PewDiePie

`3:49:56`

He's an Arch person. I... He's got the most gorgeous arc. So the world's biggest streamer for a while I remember my kids watching some of his Minecraft videos, and then he just gets fed up with that, does the wholesome thing. Marries-

`3:50:15`

... a family man, kid, moves to Japan, and then gets so hardcore into-... first Linux, then Arch, then Ricing. Did you see his, uh-

`3:50:29`

Absolutely best tier incredible stuff. And then he also becomes a goddamn AI man of the moment, building all of these systems, and you're just going like, that... What an inspiring story of evolution. Like, you can go from being funny guy on Minecraft streams to, "Okay, this is my life now. I'm building AI clusters and doing the Council of AIs," and we all get to spectate? I mean, what a treasure.

`3:51:10`

Hugely inspiring, and should be hugely inspiring to others who sit in that moment like, "Well, I don't know quite how to program. I don't know this and the other thing." Okay, but if PewDiePie can build the Council of AIs with his bespoke, um, hardware here, then maybe you can also start on things. And I think this is actually an important general point, that we need role models. We need people to inspire others, to push further, and reveal that the perceived boundaries, they're not as fixed as you think they are. And every one of those people, they started out in a situation not too dissimilar from yours. Again, that doesn't mean everyone is gonna be PewDiePie or Elon or Linus. There is not an equal distribution of talent or even intelligence. And we can come to terms with that and still be inspired by these people. Like, in the physical realm, I feel like we don't have any problems with that usually. Like, oh, someone's really good at football, they're really good at basketball, they're really good at something, and we go like, "Oh my, that's amazing. I mean, I wish I was, but I'm never going to be." Sometimes I feel like we struggle a little more when it comes to the intellectual realm.

`3:52:32`

I do like that part of it, and then I accept the part that there's also a million people who think I'm the biggest idiot on the earth and I don't actually know anything, and Omakub's just a bunch of dot files, and-

`3:52:46`

And a lot of it, I mean, is as often happens when someone comes in from the outside. I mean, I've been using Linux for two and a half years. That's not very long. Plenty of people in that community who's literally been running Linux since it was hard and difficult, and you had to walk uphill both direction against the wind in the snow barefoot. And I think there is a certain kind of nerd-... who's threatened when the community expands, and it suddenly allows more in. And do you know what? I actually... I can't begrudge that fully. I think it's fair for certain nerds to feel like, "That's my space." Like, now you're changing it into another space. I don't wanna do that. Like, I don't wanna change the Arch space at all. Like, I don't really think of Omarchy as being directly part of the same community. Because the people who were attracted to Arch in the first place were the ones who were attracted to building everything by hand themselves. Doing it the hard way because they like to do it hard, and I'm building the polar opposite of that. So I just wish that those people could go like, "Okay, well, this is not for me. I wanna build it the hard way. I wanna put in 500 hours to rising my own Arch distribution," and I think you should. I mean, actually, I said... I mean, I did it. This is what Omarchy is, me pouring in literally, at this point, I don't know, 3,000 hours into the, into this distro. You should do that if you're so inclined. I think it's wonderful.

But also do realize that we can share the same technical underpinnings and then operate two very separate-... Communities with very different aims, goals, aesthetics, morals even, and coexist, and it can be beautiful. And I mean, that's not always what I get. Sometimes I get the other thing. But at this point I've been in the game long enough to not just be at peace with it, but actually be welcoming of it. I take it as part of a barometer that things are working. When I'm working on something that works, I usually get some people like it, and then I get this balance of the universe that we talked about last time, where an equal but opposing force must be present on the other side of the scale to hate upon it. And therefore, I at this point just smile a little. Like, it's okay.

`3:55:08`

And do you know what's interesting about that is, like, this is the second attempt. So my first attempt was Omakub. And I was really happy with that, and I put it out there, and there it found a community of maybe a few thousand. Like, and that was that, and then it just sort of petered out because the level of ambition couldn't attract more. And then the second time, because I didn't fucking stop, right? Like, I just kept going. I just kept building. Then I put out Omarchy, the first version. Again, quite niche because it was this... It was like Git checkout. It was a little bit difficult. You had to set up Arch first. I was... Well, I would talk you through how to set up Arch, and then you could do the Omarchy thing, right? And then we got an ISO that meant you could just install the whole thing by yourself. And then we just fixed all the problems. This is the other thing. If you keep going, eventually the thing will just work. This was the charge against Linux itself for the longest time. Well, you install Linux and then this doesn't work, and my speakers don't work, and my, Trackpad doesn't work. Yeah, okay, but just leave Linus at it for like 30 years. He'll get to it. He'll get to all of it. And at this point I find hilarious that on, I would probably argue the majority of computers, it's wiped. You install Linux, all of it works. You install Windows, good luck hunting down the drivers you need to get that piece of hardware working.

Because they have very different philosophies. The reason Linux is 40 million lines of code is Linus just puts all the drivers in the kernel. So it has everything out of the box, and Windows doesn't. A different, different approach to it, right? So sometimes the things that look like a toy, things that look broken at first glance, they are, right? They're for people who like having fun. We call those early adopters. They play with the toys, and then the toys evolve, and then they get better, and then they get better. And at some point, they're so damn good that early adopters feel like they're invited to the party. And if the early adopters keep chipping away at it too, eventually you get to the late majority, and then you win. And we are well on the way with Omarchy towards that destination. Like the growth that the distro has seen, not just since Quattro, but since version three, it's just like, you know, the standard hockey stick curve. You go like, there's nothing, there's nothing, there's nothing. You're just toiling away. You're just improving, you're improving, improving. And then you hit this magic inflection point, and it's impossible to predict when that's gonna happen. Same thing with startups. When is it gonna happen? When are you gonna find that product market fit? Then suddenly it's there, and then it goes, just goes and off the rocket ship you go.

`3:57:45`

I do think that's the... We were already on the up, and then it changed to vertical. Because the other thing, and this was what I learned with Omakub and Omarchy first too. Omakub was stylish, nice, but familiar, is we're still using a conventional desktop metaphor. You were dragging your windows around. And I thought at the time, as I think lots of people do in the Linux community, like this is what we need. And then I just go like, okay, well, for whatever re- let me do the nerdy thing for a while. I'll build Omarchy, and maybe it'll just be for me, because I mean, it seems like there's about five people who like tiling window managers. That's not true. But as a percentage of total computer users, it's a tiny, tiny minuscule part. And then I go like, well, this is amazing. Totally different, but amazing. I put that out. Instantly, Omarchy had far greater traction than Omakub ever did. Because it was not the same. Because it was totally different, and it presented a different vision for what a computer could be and how it could feel like, and that attracts people. We are now getting sort of the exponential of that. As I said, a lot of people in the Linux community are at best skeptical, at worst hostile to AI and to agents. Omarchy is the first distribution, at least that I've seen on a scale that matters, that just goes like, "Nope, we're really into it." I mean, you can still use Omarchy. You don't have to use an agent.

If you dismiss that first notification to set up a default agent, you're not gonna get any of the stuff we talked about. You're not gonna get the crash watcher. You're not gonna get any of this stuff. You're not gonna get... You can hand chisel all your plugins. Totally possible, right? But the reason people are excited is because I don't have any reservation about saying, "This is where we're going. I think the future of the personal computer is the malleable computer, is the agentic computer. I'm gonna go all in on that." And then anyone who's excited about a similar trajectory for computers, come along. Plenty of room in the car. In fact, one of the things I pride myself on is not holding a grudge to people who come around. I had a bunch of people just last week going like, "Yeah, I used to think Omarchy was kind of shit. That was just this crappy-" "... dot files collection. And now I tried Quattro and awesome. I like it now." That to me, I live for the long argument. I live for this argument where you plant the seed like two years ago, and then two years later they go, "Goddammit, this son of a bitch was right."