Local man runs out of reasons not to start side project
The editor works. Git is installed. Investigators are running out of leads.
A developer who planned to spend the weekend setting up Linux has instead been forced to confront the project he has been talking about since February.
“Usually there is a font problem,” he explained. “Or the terminal colours are wrong. Something that reasonably takes until Sunday evening.” This time, the desktop already looked the way he wanted it to.
A perfectly good weekend, ruined
Attempts to recover the afternoon by comparing editors were unsuccessful. Neovim was there already, and the menu offered his other favourites. He installed one. It worked.
His first recovery strategy was to declare the defaults too opinionated. This briefly looked promising, until he discovered he could change them. He spent eleven minutes exercising that freedom before changing everything back. “That was research,” he said. Nobody had asked.
An independent review of his browser history found six abandoned searches for a problem substantial enough to justify a new setup document. One tab contained a comparison of shells. Another was a discussion about whether a particular shade of grey was warm. Neither produced a defensible delay.
The repository makes an appearance
At 11:42, he opened the project. This was the first confirmed sighting of the repository outside a conversation beginning with “I have this idea.” Witnesses described the moment as quiet, with no compiler errors serious enough to make lunch inevitable.
The project itself is a small application for tracking books. Its proposed architecture previously included four services, a message queue, and a carefully worded explanation of why development could not begin until the laptop situation was resolved. The first working version now appears to need a form.
Friends have been asked not to mention this. “I am pleased for him,” one said, “but he has explained the deployment strategy to me at three separate barbecues. I would quite like to record a book.”
“I would quite like to record a book.”
— A friend who has heard the deployment strategy three times
There was a late attempt to frame the situation as a philosophical objection to preconfigured software. This ended when he noticed the keyboard shortcut for his browser was convenient. A draft post titled “The Cost of Convenience” remains unsent, beneath a commit fixing the book form.
Some traditions survive
Omarchy has declined to take responsibility for the application’s feature set, its name, or the developer’s decision to spend twenty minutes choosing a loading indicator. Those matters remain outside the operating system’s jurisdiction.
At the time of writing, he had created a README and gone to make coffee. Some traditions are stronger than any operating system.
From the unofficial complaints desk. This report is fiction; the enthusiasm that inspired it is harder to explain away.