Tuesday, Sept. 1, 2026. The personal computer is interesting again, and it is not because Microsoft shipped another Copilot button.

Omarchy is an omakase Linux distribution: Arch underneath, the Hyprland tiling compositor for windows, and — as of version 4.0, “Quattro,” released Aug. 14 — a desktop shell rewritten in Quickshell. David Heinemeier Hansson, the 37signals CTO who built Ruby on Rails, published it in June 2025 as “my latest love letter to Linux” and “my Platonic ideal of what a developer environment should look like.” The official manual is blunter about the point: it is not trying to be Windows or macOS. It is trying to be “beautiful and better.”

That would be a ricing hobby if it had stayed a GitHub README. It did not. On Aug. 14 Hansson posted that Quattro was “one of the greatest software releases in my professional career.” The GitHub release notes, published under his account the same day, describe a full shell: bar, launcher, menus, notifications, lock screen, and polkit agent in one long-running process, replacing Waybar, Walker, Mako, hyprlock, and a pile of other Wayland parts. Dual-boot is in the installer. The ISO is under 6 GB. Fresh installs, the project says, can finish in under a minute on fast hardware. The code is MIT-licensed. The GitHub repo sat above 36,000 stars when this newsroom fetched it.

What it actually is

The current product, not the 2025 script-on-Arch origin story: you download an ISO from omarchy.org, turn off Secure Boot and TPM, and let the installer encrypt the disk by default. Existing Arch users can still layer it on. The manual’s first-run stack is the one Hansson uses: Neovim, Chromium, Obsidian, LibreOffice, Kdenlive, OBS, a Winamp-style player, Foot as the terminal since Quattro. Super + Space is a single searchable menu for apps and commands. Super + Shift + Ctrl + A launches a coding agent you pick — Claude Code, Codex, OpenCode, Pi, Gemini, Grok, Copilot, Crush, and others — lazy-installed on first use.

Hyprland still tiles. Quickshell now owns the chrome. Themes (Solitude, Last Horizon, Lupine among the new ones) restyle the bar, terminal, and editor together. Plugins install from git. That is the “malleable computer” line Hansson has been repeating on X: ask an agent, get a menu item, keep the machine.

Hansson’s case, in his words

In the June 2025 launch post he wrote that he did not know when “The Year of Linux on the Desktop” would arrive, “but I’ve never been as convinced that its coming as I am now.” The reasons he listed were not a benchmark suite. “There’s enough dissent in the water. Enough dissatisfaction with both Apple and Microsoft.” Valve’s Steam Deck runs Arch. Hyprland, he wrote, is “not just a cheap visual copy of the two major commercial operating systems, but something much more unique and compelling.”

By October he was claiming a petabyte of ISOs in thirty days, “about 150,000 installs.” Those are his numbers, from his blog, not an audited telemetry dump. The diagnosis in that post is the one that still holds: Microsoft is killing Windows 10 and, with it, “a whole slew of perfectly fine computers made prior to around 2017–2018”; it is “shoving AI into everything, and wavering on whether that might be optional”; “Windows is still Windows.” Apple, in the same essay, is cutting Intel Macs and “treating developers depending on the App Store bureaucracy.” Linux, he argued, finally looks good enough that the missing native Photoshop is Figma in a browser.

In August 2025 he put the company on the same path. “We’re going all-in on Omarchy at 37signals.” Ops and Ruby teams move over three years of hardware churn. MacBooks out; Framework laptops in, plus Framework and Beelink desktops. He said he gets about six hours mixed use on a Framework 13 and carries a 20,000 mAh Anker when he needs more. The trade he wanted: HEY’s Rails test suite on a Framework Desktop running Linux with native Docker was “almost twice as slow” on “the fastest Mac, an M4 Max.” That comparison is his, on his app, on his machines.

The 37signals handbook now states the rule in operations language. Omarchy is “our new Linux distribution that everyone on Ops, SIP, and Ruby programmers on Product are moving to.” Windows devices are unmanaged. Code and secrets stay on a Kandji Mac or an Omarchy box.

Money, and a foundation

On Aug. 21 Hansson incorporated the Omacom Foundation so the project would “hold the trademarks, fund the infrastructure, promote the work, and support the open-source projects and developers Omarchy depends on.” The Omarchy news post, updated through Aug. 31, headlines $12.6 million. Twelve founding patrons at $1 million each: Tobi Lütke, Patrick Collison, Michael Dell, Jack Dorsey, Matthew Prince, Brendan Iribe, Jason Fried, Drew Houston, Peter Steinberger, Brian Armstrong, Yunjie Dai, and Hansson. 1Password and 37signals are listed as corporate patrons at $100,000 a year for three years. Those are pledges the project published. This newsroom has not seen the foundation’s filings.

On Aug. 29 he posted that the GitHub home had moved off Basecamp incubation: “The Omacom Foundation is the new home.”

Fuck Windows

The Omarchy installer’s own getting-started page is the shortest argument in this story. To boot the ISO you turn off Secure Boot and TPM. “They’re Microsoft security schemes meant for Windows and Microsoft-affiliated Linux distributions.” Dual-boot is supported in free space, and the changelog’s reminder is to turn off BitLocker first. That is the lock-in: a PC that will not even start a non-Microsoft OS until you go into firmware and disable the gates Redmond designed for its own stack.

So: fuck Windows. Not as a distro-war chant. As a description of an operating system that treats the machine you paid for as a Microsoft product that happens to have a CPU in it. Recalls that brick working hardware. AI that will not stay optional. A Super key still labeled with a window because the OEM was told to. Hansson’s joke on Aug. 15, after Quattro shipped, was the same point with a sticker:

Microsoft still owns the default desktop on most PCs. Nobody serious is publishing a 2026 market-share collapse this newsroom could verify. What changed is the alternative. Repairable Framework hardware. Cheap, fast AMD boxes that run Docker without a VM. A compositor that does not look like a Windows 95 skin. Agents that live on the machine instead of in a cloud account you do not control. A company that ships products, 37signals, willing to make Linux the default for the people who write the code.

Why this moment is exciting

For twenty years “Year of Linux on the Desktop” was a punchline because the desktop was a skin over someone else’s computer. Apple’s silicon is extraordinary and the App Store is a tollbooth. Windows 11 is a storefront with a taskbar. Both are good at keeping you. Neither is good at letting you leave.

Omarchy is the opposite bet: opinionated defaults, every file yours, ISO on a USB, encryption on, no vendor to call. Hansson is not a humble maintainer, and the foundation’s patron list is a board of concentrated tech wealth funding an anti-lock-in OS. Hold both facts. The software is still MIT. The configs are still in ~/.config. If you hate the Neovim setup, you change it. That is the part the walled gardens cannot ship.

The exciting time in computers is not another trillion-dollar model card. It is a $500 mini PC, a Framework 13, a 13-year-old Intel Mac Hansson boosted for a two-minute install, and a desktop that treats you as the owner. Quattro is one distro. The argument is larger: the personal computer can belong to the person again. Microsoft already told you it does not. The ISO is on omarchy.org.

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