Linux Setup Was a Hazing Ritual. Agents Changed It.

Someone on X asked why so many developers still pick macOS when Linux is powerful, flexible, and made for developers. I quote-posted: “Because the setup of Linux has been treated like a hazing ritual of config and driver hell for decades?” This is the longer version.

The hazing

If you’ve set up Linux on real hardware, you know how it goes. Something doesn’t work. You search for it and land on a forum thread from years ago, or a wiki page for a different distro. You try commands one at a time, because if you change two things you won’t know which one fixed it. A lot of the time the failure is silent, so before you can look for a fix you have to work out which piece is broken and get it to give you an actual error message. Then you figure out what config change might fix the dang thing, and try that.

For the kind of problems below, that used to cost me somewhere between two and five hours each. When people say a Mac just works, that first week of setup is a big part of what they mean.

What broke on my machines

I run Omarchy on two machines: an M1 MacBook Pro on Asahi that dual-boots macOS, and an x86 desktop that dual-boots Windows 11. Here’s what broke, in the order it broke.

Aquamarine, during the install on the M1. The Omarchy installer tried to pull a version of aquamarine (the rendering library Hyprland runs on) that was too new to install. The machine was in the middle of installing, so I couldn’t run an agent on it. I used Claude on my phone. It did the research and wrote out the commands, and I typed them in. The fix was downgrading to an older aquamarine from the pacman cache. There’s more on that in the M1 field report.

World of Warcraft on the desktop. The game wasn’t handling my mouse. I couldn’t scroll down to accept the terms of service, and some clicks didn’t register at all. The problem was how Hyprland passed input into the game window. Claude Code sorted it out pretty quickly.

My keyboard’s function keys. These never worked on the desktop, and this one took a while. I’d press keys, the agent would check what signal was actually reaching the machine, and we went back and forth until it worked.

A scanner I use for trading cards. It didn’t work out of the box. Getting it to scan at all, with Claude Code, didn’t take long. Getting it good enough to actually use took longer. I ran scan after scan, tuning saturation and color until the images looked right. On Windows I’d do that in the vendor’s PaperStream software.

A thermal printer. It wouldn’t print at the right size, and the network couldn’t see it.

A Canon PIXMA. Also not showing up on the network. I worked through both printers with the agent.

How long it took

Most of these were fixed in five minutes or less once the agent was on them. That’s my estimate; I didn’t time them. The keyboard and the scanner took real time.

You could say I’ve just gotten better at Linux. Maybe a little. But the two to five hours is my estimate for these same problems without an agent.

What the agent took off my plate is the research: reading the threads and the wikis and turning them into commands for my actual hardware. I still check that it worked. The agent can’t tell me whether a card scan looks right, and it can’t press keys on my keyboard.

The catch

If you start an agent from Omarchy’s launcher, it probably runs with approvals turned off. I went through that in the agent safety post: eleven of the fourteen agents the launcher knows about start in their own version of “don’t stop to ask.”

Omarchy’s manual calls its config skill experimental, says to use plan mode first so you can read what the agent intends to do, and points to omarchy reinstall configs if the agent makes a mess. That skill is about config files, though. Printer and scanner drivers need root, and Omarchy routes privileged commands an agent launches through a password prompt. The AGENTS.md read quotes the rule.

I’m fine typing my password for a printer driver. If it’s going to touch disk layout, the bootloader or credentials, I want to read the plan first.

I’m not the only one

Tobi Lütke, Shopify’s CEO, said on The Knowledge Project that he changes his operating system by asking an agent and doesn’t edit config files himself. That’s around 21:51 in the episode, which came out September 15, 2026.

So, macOS?

The setup tax was a fair reason to pick a Mac. For me it’s a lot smaller now. A driver problem that used to eat an afternoon is mostly a short conversation, as long as I’m willing to check what the agent did.

That’s two machines and my own tolerance for fiddling, on systems I can recover if something goes wrong. I wouldn’t do this on a laptop someone needs on Monday morning, or across a fleet of company machines.

Read next: my field report on the M1 install, or the rest of the Omarchy hub.