Escaping the Death Star Part 1 - Windows
Through trials and time, traveled we have. Long, this journey has been.
My Windows journey started back in mid 90’s fresh out of the refugee camp. Partially thanks to Sweden’s welfare system which at that time could afford investing in the future generations and partially to my parents (goes without saying ❤️). First PC I ever owned came with Win 3.1/MS-DOS and for various reasons one got used with terminal despite having a GUI. From there on I endured all the different Windows versions that ever came out. For all the ups and downs I kept Windows as my goto operating system. Even when I got “free” Mac books through work I never really jumped on that train fully. During this time there were number of occasions when I was excited about things happening in Windows space. First time was when Internet Explorer 6 was about to be removed, second time was when Internet Explorer 7 was finally deprecated and the last time around was when Windows Phone was a thing (at least for us dotnet devs). I even made sure elders in my family walked around with Win-Phones in their pockets. My own Lumia was with me all the way to the end in 2017 when I finally gave up. After that followed a period where I was happy as long as I didn’t find it in the way of doing my work. Fast forward to 2025. You buy a new Windows laptop and get it bloated from start even when you buy it directly from MS. You uninstall and disable things you don’t use just to see them reinstalled or re-enabled on next Windows update. And on a more serious note, You setup your machine with multiple partitions with multiple operating systems just for the next update to remove your dual boot files? How did it get to here, MS requiring full control over how I use my hardware? And now Copilot all over the place?
Who wants to have this running on all of their devices? Across apps without boundaries? I kinda don’t and this is in no way bashing of the Copilot as a product. I would like to think that this is simply a more healthy approach to adopting technologies. If you are reading this and you want to understand more about the problems that “AI-first” strategy comes with take som time to listen to Meredith Whittaker, member of Signal foundation. Meredith has worked on large scale measurement systems at Google and her CV is really hard to question on the subject of tech and privacy. Below is one of her interviews that should at very least be informative for most. There are more videos on the topics of privacy and big tech but this one is a good starter.
Patience, you must have. With time, wisdom comes.
My introduction to Linux was fairly long ago as well, around 2007-2009. Working for a small company that was hosting its own products one had to learn little bit of everything. One of the things I remember doing was setting up and configuring MongoDB replica set. There was no cloud, managed services or Docker at the time either. You had to manage it yourself 😱 Even though this made my confidence grow it didn’t really made me a Linux fan directly. It was slightly beyond my comfort zone and I used it just as much as I had to for work-related tasks. Fast forward to 2025. Driven mainly by ethical reasons I installed Ubuntu on an older Surface Book that was collecting dust. To my surprise everything just seemed to work and my old Surface just got another shot at life. Suddenly the roles were switched and my test replaced the new Surface Studio 2 as my primary dev machine.
The fear of loss is a path to the dark side.
Not long ago I couldn’t imagine myself going in all in on Linux. Windows user for 30 years, occasional macOS user, never have I ever during that time consider switching to Linux. Yet here I am switching Linux distros like a pair of socks. Installing and running Ubuntu was straight forward. It was so painless I will likely recommend Ubuntu to everyone within my circles who complains on their PC being slow and what not.
Fast forward another few weeks, while being on vacation I read about something called #Omarchy. 🤔 I watched video below and I was hooked. Created by a danish developer/racer with focus on developer satisfaction and productivity.
Soon after being back from vacation I installed Omarchy on a mini-PC. For safety reasons I partitioned my hard drive to test it out.
Omarchy - Two months in
The initial days with Arch were challenging mostly because I was and still am a Linux newbie. Simple things like setting up a swedish keyboard took more time to setup, where on Ubuntu it just worked out of the box it felt like. Installing DevToys that I tend to have on all my machines made my Arch not boot. Installing dotnet 8 using -g flag made Pinta (Paint in Windows) not start anymore. My Epson printer was identified automatically on Ubuntu while I had to install it manually on Arch etc. Mostly small things but anyway these things can and most likely will happen. It is probably wise to spend some time and learn about Linux filesystem/structure, package management, system configuration. I choose to learn as I go. Cost for learning by doing in world of Linux reboot –> reinstall.
After the initial challenges came the inner peace. This thing is fluid, with minimalistic design yet intuitive. And performance is nothing I have ever experienced on any other OS I have used. It’s a workhorse and work of art at same time. Once you learn few hotkeys you will feel as efficient as ever and everything is is just so fast. Ang guess what, you remove a package and it stays removed even after next update 😱. Omarchy makes me want to boot it up as soon as I get home and I can’t see my self switching to anything else in foreseeable future. If you prefer having one big screen the tiling windows are just a joy to toggle around. Being based on Arch will naturally lead you to learning Linux more than if you use something like Ubuntu. If you try it out and you should heads up, it really is addictive!
Docs
You don’t have to be that brave to start with Omarchy. Documentation is 👌