omakub VS Tiger VNC

Since I work with Ruby on Rails, I've been following DHH's work for years. Rails is what he calls omakase (Japanese for "I'll leave it to you"): you take the good defaults that came in the box, instead of configuring every piece. Omakub took the same idea to Ubuntu, and in June 2025 came Omarchy, omakase for Arch + Hyprland. Natural continuation. I jumped in on day 1.

I am surprised Omarchy got such a large audience, DHH had already dropped an opinionated Ubuntu 'distro' - Omakub - but seemingly didn't gain popularity.

Even though I haven't used it, I don't mind Omarchy existing if it works. I had issues with omakub when I had tried it in the distant past.

https://omakub.org/

That said, I think a lot of peoples criticism of DHH and Omarchy is based on their personal opinions of DHH or that they don't like that an opinionated Arch variant is opinionated, which is a bit of a ridiculous criticism too.

You didn’t explain why you wanted to use debian, you don’t have to, but there are a lot of x86 based laptops out there that will run various linux distros so I wonder why you’re on a Mac to start with? Employer choice and not yours?

You mention Typescript which I’ll assume means some sort of web development, one thing to maybe consider is looking at https://omakub.org/ for inspiration on hardware choices and a setup. I don’t use it but was looking at it recently out of curiousity (I do Rails so thats how I’m aware of DHH and him leaving Apple HW).

The best way to understand to how get started with using Omakub is to watch the video from DHH on the Omakub website. If you prefer a text version, check out The Omakub Manual.

Step 2 - Set up VNC If you've set up SSH correctly, this is as easy as installing a VNC viewer client like TigerVNC on another device of choice, then connecting with your SSH credentials.

To use VNC, you need to install a VNC server on your EC2 instance. There are multiple VNC servers, one good option is TigerVNC.

TigerVNC Viewer

Next, install the TigerVNC server and other add-ons for its operation:

This has been around for a while and so far RealVNC does not have a fix. It's possible that something like TigerVNC [their site] may cope but I've not tried it.

PS. OpenBSD comes with vmctl, it is a tool like Docker or Qubes VMs. You can jail Firefox inside a VM then connect to their GUI desktop via tigervnc. But I believe, it is too paranoid. Separate user and separate disk partition for Firefox is more than sufficient, given OpenBSD paranoid approach to the application address spaces.

https://github.com/TigerVNC/tigervnc/issues/662 which still shows OPEN.

Tried TigerVNC but I wont even connect.