Linux's Birthday and My Journey With It

Let me preface this post with the fact that I was a huge macOS fanboy for a decade or so and only started feeling that the OS was getting in my way a couple of years ago.

With today being the 34th birthday of Linux it made me reflect a bit on how I have used it over the years. I started out using Ubuntu at University 12 years ago for some intro labs and for learning how to navigate the filesystem with a terminal. That experience was very meh, I thought the OS looked clunky and I was not sold on using the terminal over a GUI, especially when compared to the sleek and beautiful macOS UI. So this was an opinion that I held on to for a long time, of course I was using Linux in the cloud for servers and even just running stuff with docker and so on but that was it really.

Then around mid to late 2023, for some reason, I really got into optimizing and customizing my developer experience, but also just my interactions with my computer. The best way I can describe it is like I started to not only think of the computer as a tool to get things done with, but rather an extension of myself somehow. At this point I was looking for something different, something that would allow me to feel closer to the computer in a sense. Randomly I got recommended (is it ever randomly though? I feel like the Youtube algorithm somehow knows what I’m really looking for, this has happened more than once) a clip of ThePrimeagen just absolutely flying all over the screen, editing code, compiling, looking at the result, back to the browser, back to the code, paste here, paste there etc. I was just amazed and decided I want that for myself so i started learning Neovim, tmux etc. Very slowly at first but as time passed I started to gain quite a bit of confidence with the tools.

At this point in time I was still using macOS as my daily driver, but now I was starting to see the problems. Just how the OS is blocking you from doing what you want and even on the “Pro” machines you cannot really do anything they don’t want you to do. I find macOS to be quite an opinionated OS actually, and that is super fine, but I started to not share those same opinions anymore slowly but surely. My frustrations really reached a tipping point when i was trying to use a proper window manager on macOS, I chose to go with the yabai + skhd combo and wow is the setup brittle. It feels like on every macOS update something new breaks or stops working. So i thought if this is already the case, and one of the major points against a Linux desktop environment is that it can be prone to breaking, then I’m already in pain let me at least have the freedom that comes with Linux.

So I went back to Ubuntu and tried it again. It was again just okej, it was better than the first time because I was super used to a terminal based workflow and the tools I used for my job, Neovim, tmux, zsh, eza, zioxide, yazi etc were the same but something was still missing. Then around a month ago I came across an Arch Linux config package called Omarchy, from the famous programmer DHH. The first thing that I noticed was that even Ubuntu felt slow, bloated and clunky compared to Arch.

Is 2025 finally the year of the desktop Linux? I don’t know, but enough good things cannot be said about Omarchy. It is such a well thought out config package (soon they are releasing their own ISO, so it will be correct to call it a distro!). It is very opinionated and I have modified it quite a bit during this time that i have been daily driving it, but the difference is that I’m totally free to control every aspect of the OS and computer. Arch and by extension Omarchy feel like they respect the intellect of the user, not like macOS that tries to baby you and tell you what is best for you. Best of all was that it was so intuitive and easy to modify the parts that I didn’t like and get it just right, the foundation that Omarchy gives you to build on top of is just top-notch, but it’s DHH, who would have expected anything less from him.

To round things off, happy birthday Linux, and congratulations on managing to stay open and free. Congratulations of managing to become the backbone of modern civilisation, congratulations to all the contributors for pouring in so much heart and effort into Linux and creating something that is on the same scale of greatness as the 7 wonders of the world. Last but not least, thank you Linux for showing me that we don’t have to settle for what Apple and Microsoft think computing is and should be, we are allowed to and I think owe it to ourselves to decide for ourselves what computing means and is to us.