Watching the excitement around Omarchy, I keep thinking about how much room there still is to make a computer feel different. People care about the desktop, the tools, the colors, the way things move, and the choices someone has made about how it all fits together. A computer can have a point of view, and that can be enough to make people excited about using one again.
The pieces are coming together to make a different kind of computer possible. We can build around capable hardware, join an open software culture, and turn more of our ideas into things that work. A small studio has room to make the whole machine its own. The person who takes it home has more room to change it, too.
Framework
Framework gives us a place to begin with the hardware. The company sells mainboards designed to work independently of its own machines, publishes mechanical and electrical documentation, and encourages people to build other things around them.
Its Expansion Card system extends that idea. Ports and additional capabilities can live in small, replaceable modules, with published designs that give other makers a place to begin. We want to use and build on that system too.
Together, the boards, cards, documentation, and community provide a hardware foundation a small studio can work with. There are shared specifications, reference designs, and people developing their own additions. Each new project can begin with some of that work already done.
That leaves more room to think about the finished computer: its enclosure, display, controls, cooling, software, and the way someone encounters it. We can work from an existing technical core and give the whole object a particular character.
It also gives us a reason to think differently about the life of the object. We can design for access, repair, and replacement of the electronics. A beautifully made enclosure might remain worth keeping through several generations of the machine inside it.
Omarchy
Linux has long given people the freedom to decide how their computer works. Omarchy makes a particular set of decisions about how that freedom should feel.
It has an aesthetic, a rhythm, and a recognizable idea of a desktop. Someone has cared about the experience as a whole, and people are responding to that care. They use it, change it, share what they have made, and argue about what it should become. There is an energy around it that makes the computer feel worth paying attention to again.
AI is bringing that freedom within reach of more of the people using it. If you want a different layout, a control somewhere else, or a behavior to work a little differently, you can describe the change to a capable coding agent working on your machine. It can inspect the relevant files, adjust settings, or write the small piece of software needed to make it happen.
Omarchy is actively building around that possibility. Its agent integrations and guidance, alongside system commands agents can use, make changing the computer part of the experience. A change can begin with an ordinary description of what you want, then develop through trying it and refining the result.
That feels like a significant change in the relationship between a person and their computer. More people can take part in deciding how it looks and behaves. An opinionated desktop can become the starting point for something increasingly their own.
For an independent computer maker, this is a software culture to participate in and a different way to think about the finished machine. It can arrive with a clear point of view and continue to change in its owner’s hands.
AI
Those same tools expand the range of work a small computer company can take on.
There is a great deal surrounding even a simple physical object: research, software, documentation, testing tools, setup guides, a website, and the systems needed to sell and support it. Agents make it practical for us to take on more of that work with a small team.
A new physical control needs something to respond to it. A display needs an interface. A machine needs services and all the small pieces that make its parts behave together. We can investigate a component, prototype the software around it, and try another approach while the physical parts are being made.
The work still needs judgment. We have to understand what we are building, evaluate the results, and test it on the machine. Heat, tolerances, fabrication, and the behavior of a real object remain their own work. AI gives us more room to investigate how those pieces could fit together and to make something we can actually try.
More ideas become worth pursuing when a small team can take them further.
What this opens
Taken together, these changes make the computer feel like creative territory again. We can begin with a capable hardware foundation, participate in an open software culture, and take on more of the work that connects an idea to a functioning machine. The people who use it can have more say in what it becomes.
What a computer does is changing too. It can hold ongoing work, memory, tools, and agents that continue while we are elsewhere. We might reach it through another device, speak to it, glance at its status, or interrupt something it is doing. Sitting in front of a large screen becomes one of several ways to be in contact with it.
A machine with that kind of presence may deserve a different shape and character. A computer might belong in a room the way a lamp, a cabinet, or an instrument does. Ceramic, glass, textile, wood, or metal could help determine its structure, sound, light, and controls. The traditions of decorative arts have a great deal to contribute to an object we live with so closely.
I keep coming back to the movement inside a clock: a working mechanism around which very different objects can be made. A stable computer core could give artists and designers a similar place to begin, with room for the material and the maker to shape what it becomes.
There is room here for independent computer companies organized around particular ways of seeing. That is the spark behind Lab US. We want to make useful machines whose software, physical form, and place in our lives are still open to invention.
Starting with Computer 00
We’re starting with Lab Computer 00: Framework internals, the Teenage Engineering computer-1 enclosure, and Omarchy. We’re bringing them together with careful assembly, configuration, and testing in California’s Mojave Desert. A computer we want to use, and a foundation we want to build on.
Computer 00 gives us a place to begin with the things that have made this moment exciting. A capable machine, a physical object with character, and an open software environment its owner can keep making their own. We want to start there, use it, live with it, and see what we can make from it.
Lab Computer 00 coming soon.