah. I, I thought it looked cute.

• 46:48Wes Bos?

  We'll throw up a photo of it right here of, of thing. I posted it on my Twitter.

• 46:52Scott Tolinski?

  I'm going to, I'll, I'll sick pick this. Considering this whole episode's about Omarchi, I'll sick pick.

• 46:59Scott Tolinski?

  The Omarchi manual, not necessarily for people who are interested in installing this, but for people who are interested in learning about interesting CLI tools and tools in general, because the tools inside of here, whether that is the terminal UI stuff like lazy Git, or even some of the apps I had never heard of, it does shell tools, even though there's just a few of them. Like I said, I'm going to go install these on my Mac, because these are so great. You can CD something like from anywhere. Like if I just open up a terminal here, I can CD into Synhacks, which is not anywhere

• 47:41Scott Tolinski?

  near where I am right now. And it, oh, you, you, of cour-, oh, Synthax, I typed it wrong. I was gonna say, the one time I go to do a demo, it fails. If I do Synhacks, it takes me right there, because it has like a memory and it knows the directories that you visited. So man, Zoxide rules, all the stuff rules, and then I'm gonna install a bunch of these tools on my Mac so that I can have them there as well. I've gotten really used to it.

• 48:05Wes Bos?

  All right. Thanks everybody so much for tuning in. We will catch you later. Peace.

• 48:10Scott Tolinski?

  Peace.