Most of my life I used Windows for gaming, and Linux for development. When I started my first full time job in 2007, they gave me a Windows desktop for Java dev, and I hated it… In 2010 they added a BYOC policy and two devs I worked with convinced me to buy my first ever Mac, and since then, that’s what I’ve been using. Mainly because I dialed in my perfect setup early, and migrating an old Mac to a new Mac is super easy, and once I got my iPad and eventually settled on iPhone (after jumping between that and Android every 2 years for a while), I was locked into the ecosystem, and no matter how much it gets enshittified, I just haven’t been able to migrate away (and I’ve tried, quite a few times).
Why do I mention this? Because after some prompting from a friend, I decided to try Omarchy on my old 2013 Macbook Pro that was just there in the cupboard, and the first thing for me was surprise at how snappy this 13 year old laptop suddenly felt. Then it prompted me to set up my default agent, with the suggestion that it can help me set up my OS, and I quickly connected Claude. Then I asked Claude why my keyboard layout was wrong, and using the Omarchy skill it figured it out and fixed it before I could finish Google-ing for what the correct layout and variant is.
Then at some point, Chrome crashed, and I got a popup asking if I want Claude to investigate what happened… and it did, and said it crashed after I closed the window, and I that I don’t need to worry about it, it made a backup of the logs and if it happens again it will log a report…
What!?! This is great. This is what I’ve been wanting from AI integrated in my OS. I get the hype now. I get what DHH is trying to accomplish. And I’m here for it.
Will I switch? Probably not yet. I have 16 years of habit to unlearn and setup to redo if I want to make the switch. My understanding is also that it’s not quite as good on the M-series chips as it is on Intel and AMD machines, and I’m not ready to replace a Mac I purchased less than a year ago…
But, this is very impressive just in my first 30 minutes with it, and I’m keen to see where it goes, and what this means for Linux adoption in general.
This post was originally published on LinkedIn