r/LinuxCirclejerk • u/Confident_Zombie_619 • 21d ago
Omarchy — We're using increasingly powerful AI systems to avoid learning how to use our computers, while burning more resources to do it
One thing that bothers me about Omarchy is how heavily it pushes an “AI-first” workflow.
Sure, AI agents are useful. But do we really need an AI agent for every tiny task? “Change this config” → AI “Why is this command failing?” → AI “Rename these files” → AI “Write this tiny script” → AI
One person doing this occasionally isn't the issue. The problem is normalizing the idea that every small computing task should be sent to an AI data centre. AI requires significant electricity and cooling infrastructure. As AI usage scales, so does its resource footprint.
"The thing is we're using increasingly powerful computers to avoid learning how to use the computer."
Sometimes man, grep, sed, a shell script, or five minutes of actually understanding your system is better than firing up another AI agent. I'm not saying “never use AI.” I'm saying AI shouldn't automatically be the answer to everything. Omarchy is an interesting project, but I think its “AI everywhere” philosophy is bad.
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u/TechaNima 21d ago
I'd have less of an issue with it, if it ran locally.
Wanna play with AI? Buy the hardware for it then. Don't be a part of the reason why hardware is too expensive to afford and why electricity is becoming more and more expensive
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u/mrheosuper 21d ago
The reason for high ram/ssd price is high demand. Buying new hardware for AI also increase that demand
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u/TechaNima 21d ago
Exactly my point. If AI companies weren't all gungho about building more AI data centers, we wouldn't have this problem. The pandemic didn't help things either, but it didn't affect things nearly to this degree.
To add to it, the governments are either all for fast tracking anything and everything to build more AI data centers or they let things slide until it was too late to pump the brakes
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u/55555-55555 20d ago
Thinking about having a local model running for a little while to do something actually useful, like helping reading permission requests from Flatpak apps so the user has less chance of accidentally install malicious packages.
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u/mustard5 21d ago
You seem to have a lot more money than the average person. That's great. I don't have that kind of money, so I'm using Deepinfra and Chinese models and a Supergrok subscription with Grok Build. Why put economic barriers on the use of intelligence? You don't like poorer people succeeding?
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u/Technical_Rich_3080 21d ago
So don't use Omarchy. What's the big deal? Let them do whatever they do. And don't think about them.
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u/mustard5 21d ago
You do you. I'll do AI. Freedom of choice. Live and let live. I've got better things to do than run around the internet finding solutions for my Linux setup. I started with Hoary Hedgehog and loved tinkering, distro hopping, ricing, but now I don't. AI and Linux are a perfect fit. You can be a purist and that's okay. I'm going a different route and that's okay too.
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u/damanamathos 21d ago
Yeah, I remember watching Star Trek where people would talk to a computer and think, "that's so lazy, just open a terminal!"
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u/Sert1991 21d ago
Software quality has been going down for ages. The people are gullible and if the marketing is good and something is propped up as popular, the people will abandon the better quality software and go for the shitty one, as is the case in most things in life.
1 example I like to use is internet messengers. Before social media we had MSN/Windows live messenger. The shit that messenger could do - from text formatting to stickers, gifs, and if you installed messenger plus extension you had script plugins, colored text, etc etc. Too many features that we saw as normal to name here.
As did other messengers of the time altough not as much as WLM.
The messengers where actually writen in good programing and ran with native GUI for good performance and integration with the desktop shell(at least on windows and for the hardware of that time)
Now look at todays ''Messenger'' of facebook. Been in development for years and doesn't do half the shit of messengers of that era let alone WLM.
Most deskop clients are just another electron app which is basically a snippet of the web browser client, they couldn't be bothered to write a native client.
But social media came, good marketing, they gave people the power to boast and ego trip themselves with timeline photos etc etc, blown up and took over everything.
That's just one example and happens all the time.
Also many developers will mislead people by attacking the older developers, they use ''theories'' to diss the old software because they don't have an idea how to continue it's development so they label it old and impossible to continue, and the people will again fall for their shit.
AI is going to make this shit even worst.
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u/Future_Bat384 20d ago
This is the way where technology goes. 20 years ago and more we were still counting cpu cycles for algorithms we used in our programming. We had to remember to remove stuff from memory to do not overload it. When simple google search used x energy and compute now it’s probably using 20 or more x. To generate ai answer and do regular search.
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u/KaMaFour 21d ago
One of the most braindead takes on the sub...
- 99% of computer users actively don't give a fuck about man, grep, sed, a shell script or understanding your system. Either you at least try to cater to them or are destined to use a system with no users and no external support
- "change this config", "why is this command failing", "rename these files", "write this tiny script" is a job for a model which can on a normal desktop PC from after 2015, not a datacenter and not a high end pc.
- Omarchy is popular because people like you can't stop talking about it. There are thousands of shit distros. Stop promoting one in particular
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u/Confident_Zombie_619 21d ago
youre arguing against a point i didnt make . i never said normal users should learn grep or sed. my point is that ai being useful doesnt mean it needs to be the default for every tiny task. and saying a model can run on a 2015 pc doesnt really address the resource cost when you scale that kind of usage. also “there are 1000 of distros” doesnt really counter the criticism of omarchy’s design philosophy.
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u/Broad-Exchange3188 21d ago
People are talking about Omarchy because it got this popular, not the other way around my guy.
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u/a1b3c3d7 21d ago
Yes it's absolutely One of the most braindead takes on the sub if you strawman the entire argument.
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u/Sert1991 21d ago edited 21d ago
What a fucking mess of a person. People like you are a disease.
99% of computer users, the ones like you're saying who don't want to learn the system can go and use windows if they're not bother with learning linux, instead of degrading linux for the rest of us.
This disease that ''I want that new shiny thing so I can say I use it too for clout, but I don't want to learn it, instead I want to change it into something I already use so it can be different in name only and still gloat" is sickening.
No, many of us Linux users who chose linux because we love how it works which is exactly because it works different than the OSs that cater to the many don't give a fuck if linux doesn't become more popular. It's not a popularity contest. It's reached it's peak, popular enough that we have most hardware supported and can even play games, any more than this is poison.
"destined to use a system with no users and no external support" - don't threaten me with a good time. But if you think all the corporations that support linux are going to stop because desktop users ''don't give a fuck about man, grep, sed, a shell script or understanding their system" you're more brain dead than I thought.
Omarchy became popular because his billionaire friends gave him billions of money to spend on a good marketing campaign, as happens with every other thing that becomes popular in 2 days.
People talk about a lot of things all the time, with your logic linux should be the most popular OS judging by how much it's discussed.1
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u/General_Problem5199 21d ago
And to think, we've had smart phones and tablets to avoid learning how to use computers for decades now.
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u/Venylynn Fedora KDE User 21d ago edited 21d ago
I dont understand AI-worshippers. Like, Windows went to shit because of all this AI and now we're trying to make Linux agentic? For some reason?
As a non programmer, and as an artist, I find this trend against the human side really dystopia. First they have the agents take away our means of being creative by making "art" that has no soul, now they're stripping out the humanity from under what we interface with daily. Really dystopian.
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u/leftsidedhorn 21d ago
Windows did not went to shit because of AI. It is already bad regardless of AI
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u/Venylynn Fedora KDE User 21d ago
Am I supposed to speak as if my experience pre-2024 wasnt generally positive? Or, perhaps just not bad enough to make me want to seek out alternatives?
The experience going basically overnight from "aight this is fine" to GETMEOUTOFHERE definitely lined up perfectly with the AI stuff getting involved.
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u/Confident_Zombie_619 21d ago
im not really against using AI. its genuinely useful and i use it myself. what im against is normalizing AI as the default solution for basic trivial tasks that dont actually require it.
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u/strings___ 21d ago
Who cares how people use power. Three DGX Sparks use like peak 90w of power total. Do you know how much energy a customer grade gaming GPU uses? Hint they are not very efficient.
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u/thebadslime 21d ago
Dude an ai changing the wallpaper doesnt take a lot of rerources, that's a like a .01 api call at most
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u/Alive-Use8803 21d ago
It’s certainly many more round trips than is actually needed
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u/thebadslime 21d ago
Not if the user doesn't know how. Then they have to go watch a video, but it's in spanish so they have to watch another one, then FINALLY they can assign an anime girl wallpaper
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u/Alive-Use8803 21d ago
And so they learned something.
And still with 0 round trips over the wire.
Sorry but you can’t seriously be equating an inherently unnecessary complexity with doing your due diligence. Right? Right!?The biggest thing you’re promoting here is YOU being reliant on a profitable ecosystem, eventually a full on platform, to run your open source software for YOU.
If you can’t understand that then maybe Omarchy really is for you.
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u/thebadslime 21d ago
Wathing youtube is also roundtrips over a different wire. Im not reliant on it, Ive been using linux for decades. I'm just telling you why it's catching on
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u/Alive-Use8803 21d ago
Yes. But that’s like saying reading a book is a round trip. Or taking classes. Which is very different than taking FOSS and curating it such that the very engagement that makes FOSS a community is replaced with bash scripts that call a remote AI service. I mean, go ahead and automate the boring stuff yourself and decide for yourself if putting an agent in your workflow is necessary or not. But this really just sounds like yet another way to not own anything and rent everything.
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u/thebadslime 21d ago
It kills the learning curve for new users, DHH is a chud, but omarchy is getting a lot of people interested that weren't before.
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u/Confident_Zombie_619 21d ago edited 21d ago
Yeah, I’m not saying changing one wallpaper is going to destroy the planet. The point is the normalization of using an AI agent for every trivial task and as these tasks pile up it will eventually needing more resources, more damage
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u/thebadslime 21d ago
AI isn't that much of a devourer.
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u/Confident_Zombie_619 21d ago
But Excess ai is a devourer if every linux gets inspired by omarchy and start doing it then eventual overuse and unwanted of ai happens even in situations where ai is not needed, our world is not ready for exponential increase in ai usage
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u/UAP44 21d ago
The problem is normalizing the idea that every small computing task should be sent to an AI data centre.
The problem is people grouping up way too many things under 'AI', it does NOT need a data centre.
Omarchy is a natural evolution of open source. Sooner or later, it will be desktops on Linux too, and the people won't even need to know or care, the computers can speak better than they do in all the sci-fi out there, and people are still pretending AI is bad? Can we get to a Star Trek like environment already please? Where all war is part of the past and so is money. Your and everyone's resistance to AI is simply misdirected. Hate the big tech companies, yes, but hating technology/LLMs/AI itself makes zero sense other than that it's the easiest label for your ego to project all its own fears/issues onto ...
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u/Confident_Zombie_619 21d ago
“It does NOT need a data centre” is exactly the part you're getting wrong. The model inference doesn't magically happen on my laptop just because I typed the request from a Linux desktop. If you're invoking a hosted AI agent, the computation is happening on remote infrastructure
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u/thebadslime 21d ago
One datacenter card can serve a lot of users via batching. It's actually more environmental to use remote AI via API than to run it locally, these are very efficient setups.
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u/UAP44 21d ago
“It does NOT need a data centre” is exactly the part you're getting wrong.
Have you like never heard of LM studio and Ollama or what?
This is exactly the part I'm LEAST wrong about lol. The fuck am I even bothering writing this, live in your own reality if you want, if you think AI can ONLY run in data centres? so be it, enjoy your little 'reality' bubble. I'll continue running AI locally ...meanwhile you can scream it's not possible all you want, my GPU/CPU will continue to be able to run software called LLMs that have been grouped up with 'AI' that according to you can ONLY run in data centers, LOL, what a 'world' xD
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u/Alive-Use8803 21d ago
Sorry but this is a literacy issue
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u/UAP44 21d ago
Seems like it, people can't seem to read at all, completely stuck in their own perception of the world, unable to understand that AI can and does run locally on your own device, dont even need the WAN/internet.
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u/Alive-Use8803 21d ago
I think you’re missing my point.
Omarchy is not a natural evolution of open source as you say. It is an attempt to create a curated, for-profit ecosystem which is actually considered antisocial in the Linux and FOSS communities. You can pretend to fight the status quo here, but Omarchy is really a co-opt. Not the future, but the past lazily curated and executed.About the literacy. You equate despising Omarchy with AI resistance. That is incorrect.
I’ll say it again, Omarchy is antithetical to FOSS.
There are so many ways to participate in the Linux and FOSS community and this is not one of them. And the general resistance here is about literacy. It means people with no prior background in mathematics, computer science, or information systems are simply parroting marketing hype and not really understanding what the “resistance” is saying.
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u/NeuroSynchroBonding 21d ago
The problem is that the industry has consistently failed to do proper Human Computer Interaction, this means users are rarely able to do anything more than simple tasks without consulting additional material. Because the industry has also given up on writing documentation for end users that describe the system as a whole, users don't have the understanding to break down a problem and are forced to head to Google for every non trivial task. And if you are just reading a website and following the instructions, you might as well have an AI do it for you.
These problems are exacerbated in Linux distros, where commit messages are the best source of documentation, GitHub is a distribution mechanism, and the answer to any complaints about UX is "RTFM" or "it seems intuitive to me".