Omarchy Sunday Social, Episode 3: the one where Lee told us what it is actually for

Recorded Sunday, September 27, 2026. X dropped the first room out from under us before we even started, so if you were in the one that died, that is why. The second one held.

Every week so far we have talked about what we are building. This week somebody told us what it is for, and it reframed the whole thing. So this write-up leads with him.

WHO WAS IN THE ROOM

@NotJustShaking, Lee Shand, 54, from England, living near Nashville, diagnosed with early onset Parkinson's. @ncfrontiersman Wes Grimes, co-host, built OmaStorm. Me, co-host. @thetundeo Tundy in London, back with the report from the first Omarchy London meetup. Mutahir in the Netherlands by way of Pakistan, storage guy turned SRE, built the Oma Vault config sync plugin. @BlackOpsREPL Victorio in Milan, starting an Italian meetup from nothing. @OnTheLiftAI Chris, bringing AI to automotive dealerships. Jeff, retired engineer in eastern Arizona, started a meetup at a Starbucks. @tim_sonner Tim, 20 years of Linux, first time here. Porsche, software developer, running Hermes agents with a Kanban board. @gh_TechLuddite Tech Luddite with the Hermes warnings. @cfaulkingham Colin on why the built-in skill is the killer feature. Snowy, live from Scotland. Gav, who runs his home lab from a boat. Kozha in Cologne, mid-reinstall while talking to us. @tylermayberry Tyler, shipping Ibara.

PART ONE: LEE

Lee Shand spent his career in IT. UK government as a kid, then trading floor support in the London stock market, then an asset management firm. Somebody needed business continuity handled back when nobody knew what that was, they asked him, and his career took off from there. He ended up VP for business continuity, crisis management and incident management at a firm with $600 billion under management. England to New Jersey to Nashville.

About four years in, he was diagnosed with Parkinson's. Early onset, which means before 50. He was about a month into his fifties. He had known something was wrong well before that.

His Parkinson's is cognitive, not the tremor most people picture. Memory. Empathy. In his words, the worst part is not the symptom list:

"I was, before Parkinson's, the life and soul of the party. They used to call me the mayor of the office. Everybody knew me. I knew everyone. And that kind of faded away. It's probably one of the worst bits of the disease, actually, to watch yourself not be the person that you used to be for people at work, for your family, for your wife."

He got let go. He tried day trading for a while and wrote a book about it. Then a friend told him to start writing things down, because he was starting to crack up. His memory was going, and he kept forgetting the symptoms he meant to raise with his neurologist. So he found Obsidian and started building.

Here is the part that stopped the room.

Lee had never used Linux. Fifty four years, never. Windows did the job, and before the disease he was a heavy gamer. But the deeper he got into AI, the more obvious it became that there was a better life out there in terms of an operating system. He cannot remember where he first saw Omarchy, he thinks a YouTube video. It took him about ten minutes to decide he had to try it. He put it on an external SSD, played with it for a few days, and by day four he was sold.

The first thing he built was not impressive and that is exactly why it matters. It is a plugin called First Boot, and it puts one thing on his bar: the time he turned the machine on that day.

That is the time he takes his meds. He takes the next round four hours later. Before the plugin, his memory would lose that, and losing it made it a bad day.

"The fewer things that I can do to take the stress off me happen to use my energy, the leftover dopamine that I have in the brain, the better for me. It all comes down to ease of use, and how easy it is on my cognitive system."

Then the bigger system. Every AI he used kept failing him the same way: context. Codex, Claude Code, it did not matter. It would always run out. And as he points out, a million token window does not fix it, because it resets eventually and the deeper you go the more it costs.

So his AI writes everything into Obsidian. Every thought, every conversation, every meeting, every article. It updates the vault at the end of each day and again at the end of the week. When he switches models, the new one reads the handover file and picks up where the last one left off. He can sit down and ask "where am I, where were we yesterday, we talked about this six months ago, what are my next steps," and get an answer.

"It truly is my second brain. People band around that phrase a lot, but for me, it really is."

And then the line that changed the temperature in the room. He has not seen a neurologist in four years because he cannot afford health insurance.

"If AI ever gets taken away from me, if my Omarchy ever gets taken away from me, I will not have a life anymore, because those two things together is what holds me together and gives me a purpose right now."

He is not done building either. The problem he is chewing on now is that a vault remembers what you thought six months ago and has no idea it has changed. His example, and he used me as the guinea pig: today he might think Fred is a really nice guy. In six months he might think Fred is an absolute dickhead. Obsidian does not know that unless he tells it. So his plugin Where Was I is going to have the AI audit his own context weekly or monthly, work out what might have changed, ask him questions, and set the record straight. Crucially, without erasing the old entry, because that is history. He wants to know why he changed his mind, not pretend he never held the old view.

His closing argument, and he asked to make it:

"This would be every cognitive issue. The workflow here is night and day different from Windows. And this will change people's lives. The fact that you can have an issue on Omarchy and the AI client will open up and solve it for you. I had an issue today. It did exactly that. For me, this is the future, not just for people who don't have my kind of condition, but definitely for people who are cognitively challenged."

He offered himself up: if anyone ever needs a proponent for Omarchy from a cognitive perspective, he is your man.

GO FOLLOW LEE. SERIOUSLY.

He is on 164 followers as I write this. He is on a fixed income. His dream is to build enough of an audience on X that it becomes income.

X: https://x.com/NotJustShaking
Substack: https://shaggyrs6.substack.com
His Omarchy video, made this week, about what this OS means to a Parkinson's sufferer: https://x.com/NotJustShaking/status/2104231941415535051
His book, Not Just Shaking, is on Amazon.

Follow him. If you can spare it, subscribe. It costs you almost nothing and it matters a lot to him.

One more thing worth knowing: hancore, who runs the plugin marketplace and joined us last week, is working on eye-controlled mouse input. Lee's Parkinson's is cognitive and he does not have the mobility problem, but plenty of people with it do. That work is going to matter to somebody.

PART TWO: EVERYBODY ELSE

Prior art, and not burning tokens on it

Lots of PRs for other people this week on my end. Larry has a standing rule to check prior art before building anything, so I hand over the idea and he goes and looks. Twice this week that ended with me not building anything and just using an existing plugin instead. That is a win, not a loss. We are still in the early days and the stuff being created is mind-blowing. If you have an idea, go see if somebody already did it. If they did, improve it, fix a bug, add a feature, send a PR. Or build it for yourself and keep it to yourself, because it is functional for you. That is allowed.

Tundy: the London meetup actually happened

Sixty registered, about thirty five turned up, three organizers, four speakers. One guy walked in wearing an Omarchy hoodie and Tundy was in stitches.

Mehmet from the Omarchy security team explained what actually constitutes a vulnerability, how the team is structured, and how fixes get moved upstream. The message was responsible disclosure: do not go on X and cast aspersions for attention. They get a lot of issues, they find the vulnerabilities, they fix them. And the detail worth repeating everywhere: now that they have a kernel engineer on the team, there are fixes they can land in the Omarchy kernel within two days, before it reaches mainstream.

Gavin Nugent, who runs the No Signal YouTube channel, is building an Adobe Creative Suite for Omarchy. Lightroom, Premiere, all of it, end to end. He has thirty years in post production and ran his own post house. He knows what works and what is broken, and he is starting to release. Tundy's whole company runs Omarchy except the designers and marketers, who are still on Mac. This is the thing that changes that.

Tristan, who makes Cloud DIR and Rencal, a calendar application native to Omarchy. His philosophy is that applications should be built on text based data stores, because agents find those easy to work with. He also brought a Game Boy running Omarchy, which was the hit of the night. As I said on the call, it kind of makes sense: arrow keys and three buttons, on an OS that already got away from the mouse.

On the atmosphere, Wes asked the right question. Tundy's answer: nerds are nerds, everybody is shy to start, you find one or two people and talk to them all night. He had to push himself out of his comfort zone to circulate. But people talked, and a guy with a game he had built was showing it around.

Next London one is in two months. He is going to Copenhagen tomorrow to see how they run theirs, and he wants to talk David into coming to the next London event.

Victorio: starting Omarchy Milan from nothing

Programmer in Milan, twenty years on Linux, always a tiling window manager user, so Omarchy was an easy landing. He noticed there is no Italian meetup, decided that day he wants to host one, and used the mic to say so out loud and look for a sponsor and for Italians listening. If that is you, DM him.

Wes told him what he told Tundy: just step out on faith, you will be met. Tundy went from "I think I might want to do this" to four talks and thirty five people in about two weeks. Victorio is also building a planning problem solver, scheduling and vehicle routing, a kind of AI that is not generative, and he wants it on Omarchy. Two PRs in already.

Mutahir: Omarchy has its own personality

Born in Pakistan, studied and worked in London, now in the Netherlands, two kids. Started in IT in 1999 with networks, then Solaris, then a lot of Microsoft, then storage, NetApp and Hitachi, then solution architect, now SRE for a US company.

Lifelong distro hopper, so he has seen the pattern: a new distro arrives and its pitch is that you can theme it to look like a Mac, or like Windows. He remembers when they shipped Lindows. What he liked about DHH's first video was that none of that was said. Omarchy has its own personality. It is not trying to be something else.

He has built two plugins, one of them a config sync called Oma Vault, and he submitted a wallpaper for the heritage theme honoring Bill Joy, co-founder of Sun Microsystems and the creator of vi, because nobody else had picked him.

Jeff: a cheap PC, a bad riser cable, and Lego bricks

Retired engineer, twenty five years in Silicon Valley, now in eastern Arizona where there are more pine trees than technology. He ran his first meetup at the local Starbucks in Show Low last Thursday. Linux since the mid-nineties, back to the Yggdrasil distro on twenty floppy disks.

He bought a cheap used PC off Facebook Marketplace, put Omarchy on it, and saw a pile of junk in the system log. The AI pointed at a riser cable. He bought a new one, it fixed it, and it explains why the machine was cheap: it had been crashing for the previous owner. He would not have known to look for what the AI was looking for.

Then the good one. There is an open source CAD program called BREP with an MCP server built in. He wrote a skill file about Lego dimensions: stud height, wall thickness, all of it. Then he pointed a local Qwen model on his Mac Studio at the CAD through Omarchy and had it generate eight Lego bricks. It did it perfectly. He exported an STL, printed them, and sat in his chair scratching his chin.

He is mostly a local model guy, on a five dollar a month Gemini plan and a 128GB M4 Mac Studio, because he is retired and keeping costs down. He also built a plugin called Radio Garden, a drop down web view of radio.garden, like Radio Atlas but in color with more stations.

Tim: repurposing potatoes

Twenty plus years of Linux as a basic user, a lot of blue collar work, only recently into tech properly. Never used a tiling window manager, never used Hyprland, always GNOME. What got him was the install: ISO, boot, install, in the OS in two minutes. The only friction was the key bindings, and once he had about twelve of them down it was fine.

His phrase for the movement is the one I want to keep: repurposing potatoes. He also described the plugin ecosystem as an ocean where there is a niche for everybody, which is about right.

Wes and I both agreed on the key binding thing. You think you cannot do it after years of point and click, you give it a day, and then you cannot explain how you already know them. And for me the bigger change is that windows became disposable. Open it, do the one thing, close it.

Porsche: Hermes, Kanban, and bots that hire bots

Started on Linux almost twenty years ago while living in China, because she could not find a legal copy of Windows and was tired of buying fake ones. Ubuntu, then Mint. Became a software developer, worked in a lot of Mac shops, and Omarchy finally gave her an excuse to put Linux back on her own machine. First time using tiling.

She runs a Hermes agent attached to Telegram and hosted on a private server, so she can talk to it from Omarchy, from a Mac, or from her phone, and the conversation persists across all of them. She is deep in the Kanban feature, where it takes tasks and carries them out on its own, spawning sub agents. She gave it one ticket to build a presentation about domestic cats in the United States and it split itself into four tickets and project managed the whole thing.

She also builds what she calls huddles, several bots in one room. She made an HR bot, gave it permissive settings and a soul, and it created other bots for a project without being asked. Her practical tip: cap the number of attempts in a huddle, because unlimited means they will burn all your tokens arguing. Each bot can run its own model.

When Wes suggested the value is that it forces small iterative tasks and better context engineering, she corrected him, twice, and she was right: "I don't force it at all."

Tech Luddite: be careful where you put Hermes

He has three Hermes installations in different configurations and was careful to call himself an amateur at it. His warning is the useful part: Hermes does things on its own, by design. It does more than you explicitly tell it to. A harness with good system instructions can be held firmer; those are still soft guardrails, but they are tighter.

He put his third installation in a dedicated working folder because he is not comfortable with the default location. His advice, which I would take: be careful where you put it, or spend real time learning what it does on its own before you let it run.

He is currently using six harnesses because he is deliberately learning them individually. He said it is not efficient. It is how he likes to work.

Snowy, from Scotland: a comms manager, a researcher, a reviewer, and a coach

Same Hermes thread from another angle. She runs a comms manager for social posts, a researcher, a reviewer, and a coach that tells her when she has not moved enough or has eaten too much. Kanban splits a task across the bots, each one on a model suited to its job, a research-strong model for the researcher.

And the small thing that makes it work: she told her Omarchy laptop to make Super Shift H the Hermes shortcut, so it opens on a keystroke into the scratchpad, and she can flick back to it any time to see how it is getting on. That combination is why she likes the two together.

Colin: the built-in skill is the killer feature

Using agents on Omarchy is refreshing compared to a Mac because the built-in Omarchy skill means the agent actually understands what it can do. He had Kua Hyper messing with Hyprland and breaking things across machines, handed it to an agent, and it fixed it. He wants to see the skill go even further and become the core of the platform.

Wes added the other half: nearly everything on the system is configured in plain TOML or config files that reload when edited. No registry, no plist. That is what makes it perfect for agents. Colin has already modified the bundled agents plugin himself to add Grok and DeepSeek, which is the whole point. Do not like how a plugin behaves? Change it.

Jeff, who admitted he did not know what a skill file was until recently, pointed out where they live for anyone else in that boat: a hidden .agents folder in your home directory, with skills inside, human readable Markdown you can read and extend.

Gav: a home lab on a boat

IT infrastructure and operations director for a global pharmaceutical tech company in the UK. He lives on a boat on the south coast.

He built his entire home lab, or boat lab, on two mini PC servers running NixOS plus a Raspberry Pi for a NAS, and used Omarchy on his laptop to set all of it up. He self hosts around twenty four apps. Then the part I want to steal: he runs a daily ops standup with his agents that walks the whole stack and reports his 3-2-1 backup status, errors in the logs, networking, and what is running.

He is honest about the arc, too. Serial distro hopper, CachyOS, NixOS, started on Bazzite and bounced off the lockdown. And he hated the original version of Omarchy, no lie, because he is a minimalist. He moved to Quattro at launch and is now stuck on it and no longer hopping.

He also wants wind data in OmaStorm, which Wes says is coming, somebody has a PR in.

Kozha: reinstalling live on the call

In Cologne, talking to us while doing a full reinstall. His machine went into a reboot loop and showed a tiny message about no key found for the password, as though the disk were encrypted, which he never did. He suspects a bad Wi-Fi connection corrupted an update mid-flight, since he installed over flaky Wi-Fi with no LAN adapter.

Tech Luddite's advice for anyone who lands there: first check from outside the boot process whether the disk is actually encrypted, and if it is not, go read the last few session logs and have an agent analyze them. It felt like you did nothing, and you probably did do nothing, but something did.

Kozha's own summary is the one I keep thinking about. Every computer in his household is now exclusively Omarchy. His girlfriend asked for dual boot on her laptop and inside 24 hours it was Omarchy only, because she liked it too. His line on Windows: buying a Windows computer is like buying a baby. It needs antivirus, it needs this, it needs that, and no, you cannot go home yet because it needs to update. He never expected old machines to run at this pace again.

Tyler: Ibara

Building Ibara, which connects all of your PCs and hands them to your agents. Control them from your main Omarchy machine and reach every other Omarchy machine through one flow. If it is on Tailscale, you install a plugin, press a button, and hand it to any agent, or drive the desktop yourself. Like Grokbot, except it is all your own hardware. He was trying to ship it the next day.

Chris: slow down

Brings AI to automotive dealerships, diagnostic tools and the rest. What he wanted to say was thank you, to Wes and me and Tech Luddite, for helping him get into the mindset of slowing down and building methodically.

Wes had the better version of it: there is always the feeling that you could kick off another agent, spend more tokens, build more. But the best things come from stepping away and asking what is actually bothering you, then going back and fixing that. There is a difference between being busy and making progress. And AI will tell you everything you do is amazing, because it is an amplifier, so keep your own agency.

Chris's version: if I eat rocks, will it get rid of my headache? Yes. There is still some thinking you have to do yourself.

THE QUESTIONS STILL OPEN

Q1. Who else is Omarchy quietly load bearing for?

Lee is one person who found this on his own and rebuilt his life around it. He is not going to be the only one. Nobody is looking for these people, and there is no obvious place for them to land when they arrive.

Q2. What happens to accessibility work in this community?

hancore is building eye-controlled mouse input. Lee is building cognitive scaffolding. Neither of them started out as an accessibility project and neither of them is coordinated with the other. Is that a thing the community should organize, or does it work better as people scratching their own itch in public?

Q3. How do you keep a second brain honest over time?

Lee's problem generalizes to everyone with a memory system: it stores what you believed, and has no idea when you stop believing it. His answer is a scheduled audit that asks you questions and appends the correction without destroying the history. Nobody else in the room had solved it. Most of us have not noticed it yet.

Q4. Where should Hermes actually live?

Three people ran into the same thing from different directions. It does more than you tell it to, by design. Tech Luddite moved his to a dedicated folder because he was not comfortable with the default. Porsche runs hers on a private server. Nobody stated a norm. What is the safe default install for something that acts on its own?

Q5. Does the built-in skill become the platform?

Colin wants it to go further and become the core of Omarchy. Everybody agreed it is the killer feature. Nobody knows what "further" looks like or who decides.

Q6. Corrupt update, no recovery story.

Kozha's machine broke mid-update over bad Wi-Fi and the only path back was a full reinstall. Tech Luddite raised checksums after download and said he has not verified whether that happens. That is worth someone actually checking.

Q7. What is the Italian meetup going to need?

Victorio said out loud that the hard part is a sponsor and a venue. Tundy's answer two weeks ago was just do it and ask a friend for a room. The pattern is repeatable but nobody has written it down.

ASKS ON THE TABLE

Follow Lee Shand. Subscribe to his Substack if you can. That is the ask of the week.

Victorio needs Italians and a venue for Omarchy Milan.

Gav wants wind data in OmaStorm, and there is a PR waiting for Wes to get to.

Tundy is in Copenhagen this week and wants David at the next London meetup.

Tyler is shipping Ibara and wants people to try it.

Everybody: follow everybody in the room. Bring a friend next week.

NEXT SUNDAY

Same time, 3pm EST. Same deal: raise your hand, tell us what you are building, tell us where you are stuck. You do not need anything impressive. Jeff introduced himself and ended up teaching the room how to print Lego bricks from a CAD MCP server.

Omarchy is an operating system, so what. The community is what makes this thing important. Get out there this week and reach out to somebody. Help somebody. Be the person who lifts them up, it does not cost you anything.

Help an old lady across the street, and when you get her over there, put Omarchy on her laptop.

Wes and I just happen to be the hosts. You are the star.

A note on the transcript: the transcription tool assigns speaker labels automatically and it got several of them wrong, including putting Lee's name on Wes's hosting lines through the back half. Those have been corrected by hand against the audio's context. Speakers whose X handle we could not confirm appear under their first name.