0:00The following is a conversation with David Hiner Hansen, also known as DHH.
0:05You know that David has been working very hard on Omari over the past year or so, and recently Omari has been gaining lots of popularity, and there's so much happening there. You also know that I made fairly critical videos about Omari in the past, but I'm a man who likes to have strong opinions, weekly held, and Omari is getting to a stage where it becomes impossible to ignore. They raised over 20 million in funding. They
0:33are setting up a security team and I think in like the history of desktop Linux, something truly unique is happening here. So I invited David because I wanted to know more about what is actually driving him to do all of this. Uh why is he building Omari and what is happening right now in the project. We also discuss security and much more. So yes, I have changed my tune on Omari and in this podcast you can find out why. Enjoy. David, welcome
1:01to the show. Every time when I open X these days, I see just you and Omari.
1:07Omari Omari. So there's lots of things going on. So let's start there. Like what's going on in Omari right now? What are you working on right now?
1:16Yeah, thank you first of all for having me on. And second of all, everything everything all at once is going on because we have spun up so many sub projects within the Umachi fold that even I am having a difficult time keeping up and I literally spend 16 hours a day most days on this project right now. And it's simply incredible to see the outburst of creativity and enthusiasm and just people having fun
1:43with computers in a way where they experience something they haven't in a while especially for folks who've used computers for a long time and originally had a sense of wonder when they got into computers and then maybe that sense of wonder got a little lost along the way and now they found it again with Amachi.
2:01So the creativity that we're able to combine from the artistry side, we have a lot of people who are extremely creative making beautiful themes, making all these designs and marrying that with a hardcore engineering effort to secure the system, to make it more performant, to build our own bespoke kernels, to what have you, is quite special, I think, because if you look historically on Linux, there's been a lot of people who were very strong on the engineering
2:31side and could build very fast and secure systems, but I hope I don't offend them here, but they weren't always uh the best at color coordination. They weren't always the best at making things look uh pleasant because they made things look functional because that was what they were interested in. I think what's going on with Amachi right now is that we're bridging the gap between those two worlds, between art and engineering, and we're getting something very unique. And
2:58as before we even go into the specialness of the Amachi Quattro release which is of course the focus of an Agenda OS something you can change even if you're not a programmer even if you're not a Linux specialist you can now mutate your Malible operating system into becoming whatever you want it to be which has just in the first I think three weeks we had 3,000 plugins created that's 3,000 mini apps or major apps in
3:26some cases created by people who in many cases never programmed. They were simply vibe coding as we were calling it five minutes ago. I think that term actually needs to retire because at this point even the individuals who are very versed in this technology are vibe coding and I think there's some negative connotations associated with that that do not be the current intelligence we have available in the models. So put that aside. The
3:55excitement is really around just enabling so many more people to create things with their computer to make it their own to share things that they come across and combining for a new type of community too. I think if you look at both the Linux community, but perhaps also the larger tech community, there's been times where it's been like a little rough. Like the historic norm here was
4:23uh RTE FM, read the [ __ ] manual. And a lot of people get turned off by that because the atmosphere is just not that pleasant. So, I'm trying to create both a beautiful, malible machine that's actually the perfect computer, at least for me, on first installation, but also a community that's full of people who are simply happy about what they're building, and want to share and don't mind that there's new people coming into the community who don't know everything,
4:52who know nothing in fact, and are still willing to help them and be excited about things and really focus on just the progress we've been able to create together, the optimism, not be P doom all the time. Just here's a space on the internet where we're going to be happy about computers. We're going to have fun with them. We're going to make them beautiful. And then you can go somewhere else if you want to just, I don't know, be depressed about it.
5:18Okay. Wow. So, that's already a lot to unpack there. And um well I I think anyone who has been following you for a while now or for recently has seen the the clowns and the circus and the things that's got that that been said. Um but you do have a point there where um some of these projects, some of these things are surrounded by let's call it drama.
5:42There's people interacting with each other in ways that have nothing to do with the tech side of things. So yes, I I think that's a very inspiring and interesting thing that's happening around Omari here. Am I saying Omari or You got it right. Omari. I even I have a special pronunciation website to keep that R silent.
6:06You can call it whatever you want.
6:07There's GIF and GIF and a lot of other words that go back with different pronunciations. Some people call it omari. Fine. Whatever you want to call it. I call it umachi. Yeah. Omachi.
6:19Omachi. So the I think that is one of the the coolest things about what what's happening because you have such a large brand and your your your energetic personality. Bringing that to Linux and the community around it is something very special. So I want to ask you like um you've been open that um money is not your um motivation anymore to do things that that is kind of settled for you in
6:47your life. So, of all things in the world that you could be doing right now where you could race cars all day if you wanted to or lie on the beach, of all things, how did you end up putting so much energy and and time into a Linux distro? Why this?
7:05It's a good question and it has a simple answer. I just love computers and I've loved computers since I was 5 years old.
7:12I got my first Armstrot 464 back in 84. And before that, I spent a lot of time in front of a Commodore 64 with the other kids on my street. And from right at that first moment, Ya Kung Fu, that was the first game I played on a computer. I was just enthralled. This was the most interesting thing in my opinion in the world for a very long time. Now I found other interesting
7:39things whether it's family or racing or whatever else have you. But I have just this deep love of the computer. I just really like using them. Sometimes it has a purpose. A lot of times it has a purpose. I've been able to make a career using computers to build things. But I also just like using computers for their own sake. I just like sitting in front of computers and doing stuff with them.
8:02So when I discovered Linux and the access you have to the bowels of the system, how much you can change, that really clicked something in me, very similar to what happened when I discovered Ruby back in 2003 and started building Basecam, which then became Ruby on Rails as the framework that underpinned it. It clicked something in me where I suddenly went from in the Ruby case, well, I'm just using programs because I want programs. It's a it's a
8:31tool. It's merely functional. I'm seeking an outcome to falling in love with Ruby as a programming language and as a way to express your ideas and your visions about uh software in this particular language. And then I didn't really have that with the computer. I was a Mac user for 20 years and like that a lot. I think Mac and Apple has some really good instincts about what makes good computers and they have good
9:00taste. But then I've also found that the kind of company Apple has become in later years were diverging from some of the things I originally liked about the Mac now it's less about empowering the users, more about controlling the whole flow, having your toll booth sit in front of all software distribution, collecting 30% of the whole damn economy. And I just found myself drifting away from that. Uh I also then
9:27had some skirmishes with Apple over the years. We launched an email system called hey.com back in 2020.
9:35Apple tried to kill it if we didn't hand over 30% of our revenues. And I know just you know what's funny even with that I I couldn't even imagine using something else. I'd been using the Mac for so long literally at that point nearly 20 years. And however much they insulted me or tried to damage our business, I still couldn't even see that it could be something else because I only at the time really thought that the alternative was Windows. And I'd used
10:04Windows before. And I even gave it another try and I realized that's just worse in all the ways. I'm just not a Windows person. I used Windows for a few years back in the 90s when that was the only way to play video games. But I didn't want to run it as my personal computer.
10:19And I never really considered that Linux was a third option because I'd been using Linux for I don't know 25 years on the server always. But whenever I would encounter the Linux desktop community, I thought I saw a bunch of nerds that I could not see myself in, that they were interested in other things and they didn't care about font rendering and color coordination or ease of install or curated defaults or any of the things
10:48that I typically or not just typically that I always care about. And what I like so much about the Mac that they really cared about those things. They really cared about the design. They really cared about the fonts. They really cared about the defaults. But eventually push came to shove and Apple put the final straw on the camel's back and it broke and I went to Linux first Ubuntu gave that a try and found a lot that I liked. I didn't actually love Ubuntu out of the box. So very quickly I tried to personalize it and I tried to
11:18build it up such a way that it was uh something I could replicate across machines. That was what became um coupoop. That was the first kind of dabble I did in this. I ran about that for about a year and then a little over a year ago I got uh snookered by YouTube. This was uh from uh Typcraft and uh the primagen just had a lot of videos on other ways of using Linux using tiling window managers and whatnot. And I thought I'll give it a
11:48go. And I tried Hyperland on top of Arch. And in one way, it was the opposite of everything I want out of computer. Everything was an atomic bit I had to put together myself. It was just a Lego set dumped on the floor and then an invitation to build your own Millennium Falcon. That's not typically what I want out of a computer. But what I realized was if I want the perfect computer, I have to start from the
12:17smallest Lego blocks. And the blocks that Ubuntu gave me were not small enough. They were Duplo, not Legos. You could build something out of Duplo and you can have fun with it, but most kids grow out of Duplo by age five maybe at the latest and then they like Legos because they could build more things with Legos. And I realized that that transition from the Ubuntu Duplo to the Arch and Hyperland Legos was the unlock that I needed to fall in love with the
12:44Linux machine like I had with the Ruby programming language. And once that happened, I realized I now have a straight shot to building the perfect computer for me. Then I spent a year on Amamachi in that shape getting it up to version three. First we went from just the dot files. Then we had an ISO. Then we had our own mirror. Then we had our own package repository. And we just kept accumulating all the terrain that a
13:12large distribution would use. And then something happened. And what happened was that AI got unbelievably good in about the spring of this year. It was already really good in the December of last year, November last year. That was when Opus 45 came out on November 24. That to me was a real inflection point.
13:32And what's been happening the last three four months is pure magic. I have not written a line of serious production code for about four months. Everything is being created by the agents because they now write code that is arguably better the majority of the time that what I could write myself as a professional who's dedicated my entire career to this for 25 years.
13:58The agents are just better. Especially when you use them in adversarial mode and you have codecs and fable or whatever other models that you use and you use them to critique each other. The kind of implementations that they can produce are just truly magical and especially in Linux because all these models have pre-training that includes the 40 million lines of Linux code. So they know everything. They know every problem where to look, where to diagnose it. And I have not had a single issue
14:28with Linux in probably since November that an agent couldn't fix. And that was also one of the other things with Linux historically that I didn't actually appreciate so much, which was that whenever it would break, which would be somewhat frequently, it would spit out an error message about a config file in a sub package I had no clue about. And then I had to go troll the internet and find some forum where a passive aggressive nerd would have the answer
14:57but not really want to share it before they demeaned you and shamed you for being an idiot that didn't read the source or compile it themselves or whatever else they thought the bar was for participation and agents cured all that. Agents are very polite and when you ask them about a problem in Linux they will fix it for you and tell you why they did it without any prejudice.
15:18So, I just thought, hey, do you know what? That's a good time. And you combine all of that together. And now I'm obsessed. Now I see that not only can I build in theory the perfect computer with Linux, I can build it in practice. And that's what Umachi has inspired, I believe, in so many people that they can see what I ship as a bunch of really good defaults. They don't have to figure everything out. There's everything is set up. Everything is
15:47beautiful. But as soon as they then learn it, they can take that base and turn it into their perfect computer, their mutation, their aesthetics. And in that space is just a lot of excitement and a lot of what the business world would call blue ocean. There's not a lot of competition because if you look at the historic alternatives, Windows and Mac, they're incredibly hostile to the Agentic OS idea because they're very locked down. Windows is a is a mess in
16:16in all regards. you have to use computer use. So your agent is is literally moving a cursor around to click things. It's totally archaic. And then Apple on the other hand have some stances around actually security which we could talk about and other things that just make it very difficult to mutate the system. Linux is the perfect fit for AI. Everything is a CLI. Everything is a config file. Everything can be scripted.
16:39Everything can be encoded. Everything can be captured. And therefore everything can also be debugged and evolved. So we have this perfect storm and then you'd think the Linux world would embrace that but no much of the Linux world at the very best they're neutral. They're like well you can do whatever you want and then there's a huge portion of the Linux world that's actively hostile. You look at the Gnome project, you look at the Asahi project, you look at a bunch of projects that are in there articles of uh incorporation
17:09saying no AI write it all by hand. And I just go, okay, well, if the old systems aren't capable of getting to the agentic OS and the other Linux systems by a large part don't want to, we actually have a moral obligation to deliver omachi for the people who do want to run Linux and who do want an agentic operating system.
17:34The the phrase that comes to mind is that escalated quickly. Just to just to re rephrase it, you went into to to Linux, you discovered it, you were on YouTube. Oh, this is a tiling widow manager. And then you went into it, and then what is it? One year later, you're now here building the perfect computer. Like that's that's just so amazing to me.
17:55This is the gift this is the gift of the beginner's mind. This was exactly the same thing that happened in Ruby. When I came to Ruby, there were some other efforts of making web frameworks and whatnot, but I came to it as a novice, as a beginner. I didn't know all the things you were not supposed to do that others didn't think you could do or that once you've been in a community for a while, you just take for granted. When I arrived at Linux, I saw a million things
18:25that were broken and could be better.
18:27And then I saw a million things with an amazing potential and I thought I have to capture all of that right now. If I stay in Linux for three years and I don't make the effort to change things now, I will have forgotten everything that's difficult and prevent other people from adopting Linux. So there's this magic moment when you arrive in a new technical universe where you can see all the flaws that none of the people who've been there for a long time are
18:55able to see because they've acclimated to that. Then they know more things. I didn't know anything at all. And I had to learn a lot of things. But you know what? If you spend 8 to 16 hours a day on something, eventually you'll pick it up if you're smart and driven. And I'd like to believe on both those things. So I applied the intensity and the focus.
19:15let me just learn everything there is to learn. And I mean that's not possible, but enough to be dangerous. Let's call it that. And then let's combine that with the fresh memory of what a Mac is like. Why can't Linux beat Macs on ease of use, great design, font rendering, all the things? Of course, it can. We just have to decide to do it.
19:37So the the what you're what you're doing what what sucked you in was building the perfect computer right that's what you are basically doing for your for yourself and you said in other interviews that you will always have the this this curated set of of visuals and programs and and software that I like because I'm initially build it for myself. So how you could do that and just do that
20:07for yourself and and and don't even talk about it, right? But there is so much drive and energy and 16-hour work days behind this. So what is the layer underneath that goes from building the perfect computer to what you are doing now? What what is between that?
20:26I feel I have an obligation to world productivity, to world appreciation of beauty, to a re-energized set of virtues around computers of what they're capable of and what they can make us feel that if I have discovered something that enables that better than the options we have today, I must share. This was exactly the same thing I had when I discovered Ruby. I discovered Ruby at a time where it was a very very small and
20:55niche community in the west. It had a large following in in Japan and it had been around there for a long time, but in the west it was tiny. And I discovered that Ruby was simply the perfect programming language for the kind of applications I wanted to build on the web. And once I knew that, I thought, you know what, it would be incredibly selfish to keep that secret to myself. I should allow others to experience the same joy I'm experiencing with Ruby. And now it's a replay of that
21:2420 years later. Um is Linux on Rails.
21:28Omachi is my evangelization of discovering better ways to use a computer and then thinking I wish someone would have told me earlier. Why did it take me so long to find Linux as a way to use it on the desktop? Now, there are a bunch of reasons and some of those reasons are not just about lack of discovery, but it's also about timing. I think this is the perfect moment for Linux for a
21:57variety of reasons. A the tiling window managers concept has been around for a long time. We've have i3 and whatever back early 2000s I think some of these early projects got started. But it wasn't until Hyperland that I found a version of the tiling window manager concept that was captured with such poise and style and beautiful bezel linear animations that I could see myself using it. So
22:26that was one thing we had to have Hyperland. The second thing is the computers you could run Linux on up until literally this year, maybe last year, were just not very good after Apple had come out with the MacBook because the Mchips were a revolution for the favorite computer format of almost anyone, which is the laptop. So, we went through this walk in the desert where Linux really did not have great hardware
22:55choices. Now, on the desktop, it doesn't really matter. And in fact, those choices have been great for a long time.
22:59But if you want to do broad penetration even for myself, I want to not just run Linux on my desktop and then another operating system on my laptop. I want to run Linux everywhere. I want to run the same system everywhere. A little difficult to do that before we had really good computers. And now with Intel Panle in particular that just came out in the last 12 months, we've gotten something that's competitive. And then the final piece of the puzzle that didn't even come fully together until after I've been working on Amachi for a
23:28year was this agent revolution. So you take all of these things together, you needed some of the fundamentals, you needed hyperland. And in fact now the essence of omachi is also based on quick shell. Quick shell is just as important at this point as hyperland is because that's what's empowering this one unified shell where you can do all the plugins and you can do all the agent extensions and so forth. So we needed the software then we needed the hardware and then we needed the agents and all of
23:57that stuff has literally only just come together now to develop or deliver the superior combined package. You could have had individual parts of it. I mean obviously there's been people running Linux on the desktop for a very long time but what has happened with that it kind of stalled for a long time it would just hover at low singledigit% market share because it was a niche thing it required an enormous investment upfront to produce something that was towards
24:27the peak of what Linux could achieve. You could of course always install Iuntu, but as we discussed some Duplo blocks there that I actually didn't think were superior to to the Mac. If I was just stock Ubuntu, stock Mac OS, ah, I don't know, it's not that easy. I would probably go stock Mac OS.
24:45And therefore, all of this stuff had to accumulate and come together before we could fulfill the prophecy. And that's one of the things I really love about the Linux community that we have these grand tellings. The Linux prophecy, the year of Linux on the desktop was foretold in I believe 1999 at some conference. And that makes for a great prophecy. It's a shitty prophecy if you make it and then next year it comes true. But if it's a prophecy that's
25:14literally been around for uh 20 years, more than 20 years, then it's worth fulfilling. And I think that's the magic moment we're in that all the pieces are coming together. We have the lore, we have the prophecy, and now we're able to deliver on it.
25:29Amazing. So, so would you say then that um it's it's building the perfect computer, but then it's also about getting as much people to use it as possible.
25:41Not as many as possible. I would say there's a magic line that I like to call escape velocity. You need enough people on your spaceship to sustain it through the galaxy. You can't do it with two people. You can't do it with 10. You probably can't even do it with a thousand, but you can do it with 10,000. You certainly can do it with a 100,000.
26:03That's what I want to get to. I want to get Umachi to be the perfect computer for me. That's mission number one.
26:10Mission number two is to get enough people on board with that vision that they like my perfect computer and then they will turn it into their own personal perfect computer and together we can sustain it. But that's never going to be everyone. There's just an enormous amount of people in the world who really don't like computers. Now I think the reason they don't like computers is they've been using shitty ones. And if we show them Achi, maybe some of them will come over. But we're not going to get all of them. And I don't want to get all of them because also a bit of an acquired taste. It's
26:39like coffee. It's like champagne. It's like 80% dark chocolate. You give that to someone who has not tasted any of those things and the first taste, it's sour. It's No, no, thank you. Right. I would like gumachi to stay an acquired taste. This is actually a funny parallel to even the name. I don't mind that it's difficult to pronounce. I don't mind that there's some upfront investment you have to make in everything from the pronunciation to learning a handful of
27:07key bindings to even be able to find your way around to coming to terms with a tiling window manager to adopting Linux like as a whole package that's never going to reach 100%. But could we reach 20%.
27:24I believe we could. I actually think that if you look at the long history of computers, the current paradigm, desktop-based paradigm was also an acquired taste. By the time Windows 95 arrived, people were used to word perfect in DOSs and it was a little strange. Now I would have to drag these icons around. Now people forget that today because we've been living that paradigm for 30 years.
27:50But I saw what was before that paradigm and I saw how difficult it was for people to adopt it. And I see what happens to children when they're first exposed to a computer. They don't have these preconceived notions. It's an entirely adult thing to believe that a tiling window manager is difficult. No.
28:07No. It's difficult because you have to unlearn a lot of things that you've picked up to use a traditional operating system. If you give it to a child who's not been preconditioned in that way, they don't have any of those biases. And therefore I I want to reach all the kids. I want to give them a better, more beautiful, more extendable computer. One that's not locked down, ones that they can mutate.
28:30The kind of experience I had with the Commodore 64, with the Armstrod, with the AmIGGA. All of them ship with developer tooling built in and an invitation to use them. Like the Commodore 64, for example, when you wanted to play a game, you literally had to do, I think it was load space 8, something, I forget. I should look that up. You were programming the computer to be able to load the game you wanted to use. Now, that had friction and then eventually we got rid of all that
28:59friction and then we ended up with an iPad. And I don't actually hate on the iPad. I think there's wonderful things about the iPad, but the iPad certainly did not teach kids computer skills. They taught them to be consumers of Netflix and games. And there's plenty of things that can be good about that. I'm not at all against video games. I'm not at all against shows, but I am pro- computer.
29:25I'm very much pro technology and understanding it. And I think kids who just get an iPad get a very poor understanding of what a computer can be. And then I also want the adults along who want to be along.
29:39No. Again, don't have to win everyone over. Have to get enough people on the spaceship that we get escape velocity and we can travel through the galaxy for as far as we want to go. Maybe that's 20%. Maybe that's 30%. But if that's all it is, which is by the way totally delusional, like when was the last time a new desktop operating system captured 20 to 30% of the market?
30:01Actually, I think it was Windows 95 because if you look at global stats for Mac OS, I think they hover around 15%.
30:08If you look for Mac in the US, maybe it's closer towards the 20 30%. I I think it's 25% maybe. So that was the last one, right? The last one was a quarter of a century ago. I believe we have the ingredients to do it again to massively move the market share pie chart to make Linux go from wherever it is now. I mean, there's conflicting reports here. Some say 5%, some say 8%.
30:37Now something says 12%. It's hard to know when you have all these agents and we have Steam Decks and a bunch of other things. But wherever it is, it's third, solidly third, right behind Mac and behind Windows. If we could just like beat the Mac, right, with a just as well, beautiful, but also open, also free operating system. Now is the chance. Now is the window. The window has been
31:06closed for 30 years. It's open right now.
31:10Absolutely love it. Yeah. Because I'm I'm I'm very similar to you. Like I I I love working with computers. I made my career out of it. And as you say, like kids or or even the generation behind me growing up now, they're using iPads.
31:25They don't even have the concept of a file system anymore. They they don't understand. They just think in apps. So I think anything that helps people rekindle or or even be u be what do you call it introduced to what actually a using an actual computer is like I think that's only a positive thing. So I really admire that mission that you have. This is that you are and that you are that you have this as a driving force because yeah I I
31:55did a tweet once where I said that people get assigned their operating systems by society and I got a little bit of push back on that but I truly believe that that in school or somewhere you are introduced to Windows and you or or Mac and then you think that is what a computer experience is supposed to be like.
32:16So yeah, so when when you when you think of um okay, so we have this mission, we're going to make it as easy as possible to um expose this to as many people as possible with your brand. What are the next steps for this? How are we going to get more people to adopt Omari or or Linux in in general? Um for the general population, let's say, there's multiple steps. One of the most important is that we continue the
32:44transfer of enthusiasm. We get more people excited for it because they see the excitement. This is one of the other big bug bears I find in both the Linux community and the technical community in general. They have an instinctual aversion to marketing. They think anything that has been marketed or is slick or is compelling or is colorcoordinated is somehow vapid or empty or undeserving of attention. I think that's an unfortunate conclusion
33:13to draw. It's not completely unreasonable. There are many things in this world that are popular, not because they're good, but because they were pushed. But don't fall into the rabbit hole of believing that anything that has good marketing and is presented in a nice manner is also therefore de facto, void of any technical merit or attention.
33:39I think this is the trap Linux has been trapped in for a long time and I'm bringing a new kind of energy to it. I'm bringing an energy that was honed in the commercial market. I've been making commercial software for decades. I know what it takes to get people excited about things. And in fact, it's not even a ploy. I'm transferring my enthusiasm because I genuinely hold it. I'm excited about computers. I can't shut up about
34:07them. I can't stop improving them. And once I have something that feels as unique in this moment as Amachi is, it feels like a moral obligation to share.
34:17Which is also why I believe it's resonating because there's plenty of companies who have lots of money and they tweet stupid things that no one care about and get zero engagement because who wants to just be marketed at? No one wants that. But they do want to be infected with enthusiasm and good vibes and excitement for something new. And I've committed to that mission fully. This is why as a pie chart of those 16 hours a
34:46day, a large amount of it goes towards the engagement, goes towards talking to people on X, replying to folks with 17 followers or 17 million followers, and just doing the retail politics of um evangelism. Like go out, meet people where they are, hear their concerns, write them down, then fix everything.
35:11This has been one of the taglines that I've been promoting. We can fix everything. I literally even registered the domain. We canfix everything.com is a just monument to the idea that in this new world between Linux, open-source and agents there is no paper cut. There's no dependency. There's no incompatibility that we cannot cure with enough tokens,
35:40intensity, and momentum. So, I'm going to do that work. I also just love it. I really love seeing someone discover a better way to use a computer and get that aha experience because I saw it with Ruby.
35:55Programmers who had been using Java ornet and thinking like that that was the extent of it. That was what programming was. And then they would see Ruby and many of them literally could not believe their eyes the first time they saw the contrast. They thought that Ruby was pseudo code like not executable code but the kind of pretty code you'd write in a magazine when you're explaining concepts and when they realized no no this is the actual code this is what you will write. A lot of them really fell in love with the Ruby
36:24the same way I did. And I think the same thing is true on the Linux side that there were a lot of people who perhaps were curious about what Linux had to offer but really just didn't have the time and attention to spend the tens of hours, hundreds of hours to come up with the kind of beautiful bespoke systems that you would see on like r/ Unix porn that those things were artisan creation that required artisan hours and as beautiful as they were they were very
36:53niche. So, I want to broaden this appeal to the best technology and the best art that we have in the computing world to just more people. So, we're going to do that. Then, we're also going to continue to raise money. I like money. I don't need it personally anymore, but I know what an accelerant it can be for projects that you can invest in people, in projects, in marketing, in all the elements it takes to propel the record
37:23or the rocket forward faster. This is one that's also very important when you approach partners. We already have a lot of commercial partners on board with Amachi. And the more of them we get on board, the more money we raise, the easier it becomes to have the next conversation with Intel or AMD or Nvidia or whatever other company the Linux community actually needs to create the best systems for the newest computers.
37:52So, I think that's a virtue in and of itself. And at this point, I mean, I'm also just doing it for sport. Like I haven't even the faintest clue how we're going to spend the $20 million that I've raised so far, but I think hey, if we could raise 20, why not 50? Why not a hundred? And I think there's just value in the sheer momentum large numbers produce. It says we're serious. We're going to stick around. You can trust in
38:19Umachi to not just be someone's dot files. It was just DHS's dot files a year ago. And I wouldn't think badly of someone who goes like, "Yeah, I don't want to build my home computer around that." He might lose interest in it um in five minutes because that's usually what happens with a collection of DOT files. They go out of date. They don't stay up to date and so forth. Now we have $20 million. We have a foundation. We have employees.
38:46We're going for the moon here. And more people are interested in jumping on top of that rocket. And therefore, we can spread um and create Linux to more people. So, it's a very virtuous cycle. Then there's the technical part, too.
38:59The current version we have, Omachi Quattro, is amazing. And I mean, of course, I'm going to say this. This is what I just told you about. I'm I'm hype man number one. And I'm hype man number one because I love the system, but also because I think it serves a utility. So, of course, I think Umachi is amazing and that the latest version is the best version of Omachi yet. Right? That's the tagline from every keynote of every major tech company. But it's also true.
39:24It's really good, but it could be so much better. The 3,000 plus plugins, a substantial number of those should be in the core. We should be integrating all this great creativity right into the box such that more people can open more computers and have this amazing experience where everything works. I do not want to hear, "Well, my Bluetooth didn't work, my Wi-Fi didn't work, my RGB lights didn't work, my" and then the answer be like, "Well, go look at a
39:54wiki." No, no, no, no, no, no. Whatever information is in the wiki, we should be applying to software. I actually think as much as people adore the art wiki and as beautiful of a community project that is in the modern age, it's a failure state. If you have to write down a workaround, in my opinion, you should put in the work to just fix the bug or not the bug,
40:21even fix the problem. Why doesn't the webcam work? Well, there's some weird driver you have to do if you're on this version of that machine made by this company. No, let's fix it all. Let's put it all in the box. Perfect compatibility with everything. Now, that sounds crazy if you're thinking of this in terms of a small hobby project run by eight volunteers next to their day job without agents. Impossible. Could not do that at
40:50all. But that's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about the Omic Foundation with $20 million in the war chest, full-time employees, hundreds of thousands of community members. Once you have all of those things and then you combine it with the age of agents, yeah, we can fix everything. I'm setting very specific targets on that just both because it's fun and also because it creates a milestone. And one of them is perfect compatibility with the entire
41:20vintage Intel Max going back to the earliest that are compatible with GPU accelerated window tiling window managers. I think about 2009. Now, Apple actually produced an enormous amount of variety over those years from 2009 to 2020. It's only 11 years and I think if you count up all the permutations, there's going to be, I don't know, 50 different machines, maybe 100. I don't know. And many of them use different Wi-Fi chips and different
41:47Bluetooth chips and different Nvidia chips and whatever else have you. And it's a bit of a mess to try to figure out like how do you get it all working?
41:55And the standard answer, as I said, was go to the wiki, try to look up your specific uh model number, see how well it's supported, and if it's not, then live with it. No, no, no, no, no. Let's just put in the work to make it perfect.
42:08And then once we've done the entire vintage Mac range, let's do everything else. Let's do all the Lenovo machine, all the Dell machines, all the everything. Because once you have agents plus literally hundreds of thousands of people, that's possible. I'm not saying it's easy. I'm not saying we can do it tomorrow. But I can say that if we apply all of this momentum to it, could we do it in a year? Yeah, I actually think the vintage range is going to be 100% covered earlier than that. And one inspiration I'm drawing that is actually the the retro gaming community. One of
42:38the things I love about retro gamers is both because retro games are fun, but also because many of the people in the community are obsessive collectors. They need every version of every ROM in perfect mint condition and eliminate or um emulation. And I'm thinking like let's apply some of that energy to perfect mint condition compatibility with the entire vintage Apple range.
43:00It's kind of like we got the N64 library pinned down. There is not a beta version of a game that cannot be run on this emulator. We've done it all. Let's do that with hardware compatibility. Then let's continue to embrace the age of agents. One of the things we've shown that we're going to ship in one of the upcoming versions is voice modes. You should be able to talk to your computer and it should just change magically.
43:26like I want this plugin to track my favorite sports team that plays in oh like that data is available on some community website somewhere not covered by major media but I can get an agent on it and now I can have a little widget up in my top bar that keeps track of the score. Just giving you one example. We can do everything and we can continue to lower the bar on what it takes for someone to create. And that's what I'm
43:55really interested in. As we talked about with the kids, my interest there is to grow a generation of doers of makers that I recognize from my childhood came out of that and I'm not recognizing coming out quite as much in the iPad age. So there's a million missions and I could talk for hours about all the projects that we have. If you were to look at the internal base camp we have for the Umachi organization, the Mamicon, there is just so many projects
44:24firing on so many cylinders. I haven't even talked about the language stuff like we want to have perfect Chinese, Japanese, Korean inputs, everything out of the box. We just I want to do all of it all at once as quickly as possible.
44:37I and that this is exactly why I think this is such a unique situation that's happening. Like I've been using Linux for 10 years. I started daily driving Arch Linux maybe four or five years ago. And like as you say, it was always just this niche thing and if you had a problem, you had to like look there and be embarrassed and that kind of thing.
44:59But I think it's such a unique thing now that like someone with your skill set because you've built multiple companies, you have built teams, you know what it means to to get stuff done and you understand marketing. And I'm not sure if that has ever happened before where someone with your skill set and let's let's face it, your means as well and your network and apply that to a Linux distro. So I I think that is something that's truly unique that's happening and
45:29I really admire that you dedicate all of your time towards this because I can only see this having a positive effect uh on on Linux as a whole getting people to use computers fall in love with computers again and I think I'm try I'm like I I've made some video like moderately spicy videos about Amari in the past but I I really appreciate that we could have this conversation so I understand a bit more what's actually
45:58driving you here. So if we then think of um a broader adoption getting kids to use Linux then for me as a as a DevOps engineer the the I I start thinking immediately about security because with more freedom there also comes more responsibility right so uh I know that well you've raised 20 million now and a part of that is going to a security team
46:28um we've had some discussions about security as well on X. So before I I maybe suggest a couple of topics to look in that we could maybe discuss about like could you just update us on what's happening on the security front uh on the Amachi project right now?
46:45Yes, it's hugely important. It's actually the number one priority we've had since launch of Amachi Quattro. It's one of the reasons why we've not pushed out a lot of new features because I wanted to make sure that the underpinnings we had were solid and of course we needed help with that. I am not on top of all the other things that I do a expert security researcher. I rely on the fact that the Linux
47:12community broadly speaking has a ton of people who are very good at security and that most of the components that Omachi is made up of are very secure because they get lots of scrutiny and because Linux runs on everything. So we have a very secure foundation to build this on top of. This is not Windows 95, right?
47:32Like I'm not building something on top of a very shaky foundation that is just full of holes. I'm building on top of damn Linux. And this is also the curious objection I've heard from people who both want to claim that omachi is just a bunch of dot files but then also want to claim that somehow we have all these very unique security vulnerabilities.
47:53Uh well isn't it one or the other? I mean I understand that there can be security vulnerabilities in the dot files in the configs. You had one example of I think if you had installed some other terminal I forget which kitty kitty has an option that the default option was turned on and there were some people who thought that was a bad option and totally fair we can discuss this files and what holes you can open than that but I mean we're using whatever the standard open SSL lip the standard kernel the standard this that and the
48:22other thing so there's a little bit of cognitive dissonance there and I don't always think the objections are in good faith But I don't even care whether they're in good faith or not because if they find something, we will fix it. And now we have a the first team actually that got incorporated after the core team was the security team made sure that we have a bunch of seasoned professionals who work with this on a daily basis be part of a volunteer force to do it. Then the
48:51second thing was to start hiring people with deep expertise in this. Um, Kristoff, the Linux kernel maintainer, not just developer, but maintainer who is responsible for part of the PCI subsystem and other issues with the Linux kernel was uh the is it how it go? Was it the first hire?
49:13Part of the first group of hires this a lot has been happening over the last and a lot of things we keep doing the announcement. I'm like, which order did we do these in? But he came on in part not just because I wanted to have the fastest kernel with the best compatibility. That's a big motivation of course but also because he comes from a background of Linux kernel hardening and we need professionals like that on board. The same thing when we hired uh Outfox from Quickshell he has a lot of opinions about how to write secure
49:41systems. Now are we fully there with all the things? No, of course we're not. We just got started. The Holomachi project is one year and change old. Now, we've been blessed with attention from a lot of uh motivated security researchers online. That's I think the polite way of putting it. Who are donating their time and energy into finding issues. Some of them are responsibly disclosing that to security.org.
50:09I thank them. We thank them. We now have a special security credits page that call them all out and give them credit for that. And in fact, the first person who did that responsible disclosure was an intern at Cloudflare who shortly thereafter got a permanent job offer. So I think there's mechanisms here where Linux can be a vehicle for you to pad your CVE in positive ways by making contributions and being able to point those contributions as recognized by other peers in the industry. So I think
50:38that's very good. Then we also get the other kind um people on Twitter who find something and who have whatever bone to pick with Amachi about that. So they just disclose it irresponsibly and I thank them too. A lot of the ones that we found that way were upstream problems that were actually issues in all Linux distributions. So Omachi is drawing in a new kind of energy and attention. Sometimes it's kind of hatefinding. Okay, fine. I'll take that
51:07too. I'm not picky. If you find an issue on security in Amachi, I hope you will report it responsibly and if you don't, we will still fix it. So, we have all of that. We have all the investments and we got a bunch of programs in the pipeline too that haven't been able to announce yet, but just actually before hopping on this call uh call with someone on the agentic side who can give us access to cyber security models that are trained for this kind of stuff. Um, we will do all of it and I am committed to Umachi
51:37being as secure as a Linux distribution possibly can because it is the foundation of everything. If once we keep going and keep getting adoption, this thing becomes Windows 95, it's all for nothing. But I also just it requires delicate effort. It requires focus. It currently is the number one priority, but it's also something where we lean on the rest of the L community.
52:02We don't have to do this all by yourself. You're not building everything by a from scratch, right? Like most of these things are battle tested. The Linux kernel, it's got 30 years on it and a lot of attention to it. So I think it's serious issue and requires vigilance and attention and investment and hiring and focus. And I also think the specific focus that Amachi is getting in that area is completely overblown. I but on the other I think
52:31what what you said is that because of the the the popularity and the large exposure and the negative attitude of a large part of the community and that they then out of spite start looking for for negative things or security flaws.
52:47In the end they're they end up contributing to March and and even Linux in the end. So in that sense it's only a very positive thing. So I I also did a a stream uh on on giving my takes on on security in Omari and one thing that I talked about was the Arch user repository. So to to your point, you're saying the the kernel is very secure in that sense, but one of several comments under that live stream where I explained that the
53:17Arch users repository is actually not vetted. It's not scanned. Like that's correct.
53:21Anything could be in there.
53:23And there were people in the comments saying, "Oh, I've been a senior software engineer for years. I've I I was running Omari and I had no idea. So, well, I mean, it's important for that point. Let me just uh correct the record there.
53:37Does not use the AUR for anything that's in the box.
53:42What the AUR is there for is as an optional install for people who want on their own accord to go find software there. Now I think the AUR is full of great stuff and what we generally point their folks to is like Brave or whatever other browsers that the repos are controlled by the companies and so forth. But yes, it I think it's 117,000 packages. Many of them are done by
54:09volunteers and the AUR design is one of from a naive era. Kind of like the original email protocol design where the people who did email didn't think that there'd be spammers in this world. So protocol is not really made for that. AUR is made on a very actually admirable idea that hey we're just a bunch of fun people wanting to package software up.
54:33They weren't thinking so much about the malicious aspects of it and they haven't hardened their distribution network either. They had a lot of outages when they got for a long time. This was actually what caused it to switch off the AUR. The original version of Amachi did have AUR dependencies that got fixed very quickly partly or majorly because of the availability issues that they had and then that was why we stood up our own mirror and then we stood up our own package repository and then we simply just went like you know what we don't
55:02need the AUR and any of this stuff we should be controlling our own packages and our own build pipeline but I also think that you can go too far and I think that the AUR is an incredible resource in the same way that npm And npm is an incredible resource for JavaScript packages that Ruby gems is an incredible repository for for Ruby software and crates and go like there are actually a lot of software repositories where if you run those
55:31things without reading every line of code you are exposed to potential issues. NPM has seen a lot of them. NPM still runs every [ __ ] major website in the world, right? Like it's still part of those pipelines.
55:44I think we need to take it seriously and then also not throw the baby out with the bath water. Like it's actually good that individuals can publish software on the internet. Now there are issues with it. We should have controls around it.
55:55And I think this age of agents actually make it way easier than we would otherwise have. If there's one thing the agents are very good at, it is to find security issues. I mean this is one of the reason people are fright freaking out because that can be used offensively. But the defensive capability of agents is incredibly good.
56:11Therefore, we have a straight path to a modern version of the AUR that embraces agents that perhaps have some slightly less naive policies around adopting packages and some of the other problems that they've had. But we should not be throwing out the baby with the bath weather. It should be possible for anyone to distribute software on the internet and then rebuild in controls and checks and whatever to make that as secure as it can be while accepting that
56:40if you run code written by someone else but you there's a risk and it should not scare us away from computers.
56:49Yes, exactly. and and you know uh but as um so just just to get the current state of omachi so when someone installs omachi right now the a the aur is not enabled and they have to like do an action in order to enable it in order to start downloading from it when you install right now no aur packages are used no aur packages are updated there's nothing in the flow that lies in the aur what is there is if you go to install
57:18aur R you will be shown the AUR package repository. Now default is install packages. There you will just be shown the Arch main repos plus the Omachi repo. These are the packages we guarantee, right? Well, as much as you can guarantee, but Arch has a really good reputation for diligently doing package management. We've been building our own package repository. Some of it is based on original AUR packages that
57:47we then reviewed and put into the package repository once we were happy with that. But then if you can't find what you're looking for there, we give you the option of using the AUR. And if you do use the AUR, you're presented with this interface where you can sort the 117 packages. And I think it's if you push alt D, you get to see the package build. So you can review all this stuff as you see fit. And you can also decide that the AUR as a concept is just not something you want to use. You think there's too many risk factors to
58:16it. Great. Don't use it. I in fact I don't use the AUR very much because we've managed to package everything I need on the Amachi package repos. In fact, that's how it goes. Whenever there's a package I want, um, it goes into the package repository because then I'm not runtime dependent on the AUR and so forth. Sometimes the AUR just serves as kind of a invitation for us to do our own package management and in time there's not even going to be AUR like
58:44we're working towards full sovereignty around packages about hosting them and building them but as we get there I also want to allow people to to know like hey here's the wild west you can go in there eyes wide open about what that means someone might shoot you in the saloon but it's also a little exciting and there's cool horses. So, you choose what you want to do. I don't want to create Apple. I don't want to recreate the lock down computer.
59:11I want to have an open computer that is also safe where the line between the Wild West and civilization is demarcated. I actually believe we have that right now. Now, you could maybe disagree and say like, well, someone could stumble into the AUR and they didn't know anything and then they installed something. Yep. That's a liability of free adults and well I I think but just one just one idea here but even if we just like if it's not enabled by default but if you
59:41then are about to install something from the AO for the first time if you just have maybe something popping up that would at least like give some information of okay what you're about to install is something that has not been looked at just one time just just to educate people because if a senior software engineer doesn't know that is actually the case with the AUR if it's just one simple like nobody like many people don't even read this thing but at
1:00:08least at least you've tried then right yeah but I don't actually care so much for attempts I care for results and what I think we've learned if anything these popups they don't have a lot of effect demonstrated right people have been trained that If they want to use their computer, they just click okay until the software appears, right?
1:00:34I don't actually care to build software on the basis of hopes and dreams. In that regard, I care to build it on top of like what works and what is effective. I don't think knack screens or warning screens are terribly effective because I think we've trained users over the past several decades to ignore all of them. And I think the mag is actually particularly egregious about this now because there's 17,000 popups telling you this, that, and the other thing. They literally used to have an ad for this called PC versus Mac back in
1:01:03the 2000s making fun of Windows for having all these pop-ups and now they've become that themselves. Again, there could be a line here. I'm not even totally against it. I think there's just we have to be uh realistic about what does something like that do? If you put in a thing that says like, "Hey, be careful. You're on your own accord. Now you're into the wild west." You could maybe say to yourself, "Well, at least I tried." But if it doesn't actually work, uh, I'm skeptical that that's the path
1:01:30to go. I'd rather fix the problem at the root. And long-term, the root of the problem is we should be reviewing all the packages. We should have full sovereignty over the entire build pipeline. Umi is on track stated to become a foundational distribution with its own package handling and uh whatever like we're bootstrapping on top of Arch right now. We use the arch repos. We
1:01:58allow people to use the AUR but the final state is we're foundational distribution that depends on no one for nothing. We will upstream we will collaborate. We will do all the things, but we will take full responsibility for the entire package. Now, I don't know how long it took Debian or Arch or whatever to get there. A while. We're not getting there tomorrow, but we're going to get there quickly because we have the resources. We have the momentum. We have the agents. We have
1:02:28the community. We could totally do this. I don't know when the last time a true foundational dro appeared, but we're making one. So, that's the designated path here.
1:02:42Yeah. I mean, I'm as I I I I'm not going to give in uh just like that on the security thing though with the the thing like I I would really at least if you have a kids version, if if that is even going to be a thing, there will be a kids version.
1:02:57It is. And they won't be able to install anything. So we're making a lot of right now. They will not have pseudo which means we can actually not install packages on their own accord.
1:03:05Well this is okay that's great. So because when when I hear we're going to make something for kids and then they they can just search the aur and install something then I I would think that is a recipe for disaster. And the reason I say that is not because I um I I I would hate for something with Omari with this publicity to get like a huge hack and get a huge you know negative publicity.
1:03:30Right. That's that I'm not saying this because I want to hate on Omari.
1:03:34No no but that's the thing that's the thing that I would hate to see right now with this momentum. So that and same here that's why literally in the groups I've stated number one priority is security that we need to make sure that this is now that doesn't mean we're going to catch everything I mean the number of CVEs that are published every day for the Linux kernel is long most of them are not kind of zero day remote execution issues some of them are
1:04:02rather secure or issues right we need to fix all of that whether it comes from upstream whether it's in our package and I 100% agree. When I talk about the Wild West, I'm talking about informed or less informed. I'm talking about adults. Once you're an adult and you own your own computer, it is my belief you should be able to do whatever the hell you want with that now. Well, within the laws, right? Like don't use your computer for whatever. But even if you do, that's
1:04:30actually not within my limit, right? I'm selling you a fork and a spoon. If you use that fork and a spoon to, I don't know, dig out a prison or shank someone, I can't be taking responsibility for that. And I don't think that's a good path to go for. Kids, very different. Kids, you need to enable the adults in their life, their parents first and foremost, to protect them reasonably.
1:04:52And that's what we're going to do with Amachi kits. Here's a version of omachi or path of omachi that you set up for a child where they do not have access to pseudo. They have access to a limited whitelisted DNS um for using the web if that's what you want to use. They have either time limits or time nudges.
1:05:14That's what all that work needs to be. I would not today think, oh, I should just give an Amachi machine to a child with no instruction about anything, no help.
1:05:25Now, I'm saying that and then I also remember my own childhood and running an elite BBS system out of my bedroom at 14, trading piracy software. Um, so I don't know. I mean, sometimes I have it a little bit of both ways, but either way, I want Amachi to be a place that parents can trust and we have work to do there. It's not there yet, but we're going to get started very soon. There's a whole team. There's a Discord channel with literally hundreds of people working on this, not just from the technical perspective, but also from the
1:05:54art like we're doing very specific uh kids themes that are just wholesome and nice and all the other stuff. Um and then for for adults, I'm saying right now, hey, do you know what? Um is not Ubuntu. It's not trying to be it at this point. It is still in the pioneer to early adopter stage. And those people should have access to the frontier. They should have access to the Wild West.
1:06:23It should be separate. There should be a part of it that's like here's town. There's a sheriff and if someone comes in there, he's going to take care of it. That's our own packages. And that's our arch bootstrapping. And then also right over there, Wild West.
1:06:37Yeah. Well, I'm I'm really glad we could we could clarify this because like when you just look at your ex timeline, uh you or or when you say Omari for kids, then things can get taken out of context. Yes. And myself included, I also came to conclusions based on just that information. So, I'm really glad that that that you say that it's a security is a first priority. We're working on Omari for kids. Like there's not not more that I could wish for. So that's really awesome
1:07:08This is why podcasts are so much better for recent exchange. Like OnX, we have 240 characters. And even if I tweet about security, most of the time if I'm just treating tweeting positive things about security, it doesn't travel because like what people want to see is a dead body in the streets, right? So it'll travel if there's someone who finds something, but it won't travel if I just go like, "Hey, here's all these positive things we're doing about security." So podcasting is a much better format for that. And we also have a fairly in-depth security page on
1:07:37omachi.org/security that details the responsible disclosure protocol, the team, what we're doing, and all this other stuff. So take it incredibly serious. It is foundational. If you have if you're not focused on that in today's world, you're not going to make it.
1:07:54Exactly. Well, I think that's a really good statement to to end the the podcast with. David, thank you so much for what you are doing for Linux, desktop Linux.
1:08:04And I can only imagine what positive effect it's going to have for kids to grow up with a tiling window manager instead of an iPad. If I had a kid, like that would be the first thing I would do is try to find some Linux distribution that they could start using from day one. So, thank you for all of your effort, time, money, what you're putting into this and keep up the good work, man.
1:08:26Thank you so much. Thanks for having me on.
1:08:28David, where can people find you? They can find the Omachi project on omachi.
1:08:38I'm spelling it out because it doesn't always pronounce like it spells omomas.org. That's the portal to everything. And then my personal website is just dhh.dk. So that's where you can get everything I'm involved with both in the commercial side with base camp, ruby and rails books I've written, whatever else. And then um.org ORC is everything for the project and we'll be putting all those links down in the description below.
