It's all upside-down (computer-wise)

A week or so ago, I installed Omarchy on my old ThinkPad, and we hit it off immediately. I’ve tried various Linux distributions before, but nothing stuck. Omarchy is very sticky.

Tiling window managers have always fascinated me. I tried i3 for a while, but using it on the little laptop screen felt limiting, somehow. I never really got on with them. For some reason, Hyprland is different. At least whatever they’ve done to configure it by default in Omarchy feels different. It made sense right away.

I got along with Omarchy so well that I wanted to try it “for real”, meaning on a desktop machine with a big monitor. I have a beautiful and expensive Apple Studio Display, so whatever I use needs to work with that. I’ll document the details somewhere, later, but I ended up with a Beelink mini-pc (this one) and a weird DisplayPort -> USB cable. For $500 I got a Mac Mini look-alike with a fast (enough) processor, 32GB of memory, and a 1TB SSD. A similarly-spec’d Mac Mini would run around $1,300. I’m sure the M4 Mini is faster, but that’s a lot of extra money. I’m happy to report that it works great with the Studio Display.

So now I’m sitting here at my desk, doing nearly everything¹ on the little Beelink running Omarchy.

But there’s a problem. I’ve been using an M2 Mac Mini as a home server for a while. I’ve installed nomachine on that and the Beelink so I can remotely control the Mac. This works pretty well, and got me thinking: Since I’m only doing a few things on the Mac now, why not just use the Mini for those things, as well as using it as a server? I could install Lightroom etc. on it and control it remotely when I need it? If it’s too laggy, I could figure out how to use a KVM switch instead.

But then, what about that M4 MacBook Air I just bough a couple months ago? What about my external drives (formatted for Mac)? What about backups? I’m using Firefox?

You see how everything has been upended?

I’ve been using a Mac since the 1980s. My entire computing world view is based on macOS. This is weird, but it’s kind of amazing how much fun I’m having.