All-in on Omarchy at 37signals
19 points by shime
19 points by shime
Just like how you were all-in on Windows and Ubuntu?
Next week he’ll break his Arch installation by running pacman -S foo instead of pacman -Syu foo, then he’ll be all-in on FreeBSD.
The background here is that DHH was a die-hard Mac user. The latest kerfuffle with Apple over their Hey email client being rejected from the App Store (typical Apple extortionism) was, I gather, the final straw, so now DHH and 37Signals are desperately flailing trying to be all-in on something non-Mac. We’re witnessing the latest installment of that not going well.
It’s actually a noble effort, even if doomed to fail (given DHH’s sensibilities and the current OS landscape).
A noble effort by a not great person. Check this totally unrelated shit out for a laugh: https://world.hey.com/dhh/the-parental-dead-end-of-consent-morality-e4e8a8ee
“Birthright crisis”? Jordan Peterson?
From the same DHH who helped drive out 1/3 of Basecamp employees in a week, when they objected to a “no talking about politics” rule at work that was made in response to employee criticism of a racist “funny” client name list? That DHH is now cool talking about politics?
Check this totally unrelated shit out for a laugh:
I have to say I didn’t have oblique slut shaming on my bingo card.
Indeed. Once a player goes all-in, they cannot make any further bets in that hand. Other players can still bet, but the all-in player’s bet is final.
Omarchy is already by far-and-away my favorite computing environment. Right up there in joy and wonder with the old Amiga days or early OSX.
Seems like one of the characteristic things for DHH to do. Create your own dotfiles, and require the large parts of 37signals to use them.
Why not simply switch to Linux, and let people choose? Or even constrain it to be an Arch-based disto, to make some aspects of support and management shareable?
Omarchy is just Arch Linux though, just with a set of both sensible and pretty questionable stuff done on top of it.
Like for instance https://github.com/basecamp/omarchy/blob/master/install/preflight/aur.sh
I might be too paranoid, but decisions like this – combined with publically declaring that most people in your company are mandated to use this system – seems like asking for security trouble. I suppose it’s possible that the panopticon of open source counters that risk.
Omarchy is just Arch Linux though, ..
.. just with a set of both sensible and pretty questionable stuff done on top of it.
That’s my point. It’s not just Arch Linux.
Exactly. If it was arch you could just install an omarchy package, the installation script they have turns this into an effective Arch derivative, which is kind of disappointing.
What does this aur thing mean? I’m not an Arch user.
It’s kind of like COPR for Fedora or PPAs for Ubuntu. But the way you typically use those is to enable one specific COPR or PPA that you want to pull from, which adds that one to the package manager’s search space.
I used arch for a while but haven’t recently, so my understanding might be a bit outdated, but the way I’m reading the omarchy scripts, they’re installing yay first and then using it to wrap the system package manager, pacman. If I’m understanding that correctly, that means that when, say, they run yay with a list of applications later it will first search aur and then the system package repositories.
There’s no review when packages are uploaded to aur, and occasionally a malicious package makes it in. Assuming DHH reviews the packages before they go into his scripts, it shouldn’t be an issue. But I share a certain amount of ick about it, especially since this seems to be attracting a lot of users who aren’t steeped in protective habits for arch. If they want to install something and just blindly copy a line like the above from the omarchy install scripts, this feels like it’s creating quite an opportunity for mischief.
If I were distributing a script like this for inexperienced users, I would maintain my own repository with only the packages I wanted and add it to the pacman configuration in the preflight script rather than enabling all of aur everywhere. Maybe I’m overly cautious, though.
What hoistbypetard said but also additionally this script enables chaotic-aur, which is a repository of prebuilt packages from AUR. So in a way it makes the problem worse because a) it adds another layer of potential supply chain attack vectors and b) it skips some steps from aur installation that would normally enable the user to recheck what kind of installation scripts they will be running.
And if I’m not mistaken, the installation script does all this without asking for confirmation.
I can see many reasons to want to stick to an opinionated setup. It’s easier to support, collaborate and share knowledge. Many people may not want to do deep customization of a compositor based setup, and so you would have some on gnome and some on plasma. In the end, an opinionated Linux setup is still infinitely more flexible than the MacOS environment they come from.
Many people may not want to do deep customization of a compositor based setup, and so you would have some on gnome and some on plasma.
Seems like a false binary argument, as there are choices between an opinionated CEO and any distribution with any window manager.
I feel like 20K mAh is just 20Ah.
lol, I’m guessing we’re stuck with expressing battery capacity in mAh because of historical reasons.
How does one convert from mAh to watt hours without a voltage? Am I stupid or does mAh not actually tell us anything?
When this metric became established, one was always talking about a battery cell that has an intrinsic voltage. E.g., all NiMH cells are the same voltage, so saying an AA NiMH cell has fewer amp hours than a D cell is meaningful.
But now we have a lithium-ion pack hidden behind a DC-DC converter system that can produce any voltage, or even multiple voltages. So indeed, amp-hours alone doesn’t tell you the capacity, you need to specify the output voltage as well, or use watt-hours.
Is there some convention voltage that is used in this case for conversion when talking about phone and laptop batteries, or are for example two phones that say they have x and y mAh respectively completely meaningless and uncomparable?
Most manufacturers (from what I’ve seen in the wild) use the cells’ nominal voltage, that is 3.6 to 3.8V for a typical lithium-ion battery. So the mAh capacities are roughly comparable.
However, on many powerbanks you can find the capacity in Wh printed somewhere in the fine print, mostly to help comply with airline regulations (there’s a 100Wh limit for lithium batteries per device to take on a plane), and some even include the typical expected charge after conversion.
For example, I recently got a “20Ah” powerbank, and on the back it says that the capacity is 73Wh (so 3.65V nominal cell voltage), with expected output charge of 65Wh.
Why not just let the employees choose what OS they like?
This is the same company that in response to concerns from employees about questionable naming practices, decided to basically ban talking about that in the first place, resulting in 1/3rd of the company resigning.
Every platform you have increases the development environment requirements and build environment requirements. You end up with “Works on Mac, but not Windows” or “Works on Linux but not Mac”, or “Works on Linux but not FreeBSD.” Granted, it’d change depending on your programming ecosystem, tooling choices and how you do development, but it limits your choices. “We’re only a Mac shop” or “we only use Windows” simplifies support and development.
I don’t know how you’d navigate “We only use ____ Linux distro” unless it was a ‘mainstream’ (for lack of better term) one like Ubuntu, Fedora, or Mint (e.g. can someone request Kubuntu or a derived distro and how does this affect support?).
There are benefits to a centralized IT organization even if you aren’t very large:
not having to set up your own hardware if you don’t want to (e.g. you can hire people who have never installed Linux before)
having help close at hand (“folks, how do I turn on/off focus-follows-pointer?”)
laptop fails, get another one that mostly works the next day from spares rather than waiting for three weeks
Obligatory note that both DHH and the lead developer of Hyprland (which Omarchy seems to use as a DE) are not the best people.
(I know Lobsters tries to stick to technical discussion, but I don’t think we can discuss major figures in our community and ignore the impacts they have on said community.)
There’s a few dog whistles. There’s also pretty dumb behaviours like calling people without experience retarded. (On the stand-up podcast he kept using that and said his kids are retarded because they haven’t yet learned about something)
I have never thought of my kids I have parented and raised as “retarded”. So there’s a counterexample to your idiotic statement.
I have not thought this about my children. Any person who disparages their children doesn’t have the intellectual honesty to realize that a shortcoming in a child is probably something you as a parent need to work with them on. These things do not come with batteries included. Parenting is extremely hard, but so is being a kid. Make your home a place where kids feel comfortable being themselves and being wrong. There’s not a better way for them to learn.
the only thing I know about hyprland maintainer is that he’s looking for a wife, lol: https://x.com/vaxryy/status/1954292502586134551
maybe when he finds a soul mate he’ll get better at navigating politics in software engineering? :)
other than that, everything is so controversial here so that I am going to ignore all the bad things they do and focus on positive contributions so guys do.
wow yikes; i mean i knew drew’s whole schtick these days was laying it too thick but wow this is really damning.
I don’t know DHH, but I think he would be happier and more productive if he just used stuff instead of making big public-facing projects or pronouncements.
Seems like a really questionable decision, especially reconsidering they are on their third OS change according to their blog (the other one being windows, and I assume they all use macos before that.