"Empty barrels always make the most sound" says my co-national Alborosie in Poser, and I thought this would not apply to DHH, the creator of Ruby on Rails, because he is not only noisy about his opinions, he is friggin loud as f***.
I had heard of him a few times before, and only in the last few years really followed him in some interviews/posts where he was just going always in
in an obstinate and contrary direction (to quote another italian singer/songwriter).
- They left the cloud in 2023.
- They stopped using typescript. ... and much more, that blog is a goldmine of opinionated opinions.
I have been using linux since 2006.
Ubuntu, Debian, Slackware, Arch then Ubuntu again, and I have been a big fan of minimal UI/WM/DE since forever.
In 2008 I started using a netbook, an ASUS Eee PC and since RAM was scarse I had to find a better way to provide myself access to tools, so I discovered and fell in love with fluxbox.
Loved it, even wrote a guide on how to configure it (is here in Italian).
When I got less time on my hand I moved to XFCE and then just plain GNOME.
Then few years back, in 2015, I got shown i3wm and used it on my ubuntu-netinstall until 2020, then I switched to Budgie and my personal laptop has been using that ever since.
So yeah I am no DE/WM/Tiling/Linux virgin.
When last year, around August 2025, I saw that DHH was coming out with a "distro" based on Arch I assumed it would be nice to check it out, so I did.
Omarchy looked amazing, it had some rough edges but had everything I needed, and it was flying.
The most amazing thing I found was the tiling system which I missed so much and did not even realised.
Few weeks in the first few cracks started to show, as I posted on bluesky here, I had an amazingly looking desktop, but way too many tools that I did not need/want.
Namely: 1Password, Neovim, kdenlive, office, obstudio, obs-studio, whatsapp, Bitwarden, ProtoVPN and a bunch of webapps (HEY, Basecamp, X) that I do not want nor use.
I found that tool to remove it, but then every few updates I got given something new I did not need. Something else broke, and even though I love to touch configurations I prefer to do it on my own ones, rather than the opinionated one of someone else.
I had issues where new tools like clipboard manager started to kill some of my personal tools, ntrallazzu, then keybinds changed on update and conflicted with some of my custom ones.
Then videos were not playing on brave/chrome and would only do that if I run it with a custom command, but that broke all of the other webapps.
I setup my editor to be zed instead of neovim but it was still no applying properly for config updates, since it was always using neovim.
Lastly, two of the applications I use every now and then do not work properly with it at all, Godot4 and ArduinoIDE are just completely broken and had to jump through so many hoops to just make it work.
The straw that broke the camels back was forced install of OpenCode, and then a bunch of more AI things which I never asked for.
I had enough, I hate microsoft approach of pushing Copilot into things, I am a big ChatGPT user, but I do not want all of that rubbish pre-installed, I just realised that I was in only for the hype and the rice.
F*** that.
I wiped and installed xubuntu minimal, I setup the tiling keybinds, installed a few of the packages I needed, it took me 2 hours in total, instead of the days I spent to setup and chisel away crap I did not need out of Omarchy.
If you know what you are doing it wont take much to setup and get your own DE/WM the way you want it, without the opinionated crap someone elses likes to dump on their crappy system.
Peace.
My XFCE keybinds
My Panel/Apps Setup
Oh forgot, doing webapps is simple as fuck, just bind the keys to brave (or chrome) --app=URL --no-new-window done.
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