The Golden Cage

Part I: The golden cage

I still remember the well-paid freelancer sitting next to me in 2002, at my first job. He was the only person in the entire company already running Mac OS X—every other designer was still using OS 9. I was fascinated by his enormous Cinema Display, the Dock, the glossy icons, and the menu bar. It looked like software from a better future.

Twenty-four years later, I am sitting on the sofa, watching my third Apple keynote in a row, and I feel nothing.

Don’t get me wrong. I still root for Apple, and I want the company to succeed. I was never a fanboy, though. I own around ten shares—not a serious position—while a former co-worker has one-third of his net worth invested in Apple.

The hardware is still excellent. It is beautifully designed, expensive, durable, and usually has a long shelf life. Owning an Apple device is still a status symbol.

But that status is also the problem. When your products occupy the premium tier, major changes become difficult. You iterate on cash cows. Rounder corners, a slightly thinner body, a bigger camera, a marginally different keyboard. The hardware remains impressive, but the company increasingly feels trapped by its own success.

Expensive. Durable. Increasingly boring.

When the presentation becomes the product

While watching the newest hardware lineup, I got bored. In a group chat with friends, we started gossiping about the presenters instead of the products—the charisma-less delivery, the awkward hand gestures, the strange styling.

Apple seems to have decided representation matters more than presentation. Every group must be represented, regardless of whether the chosen people can hold an audience for ninety seconds. But presenting is a skill. It is a craft. Some people are better at it than others.

Pretending otherwise does not make a keynote more inclusive. It makes it unwatchable.

The results speak for themselves: Craig Federighi’s parkour intro, the “Mother Nature” sketch, and years of increasingly awkward corporate theatre. Steve Jobs could stand on a stage in a black turtleneck with one slide and make the world hold its breath. Apple’s current presentations often feel like carefully managed internal communications that accidentally escaped onto YouTube.

The problem is not that Apple hires diverse people. The problem is that it appears to hire for demographic optics while treating charisma, competence, and communication as optional.

The product launch used to be the event. Now the presentation itself is something to endure.

The year I went all in

A year ago, I decided to give up and go all in.

I already owned almost everything anyway: multiple Macs, an iPad Pro, an iPhone Pro, AirPods Pro, an Apple TV, and an Apple Pencil. So I canceled Dropbox and subscribed to 6 TB of iCloud storage for €29.99 per month. I left Things, my beloved to-do app, for Apple Reminders because Things had stalled and was missing features. I considered replacing my Sonos speakers with HomePods and moving from Spotify to Apple Music.

One year later, I am back on Dropbox, back off Reminders, and writing this article.

That is the strange thing about Apple. The hardware makes it easy to commit. The software and services eventually make you regret the commitment.

The cloud that cannot hold my files

iCloud was the first thing to break my trust. That is particularly serious because cloud storage is the foundation of the modern Apple ecosystem.

Sometimes a file of a few kilobytes took hours to download. Sometimes the progress bar froze for days. Anything involving many small files—a Zettelkasten, a repository, or a design library—turned iCloud into a slot machine. I never knew whether the file I needed was actually available.

A sync service that requires manual verification is not a sync service.

After nearly a year, I moved everything back to Dropbox. I now pay for both services, but at least my files arrive when I request them. That is how bad iCloud became.

The intelligence that never arrived

Siri is the industry’s punchline. I haven’t used it once in more than two years, on either Mac or iPhone, and I don’t miss it.

Dictation is worse because dictation is a solved problem. In 2026, I still cannot dictate on a Mac or iPhone in a way that handles multiple languages, punctuation, and context out of the box. I use Raycast Dictation instead—which is excellent—but Apple makes it unnecessarily difficult to set it up as an additional keyboard on iOS. I have to switch between apps every time I want to speak instead of type.

Apple sold “Apple Intelligence” on stage while shipping a voice assistant that cannot reliably set two timers.

The marketing is futuristic. The experience is not.

Glass over black is black

Then there is the interface itself.

The new glass design is a catastrophe. It is visually noisy, difficult to parse, and actively hostile to people with visual impairments—me included. In apps such as IMDb, it can be difficult to find the search field because glass over black is simply black.

Contrast is not a style choice you can trade away for a reflection effect.

The Launchpad replacement—App.app, really, Apple?—is such a mess that I am grateful Raycast exists. System Settings has been optimized for a phone and is now worse on every desktop it runs on. Installing an application still has several possible paths depending on where it came from. The two or three competing corner radii across macOS have become a running joke.

This is the company that used to publish the best Human Interface Guidelines in the industry.

The abandoned wing of the museum

Some stock applications are fine: Calendar, Clock, Contacts, Font Book, Keynote, Numbers, Pages, Stocks, and Weather. Nothing special, but they do their jobs.

Then there is the abandoned wing of the museum. Who still uses Automator when Shortcuts exists—and why do both ship? Freeform is a mess and still lacks a proper dark mode after years. Journal exists, apparently. Home is badly designed and integrates poorly with many appliances, so you are often better off using the manufacturer’s own application. Health still hasn’t arrived on desktop.

And then there are the applications I actually need every day:

• Mail is a catastrophe. The new tabbed inbox—now copied everywhere—is worse than useless. It actively hides mail from me.
• Maps performs well and looks good, but the underlying data remains poor, and business integration is hopeless. I use Google Maps instead, despite disliking much of Google’s software.
• Reminders is an especially poor experience. Subtasks in a repeating task do not repeat. Apple should acquire Cultured Code, the makers of Things, and let them build a proper replacement.
• Safari? No. Not a serious Browser.
• Terminal is bad. I do not know a single serious developer who uses it as their primary terminal.
• TextEdit is an abomination. I want Word or Markdown. TextEdit is neither.
• Notes is strangely unpleasant to use. Exporting multiple notes at once only started working recently.
• Music and Podcasts are acceptable on the phone and miserable on the desktop.

That is not a list of minor complaints. That is most of the operating system.

Nagware with a fruit logo

Apple’s software has started to behave like Windows. Bloatware and nagware from a company that built its brand on taste.

The Apple TV home screen carries a permanent banner selling Apple TV+. In Health, the third tab is Health+, and I cannot remove it—not even after making it clear that I will never subscribe. If you buy a new device, they nag you for three months to try their gaming, streaming, and fitness services.

This is a device I paid a premium for, yet it shows me advertising I cannot turn off.

Cory Doctorow calls this enshittification: products get worse when companies begin optimizing for extraction instead of user experience. Apple used to be the counterexample. Now it is a case study.

Security as a leash

The lock-in has also become increasingly hostile, always disguised as security.

Running an application Apple has not blessed requires navigating several warnings and system settings. Meaningful system modifications live behind the boot process, which many company-managed devices cannot access. You cannot replace the mediocre window manager with a better one because the necessary hooks are closed.

Some of this is genuinely about safety. Much of it is about ensuring that the only software running on your Mac is software Apple can control and tax.

The result is a computer that looks open but behaves like an appliance.

There is no third option

I am not only unhappy with Apple. I am unhappy with the state of software in general.

On mobile, we have iOS and Android, both compromised in different ways. On the desktop, we have Windows, macOS, and Linux, all with serious drawbacks. Windows is worse than macOS in almost every way—except, absurdly, window management, which actually works.

I often fantasize about a third option. Something that could roll up the whole market. A SpaceX phone with direct Starlink connectivity and no carrier in between.

But while I waited for somebody to build that third option, I discovered part of it already existed.

It just did not have a keynote.

Part II: Get in, losers. We’re moving to Linux.

Then I found Omarchy.

It is not a perfect operating system. It is not a polished corporate replacement for macOS. It is not another sterile product from a company with a thousand employees and a brand manual.

Omarchy is an opinionated Arch Linux distribution created by David Heinemeier Hansson—DHH, the creator of Ruby on Rails and co-founder of 37signals—and it feels like somebody decided that computers should be fun again.

That matters.

Apple helped create Omarchy

The story begins, appropriately, with Apple.

In 2020, 37signals launched HEY, a subscription-based email service. Apple initially approved the iOS app but rejected subsequent updates because HEY subscriptions were purchased on the web instead of through Apple’s in-app purchase system. Apple wanted its 15–30 percent cut.

DHH responded loudly and publicly. The dispute became one of the clearest examples of Apple using platform control to tax businesses that depend on access to its customers. Eventually, HEY remained on the App Store after a compromise that let users create a temporary account inside the application while continuing to sell the actual subscription outside Apple’s payment system.

The conflict returned in 2024 when Apple rejected HEY Calendar under similar reasoning.

The details matter less than the pattern. Apple claimed to be protecting users while enforcing a business model that gave Apple control over software distribution, payments, and customer relationships.

Omarchy is part of the reaction against that model.

DHH first built Omakub, a one-command Linux setup based on Ubuntu and GNOME, to configure his own machines and eventually help move 37signals employees to Linux. Omakub proved Linux didn’t have to start with an empty terminal and a weekend of suffering. A beautiful, preconfigured system could attract people who had no interest in becoming amateur distribution maintainers.

But GNOME was not the final answer. DHH wanted something more keyboard-driven, terminal-centric, and malleable. The project moved from Ubuntu to Arch and from GNOME to Hyprland. Omarchy grew from that transition and was released on 26 June 2025.

The name combines omakase—“I’ll leave it to the chef”—with Arch. The chef chooses the defaults, but you can still send the courses back.

That is exactly the right attitude for a Linux distribution.

Linux with taste

Arch Linux traditionally asks you to assemble almost everything yourself. That is part of its appeal, but also part of the problem. The Arch community often treats difficulty as a virtue (“I use Arch, BTW”).

If installing and maintaining your operating system requires a long evening of reading wikis, troubleshooting obscure boot problems, and remembering which configuration file controls which tiny part of the desktop, then you are apparently earning membership in an elite club.

Omarchy rejects that entire premise.

It is still Arch underneath, but it arrives as a coherent system. Hyprland manages the windows. The interface is keyboard-first. The terminal is central, not decorative. Themes, shortcuts, notifications, launchers, application menus, and system behavior are designed to belong together.

The point isn’t to prove you can build a desktop from raw ingredients. The point is to have a desktop that works—and then change it when you want to.

This is why some Arch traditionalists seem personally offended by Omarchy. They built part of their identity around Arch being difficult to install and maintain. DHH made it easy. Their special knowledge became less special.

I do not care.

If my mother can install Arch Linux from a USB stick, that is not a threat to Linux. That is progress.

Omarchy is opinionated the way Apple used to be. The difference is that Omarchy exposes its decisions. Apple gives you a beautiful box and locks the lid. Omarchy gives you a beautiful starting point and lets you open the engine.

The summer Linux became fun again

Omarchy exploded during the summer of 2026 on 𝕏.

Version 4, called Quattro, rebuilt much of the desktop around Quickshell, a programmable shell toolkit based on Qt and QML. Instead of relying on a collection of loosely connected components for the bar, launcher, notifications, lock screen, and widgets, Quickshell brings them into a single, coherent, scriptable environment.

The result is technically interesting and visually appealing. Typography, themes, animations, the terminal, wallpapers, and retro computer references give Omarchy a distinct personality. It feels closer to the computer culture of the 1980s and 1990s than to the corporate software culture of 2026.

That culture was messy, experimental, and slightly anarchic. People opened their machines, changed things, wrote utilities for themselves, and shared them with strangers. They did not wait for a platform owner to approve a feature request.

They built the feature.

Omarchy has that energy.

The project also has a sense of humor that Apple has completely lost. The slogan is not “Empowering the next generation of creators.” It is “We can fix everything.” The tone is self-deprecating, optimistic, and slightly ridiculous. When DHH announced the move to Linux, the message was essentially: Get in, losers. We’re moving to Linux.

I like that enormously.

The hype is not based on pretending Linux is already perfect. It is based on the belief that problems can be fixed. A bug is not evidence that the entire project is illegitimate. A missing feature is not a reason to wait for a corporation to solve it. The system is open, the code is available, and the people building it can still change direction.

That optimism is infectious.

Rich technology founders and open software

Omarchy’s sudden growth would be interesting even without the politics. With the money and people now surrounding it, it is impossible to ignore.

The Omacom Foundation attracted millions of dollars from prominent technology founders and companies, including Tobi Lütke, Patrick Collison, Michael Dell, Jack Dorsey, Matthew Prince, Brendan Iribe, Jason Fried, Drew Houston, Peter Steinberger, 1Password, DigitalOcean, and others.

The patron list looks like a meeting of technology oligarchs. Critics call it “Oligarchy Linux.” DHH responded by embracing the joke and reserving oligarchy.fyi.

The key point is that this isn’t venture capital in the usual sense. Nobody is buying shares in Omarchy or expecting the operating system to become a subscription service. The money funds the infrastructure and people that open-source projects normally depend on while asking maintainers to work for free.

The foundation sponsors Hyprland and its creator, Vaxry, as well as Quickshell and mise. It funds kernel work, themes, plugins, infrastructure, and development. The operating system itself remains free.

That is a better use of technology wealth than another food-delivery startup.

The project has also developed a surprisingly strong brand: a distinctive logo, a new website available in more than thirty languages, a carefully designed typeface, a catalog of thousands of plugins, and even a groovy 1980s-style song called “We Can Fix Everything” by Evin Koontz.

This is not how operating systems are normally marketed. No glossy video shows a diverse group of people standing in a white room and pretending a slightly thinner laptop will change their lives.

There is a logo, a clever typeface, a ridiculous song, and a community that makes plugins for fun. And there are lots of photos of messy home offices with old computers, monitors, and happy people tinkering with Omarchy.

I prefer it.

The politics are part of the package

DHH has been a target of online political outrage for years. In 2021, Basecamp changed its internal policies around political discussion and activism. The company lost a significant portion of its employees during the resulting controversy, and the dispute became a famous example of the culture war inside technology companies.

I agree with DHH’s refusal to surrender to that pressure.

The current ideology of compulsory conformity treats disagreement as harm and demands that every institution repeat the approved language of the moment. Give it an inch, and it asks for control of the entire room.

DHH understood that you cannot negotiate with people who interpret every concession as proof that they were right. He also understood that ridicule is sometimes more effective than a corporate apology. Someone willing to laugh at an accusation is much harder to intimidate than someone who immediately starts explaining how sorry they are.

The Omarchy community has seen its own share of this conflict. People have attempted to impose codes of conduct on the project. Critics have called it “Nazi Linux” or complained that it is an oligarchy of wealthy technology founders.

Much of it is hysterical.

I recently saw a Bluesky screenshot filled with such unhinged accusations. Someone in the screenshot was a person I had worked with before. It was embarrassing—not because criticism is forbidden, but because grown adults had apparently lost all sense of proportion.

The pandemic did something strange to many people. It convinced them that moral panic was a substitute for thought.

DHH’s public position is simple: everyone is welcome, regardless of sex, color, or race, as long as they enjoy technology. That is a much better basis for a technical community than demanding that everyone share the same politics.

Omarchy is also openly friendly to artificial intelligence. Agents are not treated as suspicious intruders that must be locked out of the system. They are treated as another category of user—and potentially the most important one.

That is where DHH is right again.

An operating system for agents

DHH discussed this at length in his three-hour conversation with Lex Fridman. The argument is straightforward: if software agents can build custom applications from natural-language instructions, a closed operating system becomes a serious disadvantage.

On macOS, I can modify only what Apple allows me to modify. I can replace applications, but not the system’s core assumptions. I can install utilities, but I cannot fundamentally reshape the desktop. Window management remains strangely limited. System integration is available only through the interfaces Apple chooses to expose.

On Omarchy, the system is mine.

If I want a plugin, I can ask an agent to build one. If I want a different status bar, workflow, or shortcut that connects three unrelated tools, I can create it. The result may be ugly. It may break. It may need improvement.

But the system doesn’t start by telling me no.

That is why the Omarchy plugin ecosystem grew so quickly. The official catalog now contains thousands of community plugins. The entire concept is built around letting people—and increasingly, agents—create and modify the desktop.

Apple has spent years making its operating systems harder to alter.

Omarchy assumes that alteration is the point.

My old MacBook gets a second life

I had a 2019 Intel MacBook Pro that had become almost unusable under macOS. It was slow, hot, and frustrating. Instead of throwing it away, I decided to use it as my Omarchy machine.

The contrast was absurd.

The Omarchy ISO was roughly 6 GB, so I downloaded it and put it on a USB-C stick. Preparing the MacBook—logging out of iCloud, cleaning up Photos, and removing the old macOS installation—took about 45 minutes.

The complete Omarchy installation took one minute and 37 seconds.

It booted even faster.

A known issue involving the two different processors used in Intel Macs could cause the machine to shut down unexpectedly. I ran into it. An agent helped me understand the problem and find a solution.

This was not a day spent searching through ten-year-old forum posts and trying random commands. I explained the problem, tested the proposed fix, and moved on.

Then I connected my Apple Studio Display.

It worked.

The display’s USB-C ports did not immediately pass through my Logitech MX Master dongle and ZSA Voyager keyboard, so I used agents to configure that as well. I connected GitHub, installed Brave, synchronized my browser settings, and created an Omarchy dotfiles repository.

The whole process took less than 45 minutes.

I moved from a dead-feeling MacBook to a working Linux workstation before I finished fighting with iCloud.

That was the moment the argument stopped being theoretical.

I am having fun again

I enjoy using Omarchy. More importantly, I enjoy configuring it.

I want to learn it. I want to play with it. I want to understand how the pieces fit together. I want to change the theme, write small utilities, try different workflows, and break things without waiting for Apple to decide whether my idea fits its product strategy.

The theming is excellent. The branding is excellent. The website is excellent. I can try it in a virtual machine on both Mac and Windows before committing to hardware.

Omarchy is not finished. Security criticisms exist, and some deserve serious answers. A rolling Arch-based system with a large collection of opinionated defaults is not automatically safer than a heavily controlled commercial operating system.

But even valid criticism is often delivered destructively, as if one flaw proves the entire project should be abandoned.

Omarchy’s response is better: Fix it.

That is the correct attitude for open software. Not denial. Not perfectionism. Fix the problem, publish the change, and keep moving.

Part III: Breaking out of the golden cage

I am not leaving Apple completely

Will I leave the Apple ecosystem completely?

No.

I still own a lot of Apple hardware. It is good hardware. My iPhone works. My iPad is useful. The Apple Studio Display is excellent. I am not going to throw everything into the street because I have rediscovered Linux.

But I am no longer willing to confuse convenience with loyalty.

Replacing the dependencies

I have already started removing dependencies.

I stopped using DEVONthink after years of relying on it for document storage. The subscription price climbed above €90 per year, while Dropbox gives me document storage, full-text search, OCR, and access across all my devices. I replaced Eagle as my asset management system with refern.

I moved to Todoist. It isn’t as beautiful as Things, but it works everywhere, and agents like Grok Bot can help plan and organize tasks. I installed Penpot with Coolify, and I prefer it to Figma in several important ways. Obsidian is already my main note-taking application, and it works on Linux without asking me to surrender control of my files.

I am also replacing iFinance with Actual Budget and Wealthfolio.

The question has changed

The point is not that every replacement is immediately better. The point is that I now ask a different question.

Not: What does Apple offer me?

But: Can I replace this?

The answer is increasingly yes.

The last holdout: Raycast

The most obvious thing I still miss is Raycast. It is one of the best pieces of software on my Mac, and I pay €16 per month for it. The company has built a strong technical foundation in Rust and already supports multiple platforms, but Linux support still doesn’t seem to be on the roadmap.

I have no idea why.

A Linux version of Raycast would be an obvious fit. Omarchy is being built for keyboard-first workflows, agents, and custom plugins. It is almost as if the two projects were designed for each other.

Until Raycast arrives, I use other launchers and pretend not to be annoyed.

It may take years to remove my dependency on Apple. That is fine. A cage does not become less real because leaving it takes time.

I have started

The important thing is that I have started.

I am becoming comfortable with a mixed ecosystem: Apple hardware, Linux computers, open-source services, self-hosted applications, and tools that do not require a single company to own every part of my digital life. Maybe I will buy a Framework notebook one day. Maybe I will replace more Apple devices. Maybe some Apple services will remain because they are genuinely useful.

But the relationship has changed.

Apple no longer owns my imagination

Apple still makes beautiful machines. It no longer owns my imagination.

Omarchy reminded me that computers are not supposed to be sealed appliances. They are supposed to be tools—open to modification, experimentation, and improvement.

The future will belong to systems that let agents build exactly what their users need, not to systems that force everybody to wait for the next keynote.

I am not leaving Apple today.

I am simply refusing to remain trapped there.