Omarchy as a daily driver on a Xiaomi Pad

I used to think “daily driver system” was a phrase that had nothing to do with me: phone for phone things, laptop for laptop things, and a tablet mostly for shows and holding down instant noodle lids. Then I put Omarchy on a Xiaomi tablet, purely to see what would happen. How far could it actually go?

It ended up becoming something I use every day. Not smoothly every minute — there were reboots, detours, and late nights when I discovered halfway through a change that the theme color was wrong. But that imperfectness is exactly what makes it fun. A person who spent many years in chips, back in the seat of a beginner: a little embarrassing at first, then ordinary. In front of a tool, who isn’t a beginner?

Themes turned out to be the best stretch of the road. I wrote Zhufeng Night (珠峰·夜): starfield, snow-white text, glacier blue. At night the tablet sits on my desk, and when the screen lights up it’s like a small high-altitude window opening at low altitude. Change one revision, look at it all evening. Change another, look at another evening. In meditation that’s called “sitting still”; in config it’s called “version control.” 😄

Then there’s the agent-computer part. Config used to mean memorized commands, search engines and luck. Now I let an agent work alongside me — better tempered than I am, and faster at proposing solutions. If I can’t follow a suggestion, I run it; if it breaks, I roll it back. That’s the gift of a personal project: nothing breaks badly enough for anyone to call me. Undo is enough.

People sometimes look at it and ask, “Is this actually useful?” The honest answer: not necessarily, but it’s genuinely fun. It makes me re-meet my tools every day, and it brings back the itch I felt the first time I put a screwdriver inside a machine as a kid. The good part of technology was never “it’s mature now.” It’s “it still lets me try.”