I’m nerding out again.
When I was younger, one of my hobbies was installing different Linux distributions. Mandrake, Red Hat, Fedora, whatever random distro was getting attention on Slashdot. I spent a ridiculous number of hours installing operating systems just to see what they were like.
Of all the ways I wasted time in my youth, that silly hobby turned out to be useful in my career. At the time, though, I was mostly just having fun.
I hadn’t felt that excited about a Linux distro in a long time. Then I tried Omarchy.
I’m running it on an old iMac from 2011. Apple stopped supporting this machine years ago, and it had become painfully slow running an outdated version of macOS. With Omarchy, it’s fast, remarkably stable, and fun to use. It has almost all the tools I want, and suddenly this old computer feels useful again.
There have been a few glitches. But having Codex and Claude around changes the experience of dealing with them. I was having problems with the old graphics card, and Codex fixed it. That felt magical. Debugging Linux used to be part of the hobby whether I wanted it to be or not. Now I can get help with the annoying parts and get back to enjoying the machine.
I even got PhotoCraft, a free, open-source Photoshop alternative, running on it.
Photoshop was another hobby of mine years ago, but I abandoned it when it became too expensive. PhotoCraft brings some of that excitement back. The version I installed was around 65 MB, and it feels incredibly responsive on this old iMac. Compared with my memories of waiting around for Photoshop Creative Suite, it’s pretty crazy.
Just the other day, I was complaining: “With AI, why does software still suck?”
Now I’m reconsidering. There is some great software coming out of this wave of vibe coding, and it feels like we’re only getting started. I’m sitting at a fifteen-year-old computer, running a Linux desktop I’m excited about, playing with an image editor, and asking an AI to help fix graphics problems.
Somehow I’ve ended up back at my old hobbies. I’m having a lot of fun.