TheStandup - DHH Talks Omarchy

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• 0:00Speaker 00

  Alright, hey, DHH, thank you for, oh wait, TJ, are we recording?

• 0:04Speaker 01

  Oh yeah, of course we're recording.

• 0:05Speaker 00

  Okay, good, I just wanna make sure, because I don't wanna like come in here with the hottest intro ever for this to happen.

• 0:10Speaker 01

  Intro.

• 0:11Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Uh, anyways, I'm sorry. To set the stage, welcome to the stand-up if you haven't been paying attention to the YouTube. TJ and I just got done doing a seven-day, 24/7 stream live where we used Omarchy for the first time together, which was absolutely fantastic, by the way. And so, it's even more fantastic that we have DHH, creator of Omarchy, here with us to talk about it. And so, we have a lot of fun things we do wanna discuss, including sins of DHH is what we're calling them, which is some of your shortcuts that you have chosen for Omarchy as the defaults. I'm not gonna say I'm offended, but I'm gonna just say they're the sins of DHH.

• 0:51Speaker 00

  But, uh, welcome to the stand-up. Thank you very much for Omarchy, and I must say it was awesome using it during those seven days. It was absolutely fantastic.

• 0:59Speaker 01

  That's awesome to hear. And then, I mean, I think the first bug report I can send in here is that, uh, the pronunciation is Omarchy.

• 1:08Speaker 00

  Okay, so, what happened to the R? Where did the R go in there?

• 1:13Speaker 01

  We swallowed it as a proper Dane.

• 1:16Speaker 00

  Okay, okay, okay.

• 1:17Speaker 01

  My wife is learning Danish right now, so that's like a joke she will definitely get, because Danish has a lot of those swallow guttural sounds. So, Omarchy, that's what it is.

• 1:28Speaker 00

  Alright, Omarchy. Okay, that's good. Okay, you get, you know, you get to decide how it's said, but just remember-

• 1:32Speaker 01

  And then no one will listen to me and they'll still call it Omarchy.

• 1:35Speaker 00

  And that's the thing, is that the creator of GIF calls it JIF.

• 1:39Speaker 01

  Exactly, and no one listened to that, right? So, that's kinda the running joke.

• 1:43Speaker 02

  So apparently, DHH wasn't right about everything.

• 1:47Speaker 00

  Apparently.

• 1:50Speaker 00

  That's actually a pretty good one. Alright, so, let's kind of, let's, let's go back a little bit in time, cuz, uh, I think a lot of people may not be familiar what, or what Omarchy is, or Omarchy, sorry, what Omarchy is. What, uh, what motivated it, all that. So why don't you kinda give us maybe like When Adam Met Eve? What happened? How did this kinda come together, and what was the motivation behind it?

• 2:11Speaker 01

  Sure, so the story actually starts back in the apple garden of Eden. And I've been a Mac person for twenty-two years, is that about right? Two thousand and one is when I switched when OSX was ten point one or ten point two. I forget if it was still a beta or not, but it was very early on. And I got really excited about the Mac because I really wanted to get out of Windows. And here was an alternative, it was built on Unix underpinnings and off we go. So I just stayed basically in that walled garden for twenty-two years. And I was using Linux on the server through the whole time, very happy with that,

• 2:50Speaker 01

  but also had absolutely no intentions, motivations or pull towards running Linux on the desktop. And then over those twenty-two years, I mean, I changed, Apple changed. And eventually my relationship with Apple also changed quite dramatically when the company just started being not someone I wanted to send all my money to. And when that kind of happened originally with the launch of hay.com, when all the nonsense about the App Store and them trying to bully us into paying thirty percent of our revenues to them, when that all kicked off, do you know what's funny? That even wasn't enough to yank me out of the garden. I was still like, well, this is madness and I fought them and we had this big blow up. And then I kept using a Mac.

• 3:34Speaker 01

  It really wasn't the trigger it should have been in hindsight. That should have been like, okay, that's enough, no more. And then I still bought like freaking three Macs after that, right? But then I reached the point when they had their whole blow up about PWAs. I don't remember if you remember that, but they had this skirmish with the European Union and they had built this quite nice implementation of PWA into Safari. And I just built a new product on that with Campfire.

• 4:05Speaker 03

  Can you define PWA? So everybody...

• 4:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, PWA for Campfire, which was really nice and was using all the tech and everything. And I felt like, holy shit, are they gonna rock pull me one more time within literally two years? Enough. So at that moment, I just decided, you know what? I can't do this anymore. I don't want to do this anymore. So the first stop was actually going back to Windows. For a hot second, there's a blog post still live, me saying, I'm doing it. I'm switching to Windows. And part of that came because WSL 2 has gotten really good. Like, you can actually legitimately run Linux on Windows. So all my Ruby development and so on could it happen there? And the VS Code integration is okay. And I thought, ah, I don't really like it, but like, I could do it.

• 4:53Speaker 01

  But then what happened was I bought a framework laptop. Literally this one. This is the ship of thesis that I still have here. The original switching to Windows laptop. I bought the framework with Windows pre-installed. And I ran it and was like, ah, you know what? I like the laptop a lot, but I wish it was a little quicker. I was doing all these bitometer testing and whatever. And then for whatever reason, I forget what it was. I loaded up Ubuntu on it and it ran faster. Like same hardware, everything the same. And I was getting better scores on.

• 5:28Speaker 00

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• 5:37Speaker 03

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• 6:21Speaker 01

  Do you know what, funny aside on that, that has been the dominating theme for a lot of people who've been trying Ubuntu lately. That most people, they don't rush out and buy a brand-new computer. They find like some old laptop, like a 2014, or 2012, or even 2009, and they put Ubuntu on it, and they go like, "Why is this so fast?" It felt like this machine basically was garbage. It was running some version of Windows, or even a version of Mac, and then Apple abandoned that platform. And then they put Ubuntu on it, and the machine just feels fresh. It feels new, it feels fast. So, most of that's just Linux is so efficient, it's so much easier on the hardware.

• 7:02Speaker 01

  But for me, just that experience of going like, "Same hardware? And like, the web runs quicker?" That's really interesting. So I started giving Ubuntu a try. And this was about like 18 months ago, and...

• 7:17Speaker 01

  Ah, do you know what? At first, I was like, "I don't love how this looks. It feels like, I want to be kind here, but a cheap copy of something else." It did not feel like it had its own identity. It did not feel like it was made by someone who had the same aesthetic sensibilities as I did, or even the same aesthetic sensibilities that had someone working at Apple. And I thought like, "All right, whatever. I can make do." And I made do, and I started tweaking, and then I tweaked it a lot more, and then I tweaked even more, and eventually Obuntu popped out, which was my kind of remix of Ubuntu. And I ran that for about a year. And then this summer, literally doing the 24 hours of LeMans, when I had some downtime during that week, I started looking into Hyperland.

• 8:03Speaker 01

  That was the first thing that sucked me into that. And then I realized, "Oh, I can't run Hyperland on Ubuntu." Like, it's not a thing that runs on top of that. What did they want? Oh, they want Arch? Arch? I mean, I heard you joke about Arch. And like, "Oh, you're gonna regain your virginity. You just gotta run Arch." And I thought like, "That sounds nerdy in ways that I'm not ready for, and I'm already kind of nerdy." But it turned out I was just wrong. And as often happens with technology, you have a preconceived notion of what it is, and then you actually give it a try yourself, and you realize, "Oh, that's not at all what I thought it was." So, starting in like June...

• 8:43Speaker 01

  I just went crazy down the rabbit hole of figuring out everything there was to know about Arch, about Hyperland, the whole ecosystem of tooling and putting it all together. And I thought, this is exactly the kind of stuff I would have thought I would hate to do, until I realized, oh shit, this is exactly like Ruby and Rails. This is exactly like 2003. I'm discovering this gem, haha, of a programming language or an operating system. It's totally unfinished, uncomplete in terms of what I need to do my work and how I want to enjoy a computer.

• 9:25Speaker 01

  But I can see that these are the underpinnings that'll take me from the bare nothing you get with Arch to the promised land you can get with a fully configured Hyperland setup. And I thought, you know what? If I just finish this work once, I'm gonna have the perfect computer. Like, is it worth for me to invest two weeks? This was what I thought at the time. Oh, it's just gonna be two weeks, just two weeks. Here we are, three months later, right? But in two weeks, I thought, I can make something that's probably gonna be a lot nicer than anything I've used before. At least, that was the thesis. And I started doing it, and I realized very quickly, yes, Hyperland, Tiling Window Managers is actually how I want to use a computer.

• 10:10Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 10:11Speaker 01

  I didn't know this. I watched other people using Tiling Window Managers. I mean, I3 and DWM and all these other ones have been around for a long time, but for whatever reason, either I was ready, or Hyperland was just a lot better, it all just clicked.

• 10:24Speaker 00

  Let me kind of jump in for a quick second on this. So, a big thing that I think makes Hyperland really special, and I do want to give a shout out to the creator, is that when you get I3, you're used to this idea of a desktop environment. And I3 is like, oh, you, no. Like, no, you don't get that anymore. And so, it's like, if you want to make it look good, it's actually a significant effort. Whereas Hyperland's like, oh, people like things to look good. It's just gonna be built in, it's gonna be super simple. Like, it's not gonna be this, like, super complex experience. And so, I'd say even back in the Arch pre-Hyperland was actually a much more, like, not as pleasant of an experience, because all Tiling Windows Managers weren't nearly as, you know, pleasant. Hyperland is a true, like, piece of art when it comes to operating systems.

• 11:09Speaker 00

  But I just want to throw that out there. Big appreciation moment.

• 11:13Speaker 01

  Which by the way, this was one of the first things I did when we started getting going with this and I realized we're going to be quite serious about it. I had first personally, I started just helping fund Baxri. I mean, he's this student in Poland, working on this basically just all by himself. And he created something this amazing, like in, I don't even know if he lives in a dorm room or wherever he lives. But he does not live at one infinity loop Cupertino. And he does not have three trillion dollars worth of resources to command thousands of people to do stuff for him.

• 11:52Speaker 01

  And yet he, one person has been able to come up with a more appealing operating system than the one I used for 22 years? That's crazy. And I mean crazy in the most beautiful internet stranger kind of way. And I thought that was a big part of the appeal too, that here's something that as you say, doesn't just work right, but looks amazing, looks better. The animations are smoother, they're better timed, the basier curves are more as they should be.

• 12:26Speaker 01

  And then I think that's just, that's incredible, right? So I thought, once I, once that clicked for me, that, oh, I didn't have a problem with tiling window managers. I just had a problem with the ugly ones, as you say. I had a problem with having to, it's a DWM where you literally have to recompile it if you want to change it, I think that is. I just thought, that's a bunch of unnecessary ugliness and unnecessary cumbersomeness. And here's Hyperland that out of the box, for what it does out of the box, which by the way, I mean, let's be fair here, isn't all of it. It's a, it's a slice, it's the tiling window management, but it looks great out of the box. And everything is basically set up. I thought, I can really work with this.

• 13:06Speaker 01

  And then I discovered a few other things. Oh, a wave bar, I can do all this configuration and I installed all the other tools, hyper, idle and this, that and the other bit. And in those two weeks, I then had a system where I thought, I wouldn't go back. Like even if Apple came tomorrow and said, "Sorry dude, our bad. Here's the most amazing M7 computer, you can just have it." I'd go like, "Thank you, but you brought me to a better place. Namaste. I am at peace with the fact that we had some beef and you sent me on this journey and I ended up in a destination that I should probably have been in five, 10 years ago, I don't know. But now I'm here and I can't appreciate it more.

• 13:49Speaker 01

  And I want to do exactly what I did with Ruby. I want everyone else to re-- well, not everyone else. I want developers at the very least to realize this exists and you should give it a try. Because if you do, you might have the same experience I did and now tens of thousands of others that, "Holy shit, I want to run Linux." Like, "What?" I had literally no intention of ever doing that. Not because I didn't appreciate everything that's been built. I mean, as I said, I run Linux on the server for a billion years. Not because I didn't prefer the underlying philosophy and the open sourceness. I, all of those things.

• 14:29Speaker 01

  I just didn't think that that was something that was compatible with my aesthetic aspirations and how I wanted things to just work and all the other stuff. And I was just wrong. The best possible way of being wrong, when you have misconceptions about something that's free. Free! And you can just take it, put it together, and then you get something incredible like this. And that almost brings us up to speed, because you know what? This was three months ago. Like, I just started this thing. Literally three months ago, I, is that right math here? Uh, July 1st, I think is when the Omarchy first release dropped. So, yeah, three months and a, and change. And here we are now, literally tens of thousands of people have used it.

• 15:14Speaker 01

  There's an enormously engaged community, which was, by the way, something that was interesting. I mean, I sort of did the same thing with Omakup, just at a very small scale. It was a remix of Ubuntu. A few other people showed up to help and a few thousand people used it. But with Hyperland and with Arch as the underpinnings, we're at four levels lower in the stack, which means we can fix almost everything. Nothing is set in stone. If we don't like something, we throw it out and put something else in. You can't do that with Ubuntu, right? Like, it's very high up in the stack. You could change some colors and you could install some tweaks and so on. Arch, like, ground zero, right? Like, the thinnest possible layer on top of raw Linux,

• 15:58Speaker 01

  which means that all of these hundreds of people who have piled into the community and contributed patches and so forth, they could just fix things. They could just do things. And we could set it up exactly how we all wanted it. And I think that's the other part that's really capturing that unique Linux spirit. I'm not trying to sell anyone with a machi on, "You're never gonna have a problem. Everything is just gonna be perfectly easy. You can just drop in from macOS. You don't have to learn anything." I think that was a huge mistake, at least as I see it, when it comes to talking to developers, that we were just selling it on philosophy. We were just selling it on like,

• 16:40Speaker 01

  "Oh, it's sort of like a slightly worse version of Mac or slightly worse version of Windows, but it's free us in speech." Okay, I mean, that's great. And then no one gives a fuck, right? Like, they just want a better system. They just want something that works. And a lot of people right now, they just want something that has a long-lasting battery, which we could talk about later. It's the most amusing final stand that Apple has. For everyone I talked to, it was like, "How screwed is the battery?" Holy shit, Apple's been reduced to a battery company? That's what you do now? You do or sell? You're the little bunny that goes like a little longer in the commercial than the competing battery? Jesus Christ, waterfall. Anyway, just that we get to this place

• 17:25Speaker 01

  where we have a system, you could change everything, you can make everything better, and then you can iterate on it. And I can cut a new release, and a week later, you've made a change to an operating system that's then distributed to tens of thousands of people? Like... For a lot of people, again, if you're hardcore Linux nerd and you're already running on like latest Git versions of everything, like this is new to you. But a lot of people that I talk to normally, they're used to commercial operating systems. They're used to Mac, they're used to Windows. It's not how it works. Like, you're not gonna send your little patch to Apple and say, like, "Ah, liquid glass? Could you make it a little less liquid?" Like, that's not a thing that's gonna happen.

• 18:09Speaker 01

  You don't have access to the source code, you don't have access to anything, and what they're just gonna tell you is like, "Shut up, it's perfect." Right? We know best. It's not best. We know best, which, by the way, I mean, that's ironic, because I'm totally the same way, in a sense that I know best for the installed version that you're gonna get. Omarchy actually, for a hot second, had a bare mode, where you could install it without all my other programs that I wanted to install. And we ran that for a little bit until I decided, like, that was stupid. "Oma" in the Omarchy name literally stands for "omakase." Literally stands for chef's choice. Literally stands for "I decide what's on the menu for starters." Right?

• 18:50Speaker 01

  But what's so beautiful about open source, in the same way it was with Ruby and Rails, which is also super opinionated about everything, and it comes with all these configuration points already set, was that you could take that and then go like, "I'll give it a minute, and then I'm gonna wanna change five things." And then you just can. It's your computer. You can literally change anything you want, rip out any decisions I've made, put your own in there, and we can still be friends. What? Isn't that great? And then it's wonderful to see that action in practice, right? Like, all these people who've installed Omarchy, and then I look at their desktop and like, I can squint and I can still see my vision in it, but I also see their vision.

• 19:32Speaker 01

  And I think that's just a uniquely wonderful, beautiful part of running Linux on the desktop. We're used to that. A lot of web developers are used to that with our frameworks, with our tooling. You can set a patch to React or a patch to Rails, and it might make it into the next release, and it gives you some satisfaction. But the satisfaction you get from changing the tools you're directly touching and seeing and how the windows move around, that exists on a different level of pleasure, I'd say.

• 20:04Speaker 00

  You know, one thing, you go teach.

• 20:06Speaker 02

  Okay, well, I was just wondering, you know, since you said that this all started in the garden of, of, you know, Apple and stuff, and if you've ever thought about this logo, DHH, have you ever thought about this, that this is a piece of fruit with a bite out of it?

• 20:23Speaker 00

  It's, I, it's, it's an intentional design, too.

• 20:25Speaker 01

  Holy shit. Holy, what? Yeah.

• 20:28Speaker 00

  You want to hear a follow up funny?

• 20:30Speaker 02

  And it's, yeah, go ahead, Prime.

• 20:32Speaker 00

  The follow up funny, even though this was, Steve Wozniak determined the first price of the Apple 1, which they sold for $666. He liked repeating numbers, but just like, all art is but nature unknown to thee. Like, it's very funny, the, you know, the accidental symbolism that all just runs into each other, even when unintentional, because Steve Wozniak was ardently not trying to do something. He just loved repeating numbers, and that was the one that fit into the budget the best.

• 20:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, I, I, I do like when sort of the metaphors all line up. I do like when, uh, you can tell a nice story where the things fits and the characters line up. I will absolutely use that bite of the apple thing.

• 21:13Speaker 00

  It's just funny. All right. Yeah. By the way, so what we're trying to say is Apple's literally Satan. No, uh,

• 21:20Speaker 00

  no, but, and we love Woz, but there's something super important in what you said, which is just, which is, I've experienced it, I've felt it, I understand the feeling, which is the, uh, the problem of choice. And when you first start, like, say, something like Vim, there's so many ways to navigate, there's so much you have to go through, it just feels so overwhelming, because it's not even just that you have to choose, you have to, like, actively engage in this, like, just this weird struggle with yourself to use something completely different. And the same thing with switching from, say, Mac, which you, you do nothing, and you just press buttons and things appear, and you just use a mouse, and that's it. And you're like, oh, this is fantastic. You don't have the problem of choice. And you're actually seeing this happen more and more.

• 22:02Speaker 00

  It's happening, uh, if you use almost any major streaming thing now, you'll see something that's just like, think for me, and they'll just show you something. I'm also convinced this is why shorts are super popular, because shorts, you decide. When you don't want to watch, you don't decide what to watch. So you're just like, oh, I like that. Oh, I don't like that. Oh, I like this. And so it's like this constant feed. And so Omarchy taking or Omarchy taking the stance of, we're going to give you something that you can just use. And then you can progressively make that choice wider and wider. I think it's something that's going to be really like, it's a very powerful, like amplifier that will get many, many more people using something. And it just makes me very excited.

• 22:39Speaker 01

  And I want to make sure though, that we stay in the tension that the on-ramp is as low as possible. Zero effort to give it a try, but not zero effort to stay. Because what I don't like about shorts and a lot of other media and tooling and computers, that you never have to think, you never have to engage with it. You never have to learn anything. You never have to get better. I actually think is a complete dead end. They got the first part right. It should be so frictionless to try, to see if this is something for you. Because why should you invest endless hours customizing your setup and doing all this stuff? If you don't even like it in the end, that's a complete waste of time.

• 23:22Speaker 01

  And that's what kept me away from Linux for a long time, away from even Neo Vim for some time. I could see something there that I thought, this is really cool. But if it requires me 40 hours to even just set up a base config, I'm sorry, that's a next year project and next year becomes next year and it becomes never. I want an opportunity to try this out and see if it's something for me. And then I'll know whether it's worth the investment. So this is quite to the core of the philosophy of design I'm trying to imbue Omarchy with. So easy to get started. We will be not just the easiest, but the damn fastest

• 24:05Speaker 01

  Linux distribution you've ever installed that gives you an entire system. I mean, you guys have Teach, I think it was your run that has the World record. Record, world record for Omarchy install, one minute, 46 seconds. Like, think about that for a second. How many times have you spent like tens of minutes just doing a minor upgrade of macOS? Or in some cases even hours installing Windows and getting the updates and being stuck in that loop? And then we install an entire system that is way more featureful, way more full stacky for a developer in a minute and 46 seconds? Like, that's crazy. In fact, if you told me at the start of Omarchy that we could get to that,

• 24:49Speaker 01

  that you could get to an install in a minute 46, I'd say, "No way." Like, there's stuff. And then I realized, "What stuff? How fast can you copy Omarchy? The ISO is 6GB. How long does it take to copy 6GB?" Like, that should actually be our floor for how quickly you can install on something. Um, it's a few seconds. Okay, we can't do it in a few seconds, but then it's unreasonable to think that even we need 10 minutes. Like, on a very fast, modern computer, we should be able to do it. I originally thought if we can just get to like 5 to 7 minutes, that'd be amazing. And we kept discovering that the reasons things were slow were stupid. There were absolutely no reason that this stuff had to be slow.

• 25:31Speaker 01

  You could set up, especially Arch, in such a way that it was just lightning quick to install, which directly serves that purpose of getting someone to try something with absolute minimal effort, yet still being on the road to real. There's a bunch of people who've asked for like live CD stuff where you sort of kind of tried, but it kind of sucks because it's running off the USB. And I'm like, "Um, that's not what I want to spend my time on." I want to spend my time on you watch a video, you watch a people and you go like, "I want to give this a real shot on maybe an old laptop, maybe a new one, I don't care, but it's for real and you can actually use it." And then you'll be up and running in an unrealistically short amount of time. A surprising, "Wait, what is it done?" amount of time.

• 26:16Speaker 01

  And then you'll give it a try. And if you don't like it, you've wasted, what, 5 minutes? Okay, I mean, you fucking waste 5 minutes scrolling on TikTok 20 times a day, or whatever you scroll on, whatever doom scrolling is your pleasure, right? And if it actually piqued your interest, you can now spend...

• 26:36Speaker 01

  Another two hours or five minutes and start using it. And over the next year, you can plow in as many hours as you want. You keep learning, keep getting better. But I'm not going to keep it so simple that if you need to actually do anything or change anything, you don't have to learn anything. I want you to learn this stuff. This is why, um, actually it's actually kind of hardcore. If you go to edit any of the config files, I just dump you into NeoBIM.

• 26:59Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 27:00Speaker 01

  Sorry dude, swim or sink, like WQ, do you know it or not? Uh, you'll find out because otherwise you can't quit, you can't save. And I think that's, um, that's, that needs to be part of it. The Umachi experience is not just that it's easy and then it's flat. No, no, we're going to fucking Mount Everest, dude. Pack your backpacks. The first little stroll is going to be completely flat terrain and the birds are going to be singing. But if you want to learn, you gotta have some incline and you gotta keep going.

• 27:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, I was cracking up because I was tweeting at you while we were installing like CurseUDHH. I was planning on getting so much stuff done in between installs here. And I kept on having to move down the line to like install, install the next one. I mean, right here, I'm pretty sure this is the computer that I got the world record on. So I just wanted to, you know, shout out framework. We got some cool tiles here too. So anyways, that's, uh, that's the one.

• 27:54Speaker 01

  So I also think this is, this is funny, by the way. I mean, this framework thing is actually part of this moment. I mean, I've been pushing framework ever since I switched to Linux. But I think the framework desktop, I have one over there in the corner as well. And it's got little Umachi tiles on it too. There's just something perfect about things coming together at the same time. And this is what I found with, Hyperland is also relatively new. If I'd tried this five years ago, there wouldn't have been a Hyperland. There wouldn't have been, I think, uh, I've actually started on it three years ago, maybe. Framework wouldn't exist in this form. There wouldn't be this competitive AMD alternative to the M chips. So all of these bits are coming together. And also we wouldn't have had the blessing that is Mac OS 26. We wouldn't have had Tahoe.

• 28:37Speaker 01

  We wouldn't have had, uh, Microsoft stopping Windows 10. We wouldn't have had all these gifts. They're like, hey, are you guys running marketing for Linux right now? Like what's going on here? This is a little fishy.

• 28:47Speaker 02

  Sending sleeper agents into Microsoft and Apple.

• 28:50Speaker 01

  Tosh, everything such that Linux looks so much better in comparison. But I've also found this is why it's so magic, that you could be right. But at the wrong time and then nothing changes. Like, there's been people who've been right about Linux for a very long time, right? Like, they've been literally ringing the bell, "The year of Linux on the desktop!" Since, what is it, 99? Is that when that meme started?

• 29:17Speaker 00

  It's a long, long time.

• 29:19Speaker 01

  Suddenly, the moment meets reality. The moment meets the talent. The moment meets the momentum. And now we got Hyperland, we got framework computers, we got great AMD chips, we got Arch, we got all of it. And I go like, "Now, let's go." So, I put all this work in, get it out there, and the response has just been crazy. I mean, I'm sure you guys see that too. I have not seen this level of novel excitement from people who don't just like, "Oh, that's kind of nice," but are just head over heels in love with a new system that they found since evangelizing Ruby back in the mid 2000s. It feels like that kind of moment.

• 30:04Speaker 00

  All right, I gotta jump in and we gotta circle back a little bit here. I want to talk first about the ease curve to where it goes. Like, you don't have to learn anything into, "Oh, you have to learn everything," right? Like, you are along that path when you start down this road. I really, I think this is one of the most important things, because I remember this being drilled into me over and over and over again during my time of open source at Netflix and during internal tool development, which is always make every tool so someone doesn't have to learn something. And I found that the interfaces would get more and more abstract, to the point where when you had to do something, due to the fact that the North Star was never learn something, doing something became progressively harder.

• 30:49Speaker 00

  Because there was always this idea that you should never have to learn. And it's just like this thing that just makes me bonkers with kind of modern direction of web development, which is, "Don't learn. You don't need to learn. Here, we're gonna make the most perfect thing for you. Just don't learn, just use what we have. It's perfect 100% of the time. It's gonna change every year, but it's gonna be perfect because we have it perfect now." Right, so it's just like this, it's just like this weird mentality. And I don't blame anyone for falling into it, because learning is, it takes time, it takes effort. It can feel very daunting sometimes when you think something's complicated. It feels complicated until you look underneath the covers and you realize, "Oh, it's actually..." Oh, it's just a bunch of if if statements and for loops. Oh, okay. It's actually not that complicated. It's pretty simple. And so I just, I wanted to call that out. I know we're way past that time because I just feel so

• 31:33Speaker 00

  strong about that philosophy of of don't ever want to learn, make everything the pit of success. Because it just makes everything awful. Like if you would have done that with Oomachi, I don't think I would have liked it. Because I couldn't take control because it had been like so well gardened off. I would have hated it. I would have just disliked that experience greatly. And so I'm just very happy that that is the mentality because that is just, it just kills me on the inside that that that isn't it. And I see it all the time in chat, too. People always say things like, oh, like Neovim's too complicated of a text editor. Like, oh, we just saw one. Someone just said that just recently. It's the kind of the same mentality, which I totally understand. Again, big investment upfront. But I would argue it's it's it's by far less complicated than VS Code. Like, I don't know what you mean by that. Like, it's it it.

• 32:16Speaker 00

  But it's just because it's it's it's opt-in is for customization. It's opt-in is not for you using their interface. And so that's like this experience of you need to sharpen your own axe, as TJ likes to say. You gotta spend a lot of time sharpening the axe before you go to the tree. And some, you know, some pieces of software require a lot more sharpening. But when you get it to that point, it feels really great, right? Like, it is really great to use. And so I just, I just love that experience. So I just had to get that out there. Just absolutely love it. I just can't even stand that it's not the default of everybody's kind of like position.

• 32:48Speaker 01

  And I think this is actually key to why Linux hasn't succeeded in its primary mission on the desktop for a long time. Because it was trying to copy exactly what you're saying. That theme set from macOS and set from Windows. That this needs to be able to be instantly usable by everyone, regardless of skill level and interest in learning. And I'm like, no, when it comes to developers, or I'd like to say, anyone who just likes computers. That's why I've tried to distinguish that Oomachi is not just for developers. It's for people who legitimately like computers. Now, that's a minority of people who use computers. I'll tell you that. Most people don't like computers.

• 33:32Speaker 01

  They begrudgingly accept that they have to use them to get things done. A surprising number of developers don't even like their computers, which blows my mind. You have picked the wrong career buddy if you don't even like computers. But if you like computers, you should like to use them well. You should like to want to use them well. And Umachi, from the get-go, I have some of these lines here where, you know, you have to learn some key bindings. Like, the mouse is not gonna really help you all that much unless you learn that um, Super Space starts the app launcher. Um, Super Alt Space starts the Umachi menu. Um, Super Return starts a new terminal.

• 34:16Speaker 01

  Super B starts a browser. Super A starts your AI. Like, there's just a handful of- Super X? Yeah, you forgot Super X. For X. And about it. Yeah, for X.com, everything app. Super M for my music and Super O for Obsidian. And like, there's a bunch of tools that you have to get that into your fingers. And it's gonna take a little while. And while you're waiting to load that in, it's gonna be a little frustrating. And this is exactly actually inspired by me learning Neovim. Because part of the hardship I had getting out of the Mac was actually not even the Mac integration, all this stuff. It was Textmate, an editor I'd been using since 2006 and I really love, that I still love.

• 35:01Speaker 01

  And obviously it just doesn't run on anything else. It just runs on the Mac. So I had to find something else. And first I tried my hand with VS Code, which is inspired by Textmates in some ways and similar in other ways, but ultimately for me, unfulfilling. And it was actually, uh, you guys' stuff and a few other YouTubers who got me into, do you know what? Maybe I could learn Neovim. Maybe I could learn Vim again. Maybe I should give this another go. And then realizing that the first two days totally sucked. Because I felt like, not just a beginner, but like a child who can't articulate basic words, right? Like, I wanna say something, but the words aren't there. Like, "me, me, foodie." And it was like, "What do you want? Do you want poetry?

• 35:46Speaker 01

  No, I fucking want strawberries, you idiot." "Why won't you just give me the strawberries? Just because I don't know the word." And I felt like that in the open for a little while, for a couple of days. It was like, "I wanna do the thing, but I don't know how to do the thing, and now I'm gonna look it up, and ah, now I just deleted five lines, Jesus." That's real. That is very real. But if you make it through to the other side and you level up, you go like, "Holy shit." I am doing things now with my hotkey combos that I could never do in VS Code, or I could never do even in TextMate. I love TextMate. So the investment, two days of pain, a week of real intense learning, and then what, another 20 years of payoff? What an amazing investment.

• 36:31Speaker 01

  Can I find more investments like that? Where it hurts for like a couple of days? And then maybe it's annoying for a week, and then it's incredible for the next decade? That is the kind of investment that should just be a no-brainer for anyone who likes computers and wanna get better at them. Another framing for this is a professional computer, right? Like, there's something about Pro in a way where it doesn't just mean fucking, I don't know, aluminum railings on your phone, or some stupid shit like that. That Pro in the literal sense of it, here's a tool made for people whose career depend on it? Like, those can actually require learning because it's worth making the investment, because this is how you make your money, this is how you enjoy your hobby.

• 37:16Speaker 01

  So we can make this investment, and it's gonna be worth it. And the mental image I had in my mind for a long time was old travel agents, or even flight check-in attendants. I don't know if you've seen some of those who work those terminals that are, like, those terminals are still archaic, right? Yeah. And you just hear the keys. You can just hear like all the hotkeys, and they're jumping back and forth, and it goes... Yeah, okay, your flight is now booked to Atlanta. And you're like, here's someone who really needed to learn to be fast and proficient at that task and learned all these bindings. Or you see the same thing with someone working the numpad if they're an Excel wizard.

• 37:58Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 37:59Speaker 01

  Shit, look at that skill. It's like some of those videos where they throw up the coconut and like he just chops it like four times and like it's all like, whoa, that skill. Why don't we want that? As a developer, as someone who likes computers, don't you want that kind of skill? Like an Excel shark doing the numpad or a check-in agent just tapping away or someone cutting a coconut real cool? You should want that. You should not want like, oh, can I use the same lethargic way of using a computer that literally a monkey could figure out? That, no, no, no, no.

• 38:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, the analogy too that I like using is that like my software development career is a marathon, guys. Like it's not a sprint. So like getting something done over this weekend versus the like, hopefully, you know, 20 to 30, 40 years that I'm still hopefully going to be writing code or whatever that looks like in 30 years. I don't know, but still whatever. The like, I still, I, I, it actually matters to invest in figuring out how to do those things, which doesn't mean you have to pick Neo Vim, you know what I mean? But like, figure out your tool that actually works and like, understand it because you want to do that. And then the other thing that I also talk about in that sort of marathon mindset is like, if you're liking programming, you're going to want to learn it more.

• 39:20Speaker 02

  Like, go ahead and trick your brain into doing the thing that you like. So then it's like, oh, I'm looking forward to sitting down at my computer and smashing the keys and doing something instead of, oh, it's Monday and I have to write code again. Your career's gonna not be as good.

• 39:37Speaker 00

  Perspective is a huge thing. Like it is one of the most, I mean, I still remember dying on the cliff of, "I just want to do real work," which was always something else, right? Which was always some other task and then I was always encumbered by like my tasks at my job. And instead at some point, I just, I just remember being like, "I could just make this fun instead." Like I can figure out the best way to do this thing and just like dork out on this, even if I don't, like even if my love for the actual task isn't there. Dude, I got the, me and Sam Altman, love of the game is there though.

• 40:06Speaker 01

  Love of the game.

• 40:07Speaker 00

  Dude, I gotta just do it for that reason. I gotta do it for the love of the game. And it just changes everything when you're just like, "Oh, this could be fun." Like even TJ and I, the game we're making, making the little enemy icons for where they pop out. It just does like genuinely, like when you really think about it, it's just a boring task. Do a little bit of math, do a little bit of offset, paint a couple of things right here, put some enemies in, call it a day. Or you can be like, "How can I make this the greatest experience you could possibly have for this one little thing? What makes this awesome? How can I program this so that it's awesome and easy to maintain? So that other people can come and extend it or do something with it that actually is meaningful." Like instead of just being so like, "Oh, gotta do one more thing, one more thing." Like make it good, because it's fun. It's actually fun. Have fun with it.

• 40:45Speaker 01

  And you know what? The most fun is to be competent. The most fun is to be good. The most fun is to have learned a bunch of stuff so to look back upon how silly you were a year ago in your ignorance, in your lack of skill. And now you've stepped up the mountain, you've gotten higher towards the peak and the top. And this is actually one of the reasons

• 41:09Speaker 01

  why I'm so focused on aesthetics as well. Because not all programming tasks, as you say, even in stuff that I'm making for us and I'm excited about the general vision, like not all of it is gonna be just super exciting, the problem itself. But if I'm working in a cool environment that looks great and I can get satisfaction out of applying my competence. In ways where the code just looks super nice and is very nicely structured. And I picked just the right words for my objects and boom, now I'm just switching my Umachi theme to Osaka Jade because it's nighttime and it's all green and I just go like, I love how this computer looks.

• 41:50Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 41:50Speaker 01

  I want to use it more, as you say, Tej. I want to sit down and hammer those keys. It's one of the reasons why the mechanical keyboard has done such wonders for me as well. Another thing I just slept on for all these years, when I heard nerds talk about the mechanical keyboards, I went like, I got a magic keyboard, thank you very much.

• 42:07Speaker 02

  It literally has magic in the name, guys.

• 42:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. It has magic in the name. How much better can it be? And then I was like, I tried a couple of mechanical keyboards and I didn't love them. I was like, see, Apple was right. And then I tried the right mechanical keyboards and I went,

• 42:23Speaker 01

  like, are you telling me that not only can my operating system look amazing, I can literally listen to Thaiki Heaven while typing? What kind of, like, is this a job? Like, I should be paying for this privilege. I shouldn't be paying for this. This is amazing. And I think setting yourself up in such a way where literally like just making keystrokes is a pleasurable experience because you get the little thawk and you get the nice touches and all the stuff. And then you're looking to, or it's a beautiful vista of what the computer's like and you've got just the right things and you've got all your little key bindings. You could take on a lot of tasks that would otherwise, in a more mundane environment, feel quite dull and it'll be enjoyable.

• 43:07Speaker 01

  And then you just get to like more of the time, I'm having fun in front of my computer, solving problems, learning new things, getting better.

• 43:17Speaker 02

  Yeah. This, this just made me think of like, the obvious parallel of this is like, Hey, would you rather work in an office with fluorescent lights overhead and like a really uncomfortable chair? And like your neighbors yelling randomly about something annoying? Or would you rather have like a nice office with pleasant light? Like everyone's like, yes, of course, I want the nice version. I will work better and I will have a better time and I will be more productive. Otherwise, like, why is Google spending a trillion dollars on their headquarters, right? They clearly think the way, the place you work affects the way that you work, right? So then, oh, but as soon as we put it on a screen, that's for children, you know, or something like.

• 44:02Speaker 01

  And there's a lot of Linux thinking that's like that. In my opinion, unfortunately so. And I have the greatest respect for people who don't give a shit about this stuff that we've been talking about. And you just want like, I was watching this infamous YouTube video, maybe we talked about it last time, where the guy is writing a device driver in Linux for, for something, for some old machine. There's not even Cintex highlighting, right? Like he's, I don't think he's even using BIM, he's using BI or something. And you just sit like, he's working there and he's like, I don't even see any of that stuff. I don't even care. I'm like, holy shit, that's kind of amazing. And I respect the hell out of that. And also that is not me at all. And I could not work like that. I don't want to work like that. I want my fonts to look super crisp.

• 44:45Speaker 01

  I want some nice colors. I want all the stuff. I want it to look nice. That's what I need. And massive respect to the old guard of Linux folks who didn't need any of those things. The beauty of the moment now is that we can coexist and make just everything better for everyone. We get all this core Linux stuff from a bunch of people who not only couldn't give two fucks about aesthetics or actively hostile towards the even idea that things should look good, which I find.

• 45:16Speaker 01

  Interesting, but then you also have the new guard, people like Backstreet, who just shows up with Hyperland and it just looks incredible and looks buttery smooth, right? Like all the animations adjusted the right curves and full 60 FPS and you just go like, holy shit, I could get, I have my cake and eat it too? I can literally get access to 30, whatever, four years of Linux goodness? And now it can also look amazing and feel amazing and sound amazing? That's amazing! And it's all free and I get to change it whenever I want? And there's all this community of people who care about the things in just the same way that I care about things? Man.

• 45:58Speaker 00

  So, so there is some fun things about that. You know, you mentioned the person with no syntax highlighting. Uh, you may not realize this, but 1982 was like the first, like, software syntax highlighting. There were some basic ones and a couple editors beforehand, but it didn't really even come onto the scene until the 80s. You know, like GUI-based desktops were also not, you know, like, they, they're just recent memory. There are people that you interact with every day that were alive and working before those things were even available, right? So it's like, you know, I'm not that old and it's within my lifetime. I was only born a couple of years after syntax highlighting. And so it's like, that's not, that's actually kind of mind-blowing that, that, you know, this exists. And so even the aesthetics of this and how it's going is so relatively new.

• 46:43Speaker 00

  So many people don't realize, like, even something as simple as autocomplete was rarely available unless if you were in Visual Studio Code, Visual Studio Express, or not even Visual Studio Code, that wasn't a thing.

• 46:53Speaker 02

  Visual Studio Enterprise to use, sir.

• 46:55Speaker 00

  Yeah, Enterprise or Express. You could get Express and it worked with C, which was pretty awesome, right? Like, there's a couple of things you could actually get it to work on, or X and A Studios with C# Express, uh, and NetBeans. And that's because Java, Java had a pretty extensive version of all that. And like, that's... There was a couple other, but that was about it. You couldn't use any language. You couldn't just get it for free all the time. And so it's like so much of our life has only recently, in the last just little bit of time, kind of started to come together where this is available more broadly. And so it's just like, we're only at the very beginning of all this stuff, of things looking really nice and actually knowing what nice even looks like. But I think that you're going to see a lot of people not, maybe not valuing it. I mean, me personally, I'm not a huge valuer of the nice things as much as I am of the distraction-free things.

• 47:37Speaker 00

  I like the editor that is full screen. No, not, I don't want to see anything on there. I just want it to be very, very simple. When I type, I want to see very few pop-ups. If any, I don't want a lot of hints. I just want to keep it, you know, clean and streamlined. And there's this like aesthetic beauty to nothingness. Because it helps me do the thing, right? There's a weird, there's a weird world betwixt the two that, that exists. But I also love the look of, uh, Omachi when you like load it up. It just looks and feels good. I like the screensaver. So I'm like, oh, man, I'm like stuck between two worlds of I want it all and I want nothing at the exact same time.

• 48:08Speaker 01

  You're not stuck. You're enjoying just that golden middle road. When I got started with Ruby and Red Rails, I was like, you know what? I love the hacker culture of PHP. Just get something working, immediate gratification, amazing. But I don't want to live in spaghetti code land. And then I also really enjoy Java, the rigor and the patterns and whatever. But I also don't want to spend four days setting up my XML config file. Is there a golden middle path? Of course there is. Can we take the best from PHP and the best from Java? And get something in the middle that is both quick and rigorous. The same is true here.

• 48:47Speaker 01

  Can we take sort of the minimalism, the beauty of no distractions in Linux land and just make it look nice with great fonts and great colors? And things that don't dance around? It's funny because the distraction-free and the calmness of that, we I've gotten a lot of pull requests for changing the waybar and people want to stick all sorts of things in. They want to stick in like which track is playing and it should be rotating or maybe they should even have like the equalizer bars. And then they want to see the weather and I'm like, yeah, we're not doing any of that. I don't want any movement at all in my waybar. I want once a minute, one number gets to change. That's it. That's what I want to see. The clock at the top is the only thing that's allowed to change.

• 49:27Speaker 00

  I love, by the way, your clock. Can I just throw that out there? You did not put the year on there, which I am so thankful for. That is like, that drives me bonkers that clocks have like the full extended year. You're like, I don't need that, man. Just give me the simple stuff.

• 49:41Speaker 01

  Dude, I spent like two days sweating what the clock and the dates should look like on that. And lining it up just right and trying it full length and short length and the other side and this side. And like just really nerding out about the individual positions. I'm really glad that you appreciate that. Most people don't see it. Most people see like, I want more. And do you know what? What's so funny is that I think Omarchy is mainlining RISING culture into a more general audience. And there are some folks in RISING land who just love like everything is dancing, right? Like everything is playing, everything is swooping up and down. And I go like, I love the creativity of that, but I'm also building like a pro desktop. And that sounds kind of snotty. It really is not meant to be.

• 50:26Speaker 01

  I'm creating the computing platform I want to work on all day long. I want to be surrounded by beautiful, calm things, right? Beautiful shapes, beautiful colors, crisp fonts, all of that stuff. Not like everything's going to bounce around and not the waifus and not the anime characters. All the other stuff that RISING culture is also kind of very fond of. And I think that's totally fine. If you're 19, like smash all the Japanese anime girls all over your desktop. Peace be with you. Ah, that doesn't really work for me. That's not what I want. Can you give me just a peacefully serene sunset? Like that's a default backdrop.

• 51:08Speaker 02

  Brian, what's that one repo that you have for anime waifu backgrounds?

• 51:12Speaker 00

  Anime.

• 51:13Speaker 01

  Oh, you literally have a whole repo.

• 51:15Speaker 00

  Yeah, I have a repo for it because I know how much chat loves them.

• 51:18Speaker 01

  That sounds like the secret stash on your hard drive you're hiding for your mom.

• 51:25Speaker 00

  Mom is just porn. It's not anime. Don't worry.

• 51:29Speaker 02

  That reminds me though too of what you're saying like if I went to a mechanics off it like a mechanic shop right? And they just have like a million lights playing and like a smoke machine and all this stuff. I might be like, I feel like this is not the professional setting I need to solve my car issues, right? So it's, it's nothing against smoke shows or like laser light exhibits, but I think I want my mechanic to be like, straightforward. He can fix my problems. I feel the same thing about my work computer, right? Like.

• 51:57Speaker 01

  So there is something to that. Where it doesn't have to be gray. It doesn't have to be dull. It doesn't have to be corporate.

• 52:03Speaker 02

  Right.

• 52:04Speaker 01

  But it can be calm and beautiful and aesthetically pleasing and also the place where I do work. I guess is one of the things I got some shit for was Omarchy when you use the ISO does not give you the option not to have full disk encryption. Like that's just not a negotiable thing for me because it's irresponsible for you to install a work operating system, especially in a laptop with company data on it. If there's no full disk encryption. So that's just not a relevant domain for me. I'm making this for professionals. You can do whatever you want. You could always just install Arch first, not install full disk encryption, then install Omarchy. Great. That's a side quest for you. And then for me, the straight highway line of getting Omarchy onto your computer involves full disk encryption because this is for work.

• 52:50Speaker 02

  I think I somehow installed it without though, because Ed hacked your computer while we were there, didn't he, Prime?

• 52:55Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, no, it was, it was someone else's computer. Yes, but there was something that went on there. Uh, but I did, I did want to throw this in there, which is the, uh, just going back to kind of like the dancing and the hyper like racing and all that. Uh, I, I am not on, I am not quite on that side. I don't really enjoy that stuff, but I love the idea of how can you make a complicated thing into something super simple that you can get the same information out of. And so like T, like a good example is when Tej and I were working on the tower defense, we had this really complicated menu. And we worked many days to turn it into something that's like small and very easy to understand. And that's small, easy change. Now it just feels 10 times better because you're like, I get the same information for one tenth the cost.

• 53:36Speaker 00

  How do I do that constantly? And that's kind of like the, that's, that's my version of racing is like, how do I get maximum information with absolutely no cost to it? I think Apple for a long time was the best at this. Like this is why I think they got so successful is they did all these things and made you feel good using them.

• 53:52Speaker 02

  The other thing too that I think where you know, people doing RISC don't get enough credit is like, sometimes when you push the system really hard in a direction, it like opens up easier pathways to do like, "Oh, we want to be able to make dancing waifus show up in the waybar, so it needs to be able to refresh at crazy speeds." And then all of a sudden, "Oh, well, I just want kind of like a little equalizer to show up." Right? And then it's like, "Oh, well, that's simple. We already did dancing 4K anime waifus." You just want the equalizer, that's simple. And like, I had this experience with, um, like, the reason I started Telescope for Neovim, I was not trying to make a fuzzy finder that people would use. I was literally just looking for a real-world project

• 54:37Speaker 02

  to test Lua integration. So I was just trying to push, "Where does Lua integration fall short? What features do we need to work on? What are we prioritizing? What, what, can we make a full-featured Lua plugin that does like a million things inside of Neovim? And what is it missing to make Lua feel truly built-in and native?" Because it was not at the time, it was still VimScript for so much stuff, right? And like, it happened to be useful, but like, that was effectively like, and you know, people were all like, "We already have FCF. Like, why are you RISC Neovim for nothing?" And I'm like, "I'm just trying to figure out what we need to do in Neovim Core to fix a bunch of problems." And so sometimes I think, like, uh, they don't get enough credit for pushing the system hard in like different verticals,

• 55:20Speaker 02

  and then it makes it really easy to figure out how to do, whatever, you know, whatever you need for Omarchy, you know, that kind of thing, which I think is, yeah, they should get a little more credit for that.

• 55:30Speaker 01

  They should get huge credit. I think the exploration that has gone on in the RISC world is what's sort of the vanguard of what allows us to all do all this stuff now. Hyperland turned into, I think it's, is the most popular place to implement these RISCs that is on our Unix porn and these other places that collect the RISCs. And I always look at that and go like, "Oh..." This is too much, I literally say that almost every time. This is too much, but here's a kernel of something that is incredible. I'm gonna borrow that. I'm gonna put that into sort of a slightly calmer version. You've explored the terrain. You've showed me all the things that are possible. I only want 5% of it.

• 56:14Speaker 01

  But if you hadn't turned on the light in that room, I wouldn't have gotten any of it. So incredibly grateful that this is happening. And not just for what I get out of it for the operating system I want to run. But making computers fun and personal and quirky. That is a huge win and accomplishment in and of itself. I think this is one of the things I've both liked and really disliked about the Apple years. That we just sat around and waited for Apple to give us something. And Apple was really good, it's giving us nice things. But how many people work at Apple in their design department? I mean, it's a handful of people. How many people work on the internet and have crazy ideas in their bedroom about either anime waifus

• 56:58Speaker 01

  or something else and then want to see it happen in the world? And accidentally discover something incredible? A lot more, a lot more. And if we sort of harness all of that exploration and go like, alright, this is all the things that are not possible. I'm gonna take the best of it. I'm gonna compress the complexity of it. I'm gonna compress the information density, as you say. I'm gonna boil it down to just the best of the best of the best of all of that. You're gonna just end up with something so pure and so incredible that we can all benefit from. And that we can benefit from without having to spend 150 hours on our amazing, unique Hyperland Rising.

• 57:41Speaker 01

  And those things can coexist, which is also what I love. That now Omarchy is here and anyone can get a beautiful, amazing system in literally two minutes. That's how long it takes to install it. And then Hyperland is still here with all the bells and whistles and knobs that you can turn on. And you can... Transform your operating system into something that looked like a 1996 adventure game on the Amiga. I think that was the guy who won the latest Hyperland Rising contest. He literally turned it into what looked like an Amiga game from like 96. And I'm like, I didn't know computers could still look like this. And you're telling me like that a modern operating system can be turned into this? I love it. I don't want to run it every day, but I love it.

• 58:26Speaker 01

  I love that sense of creativity for the hell of it. What is the guy getting out of it? Personal gratification and satisfaction and admiration from his peers. That is the most pure and pristine motivation you'll find out there. And we should applaud it with both hands. And we had none of it, none of it during the Apple years. All we could do was sit around and say like, oh, it's time for WWDC again. Then let's clap at all those people and what they put out. And again, it's not that there's something bad about it. It was just that it was such a mediated way of using your computer.

• 59:04Speaker 01

  Like now we can really get into theology here, but there's some parallels between Catholicism and Protestantism. About like, do you get to read your own Bible? Or do you have to get the word of the Lord handed to you by some priest in a funny hat? And that's the only way you can get that connection, right? I'm more on the direct connection part of it. I'm more of the direct connection to my operating system. And being able to interact with that glory.

• 59:35Speaker 02

  So we shouldn't call you the Pope of Omarchy is what you're saying?

• 59:39Speaker 01

  Please, no.

• 59:41Speaker 00

  He wants something different. He wants the Ten Kells of Omarchy, okay?

• 59:45Speaker 01

  Church door.

• 59:48Speaker 00

  That's pretty good. That is actually really, really good.

• 59:50Speaker 01

  That would be technically the night. Actually, that's the 99 theses.

• 59:57Speaker 01

  There's gotta be an actually. Actually?

• 1:00:01Speaker 00

  The high church actually is pretty crazy.

• 1:00:07Speaker 00

  Well, this has been fantastic. I know you have a tight deadline, so I think you're right around the time you have to head off, right?

• 1:00:12Speaker 01

  Uh, yeah, I haven't had dinner yet, and I'm starting to starve. That's important.

• 1:00:17Speaker 00

  Yeah. Well, let's make sure that you can get that dinner. DHH, thank you so much for joining us and just talking about... Omarchy, I know you want to come back on again here soon. Maybe we can do something on just Ruby and all the stuff that's going on, because I think a lot of people are confused at all the things. And I did want to end with, we've been playing around with AI-generated music and taking your articles and making bangers out of them. And I have listened to your "It Takes 10 Years" article, maybe about 100 times, and just you talking about this. Again, this whole Omarchy thing, or Machi thing, comes down to this idea that you put a bean counter at the very, very top, someone who's not quite, you know, dedicated to the product, but is good at hitting numbers. And it's just like, now look at you, you're upset, you're angry, and it took 10 years for it to kind of slowly fall apart.

• 1:01:01Speaker 00

  And it's just like, it's starting to happen for a lot of people now, where this idea that people who aren't in charge are the people who are also living and breathing that, you know, that product. And that's why one person, a singular child from Poland, who's probably not even like 24 years old, can outperform a huge swath of people, because they just relied on something completely different. You can just see, you can feel it. One has, one's in it for the love of the game, you know?

• 1:01:27Speaker 01

  And I think what's so mad about this moment right now is that we have this collective realization that Apple is no longer what it was like in 12, 2012, or 2015 even, that it's a different kind of company. And it's rare, again, that this pendulum swings for everyone, like, sort of at the same time. And this has been so remarkable for me to see, that in many ways, Apple still makes some really nice stuff. They have really nice laptops that have long batteries and... Thick battery life.

• 1:01:59Speaker 00

  I love that battery company. It's my favorite one.

• 1:02:01Speaker 01

  They're a really nice battery company now that makes nice aluminum enclosures for their very nice battery tech. And we can sort of look at that and go like, you know what? I want something more. Like, I'm not gonna pick my computer just on the basis of who has the best do or sell lasting batteries, right? And then we're all coming, and all, right? Like, I'm in an eco chamber. Everyone is in an eco chamber. But so many people are coming to that realization at the same time. That's, there's something, there's something in the air. I could sniff it, right? And this is why the joke that this is the year of Linux on the desktop is both funny, because we've been saying it for all these years, but I also actually legitimately think it's true. It's coming true. It is gonna fucking

• 1:02:46Speaker 01

  happen. 2026, we're not gonna look at whatever, 2%, 5% market share within the segment of people who really like computers, within developers. I think this is gonna happen gradually and in very suddenly.

• 1:03:01Speaker 00

  Well, awesome. Uh, well, let's see. Where can people find some information about you, DHH?

• 1:03:06Speaker 01

  DHH.DK, that's my personal site, has links to everything. And then umachi.org has the link to the ISO, the link to the manual, the link to my video.

• 1:03:16Speaker 00

  All right. And then, uh, there's a website that's like, something like, uh, Omicon? Or something coming in 2026? What's that all about?

• 1:03:25Speaker 01

  Uh, what is that all about? Yeah, I, um, I wanna make a, a small conference for Umachi, for this whole idea of Omikasa software, for this whole new wave of Linux with vibes, as the tagline says, right? This marriage of everything that we've been talking about for the last hour or so, that now is the moment, now the aesthetics, now the functionality, now Hyperland, now Arch, now Neo Vim, it's all coming together. And we should celebrate that. And we should celebrate it in person, because both the people who are involved in all that should meet up and just, uh, I wanna give Vax3 a high five, and I wanna give you a high five, and I wanna see people who are building this future. And then I

• 1:04:08Speaker 01

  also wanna have fun with people who are excited about it. So, next year... Pretty sure we have a venue and I'm pretty sure we have a city and I'm pretty sure you guys are gonna figure out how to make some spectacular YouTube videos out of it. And I think it's gonna be a lot of fun.

• 1:04:25Speaker 00

  Yeah. Awesome. Well, thank you very much, DHH, for coming on. Thank you very much for watching The Stand Up every Wednesday and Friday at 10 a.m. Pacific time. Uh, and of course, 11 a.m. the Lord's time. That's my time. Uh, and there we go. That's it. Thank you very much. Thanks for joining us. Play the song. Play the song. Play the song. The 10-year song. Yeah. Oh, my gosh. It's the best. You can end it with just that.

• 1:04:46Speaker 04

  Once the CEO seat is given to someone without an engineering or product ground.

• 1:04:55Speaker 04

  It's been the story of Boeing and Intel and now Apple legendary American companies that all got lost when a bean count and marketing man or logistics hand took over.

• 1:05:10Speaker 04

  Boeing's troubles started when they were taken over by McDonnell Douglas in 997, but really accelerated after 2005 when they installed their first CEO. With no aerospace background, the result after 10 years of cost cutting and outsourcing was the 737 maximum seas tragedies and an organization gutted of ambition and engineering pride.