Is The Omarchy Hype Real?

Welcome to Syntax.

Today, I'm gonna be talking about Omarchy.

And I'm gonna say Omarchy.

I believe that's how it's spelled. If if that is a wrong pronunciation, please correct me. Omarchy is a much hyped new Linux install from DHH and the Basecamp folks. And you 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. 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 video as well. My name is Scott Tolinski. I'm a developer from Denver. With me, as always, is Wes Bos. What's up, Wes? Hey. I

knew that you would be into this. As soon as they 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 and you 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 gonna try this and say it's the best thing ever, and it was it was probably hours.

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, it feels like nothing else, and it feels very polished.

And that's, like, a really great thing for me. I I do like polish. And I'm not talking, like, UI polish necessarily.

It's experiential polish, which we'll 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 century.i0/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 century.i0/syntax.

Again, we've been using this tool for a long time, and it totally rules. Alright.

So, Omarji, what is it? It's an opinionated arch and hyper land 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 Node, 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 02/2002, 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. It is Hyperland. It's a Hyperland setup. What is Hyperland? Hyperland is window layout management, so to say. It's like how the windows are managed on the desktop, which JS, 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. Man, it it seems

it seems nice. I'll say I I haven't given it a a dip just just yet. I my sister gave me her old Mac Pro, which has, like, a pretty good like, it has a SSD in it. It's been updated. It has a pretty good Intel Xeon processor in it, and everybody's like, throw this on it. That would be Scott. But I just I don't know if I've got time for that. Yeah. I know. I feel the same.

But that said, I do think I have heard that the, like, the Mac install for it, it it maybe isn't, like, as effortless as something like this. I'm running mine on a system 76 lemur 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 you know, I used it, but it never became, like, my main thing.

So, what is Hyperland is 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.

You know what Wayland is? No.

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, something is Wayland based or not. And many of the distros are, like, making Wayland, the new default.

Previously, things were based on x 11, and this new architecture makes it more streamlined.

There's less, 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 Windows into the browser.

That is my understanding of it, folks. Please leave comments below on how, wrong I am if that is in case the fact. So, basically, Omarchi is this preconfigured 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 preinstalled, which when I say a lot of stuff preinstalled, 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. 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 preinstalled on this thing. Not only just preinstalled, but 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 wanna pop open chat GPT.

All I have to do is hit super or Mac folks command, a. So, like, super a, and it pops open chat GPT right here. It it it just pops it right open. And and those kind of system wide shortcuts for opening these types of things exist and all kinds of stuff. I you know? And you can add your own just so easily. So

yeah. 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 and same with your your editor as well. Right? And Yes. Just having something sort of, like like, premade, 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. And they make sense. So, like, one thing that I've gotten really used to with Omar g in general is that and then ESLint 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 gonna close the window, right, where control w is gonna 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 Node. Where, like, on Mac, you kinda just use command inside of apps, outside of apps for system stuff, all kinds of stuff. Wes this that little distinction, once I understood alright. 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 Vercel. I'm 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 or whatever, and you're like, okay.

It did tell me that I could do super alt and hit space bar to open up this and then go down to learn to learn more. You go to learn, and there's just like, alright. What 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 I bet if I had a coach working me through this, I'd be fine in, like, ten minutes. Right? You know what to do first. The very first thing I tried to do is I wanna 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 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 gotta go to Google. And I'm 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. But, like, it comes with one password, but not SMB.

Yeah. Yeah. What what's the the idea behind that? Like, people are like, that's a, like, a low level network protocol. Bro, I I couldn't tell you. I think it's an Arch Linux thing. Okay.

You know, I honestly have no idea. Maybe they're just trying to keep it streamlined to the stuff that DHA 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 around this computer specifically.

So Omarche, 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, 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. Only did I realize, like, oh, this it's just this laptop Sanity screen that's giving me guff.

Well, you'd it wasn't that like, you Node, like, proper drivers for No. 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 pnpm 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 Neovim. I think I had to chain it was set up to, like, one auto one or something. I don't know. I I went ESLint, and I just or I read the manual and set this to preferred auto one, and that made it fine. So that's the kind of experience you 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 kinda understand moving from space to space. I'm hitting my keyboard shortcuts.

I'm doing super one, two, whatever to change the window, because there's 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. Wes 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 wanna move this to another space. I do shift super three, and it moves it to this space. Okay. Now I actually wanna 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, dang. I'm gonna go open a new browser. Okay. There's an anonymous space. Move it to a new space. TypeScript you know, it all feels very nice. Yeah. That's I tried I've I've talked about this in the past, but I tried using aerospace for

probably about two weeks. And I was That was brutal for me. 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, Mhmm. It was just a little bit Scott, but I I have a couple issues on Aerospace's GitHub of, like, things that I would like to see, and 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 JS a little bit too rigid. I want it to be rigid and opinionated,

but I also wanna be able to break out of stuff like that. Like, you can't is can you just manually resize a window here, or is it is are you all in on this tiling manager? 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. That set up too. And you hold 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 wanna 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 you Wes, 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 I had such a hard time with the arrow was it aerospace? What was it? Yeah. Aerospace is the one that I was using. 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. Yeah. See, that's the thing JS I spent maybe an entire day

getting my aerospace dialed in and, like, like, looking up what, like, other power users were doing. Right. And there there wasn't, like, a decent config out of the Bos. 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. 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 Node, and

I have been feeling good. Like, I haven't had to open my MacBook. My MacBook has been sitting closed,

which is, like, very wild for me. Have you done any real work on it, though? Do people who use Linux do any real work?

I did lots of real work.

And that kinda comes down to the way that this is set up with the apps that are on here. No. No. You're 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 Yarn because I'm not a good Neovim user. Neovim is the preferred and setup editor in here, and it is done so via something called lazy VIM. The what's nice about lazy VIM and Neovim 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. So I I'm, like, needing these guides or or, 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, man managing Git. Like, from here, you just said, you know, c to commit, s to stash, d to reset. You there's all these different key bindings again, like, everything, and you learn them, and you get good at that. Gives you a bit of a UI in the terminal where you can kinda see what's up. Right? Similar to, like, the you you'd get in Versus Code. 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 I don't click on stuff. Wow. You could click on stuff. It is come a long way. Yeah. It's actually kinda 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 I wanna 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 to hit super w. So your mouse highlights whatever window it's on top of. And I yeah. It ends up feeling like a really nice kind of like you feel kind of like a a superhero using this thing. Yeah. That's you want to be, like, a keyboard master. Right? Like, I'd ESLint so much time

getting all my keyboard shortcuts dialed in and and being as efficient as possible. But other times, you simply just wanna you just wanna click on things. And 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, 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 productivity and efficiency, he's he's not gone away from the mouse, which is is 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.

Yeah. And with the, with the Logitech mouse, that is so good. Like, there's, like, so many buttons on that thing. Yeah.

You could do all kinds of stuff with it. So let's talk about Bos, 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 gonna feel right at home because the command palette, like the app launcher, JS, again, is super space Bos by default. And there's a ton of stuff preinstalled on here, like 1Password, Chromium, Discord.

Like, all this stuff, Figma comes preinstalled.

Like, all this stuff comes preinstalled. So, like, when you first open this, you know, you can do, you know, super s or super space bar TypeScript Figma, and it'll open. It's like, 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. Can we talk about the rest of Raycast really quickly? Because Oh, yes. It is not the rest of Raycast for sure. Yeah. That's

like, is 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.

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 Neovim 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 JS, 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 or opening apps. Screen capture and screen record. So if I hit capture, you can do a screenshot or screen record. 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 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, night light, 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 Man, it's screensaver. Haven't I we gotta bring back screensavers, man. Like This thing is bringing back screensavers. It's essentially just text, and then it does, like, matrix style or things hitting it left or right. I wanna know how they built them because they're incredible.

My and there's I there's so many different ones, so they're just constantly looping. They're so cool. Okay. Next one is style. You can change the style of the Bos, whether you wanna change the entire OS, system font, you wanna 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.

So if I wanted to what's a a good one to try? The, just like 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.

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 Yeah. And being able to mess with the stuff myself.

And, like like, what about, like like, media and stuff like that? Like, I I'm assuming most of the apps you use

either have a Linux version or are just, like, web apps. Right? Yes. So I have a whole section on here on the apps that I use every day that work just fine inside of this Yarn 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, Versus Node. What 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 you wouldn't 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. Oh, I'm sorry. Here's another one I've installed that doesn't come on it but works. DaVinci Resolve works for Linux JS on here. 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 are on the Mac because they need

either some of the Adobe apps or, like, a video editor. Yeah. There is a built in video editor for this, but it looks very Linux y. It looks very, like, Inkscape. You Node? Like, I know those peep the Linux folks have been like, oh, it's what I edit my videos on. No. It's not gonna do it for me. I but then you use all your own stuff. Sanity is Yeah. Come on. No. 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 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.

Good job, Sanity. 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 gonna be a pain in the ass because this computer has one USB Bos port. And Oh, yeah. Like yeah. There there it's just the computer is, like, not capable of running a lot of media, I don't think. 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, like, a m whatever equivalent?

Yeah. There's a there there's, like, several laptops. 64. That's what I'm thinking here, not AMD. 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.

It uses Ryzen. It doesn't use Yarn. Okay. And these computers are 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 Scott getting the best bang for your buck, but you can replace literally anything in them. And this 16 inch computer can be seriously spec'd out. So the 16 inch one can have, yeah, this Ryzen a nine, seven thirty, 12 cores, 24 threads, NPU of 50 TypeScript, 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,

yeah, you don't want to pay the stupid Apple tax on that where they screw you when you want a couple more gigs. Hey. A 128 gigs on your laptop. That seems like a good idea. Yeah. You're 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, and this is a little aside here, is that let's say I was going on a 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. Like Wes, that's cool. You don't you don't have to do anything crazy. Like, you could just, adjust the the the specs of it and increase your battery life. Just leave your processor at home. 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 can 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 is like Yarn 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, Docker comes preinstalled, but you could install from JavaScript.

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 and just quickly install these things as you need them. And, likewise, like, same with, like, Versus Node is under here under editor. Yeah. You wanna install any of this stuff. It's just here. Boom. You don't have to go hunting for it. So what if you need to, like, install something

via the CLI? Is that with AUR, or do you gotta, like, app get whatever? Because, 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.

Yeah. I don't I don't know about that necessarily, about the updates, but the equivalent of apt get here is Pacman, 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 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 kinda like a terminal UI for these types of things. There isn't like you know, in, 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? 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 the app name, app name, whatever. It asks for its URL, so httpssyntax.fm.k? And then, needs an icon. Shoot. Node an icon. I don't know if I have an icon. In the link. Okay. So syntax has been installed. So now from the launcher, you could just say, get me syntax.

I saw it. Oh, did I,

Oh, it's app anime, it's called.

App name? Oh, I oh, I just typed an app name. I didn't give it a name. That's my fault.

That's 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 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 and you use these things as if they're apps. 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 then download the DMG and drag the thing over. No. They're just web apps. Slack, I installed it as a web app. Reddit, Wes app. Superhuman, web app. Tweak, web app. And it's been great. That's, like The future. Am I installing an Electron app when I can just use the web app without you know? Like, why? What's the point? Yeah. That's that's the thing JS that, like, why do Wes install so many of these silly Electron apps

simply just because we want them in our dock? Right. And or 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 Node parts need to do that now. Yeah. It's a 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 I really don't like doing is having to hunt for a logo, PNG.

Like, yeah. Give it a Node. 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 in their their 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 it 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 app and how it is. Like I said, I've been using all kinds of stuff from Slack. I've installed Notion that way. 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, added Yarn. You know? So, that's something I love about this. I think it's really great. The apps that I'm gonna miss the most from using this full time, gonna 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 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. 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 thing at work. And I I have my phone sitting next to me all Wes time anyways.

Having it in in, like, AirDrop? Holy hell. AirDrop's the best. You know? I never use AirDrop.

No? Oh, man. I I send stuff on 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 just 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 I've been thinking about that as well. It's like, what things am I still loving iOS for? And it's Dude.

It's AirDrop and and, like, iMessage not even that much anymore. It's No. IMessage not that much. It's it's mostly just so I, like, can, like, do it from my computer. Like 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 Oh, I wish it was Node longer on. Yeah. 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. I've been thinking about this a lot, and this whole whole Omar g thing has been, like, really kinda 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 muse, 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 Yeah. I'm not like, I come back to Mac, and I'm like, man, this thing feels clunky.

One thing that I it really bugged me about modern Mac is that they've added so many 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? That's gotta be the worst way to manage your windows. But, yeah, they added it in here, and and they're not gonna improve it. It's just gonna exist. They just half ass it enough that half ass it. 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. Yeah. You know, it 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 UI looks nice, but it also has really bad, 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, some menu options that you can't even access them. They're not in the, like

yeah. Can we talk about the I I have the MacBook, and it has the little cutout for the The cutout. Yeah. That's so lazy. If you have too many menu bar icons Dude. They're inaccessible. You there's no way to get to them. And then everyone's like, well, install bartender. I'm not installing a third party. I 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. Yeah. To me, it there was, like, some crazy stuff with the the new the new Mac, UI Wes 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 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 slap slap Dakota paint over. And it's further, made apparent because the system windows have this massive, like, 25 pixel plus border radius on it, 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 and just bizarre.

So, like, for me, I'm, like, felt like Wes is rotting so much, and and it feels clunky.

This feels like it feels like a cheetah, man. It feels like a Ferrari.

It is it is and and I'm so used to Linux being so unpolished. And sure enough, there are little things here and there, and, you know, having terminal UIs for everything isn't my favorite thing in the whole world. But, like, does usage of it just feels great? That said, there's annoyances for me. Scott of little annoyances. DHH, I would like this. I don't know if anybody else cares. But when you do a command prompt and the system prompt, I 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? Yeah. You need some, like, fuzzy searching.

Yeah. Let's let me go deeper with that. Two, there's lots of names for stuff. You gotta it's not like the Omarche system. It's the Hyperland window tiling system. It is the whatever the 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, alright. 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 a little annoyances from a Mac user. Right? So my advice to you, with Omarji, is to try it. If you have a machine sitting around 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 wanna 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 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 and shell, Eiza, which is like a replacement for Wes, that is really great.

The replacement for CD, is so good with it, Zoxide.

All this stuff is great. I'm gonna install all of these on my Mac because I 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 docker, all these little things that come on this. Once I, like, dove through here and, like, really understood it, I was like, 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 if this is the type of if this episode spoke to you at all, hell, yeah. It's worth it.

I I've been really liking this to the point where, like, I've gotten such renewed use out of this crappy old lab. I don't even know. It's not super old, but it's not, like, spec'd 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. 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.

That's kind of like just like seeing if there's some possible way I can justify it. Because, yeah, I 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 Cam Link works just fine, and DaVinci works just fine, there's nothing that would stop me from using this full time for sure.

Alright. Let's let's check-in in in, like, a month's time and see how you're doing.

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 Omarchy or Linux based. They've been Neovim based, which, like But, like, yeah, just use Versus Code. Like, nothing's stopping you from using Versus Node, is there? No. No. No. I'm I'm doing that I'm doing the, Omarchi thing because it's like, oh, I, or the, Neovim thing because it's like, oh, I wanna just go all in. In fact Yes. I know. I yeah. Shout out to friend of the show, Dax Rad.

OpenCode is the, Claude Node open source terminal user interface alternative.

Man, this thing rips.

This thing rips. I logged in with my Copilot.

I'm using my, Copilot. I'm using GPT five or whatever, And I'm using this, like, cloud code, and I'm having it build. There's build mode and agent or a build mode and plan Node. 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 not gonna build a terminal UI super. It even has, like, an audio level meter and stuff in it. It's ridiculous because I wanted a I wanted a little project to build on this thing. So I've been building this, and it actually 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, 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 config or anything in it yet. It's not like replacing words, but, I've been I've been goofing around. There's been a lot of fun to learn. I'll tell you that. ESLint in JavaScript.

Cool.

That's all I got to say. This has been greatly making me reconsider the Apple ecosystem overall JS 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? Oh, Marchy, Linux, Vercel.

What what do you think? Leave a comment below.

As always, do you wanna get into sick picks?

Yeah. Let's jump on into it.

Sick picks are the things that we pick that are sick, that we enjoy, things that we like, things that could be anything from a podcast, a movie,

all kinds of stuff. I got one for you. I don't have it right here, but I already did on the weekend. I did our kids' like whole charging infrastructure.

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 a's 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 a 200 watt with, I don't know, eight ports on it. It has five USB c's and two USB a's, 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. It charges iPads and and phones nice and fast. And and with that, I also got silicone USB Bos cords, which are awesome. They're like Where'd you get them from? Have you ever had those, like, silicone monkey noodles that you play with? It's kinda like that, but it's actually a USB cord. They're really thick.

And the our problem is that the kids get them tangled all the time, and and they they, like, snap 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. I'm not playing with no monkey noodles over here. That's not something I've done. You've not played with monkey noodles before? Oh, man. I highly recommend getting a monkey noodle or two as well. Alright. I'm gonna have to figure that out. That sounds dope. Cool. Yeah. I I thought it looked cute. We'll throw up a photo of it right here of of thing I posted it on my Twitter. I'm going to I'll I'll sick pick this. So considering this whole episode JS about Omarchey,

I'll sick pick the Omarji 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, just shell tools even though there's just a few of them. Like I said, I'm gonna go install these on my Mac, because these are are so great.

You can CD something, like, from anywhere. Like, if I just open up a terminal here, I can CD into SynHax, which is not anywhere near where I am right Node, and it, you you of core oh, Synthax. I I typed it wrong. I was gonna say, the one time I go to do a demo, it fails.

If I do Synthax, it takes me right there because it has, like, a memory, and it knows the directories that you visited. So, man, Zox Node rules, all the stuff rules, and and I'm gonna install a bunch of these tools on my Mac so that I can have them there as well. Gotten really used to it. Alright. Thanks everybody so much for tuning in. We will catch you later.