My Microsoft is not working

There were two reasons why I switched to Omarchy.

The push

Windows had got on my nerves, with endless OneDrive subscription notifications and a printer that dropped off the network whenever I wanted to print maths exercises for my daughter.

The pull

Lex Fridman published his conversation with DHH, the creator of Omarchy, and it clicked instantly.

I switched my laptop to Omarchy straight away, just to try it out. Two days later I was so impressed that I switched my desktop too, and I haven’t looked back since.

Opinionated, and that is the point

DHH describes Omarchy as “beautiful, modern & opinionated Linux”, and that is exactly its strength. There is no title bar with a close button and no taskbar. Plenty of people would look at that and say users will never accept it. He simply built what he liked, and the result speaks for itself: within hours I had the keyboard shortcuts in my head and was using the window management as if I had never done anything else. Sometimes we need creative destruction. We cannot always carry on as before and ask everyone for their opinion first. That is also why innovation tends to come from corners you don’t expect. As Clayton Christensen showed in The Innovator’s Dilemma, new ideas in established organisations get killed by existing processes and values unless they are measured by different yardsticks from the core business.

An operating system you talk to

What appealed to me from the start was the idea of a malleable operating system that you shape with AI. Omarchy ships with a skill that tells the AI how the system is built and how to change it. You no longer dig through the settings looking for the right switch. You tell your computer what you want, and it makes the change for you. I have never experienced anything like it.

It is just as impressive from the perspective of someone who installs and maintains systems. When something crashes, the AI examines the system, works out the cause, suggests a fix and writes a bug report with everything the developers need. I think of all the hours our teams spent over the years chasing tickets without any useful information.

I will never forget the ticket that simply said

“My Microsoft is not working”.

Although, now that I think about it, that is exactly what happened to me…

Beautiful

And then Omarchy is simply beautiful, just as DHH promises. It works, it is different, and I like it. I look forward to starting my computer, I enjoy the screensaver, and I like the way everything fits together. And you don’t have to stick with what comes out of the box. Omarchy ships with 22 themes, the community offers many more, and anything else you can easily change yourself.

Verdict

For me, the promise holds, and it showed me once again that you only really learn something by trying it. What I like most is how deeply the AI agents are integrated into the system. Systems that explain, repair and report on themselves will change what IT costs and who needs to understand it. As for me, I don’t even know whether the dual boot still works: I haven’t started Windows once since I switched.