Warren WestfallUSday-job-automationlocal-firstlocal-aiown-your-machinekeystroke-efficiencySelf taughtai-as-teacherhome-labomarchy-pluginsContribution over glorydistro-journeybuilder/builders/warren-westfall/avatar.jpg
From 28 green screens in a village school to an all Omarchy fleet in Alaska, shipping an expenses widget for the Omarchy bar and a benchmarked local AI recipe for his own laptop.
first computerGreen screen command line machines and Oregon Trail, then a Lisa and his first mouse drawing, which he still keeps
linux since2006
omarchy since2025
modelsqwen3.5-9b
// shorts
Shorts
1 video
0:26Always a keystroke guy. Within a few days of tiling: this is what I've been looking forHe has always been a keystroke guy. Learning the key bindings, he was tiling and moving around within a few days: this is what I have been looking for, and what Pop was not doing.
// life timeline
Oil money builds a new village school with 28 computers. Oregon Trail on green screens
Draws his first picture with a mouse on a Lisa
Buys an Apple dual 450 tower, OS 9 then OS X
Teaches himself cron from library magazines
2006Dual boots Ubuntu on a MacBook Pro from a Macworld live disk
2008Triple boots Windows, macOS and Ubuntu and gets Wi-Fi working
2018Decides he wants out of the big platforms
2022System76 Oryx Pro, Pop!_OS as his daily driver
2025First Omarchy install on a 2016 MacBook Pro
2025All in on Omarchy around 3.0
2026July: every machine on Omarchy
2026August: starts Alaskaquake, an earthquake monitor for Alaska
2026October: submits expenses to the Omarchy plugin marketplace
2026October: tested local AI recipe for his RTX 3070 Ti, 92.6 tokens per second
// 00
The rundown
Warren Westfall is a rock star. He grew up in a tiny Alaska village whose school had 28 green screen computers, he dual booted Ubuntu on a MacBook Pro back in 2006, and today every machine he owns runs Omarchy, from a 17-inch System76 laptop to a home server that never turns off. He has an expenses widget submitted to the Omarchy plugin marketplace and a tested local AI recipe pushing 92.6 tokens per second on his own laptop GPU. Everything he builds is free, local and his. His mission fits on a sticker:
"I've been working hard at doing everything local."
“I've been working hard at doing everything local.”Warren Westfall · L200
// 01
Oregon Trail on a green screen
Warren grew up in a village of about 250 people in rural Alaska. In the early '80s the oil was flowing, money reached the rural villages, and they built a new school. The whole place, K through 12, had maybe 90 kids. It also had 28 computers.
They were green screen machines, and you had to command line pretty much everything to get anywhere. Time on them was the prize for finishing homework early, and the prize was Oregon Trail. A couple of years later the Lisa showed up with a mouse. Warren drew his first picture with it. He still has that picture in his keepsake box.
// 02
Cron from the library
Warren became a firefighter, and back then he was more into hot rod cars and metal music than computers. He grew up on Apples, so when it was time for a real machine he went straight to an Apple dual 450 tower. It still shipped with OS 9, but he had seen pictures of OS X in a magazine and knew what was coming.
When OS X landed, everything changed. "Everything worked. It was brilliant. I loved it." He wanted to know how to make the thing do stuff. There were no chat boards in his life and nobody had a cell phone, so he went to the library, found the magazines and taught himself things like cron, a little bit at a time.
// 03
800 miles of pipe
Warren's day job is the kind of thing most people only see in documentaries. He is a pipeline controller, watching the screens and running the flow of oil down the 800 mile pipeline that crosses Alaska, all the way to a ship at the end of the line. Right now that is around 530,000 barrels a day. Every mile of pipe holds about 11,320 barrels, the oil moves about two feet per second, and it climbs over three mountain ranges, riding gravity for much of the trip. Ask him how much of that is computers and how much is muscle and he lights up. "Oh, man, it's automated to the hilt, man." He has been at it for 26 years. The same guy who taught himself cron from library magazines, and who calls himself a keystroke guy who lives for efficiency, spends his workdays in a control room built on that exact idea. Let the machines do the repetitive work and keep a sharp human watching every screen.
// 04
Ubuntu on a magazine disk
In 2006 his copy of Macworld came with a live boot disk of Ubuntu. Warren went to the forums and asked what he could do with it. The answer was simple. Dual boot it. So he did, on a MacBook Pro, in 2006, with basically no instructions. That was his first taste of linux.
In 2008 he went back for more and triple booted the same machine with Windows, Mac and Ubuntu. "I actually got Wi-Fi working." Anyone who ran linux on a laptop in 2008 knows what that means.
By 2018 he wanted out of the big platforms for good. "I want out of Apple, I want out of Google, I want out of everything." He moved to Pop!_OS and learned his way through it. In 2022 he bought the machine he still sits at today, a 17-inch System76 Oryx Pro, fired up Steam and thought, holy cow, this is great. linux has been his daily driver ever since. Whatever distro showed up on X or YouTube, he spun it up in a VM to try it. Then Pop moved to Cosmic, and Warren started asking one question. "Do I have control of this machine or not?"
// 05
The keystroke guy
In 2025 DHH showed up in his feed. Warren passed the first time. It came back around with a simple message, just try it, and he did, on a 2016 MacBook Pro. He had heard all the Arch horror stories. The install went boom, boom, boom, boom, and it was done. Then he found the key bindings.
"I've always been a keystroke guy," he says. Within a few days he had the lay of the land, opening windows, tiling and moving around the whole system. "This is what I've been looking for!"
That MacBook got locked up at the firmware level, twice. Warren did not walk away. He followed Omarchy on X, kept watching and waited for his moment. In his words, "I think it was 3.0 that I actually, bit real hard." He backed up all his files and went all in, in late 2025 as he remembers it. By July 2026 he had switched over all his machines.
// 06
Free, local and on his tailnet
Omarchy did more than change his desktop. It changed how he builds. Warren says he would not be able to do what he does now without learning how AI fits into a real workflow. "Omarchy kind of introduced me to that."
His home lab is an old Lenovo ThinkCentre loaded with storage. It stays on all the time running Jellyfin and everything else that is server side. He keeps his projects in his own markdown files and treats AI like a teacher, not a crutch. "But I've been asking it to walk me step-by-step how it does things, and then let me do it." That is how he learned GitHub.
His first plugin on GitHub is expenses, a widget that lives right in the Omarchy bar. It tracks monthly expenses across 13 categories, with income tracking and month browsing, and it can sync to his own self-hosted ezBookkeeping. He snaps a receipt, a timer picks it up, reads it and imports it, and out comes a ledger he can audit, transaction by transaction, fixing any category it got wrong. Every piece of it is free. "And it's all free, it's all local, it's on Tailnet." He submitted it to the Omarchy plugin marketplace, and anyone can add it with one omarchy plugin command.
He walks the local talk on AI too. Warren opened a pull request on local-ai-registry, the registry of tested machine recipes behind the Omarchy Local AI plugin, adding the first tested recipe for the RTX 3070 Ti Laptop GPU in his System76. Qwen3.5-9B at 64K context on TabbyAPI, all six lab gates passing, 92.6 tokens per second. Run on his own machine, with the evidence attached.
And he is just getting started on Alaskaquake, an earthquake monitor for Alaska.
Warren went from Oregon Trail on a green screen to shipping his own tools on Omarchy. He knows exactly how that feels. "I've vibe-coded something, and it's really cool. It's awesome."
L30Warren: Well, my first experience with computers was back in the, 80s. you know, the beginning of the 80s, apple… Had released the, Kind of like, one of their first computers. And, you know, oil money was flowing Flowing like crazy up here during that time.
L62Warren: Yeah. Anyway, so in the early 80s, oil was flowing. You know, and we got lots of money out to the rural villages, so they built a school. And we got… probably… you know, for a K-12 school that had maybe 90 kids in it total. So, the whole school was K-12. And we had 28 computers. And it was all green screen, you know, you had to command line it pretty much everything to get anywhere. And, so we were doing Oregon Trail, that was our, that was our, you know. our prize was, like, if we finished, got done with homework early or whatever, we got time on those computers. And so the first… my first remember is, memory is, Oregon Trail, and the sword fighting guys, you know, the stick fighting. And, anyway, so a couple years later, the Lisa came out. You remember that? The… the square box?
L66Warren: Yeah, it just… it was… it's in my… it's in my keepsake box for some reason. I just thought it was cool. I never… I never dreamed to be a techie-minded person, you know, up until a few years ago, actually. But, so anyway… through the 80s, you know, you just get through school, get into college, I used computers a little bit in there, in the early 90s, to… to do papers and stuff like that. And, but I never owned one. And then I became a firefighter. And, one of my, one of the firefighters that I roomed with, he was big into computers, so he… but it was all gaming for him. True. And so he was into the gaming scene, and so he… it was up and coming, and I'd play a little bit on it, and I was like, I was more into Hot Rod cars, and… And, you know, that kind of thing back then. And… Metal music. I wonder what Apple's doing. And Apple had just come out with this dual 450 tower. But it still had OS 9 on it. And I'd heard… I'd heard about OS X. coming out, and I was like, oh, that's gonna be cool, you know, they showed, like, a, you know… it was some magazine, I saw pictures, and…
L67[redacted: style, lines 67 to 75]
L76Warren: Anyway, and so, So then OS X came out, and it changed, and just a life, you know, it was just like, whew! Everything changed, you know? Everything worked. It was brilliant. I loved it. You know, I was like, this is it. You know, this is where… this is my destiny. Apple computers. And so, at the time, you know, you could still do some stuff. with it, you know, get into it. I was… I didn't know anything about coding, I didn't know nothing. I was like. I wonder what this thing does, how do you make it do stuff, you know? And I didn't know anything about chat boards, or any of that stuff. I didn't even have a phone, I didn't have a cell phone, nobody did, really. But, So, I didn't know what to do, and I ended up going to the library and finding these magazines. And realize, you know, and I was learning stuff like cron… cron, you know, learning stuff, little things, little bits, tids and bits.
L80Warren: Yeah, so for, you know, the big boys. Anyway, so that got, you know, that just waylaid any of my computer, adventure. And then about 2006, I got a MacBook Pro. I subscribed to Macworld magazine, And Macworld came with a live boot disk of Ubuntu. And… At that time, I'd learned how to get on chat forums and that kind of thing, and so I was asking questions, what can I do with this? And they're like, well, dual-boot it! So I dual-booted… dual-booted the MacBook Pro with Ubuntu. in 2006, and it was terrible. It didn't work, didn't work right, you know, I didn't know what to do with it, I had no idea, and there was real no instructions. It was just kind of like this… weird thing that you open the book, and there's a CD, and I was like, oh, what's this? You know, there's really no instructions. I didn't know where to go to get them, and Anyway, that was my first exposure to linux.
L82Warren: And then, I, put it away for a while, 2008 came, I tried again. I do. I actually triple booted that computer, I had Windows. Windows, Mac, and Ubuntu on there, and it worked. It was working. I actually got Wi-Fi working. Wow. And it was working, And I was just poking around, you know? Sure. And so then that… It worked for a while, and then things broke, and then… Then I just put it back.
L83[redacted: private, lines 83 to 162]
L163Nix: Let's jump to… let's jump to Omarchy, like, how did.
L166Warren: Okay, so, 2022. I bought this computer where I'm sitting on now, which is a System76, Oryx Pro, yep, 17-inch computer.
L167[redacted: private, lines 167 to 185]
L186Warren: So, anyway, I bought the, I bought the, this computer, and I was using, Pop!_OS. Because I had, I had switched to Pop!_OS before that, on the MacBook Pro. And I was like, okay, this is user-friendly for… for, beginners and, you know, that kind of thing, and I kind of, kind of learned my way through it, and And so I got… I got… I got stuck on Pop!_OS, and I was like, okay, I'll just stay here. And I would try other stuff on… on, a VM, You know? I try other stuff on VMs, and that kind of thing for a while, and I, you know, I tried a bunch of stuff, man. Whatever I'd see come up on X, or… whatever it was, I'd… YouTube, you know, I'd just go try it, and then I'd be like, yeah, nope, staying with pop, you know? And just because it was…
L187Nix: You'd look for something better, and find out it wasn't so bad where you were.
L188Warren: Yeah, right. And then I, you know, then I was like, then I bought this computer, and then I, installed Steam and was playing games for a little bit, and I was like, holy cow, this is great! This thing's working great. I mean, that's what this computer is made for. And, but… You know, I was just learning, so I was… I messed it up several times, like, broke it, and had to reinstall it from the beginning, kind of thing. And,
L198Warren: I've been using it as a tool, and… when I do things, like, I've been doing things on my own, learning how to use GitHub and all that. And… But I've been asking it to walk me step-by-step how it does things, and then let me do it. And, it's… that has helped, because I just… I've had all these ideas. how I've wanted to improve my productivity, but I just don't know how. I've tried learning Python.
L199Nix: Well, the cool part is, me and you got to see it before it existed, and now we're gonna get to see, you know, we're gonna go from no computers to AGI, I think.
L200Warren: Right, yep. And that kind of scares me, to tell you the truth. So I've… I've been working hard at doing everything local.
L201Nix: Tell me more about that, that's… that's a… that's a… Let's dive into that a little bit. Tell me about what you're doing on local.
L202Warren: Okay, so let me, let me back up just a little bit.
L206Warren: So I was on Pop!_OS, and Pop!_OS went to all Rust. Re… redid their whole… thing in Rust, and I was fine with that. Whatever. Everything seemed to work fine. Cosmic came out. And, you know, I'm like, it's just… it just seems like everything… just like Apple was. Apple started out like this, and then just slowly went, and then you can't do nothing. And so… and this is the way I feel like Cosmic is going, is they're just… they're just making it so that it's just… it's not really going like this so much as it's going like this, and you're… and you're going, well, I'm getting confused here. Do I have control of this machine or not?
L208Warren: And so… A year and a half ago, Omarchy came out, He, he, DHH… I just happened to, for some reason, he came up on my feed. And I'm like, who is this guy? This is, like, kind of a wild, crazy-haired guy, you know? what's going on here, you know? And I listened, and I was like, it's not for me, and then it came back around. And he's like, just try it. And I'm like, okay, I've been doing this for a long time now, I'll just try it. And so I put it on an old 2016 MacBook Pro at the time. And at that time, you know, you did the arch installer. And I was so afraid of Arch, because you hear all the horror stories. So I put it, and it was so easy, it just, like, boom, boom, boom, boom, it did it. And then I installed Omarchy. And Omarchy worked, it was great, and it was working, and then it just bricked my machine. Boom! it just disappeared. I mean, I'm not kidding, it was just like a bomb went off, and I was like, what's going on? Did it fry something? You know?
L209Nix: Come back from that, because generally when that happens, you're like, screw that.
L210Warren: Well, it was the… my… his first impressions. I've always been a keystroke guy, like efficiency, And so… I'm like, when I first started messing with it, I was like, oh, oh, oh, you know, you're discovering how efficient You know, you just… open the key bindings, and you get the key bindings. And, you know, and so I was just learning that, and then within a few days, I had gotten the lay of the land. And I was moving around, and opening windows, and tiling, and doing all this stuff, and I was like, yes! This is what I've been looking for! This is what pop is not doing, you know, kind of thing. And… and then it bricked it. And then the computer sat for… 8 months or so, because, like, it went into, like, a… it went into, like, a panic mode, Apple's kind of backup security feature, or whatever, it's called, firmware. firmware login page or something, I can't remember what it is, but I had to, like, go to Apple. With the original receipt, and then say, you know, unlock my machine.
L212Warren: And so I bricked it one more time after that, and I was like, alright, I'll just leave it alone. And I followed on X. And then… When was it? When was it when the first one came out? January? The…
L216Warren: Yeah, I can't remember when it was, when I… I think it was 3.0 that I actually, bit real hard, and I… I was like, okay. You know, all nervous. Backed up all my files.
L217Nix: You've been use… you've been using it since 3.0.
L218Warren: Yes, I've been using it… well, actually. I don't know what it was last year, in October, August, October, somewhere in there.
L219Nix: Okay, so you're not… you're not jumping on the… the train, you're… you've been on it for a while.
L220Warren: Yeah, as soon as you could install it on an Apple computer, I had been playing with it. And, so then, you know, It's gotta be, I want to say July this year is when I switched over all my machines.
L222Warren: I've got a… I've got a old Lenovo ThinkCentre. That has got a bunch of storage on it, and I'm using that as a server storage, kind of… it's on all the time. And so I run, you know, my… my CleeAMP server, my Jellyfin, my, Just everything that's server-wise, because it stays on all the time. And that leads me into… why I am really appreciating Omarchy is because I wouldn't be able to do this if I hadn't learned about how AI can be Integrated into your workflow. Omarchy kind of introduced me to that.
L233Nix: Nope. So, you got into the drones, you're building stuff locally, the last thing, let's continue on, you made some plugins, and where are they, and how can people find them?
L234Warren: The one plug-in that I do have on, the… GitHub is called Expenses, and it's basically…
L235Nix: What's your GitHub user, do you know that?
L248Warren: Yeah. And it's basically, I, you know, and I'm learning this, so I don't know, I don't know how it's gonna get labeled, how's it gonna… anyway, so basically the premise is, is that I… I scan those… I scan those receipts into a file, and there's a script that grabs that receipt, it… It imports it into Easy Bookkeeping, Which is a free service. And it… it creates a ledger. And you look at the ledger, and you can go into each transaction and change the category. If it imported it wrong, or, you know, you're auditing your own expenses, basically.
L250Warren: And it's all free, it's all local, it's on Tailnet, it's on my tailnet. Yup. And so, that's it, man. It's just a real simple… Tracking expenses, and
L256Warren: No, it's, it's… I'm really excited, because now I kind of feel like one of the, you know, one of the crowd kind of thing. I've vibe-coded something, and it's really cool. It's awesome.
