The Art of Owning Your Machine

Let Me Tell You About My Ex

On October 10th I stood in front of a room full of Linux nerds at ThoughtWorks, Gurugram, for Omarchy New Delhi, the first community-run Omarchy meetup in the city. I hosted it. I also had to open it with a talk, and I had no idea how to talk about operating systems without putting half the room to sleep. I'm Aryan. Design engineer by choice, software developer by referral, and a computer nerd at core. This is that talk, written down, with everything I didn't have time to say on stage.

I didn't open with operating systems. I opened with my ex.

And even after we broke up, my ex still follows me. Then the next slide went full blue. The room got it before I said a word.

Six Years Of Looking For The One

The first computer I ever touched ran Windows 7. That was the default, nobody asked me. In 2020, in the middle of Corona, my dad bought me my first laptop. An HP 15-da1058TU. i5, 256 GB, a plain office laptop that was never supposed to do what I made it do. For the next four or five years that machine did everything: video editing, Linux experiments, gaming with my mates. It was not built for that much. I used it to its core anyway. I was even a Windows Insider for a bit. It lasted about two months before I dual-booted Ubuntu on it. Then came years of GNOME. I loved it enough to build GNOME extensions last year. But every time a new version dropped, something on my machine broke. An extension here, a setting there. Small cuts, every single release. I hopped to Garuda, to KDE. Lovely, all of them. But I still had to reboot into Windows every time I needed to edit in my very legitimately "purchased" Premiere Pro. (I hate Adobe at core. That's a separate post.) Recently I got a MacBook. Smooth. Gorgeous. Still not mine. Every OS I have dated:

Windows: the toxic ex
macOS: the rich one my parents would love
GNOME, KDE, Garuda: situationships
Omarchy: we'll get there

Windows was never home. Ubuntu, Garuda and KDE were homes for a while, but more like huts. Somewhere to stay, not somewhere to live.

A Billboard You Paid For

This is where I asked the room: hands up, who's still on Windows? You pay ₹50k, ₹1 lakh, sometimes ₹2-3 lakh for a machine. And what you get is ads. In the Start menu. In search. In File Explorer. In the system tray. In Widgets. Open Edge and it's another wall of them. Even the first-boot setup, the part where you just want to pick your region and keyboard layout and get in, is trying to sell you Microsoft 365 and OneDrive. I don't want your cloud for my cat photos, bro. I want to get my work done. Let me in.

"When you buy a brand-new computer and spend 42 minutes waiting for updates before you can use it, that is bizarre."DHH, creator of Omarchy

And the worst part isn't the ads. It's that you're never allowed to say no. Update now or Later. That's the choice. There is no "No". There is no "shut up, I never want to see this again in my lifetime". Every time I booted into Windows just to edit a video, it was there, waiting. What "no" looks like on Windows:

No local account without a fight. It pushes you to a Microsoft account like I owe it my Hotmail
No way to fully turn off diagnostic data on Home or Pro
No clean slate. Your licence is tied to your hardware, so even a fresh install knows exactly who you are

I just want to stay on my local network. I don't want my OS following me around like an ex who still watches my stories after the breakup. Maybe that's why they called it Windows. Someone is always looking in.

The Windows Survival Kit

Now, if you're still on Windows, I'm not going to judge you. Okay, I'm going to judge you a little. But I spent years patching this thing, so here's what actually made it bearable. This was the "take a photo" slide. Take the shell back:

ExplorerPatcher: taskbar and Start menu, your way. It takes control of Explorer away from Microsoft and hands it to you
PowerToys: the single best thing Microsoft has ever shipped. Probably the only good thing their team did in its whole lifecycle
Windhawk: mods for every corner of the shell. This one's for the ultra-nerds like me who want total control

Find anything, fast:

Raycast: launcher and command palette, now on Windows, and a must. I made a video on it and the whole Raycast team said they loved it, which still makes me grin
Everything: file search that actually works, because Windows search is broken as hell
QuickLook: hit space to preview a file without opening it, the way Finder and Nautilus have done forever

Capture it:

ShareX: screenshots, recording, annotation, all of it. It's so good that I made a whole video about how ShareX destroyed every Linux alternative I tested

Housekeeping:

WinDirStat: see exactly what's eating your disk
Twinkle Tray: brightness control for external monitors, which Windows somehow still doesn't do
IDM: downloads that survive a crash. I bought it back in 2020. You probably don't need it in 2026, but you also don't know when Windows is going to crash on you

Small side note I made sure to say out loud: I was very glad our venue that day was not Microsoft Gurgaon.

A Beautiful Hotel. Don't Move The Furniture.

Second hands-up of the day: who's on a Mac right now? A lot of hands. Mine too. Let me give Apple its credit first. The ecosystem is great. It's smooth. The virtual desktop switching animation is genuinely lovely. Apple used to sell two things: great UI and great battery. Now look at what the company famous for design shipped in its own Mail app.

Archive, Delete, Junk. You could at least have aligned the Delete. My brother in 10th grade can do better than this. It's so bad I'm positive no LLM touched it, because even an LLM would've centered it. They still can't get the corners of app windows right. And it's not just looks. Apple's own Calculator app leaked so much memory that macOS started begging people to force quit things.

A calculator. Using 32 GB of RAM. And in 2026 the design direction is apparently: make everything rounder.

Want a rounded corner on a rounded corner on a rounded corner? Welcome to macOS 26. So the UI lead is gone. What Apple has left is the battery. And you can get the same crispy, smooth feeling on Linux, honestly better, and buy a charging brick with the money you saved. The real problem with the Mac isn't the corners, though. It's control. A Mac is a beautiful hotel. Stay as long as you want. Just don't move the furniture.

The macOS Survival Kit

Bare macOS is still not usable for me. I need a stack of apps on top of it before it feels like my computer. Second "take a photo" slide. Make it usable:

Raycast: Spotlight on steroids, plus a Hyper key that does half my job for me. If I were on the Mac team, I'd buy Raycast and ship it as Spotlight
Mac Mouse Fix: turns any normal mouse with extra buttons into something that switches desktops like Apple's Magic Trackpad
FineTune: per-app volume. macOS still can't do it on its own. Told you this was getting nerdy
BetterDisplay: makes my BenQ 27" look right. I do not have $2000 in my pocket for a Studio Display, and I'm more than happy with my BenQ

Build the ecosystem Apple won't give you:

AirSync: I'm an Android user, so there's no Apple ecosystem for me. This makes my phone and Mac feel like one
Blip: send anything to any device
LocalSend: files between my Mac and my lovely darling Omarchy machine

Capture and type:

Shottr: the closest thing to ShareX on a Mac, since ShareX never made it here
Mojito: emoji, faster

Clean up after yourself:

Mole and Pearcleaner: because properly deleting an app on a Mac is not child's play

Then I asked the room the obvious question: what do you do with photos of your ex? Next slide: /dev/null.

The Turn

Here's the thing I only noticed when I put both survival kits on screen, back to back.

"If an OS needs 21 apps to feel usable, the OS is the bug."

Ten apps to make Windows tolerable. Eleven to make macOS feel like mine. I'd been treating that as normal for years. It isn't. Microsoft is too stupid, and Apple is not capable.

Omarchy

Then I found Omarchy this year, and things changed.

If you haven't heard of it: Omarchy is DHH's take on what a developer's Linux desktop should be, out of the box. The name tells you the philosophy.

"Oma is short for omakase: chef's choice. I'm the chef, I'm making the choices, and this is the setup ready to build on minute one."DHH

What Omarchy actually is:

Arch: rolling release, fresh packages, the AUR. And yes, you finally get to say "btw, I use Arch"
Hyprland: tiling, so windows arrange themselves
Keyboard first: everything is a shortcut away
Beautiful by default: curated apps and themes, restyle the whole thing with one key

There was a learning curve. A small one. But it was a loving experience from day one. I put it on my ASUS TUF F15, i7 14th gen, RTX 4060, a properly beastly machine, and it felt like the first time an OS was keeping up with the hardware instead of fighting it. The slide I enjoyed building the most was this one. Log in, start working. On stage it built one zero at a time, and every zero got its own reaction from the room. So let's count, the same way. Remember the ads in seven different places on Windows? Start menu, search, Explorer, tray, Widgets, Edge, even the setup screen. Ads: zero. Remember my ex making me sign in just to talk? The Microsoft account you have to fight your way out of? Accounts: zero. Remember Microsoft 365 and OneDrive at first boot, begging to babysit my cat photos? Upsells: zero. Remember my ex tracking my location and reading my "diagnostic data"? Tracking: zero. And remember "Update now · Later", the button where no was never an option? There is no Later. No 42 minutes of updates before you're allowed to touch your own laptop. You log in and you start working, baby. And then it gets out of the way and lets you make it yours. That's the part I care about most. I paid for it. I get to shape it. I want my OS to look however I want, because at the end of the day it's my machine. I'm pretty sure most of you feel the same. Third hands-up: who's lost an entire weekend making their desktop look exactly right? Way more hands than for Windows. If you've never been, go spend an hour on r/unixporn. That community is full of beautifully unhinged people who take their desktops more seriously than most companies take their products.

An OS Your Agent Can Read

This is the part that I think makes 2026 different.

"All the drawbacks of Linux five minutes ago, the CLI tools, the plain config files, are now its greatest superpowers."DHH

Everything in Omarchy is a text file and a command. That used to be the reason normal people stayed away from Linux. Now it's exactly the reason an agent can actually work with your system. Think about what asking an agent to change your setup looks like on each side. On Windows or macOS, it has to drive the GUI: find the right Settings page, click the right toggle, hope nothing moved in the last update. Slow, and it breaks constantly. On Omarchy, your keybinds, your theme, your whole window manager are plain text. The agent reads the file, edits three lines, reloads Hyprland, done. You can see exactly what it changed, and undo it with git. Other operating systems treat AI like an app you download. On Omarchy it's closer to a native citizen of the system. When you can vibe-code any app that comes to mind, you should be able to vibe-code your operating system too.

The Year Of The Linux Desktop?

Everyone's been joking about this for twenty years. I think the joke is finally running out. Why now:

Windows 10 is over. Support ended in October 2025, and a lot of people are staring at hardware Windows 11 doesn't want
Games run on Linux. Steam Deck and Proton made it normal. I'm not a gamer, but I'm genuinely happy for my friends who are
Beautiful by default is real now. Omarchy is one install, not a year of ricing

So, who is it for? For developers. Vibe coders included. Which, honestly, is most of you reading this. It's not for my mom. My mom has 19,000 tabs open that she never wants to close. She lives in Brave, not Chrome, because she's my mom. She is never going to tile windows and go code, browser, code, browser all day. That's not her mode. She still hates Windows, though. And if you're sitting there with a MacBook thinking this isn't for you, it might be. Naeem Malik (@tiredkebab) is building Omarchy for Apple silicon, and he demoed it live at the same meetup, on a MacBook, held up in one hand.

And if nothing else convinces you: a fresh Omarchy install takes minutes and lands you on a ready-to-use desktop. Compare that with 42 minutes of Windows updates on a brand-new laptop before you're even allowed in.

The Room

My talk was only the opening. After me came Rudra Pratap Singh with his agent brain. He walked the room through how he actually builds in the age of AI: BMAD, agents handing work to other agents, and the kind of workflows that make coding feel a little crazy right now.

Then came Naeem with his beast of an M3 MacBook, running Omarchy. Watching Omarchy boot on Apple silicon, in a room that had just heard me roast macOS, was a moment. After that it turned into the best kind of chaos: crazy, nerdy chit-chat with Naeem and questions flying from every corner of the room. The energy in that room was something else. Everyone who showed up was genuinely curious, the curated kind of crowd you hope for and rarely get. I'm really grateful to every single one of them. Less watching. More tinkering. More ownership. And then there's Vaishnavi and Ritu. They volunteered to help me pull this off, and honestly, this day wouldn't have happened without them. They kept the whole day moving so I never had to look away from the room. And most of the moments you've seen in this post exist because one of them thought to pick up a camera at exactly the right second. A meetup is just a calendar invite until someone makes people feel like they belong there. That was them. The day felt wholesome, and a big part of that was them. Thank you, both of you. This one is as much yours as it is mine. We brought Omarchy to New Delhi, and this is just the beginning. Thanks to Naeem Malik and Rudra Pratap Singh for speaking, to KNOTiC for building the community around it, to Commudle and Thoughtworks for supporting it, and to DHH and the Omarchy team for building something that gets a room this excited about computers.

It Was Never A Breakup Story

At the start of the talk I told everyone this was a breakup story. I lied. It's a love story. For my first few years on Linux I wasn't there out of love. I was there because Windows was so bad and I didn't have a Mac. GNOME, KDE, distro hopping, I was forcing myself to make a home out of whatever I had. I already loved Linux before Omarchy. After Omarchy it feels like a forever relationship. And this is the thing I actually wanted the room to walk away with: your environment is part of your joy. We spend so much of our lives on these machines. If you work somewhere beautiful, smooth and put together, you enjoy the work more. You build more. Let's be real, between telling Cursor "fix this" and scrolling Twitter, you just want something nice to look at. You deserve that.

"Your computer should feel like an extension of your mind, not a kiosk for a tech giant."

That line is where I ended the talk. (Here's a glimpse of it, if you want to hear me say it.)

Your Turn

You don't have to wipe your laptop tonight. Just count. Open your Applications folder or your Start menu and count how many apps you installed only to fix the OS you paid for. If that number is bigger than you'd like, grab a spare SSD or an old laptop, go to omarchy.org, and give it one weekend. Worst case, you lose a weekend making your desktop look exactly right. Ask anyone at r/unixporn, that's not a loss. Keep tinkering. Keep building. Own your machine.