Iron Brew Works

A YouTuber I like posted a video this week called “I love the idea of Omarchy (but I’m not switching)”. Dave Swift. Good channel. The premise is that he wants everything Omarchy offers, the tiling windows, the keyboard-driven workspaces, a machine that bends when you lean on it, but he’s too far into Apple to leave. So he rebuilds it on macOS with five apps.

I’m not going to take the list. I already own CleanShot. Raycast covers the launcher and the clipboard history and most of the window management, and I’ve never wanted tiling on a Mac in the first place. So I have no dog in this fight at all, except for one claim sitting underneath the whole video that I think is wrong, and wrong in a way that costs people time.

His argument goes roughly like this: I never hand-edit a config file anymore. I tell an agent what I want in plain English and it writes the config for me. Therefore macOS is about as hackable as Linux.

Those aren’t the same thing.

Writing a config file is configuration. The agent is filling in a form that a third-party app reads. And notice why that app has to exist in the first place: macOS won’t tile windows itself, so somebody built a program to bolt the feature on from outside. On Linux the thing that arranges your windows is a component. You pull it out and put a different one in. It isn’t an add-on. It’s a part.

Hackable is something else. Hackable is the agent changing the machine itself, unattended, with nobody sitting in the chair. That’s exactly where macOS stops you, and it stops you deliberately. Permission dialogs. Signed and notarized apps. No real control of the machine unless a human is logged in and present. These are good protections and I’m not mad at them. But they are a wall, and the wall is the entire difference.

A note on what Linux actually is, if you’ve been nodding politely

Every computer runs an operating system, the layer underneath your apps that owns the screen, the files, and the keyboard. On a Mac that layer is Apple’s, and it is sealed. You get the parts they ship you.

Linux is that same layer, except it’s free, it’s open, and any piece of it can be pulled out and replaced by whoever is using it. Omarchy is one prepackaged arrangement of those parts, assembled by somebody with taste, so you don’t have to build it yourself.

That’s the whole distinction this post is about. On one, you adjust the settings. On the other, you change the machine.

Here’s what the wall cost me.

Last month I had an agent audit the disk on this laptop. It came back 235 gigabytes short. I spent an hour chasing ghosts. Phantom snapshots. A deleted-files theory. A backup theory. All wrong. The actual answer was that macOS had quietly blocked the agent from reading parts of my own hard drive, and the tool it was using skipped every folder it couldn’t open without saying so. Three hundred and eighty refusals, swallowed on the way past.

No error. No warning. A clean-looking wrong number.

That’s the failure mode worth understanding. It isn’t “the agent can’t do it.” The agent does it, reports success, and hands you an answer that is quietly false.

And the fix is the joke that proves the point. I had to open System Settings, click into Privacy & Security, and give a background program permission to see the disk. By hand. With a mouse. So that an automated system could do an automated job.

Now here’s the other half.

There’s a ThinkPad sitting on my desk that I bought on eBay for two hundred and fifty dollars. It’s a 2019 X1 Carbon, seven years old, with a battery somebody else already wore down to seventy-nine percent and a keyboard somebody else already broke in.

It runs Omarchy on this month’s Linux kernel. Not some stripped-down build for old hardware, the current one, same as anybody else’s. It’s been up ten days straight.

It runs Omarchy, and it runs the same modern agentic software I use every day. Not as fast as the Mac. I’m not going to pretend otherwise, the Mac is a far better machine and it isn’t close. But that isn’t the interesting part. The interesting part is that a laptop costing less than a decent pair of boots will let the software actually do its job, all the way down, without stopping every few minutes to ask a human for permission.

That reframed the whole thing for me. The difference between those two machines was never horsepower. It’s consent.

So no, I don’t think this is Mac or Linux. I think power users end up on both, and the line isn’t which apps are missing. It’s who’s driving.

Agent as operator, meaning jobs running at three in the morning, whole fleets of things, nobody watching, Linux wins, and not by a little. That’s why every unattended thing I own already runs on a box in the other room instead of on a Mac. I didn’t plan it that way. It just kept being the path of least resistance, one small decision at a time, until one day I looked up and all of it had moved.

Agent as assistant, meaning me in the chair, building something, the agent writing code I’m about to turn around and use, the Mac is genuinely great. Better, mostly. The apps are nicer.

I run both at once, most days. Not as an experiment. Because each one is better at a different job, and I got tired of pretending otherwise.

Dave nearly lands here himself. Near the end he says that if you try Omarchy, “you’re probably gonna need to keep another OS around.” He’s right. He just draws the line at missing apps. I’d draw it one layer down, at who’s holding the wheel.

There’s a Framework laptop on order. Ask me again in three months and I may have to revise every word of this.

Which would be fine. That’s what the journal is for.