What do Omarchy, the iPod and Dropbox have in common?
Geeks are the best at creating technology.
But they are also often the worst at understanding what it is they've created.
iPodn't
Witness the historically epic review of the iPod when it came out, on a site called Slashdot (subtitle: news for nerds, stuff that matters) which, at the time, was an epicentre of online attention, at least among geeks:
CmdrTaco (who was one of the main curators on the site and had quasi-infinite geek cred) dismissed it in typical blunt fashion:
No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame.
From the "well-thats-not-very-exciting" dept, no less.
Of course, the iPod would go on to become one of the most successful products of all time. CmdrTaco, bless him, looked at the feature set and saw something unimpressive. There were many mp3 players at the time, some with CDs, some with hard drives, and comparing the iPod feature for feature made it look bad. But of course the iPod was more than its feature. It was integrated into an ecosystem that included iTunes, which included the ability for the average law-abiding citizen to easily buy single tracks easily, which broke the previous system whereby labels forced people to buy entire CDs, without requiring using "illegal" software like Napster or more complicated sofware like Gnutella.
It also made just the right compromises on technical specs and quality and look and feel, and had an innovative, pleasing user interface (the scroll wheel), and so managed to seem cool and desirable.
It made having music in your pocket fashionable and legit, taking the mp3 player concept out of the geek world into the normie world.
I had had 3 or 4 mp3 players before that, but none of them had ever been something my normie friends looked at and wanted.
So the iPod wasn't just a physical product, it was a cultural phenomenon powered by a tight application of technology.
Dropped box
Geeks struck again with Dropbox. Being a YCombinator startup, it was first announced on Hacker News, which by 2007 was starting to rival Slashdot for geek attention.
The gist: I can build this myself "trivially" with a bunch of technology acronyms most normal people don't understand.
Again, the reviewer (let's not beat up on Brandon) committed a very common sin of geeks reviewing technology: he looked at the technology, not at all the stuff outside the technology itself, or at what it meant for "normal people" who don't know what FTP, SVN and CVS are, or even what a "mounted filesystem" could possibly be.
But of course Dropbox was also more than the sum of its parts. The "it just works" magic ingredient, coupled with a system designed so that its users didn't need to know anything about tech to make use of it, enabled it to become a hugely successful product and a multi-billion dollar company.
Ohnomarchy
The latest such episode is Omarchy, a linux distribution created by the ever-controversial DHH (who, don't forget, makes for a great Claude-powered code reviewer!).
It's designed to be useful to devs out of the box, to look good as if it belonged in a sci-fi movie (something that operating systems fans call ricing), and to ride the bleeding edge of linux technology through being a derivative of the "Arch Linux" distribution, which prides itself on using the latest version of everything.
As usual, most geeks don't get it. What's unusual is that this is actually a product for geeks - Omarchy is squarely aimed at developers who want to escape the Windows/Mac ecosystem for something more in integrity with their beliefs[footnote]The fact that the core drive for Omarchy's existence is not technical but ideological ought to already be a clue that it's not "just technology", btw.[/footnote], but without having to spend all their time maintaining their computers, a problematic reputation that Linux has justifiably earned over and over again, for decades.
In this case, I guess there are two classes of geeks:
First is the "original" Linux geeks, the ones who have already been using Linux and maybe Arch for a long time, already switched to Linux desktops, and so don't see what the fuss is about, and maybe feel even a little hostile about the appearance of this "Omarchy" thing they don't understand, and are confused and fearful about why it's getting so much attention. It's scary when you feel left out of the joke.
Second, is the vast hordes of geeks who may have used Linux occasionally in the past, or not at all, but really would like to switch, and are very clear that they want to use Linux, not maintain Linux. Many of them are "proper geeks" in their own right, willing to contribute to open source projects, just not willing to spend hours each week tweaking their operating systems just to maintain core functionalities, because they have jobs, lives, families, other things they want in life more that to tweak config files.
It makes sense that the first type of geek doesn't get it.
Much like CmdrTaco looking at the iPod and seeing an inferior pile of features.
Much like BrandonM looking at Dropbox and seeing a few FTP/CVS scripts.
They look at Omarchy and see a pile of dotfiles on top of Arch Linux.
What Omarchy actually is
What they don't get is that like the iPod, Omarchy is a cultural movement. And like Dropbox, the power of making things simpler is that it vastly expands how many people can use it.
DHH is a leader. Some hate him, some love him, but there's not doubt that he leads, from the front, creating new things, drawing attention to them, and giving them momentum and life. He has been that his whole life.
In Omarchy, he's leading, once again, and this time he's leading a cultural movement away from the Mac, that is concretising around a piece of technology (or a collection of technologies, since Framework and Beelink computers and even keyboards and monitors seem to be on board for the ride). If you look only at what's on the 6GB ISO and criticise that, you're missing the point of what it is.
And... let's forgive the Linux geeks. This is a recurring sin of geeks everywhere.
We're good at creating technologies. We're rarely good at understanding what we've actually created.