DHH · 2026-08-26 · source ↗ · whole document (10)
PewDiePie
`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."