How a 5-Hour Podcast Finally Made Me Ditch Windows for Omarchy
From a decade of Windows excuses to a three-box setup built around OmarchyHow a 5-Hour Podcast Finally Made Me Ditch Windows for Omarchy
The first time I tried Linux was back in 2018. It was Ubuntu, and going in, I had this grand idea that it was going to be awesome.
It wasn’t. It felt lackluster and unfinished. Over the years, I’d toss Linux onto spare, aging machines, like giving my wife a simple setup just for browsing the web and typing up documents. But for my own work, I always crawled back to Windows. My entire creative workflow was anchored to proprietary tools, namely Adobe, and Windows was where the software actually behaved.
I made excuses for years to stay put.
Earlier this year, I bought a base-tier M4 Mac Mini because I wanted to build native mobile apps, and Apple Silicon is the toll booth you have to pay if you want to ship there. Coming from a lifetime on Windows, macOS felt bizarre. Basic window management was quirky, closing and minimizing felt unintuitive, and having muscle memory fight the Command key instead of Control drove me up the wall. It did its job as an Xcode compiler, but it was never going to be my home.
Then came Lex Fridman’s five-hour podcast with DHH.
Hearing DHH lay out the philosophy behind Omarchy, and hearing him flat-out call it the best operating system, cut through my remaining excuses. I decided right then to stop dabbling and actually commit.
Bringing dead silicon back to life
I had a 2023 Asus laptop that had basically been sitting cold on a shelf for over a year. I rarely touched it. Instead of blowing away my main workstation on day one, I decided to flash Omarchy onto the laptop right after Quattro released.
The installation was shockingly painless. Everything, Wi-Fi, sound, display scaling, just worked out of the box.
To turn it into my true daily workstation, I bought a proper docking station with DisplayPort, dedicated Ethernet, and enough USB-A and USB-C ports to handle my peripherals. But the real surprise was pairing the environment with an agentic CLI (I was running Antigravity). Any time a tiny system quirk or configuration tweak popped up, I didn’t spend three hours scouring 2014 forum threads. I just pointed the agent at the config: “Hey, this isn’t behaving the way I want, fix it.” Most of the time, it one-shot the solution directly in my dotfiles.
Suddenly, a dormant laptop had become the sharpest machine I owned.
The three-box setup
I stopped trying to force one machine to be my daily driver, gaming rig, build server, and compute box. The work got divided cleanly across three machines:
1. The daily driver: 2023 Asus laptop running Omarchy
This is where 90% of my day happens. When I’m at my desk, it’s docked to a monitor, sharing a keyboard and mouse with the next machine over a hardware KVM switch. If I leave town or work from the couch, I pull one cable and the whole environment comes with me untouched.
2. The compute node: headless Ubuntu server (Ryzen 7 / RTX 3080 Ti)
My old desktop was a beast with an RTX 3080 Ti in it. It’s a generation or two old now, but it still has too much raw VRAM and horsepower to let sit around or sell off for pennies. I stripped Windows off it, installed headless Ubuntu Server, and tied it into my private Tailscale mesh. Heavy local AI inference or raw rendering happens over the network from my laptop, without GPU fans spinning on my desk.
3. The app workshop: M4 Mac Mini
The Mac Mini sits quietly next to the desk. I hit the KVM toggle, jump over, compile what I need in Xcode, and switch right back to Omarchy. It’s an appliance for Apple targets, nothing more.
What it’s actually like day-to-day
Moving to a tiling window manager like Hyprland takes serious rewiring if your brain has spent twenty years clicking title bars and dragging windows around.
The focus-follows-mouse behavior takes getting used to. Whatever window your cursor drifts over suddenly grabs focus. You open a dialogue or a pop-up, move your mouse slightly, and you’re suddenly interacting with the background tile.
Then there’s muscle memory. My keyboard layout, or my heavy fingers, means I sometimes hit Super + W to kill an active pane and accidentally blast the next window in line right behind it before I realize what happened.
Compared to the bloat, forced updates, telemetry, and erratic UI regressions on Windows, or the rigid, quirky desktop paradigm of macOS, these are problems I actually enjoy having. On Omarchy, everything is fixable. I own the configs. If a shortcut bites me, I change the binding. If a layout annoys me, I rewrite the rule.
The hardware finally feels like it belongs to me again.
That said, there was one massive catch that almost stopped the whole experiment in its tracks: photography. I needed a serious, Photoshop-grade image retouching tool on Linux that didn’t feel like a compromise. Since that tool didn’t exist, I had to build it myself.
In Part 2, I break down how I started building Omapix from scratch in Rust with zero previous Rust knowledge, using Claude Opus 5.5 to run circles around traditional dev timelines.