For me, the “Year of the Linux Desktop” was in about 2023. My home desktop, a gaming rig that has been “Ship-of-Theseus’d” since I was about 13, has been in almost continued use for nearing 10 years. It is almost certainly not the same computer as I had in 2014. I have graduated from the $200 computer my Dad bought from a work friend for my birthday, which was complete with an AMD Phenom II, a GTX 660, and an absolutely ripping 4G of RAM. This was my first introduction to “getting my hands dirty” with computing.
Perhaps nearing 15 years ago, when I was maybe 10 or 12. My mother took me to her office. I cannot remember the reason. But it was the Microsoft office (not the Microsoft Office) in Las Colinas, Texas. I have a hazy memory of walking through the glass lobby, and being obsessed with entire room full of computers on the other side of a glass wall. I did not have the vocabulary then to describe what I was seeing, but I was almost certainly looking at the office’s local data center, before being lost to the omnivorous “cloud.” My parents, being relatively forward-thinking, technically-minded people, did not allow me a phone or a computer to use alone until I was well into my teenage years. It took me ten years and many more years of experience and knowledge to understand that they were correct for not letting me have unfettered access to technology.
When they eventually did let me have relatively-unfettered access to my phone when I was around 15 or 16, I quickly became subsumed into all of the bad parts of social media. I was constantly stressed, was constantly glued to my phone, and did not do the things I really liked. Like reading, or playing video games, or whatever. When I was in college, I eventually learned that I had been exploited by tech companies. When I completed college and began to work, I saw that purposeful exploitation of data firsthand. I became disillusioned with the realm of Windows. It was at this first job as a data consultant at a large technology consulting firm, that I used MacOS for the first time. I was given what was then a top-of-the-line MacBook Pro, with the latest M1 chips. Becoming proficient at the UNIX shell became a hobby of mine. I felt myself begin to see computing less as a science and more as an art. Something that can be composed in myriads of ways, developing my own auteur style of programming.
It was during this time that I switched my home-desktop setup, now complete with a 3080Ti for which I paid 400% more than MSRP during the height of the GPU insanity of COVID, to Linux Mint. I had read it was the easiest Linux distro to setup, and I was definitely into it. I played Helldivers 2, Factorio, Halo Infinite, Celeste, and Fallout: New Vegas on Linux Mint. Indeed, I still do. I did not do any customization to my Linux Mint environment. Indeed, I haven’t even changed the background. But it was a start.
Soon, I became unsatisfied with VSCode. It kept crashing when I ran computationally-intensive code, the difference between the interpreter used when you clicked F5 versus when you run a command in a terminal was confusing. At the same time, a friend of mine recommended that I use the Vim motions. Until then, I had only used Vim to write the occasional git commit. I became vim-curious. I quickly became vim-sexual. It was at this point that I began reading more about programming. I learned about Neovim and uv and docker containers and deeper knowledge of git and the importance of logging. I was now writing more and more code than ever. I was logging hundreds of commits a year, dozens a month. A few of them were even decent commits.
But I wanted to go faster. My brain works faster than my hands. Sometimes they would get out of sync, and I would make mistakes. I needed my hands to go faster, or my brain would be forced to go slower. I quit VSCode and started using Neovim full time. I wrote code in Neovim, I wrote notes for school in Neovim, I wrote articles in Neovim.
I was not going fast enough. I wanted complete dominion over the machine. I wanted it as an extension of my body. I built a custom keyboard, a Sofle. Split, ortholinear keyboard with thumb clusters. Oh my god it even has a watermark.
Then I learned about alternative keyboard layouts. I forced myself to learn Colemak. Again, I wrote notes in Colemak, I wrote code in Colemak, I wrote articles in Colemak. It took weeks to get up to a “proficient” typing speed in Colemak—around 50 WPM. It took months to get back up to my previous QWERTY typing speed—between 100-120 WPM. It took me even longer to exceed 130 WPM burst.
But there was still a kind of odd disconnect between my computing style at home and my computing style at work. At a company as large as the one I worked for until 2023, getting a second Linux laptop was out of the question. Too much work building images for security and such. I could sympathize. So I continued my fragmented computing lifestyle. Business in the front with a clean MacBook Pro, party in the back with a Linux Desktop at home.
For my first year or so at Northwestern, I was given a MacBook Air M2. The one with like only 2 USB ports and one HDMI port. It did not even work with more than one monitor. The fact that I could not plug in multiple monitors without a special $400 dock for the MacBook may have taken years off my life and chipped away at my sanity. I had two monitors at my desk. I had to plug in both the USB C and the HDMI cable to use the monitors. I could not plug into more than one with the Dell dock station that was standard for our organization. I was not about to ask the IT team to purchase a $400 dock just for me to have my special little vertical monitor setup.
Then, I got a new office, somehow finessed my way into getting more monitors and a brand new M3 Max computer with 36G of RAM. I now had three monitors at my desk. We were moving up in the world. My monitor setup, though still remained insane. I had two $400 Dell docks with insane internet connections to both of them. I only had one monitor plugged into either of them, and then also used the HDMI port for the third monitor. This completely negated the entire point of a dock. Several thousand dollar computer and it doesn’t work with all docks.
The entire time, in the back of my mind. I kept returning my Linux Machine at home, that functioned perfectly fine with all of my monitors out of the box. That penguin. That stupid fucking penguin haunted me. Then, opportunity arose. I was developing some applications for our HPC clusters, but needed the CUDA toolkit to do so. The CUDA toolkit just doesn’t work with Macs, because Jensen and Tim can’t overcome their little fight. Of course, I could always just spin up a virtual machine or something similar. But that felt… bastardized. Thus, my plan was hatched. I would ask IT to give me a second laptop. I would tell them that I needed it to develop some CUDA programs for the HPC cluster (which was true). I would tell them that it would make me much more productive (also true). And that I would not need a very expensive laptop (also true). What I did not tell them was that I would not be running a sensible productivity-focused distro like Ubuntu or Mint or any other number of low-effort distros. No. I would be running Omarchy. I would have to relearn the entire way I interact with a computer.
I have now been using almost exclusively Omarchy at work for several weeks now. I have now used it for everything productivity related. I use it for synchronous communication via the Microsoft Teams, code using Neovim, note-taking via AFFiNE, manage my research with Zotero, and sometimes light spreadsheet tasks with LibreOffice. I am typing this on my work-issued Macbook right now, and I am surprised to say that I think the benefits of the Omarchy setup outweigh the benefits of the Macbook keyboard. In theory, I could run Omarchy on my Mac. I do not think I have earned the right to tinker that much on a several-thousand dollar computer that was already specially purchased for me.
Regardless, I have always been a proponent of Linux at work, but not so much a proponent of Arch at work. That is one of the really good things about Omarchy. It needs very little setup. The out-of-the-box experience with external monitors can be improved. But I have no idea how to implement that myself so I can’t really complain too much about it. Once you get used to it, it is fine. I think that due to Omarchy’s ease-of-setup and updating that I can confidently use it when I am working to make money.
This is not to say that we should be deploying these on every person’s laptop at work. We should definitely be easing people into it. Start them on Linux Mint, get them into something they are somewhat used to from Windows, introduce them to the power of LibreOffice, baby you got a FOSSOffice going.
To be perfectly honest, if I were the IT director at my work right now, I would start migrating people to Linux laptops. It is more secure and private at less cost.
I would heavily disagree with some of the non-libre default applications, but they are easy enough to remove. What is terrific, though, is the system snapshot. This has saved my ass a couple of times when I broke something but didn’t know what.
Running an Arch-based distro with hyprland feels like the endgame of vim motions. Vim motions in your operating system and window manager. The way I feel about computers is what I think that car people feel when customizing a car or motorcycle. Or perhaps that of an artist experimenting with a new style of art. There is a hint of the idiosyncratic — a morsel of the old finds itself in the new.