Alright, the time has come to jump into this wide wide topic.

Windows 98

I’ve been using computers for 25+ years now, one way or another. Windows 98 running on Intel CPU and most likely 64MB RAM if I remember it correctly. It started with playing Minesweeper, Solitaire, Colin McRae Rally, creating documents using Word, then HTML pages on Notepad, then encapsulating all the imagination into PSD files, glueing everything with PHP, pushing into FTP servers and all that stuff. Also customizing how Windows XP looks altogether, matching Winamp skin and so on. It felt so cool having a custom, unique environment.

The Macbook Years

Then I got my first Macbook Pro in 2010, and it was on a different level compared to all the other notebooks. First thing, its physical appearance was premium. Then OS just looked amazing without any customizations, just the one you need to be productive. No need for customization, all the 3rd party software felt like the part of ecosystem. And it stayed for 16 years, until it just started feeling stale. There were some nerds who kept talking about Arch, and I thought “oh you weirdos, why do you need to waste your time with it, machine should just work and my choice is focusing on web development and getting paid for that”.

The Terminal Clicked

I even remember attending one of the workshops where the guy taught how to develop web apps with Python, he was using TUI, firing one command after another and I had no clue how it was even possible. When I tried to follow his steps, everything I typed just threw an error, every single time I touched the terminal. Until it changed and something in my head just clicked. The simplicity, convenience and speed was on a different level compared to all the GUI. I.e. I was using WAMP/MAMP GUIs to run web development environment and I just grew clicking buttons, filling inputs, and switching screens, moving windows with a mouse.

macOS Isn’t What It Used to Be

But in the last few years I just started feeling that macOS is not the same as it was in 2010. And I also became the one who expects different interactions with a computer than I used to before. Everything got too saturated, software does not feel like it is built for macOS, I am spending more and more time in terminal, I want to manage workspaces and windows with a keyboard. There are apps like Spectacle, Rectangle, it helped to build new habits but it was not enough. I don’t even talk about native spaces and window management in macOS, it feels like someone created that just for the sake of putting a checkmark in their todo lists, nothing more. So I had the itch that there should be something to make my experience better, and found the popular trio of Aerospace, Sketchybar and JankyBorders — somehow I hadn’t come across it before, even though it’s existed for a while. And this article helped me to understand what I can expect from that setup with a lot of examples baked in. It made things better, but it still felt like a patch on top of something broken, or maybe it always was and my expectations had just changed.

Building a Sim Racing PC

In the beginning of 2026, I got a cheap and used PC but not for the work. The PS5 didn’t feel good enough for sim racing — no custom software, no overlays, no AI-based coaching that lived up to what I expected. It had just to be good enough to run main sim racing titles like Assetto Corsa, iRacing and others. And what an unexpected journey about the computers it was after all those years using only Macbooks, a few of them. It started with learning how sim racing games expose all the telemetry data on Windows so that I can create overlays that show various data in real time, later I created itsp1.com where you can use your pedals and wheel directly in the browser as game controllers and do some practice drills to develop muscle memory and understand the basics of controls in sim racing. Then the summer heat came, and the PC just started shutting down during online racing sessions. That led me to recording a lot of telemetry from the real PC hardware this time, not from a simulation, and feeding it into Claude. I learned the PSU was the weakest part in the chain and needed replacing. The GPU had its own problem too — overheating — so I pulled it apart, changed the thermal paste, and swapped the thermal pads. I had changed thermal paste on a CPU back in my teenage years, and I remember being afraid of it. What if something goes wrong, computer gets broken and game over? What a liberation it was right now without thinking about it and just enjoying the process of tinkering. It was frustrating a bit as it blocked the racing part but you have to make breaks to get better.

Landing on Omarchy

But what a relief to finish the stream of consciousness here when I write this using Omarchy running on ASUS ZenBook 14 - the amazing OS I wanted to have on the old computer that we have at home not being used anymore. ASUS itself is boring though, and I will likely pick something else as my main machine going forward, a Dell XPS or similar. Unless Omarchy M succeeds with the M4 - it is already doing well with M1 and M2. What an irony - it reminds me of the times I tried to boot a Hackintosh on my PC as a teenager, just in reverse this time, breaking out of Apple’s closed system instead of into it. Anyway, I am joining that train of hype about Omarchy, and I strongly believe that it will be my daily environment for upcoming years and a new chapter in using computers. It just feels like the third breakthrough moment, following Windows 98 and Mac OS X.