SEASON 2 - EPISODE 112 - JUNE 5, 2024

For the Love of Linux

In this podcast episode, REWORK host Kimberly Rhodes talks with David Heinemeier Hansson, co-founder of 37signals and CTO, about his personal shift from using Apple products to exploring Linux and Windows platforms. He discusses the expanded platform integration at 37signals, which now includes all three operating systems.

Watch the full video episode on YouTube

Key Takeaways

00:21 - The last straw with Apple.
06:34 - Discovering Microsoft’s recent improvements and support of developers.
10:30 - Linux and Windows work well together.
13:27 - The user-friendly and upgradeable Framework laptop.
17:45 - Transitioning 37signals to a multi-platform development team.
22:58 - David’s recommended computing and operating systems.

Links & Resources

Transcript

Kimberly (00:00): Welcome to Rework, a podcast by 37signals about the better way to work and run your business. I’m your host Kimberly Rhodes, and I’m joined by the co-founders of 37signals, Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson. Well, we’ve talked a lot about technology changes at 37signals and this week we’re talking about Linux. David, I’m just going to turn it over to you. Let us jump right in.

David (00:20): Yeah, so I have been on a personal journey of discovery when it comes to computing in the last few months. The final straw kind of hit the camel’s back at some point when Apple announced they were yanking support for web apps in Europe in their petty fight with EU bureaucrats over their monopoly case. And I just at that point finally felt like, you know what? Why am I still supporting this company? And I don’t even mean that in a economic sense. I mean that in a sense of attention. Why is Apple still the gravity of all my computing? Why do I have all these Apple devices? Why am I on all these Apple services if I fundamentally have grown to dislike how the company is run? Now, there are all sorts of legitimate reasons you could answer, well, this is why it works very well.

(01:11): They make good computers. I don’t care about this stuff. I’m not here to tell you that those aren’t valid reasons for you. I’m telling you that they aren’t valid reasons for me. I care too deeply about the future of computing. I care too deeply about computers as they are and as they exist. For me just to resign myself to like that’s just how it is. I just have to live with whatever edits Apple throws my way. Now, in some way I do. B ecause we have a ton of customers who are on Apple, we’ve been in all these fights with Apple over access to distribute our software on the app store because if we don’t have a HEY email client on the app store, it’s going to be very difficult to make that product a success given how many people are in that ecosystem. But for me and my own personal computing, that doesn’t have to happen on Apple.

(02:02): And if I have such a fundamental misalignment with where this company has gone, why stay? And I think that was the question I finally just asked myself for the umph-teenth time and realized I didn’t have a good answer that wasn’t just based on comfort, that wasn’t just based on this is what I know. That wasn’t just based on, in my optics, relatively trivial things. Oh, Apple right now, for example, have amazing CPUs. They’re more efficient than the competition in some benchmarks, in some applications, they’re faster. That’s really nice. It’s really comfortable that say, my laptop battery lasts for 12 hours instead of six hours. Is that enough? Is that who I want to be? Do I want to keep using the products of a company I don’t fundamentally really align with anymore just because my battery lasts longer? That seems to me, and again, I’m really talking about me here, trivial, and it doesn’t seem congruent with the other things that we talk about all the time on this podcast and elsewhere, our love of independence, our love of freedom, the choices to use whatever software we want without asking anyone for permission.

(03:13): So that’s the long story of just realizing after 23 years, 23 years, I went to Apple in 2001, I bought my first OS 10 machine in 2001. This was when Apple at that time, hard to even remember, and some people listening perhaps weren’t even born at that time, that Apple was the underdog. Apple was the underdog, apple was the rebel. Apple was the alternative to the big behemoth of the time, which was Microsoft and the dominance of Windows and the dominance of Internet Explorer and that whole system, which I at that time had my issues with, right? I owned a PC, begrudgingly so. After all the cutoff, the air supply tactics that Microsoft applied towards their competitors with Netscape and whatever in the nineties, I went like, ugh, I have a PC but I don’t like Windows. And then boom, Apple releases OS 10, complete new OS built on the underpinnings of Unix.

(04:17): It just felt like, oh, this is it. And it was also cool and it had Steve Jobs and it had all these exciting perspectives and interesting things and more than anything else, it was just a way out. And I thought like, wow, live long enough and you shall see patterns repeat. And here we are in 2024. Apple to me, is a far bigger bully than Microsoft ever was when it comes to developers. They have far more egregious rules and hoops for developers to jump through to get access to the major platforms of our day. When you think back upon, when I think back upon the nineties and the stuff that Microsoft did, they never tried to say, unless we give you permission, you can’t publish software for Windows. That is just so far beyond the pale and outside the scope of what I could have imagined at the time.

(05:10): And yet that’s where we are today. If you want access to the iPhone, you got to beg and plead Apple, not just once, but basically every time you submit an update. I don’t want to live like that. I don’t want to live like that. That’s why I embrace the web all the way back in those early two thousands, even like the nineties and why we built this entire business being web first so we didn’t have to go through that. So, all of these factors conspired to say, I’ve had enough. These Apple computers are very nice. I like so many things about Apple’s aesthetics. I like how they think. I like the integration. I like so many things, but it’s not enough anymore. It’s not enough. Apple has become this unpleasant company and I’d rather be around pleasant company. So I went through this phase. Then what? What do I do?

(05:59): I’m so integrated, immersed in Apple’s services. I use all of the things. They all work together. I have an iPhone, I have an iPad, I have Apple, this, that and the other thing, and they do create a very beautiful garden, but the walls are very tall and they have barbed wires and sometimes you go, I want to see what’s outside. So somehow I managed to get outside. I managed to disconnect from all these services that kind of pull you in, like, oh, your photos and your notes and you this and you that, and the other thing. Got out of that. And then the first platform I went to was like, I wonder what Microsoft is up to these days. They just seem like a much more pleasant company. I’m not hearing, again, I’m not saying Microsoft’s a perfect company. I’m not even saying I’ve forgotten the history of who they used to be in the nineties.

(06:46): I’m saying today, right now as a developer working with the web, Microsoft is a far more pleasant partner in that dance. They still do stuff that annoys me. They still do big company stuff, no sinks, but it’s better. And I thought like, do you know what? Better is good. Better is good. I’ll take a little bit better here. I’ll take integrating with a company, or not even integrating, using a company’s products where I go like do you know what? They got some cool stuff going on over there. Microsoft today, even compared to just 10 years ago, it’s just, they’re so much cooler. They do so much more interesting stuff. They’ve been such good stewards of things like GitHub, integrating and embracing open source. They have this whole Windows subsystem for Linux where you can run Linux inside of Windows, which is kind of incredible from a company that used to call Linux and Open Source in general, the cancer, there’s just a beautiful redemption story of if you are a technology company that’s been around as long as Microsoft has been around, you can actually change.

(07:48): You can become something different than what you used to be than when Steve Ballmer was running the show. Now it’s funny again with Steve Ballmer, I now actually look back upon him slightly fondly. There’s this iconic mean clip where he goes, developers, developers, developers, and he’s sweating like a pig. Developers, developers, developers and more and more sweat likes huge plumages under his arms. Developers, developers, developers. And he’s jumping around a freaking madman at a conference in an ode to developers, and you’re like, okay, that’s ridiculous to some extent, and it’s kind of cringe, but it’s also endearing and lovable in a way where like, could I imagine Tim Cook hopping around on stage clapping for developers? No, no, no. I could not. I imagine him sitting at a hearing or in court going like, developers actually, oh… They should be happy if they just got to keep 30 cents in the dollar, but we let them keep 70 and they’re still ungrateful.

(08:54): That’s the mental image I have of Tim Cook. He’s not developer’s friend, he just isn’t. And Apple, I mean, I don’t know, never perhaps to some extent pretended to be. They were always very clear about their priorities. Apple is number uno, users, number two, and developers, I don’t know, 14. There’s something else in between that list. And for some time maybe it didn’t matter because they weren’t necessarily trying to help you, but they also weren’t trying to put obstacles in your way. They just make good computers and if you could sort of figure it out, you could do what you wanted to do. That’s not who they are anymore. And Microsoft is, isn’t that weird? Isn’t that funny that they’ve somehow changed places? But that’s what it is. So I went to Microsoft with an open mind and I really liked what I saw. Windows first of all have improved a lot.

(09:46): I did a short tour of Windows in 2019 when I last got mad of Apple because they were making such horrible laptops that kept breaking. So in frustration, I went to Windows and gave it a try, but that frustration was based in like, it doesn’t work. Your product is kind of bad. MacBooks of today don’t kind of have those same problems. They’re actually really good machines, which makes it harder, which makes it, there’s not the motivating factor of my machine is literally broken. The E key, either it doesn’t work at all, or if I push it once, it gives me five E’s. So it didn’t stick back then in '19, then I tried it now in '24, first of all, the integration stuff that I’m so happy about, the Windows subsystem for Linux have gotten really good, really just out of the box. WSL space, dash dash install, boom, you got Ubuntu, one of the major distributions of Linux running right inside the windows and all the things kind of work and there’s nice Integr integration with their VS code editor that also in that time have taken huge leaps forward.

(10:51): This was one of the things I found was so difficult when I tried to do the switch in the first place was I have this text editor on the Mac that I have lived in for literally 20 years, and I actually helped create. Alan, a good friend of mine is the original programmer of that, and we worked together in 2004 to put it together and I just love it. It’s called TextMate and I still love it. Textmate to me is one of those all time, hall of great pieces of software that I’ve used in my entire career, but it’s Mac only. And for me to switch to Windows or any other platform would mean giving up Textmate. And I was like just torn. I was torn between, I don’t want to be under Mac anymore, but I love Textmate so much. So what do I do here?

(11:39): And that was a hard thing. But I went to Windows and said, all right, I’m going to just suspend disbelief here. I’m not saying I’m going to do one thing or the other thing. I’m just going to try something. I tried VS code and I thought, huh, alright, I can see what people’s on about. This is a pretty good editor. This is not bad. This is actually kind of, maybe I could do this. I dunno, maybe I could do this. So that kind of helped facilitate the switch over and for, I dunno, about a month I ran Windows as the main operating system, which was wonderful in all sorts of regards. I hadn’t run Windows in anger as the primary operating system literally since summer of 2001 maybe. I mean I had that short sprint where I tried it as a side laptop in '19, but never committed fully here.

(12:25): I committed fully for about a month and I was like found a bunch of things on Basecamp, found a bunch of things on HEY that didn’t look as nice as they could for Windows users. And it didn’t take much of like, oh, we got to tweak this. We got to restyle some sliding bars. We got to change a few things. And like, oh, it looks much nicer now. And then you look at the stats and you go like, wait, what don’t we have more than half of all Basecamp users use Windows? And they were looking at something that could have been better for all these years because no one at 37signals ran Windows for real, for real? Okay, that wasn’t great. That was actually an important lesson. We should be more where our customers are and we should see what our customers see. We can’t just be in this Apple cocoon over here, especially when Apple is not the dominant platform for something like Basecamp.

(13:12): Windows is the number one platform for Basecamp. More than half of all users are on Windows. So I had a good time there and then I found this super interesting company called Framework and they have a totally new way of thinking about hardware, which is essentially that it should be user serviceable, it should be repairable, it should be upgradable all the way down to the CPU and the motherboard. That’s something, I mean you can’t even change the amount of RAM you have in a Mac and haven’t been able to do so with, I don’t know, 10 years or something. Like everything is soldered down. You can’t change the SSD, let alone if the keyboard breaks and the E thing is stuck. You got to take it to Apple and pay through the nose. You can’t surface anything yourself. That’s not how it used to be.

(14:04): My first iBook, whatever it was, you could take the battery out, you could buy a new battery when that one was used. You could plop in more RAM when that became more affordable. You could do all those other things. And so was the case with a lot of other PC stuff at the time. Now it’s no longer true. The vast majority of PC hardware sort of soldered down, a Mac hardware as well, even more so with the Mac. But Framework went like, no, actually why do you have to throw away your computer just because a new faster chip comes out? That’s pretty wasteful. And I was like, yeah, actually, good point. And then I look in my closet here and I have an M1, an M2, a freaking M3. I have three laptops stacked on top of each other because I wanted the latest chip.

(14:48): The screen was still fine, the battery was still fine, the chassis was still fine. That’s a kind of consumerism. You could just have said like, whoa, you don’t have to do that. You could just have kept that M1. Yeah, but that’s just not who I am. I like to have the new technology. I like the new chips, I like CPUs, but I’d also like to be able to do that in a way where I don’t have to throw everything around and framework provides that. So first of all, the main way you buy the framework is in parts. First of all, what you get it as a DUI kit, D-U-I? D-I-Y?

Kimberly (15:23): D-I-Y.

David (15:25): D-I-Y. That’s how it is. DUI. That’s something different. Don’t do that.

Kimberly (15:28): Different kit.

David (15:29): DIY. So you put it together yourself. I mean it’s a little overstatement that it’s DIY because it literally takes less than 10 minutes, but still it does come in parts. You get the box, you open it up and here’s the computer that’s like screen doesn’t have its bezel around it because you can actually change the color of the bezel. You got to flip that on, but it’s magnetic, so it snaps in and then the whole board is exposed. The keyboard is in a separate box. So you put in your ramp, you put in your drop, and then you put in your keyboard. And as you go through it, you’re like, I’m building my own computer. This is kind of cool. You have to put in some things here and then you end up with a computer that you built, which is totally, I don’t know if it actually adds up.

(16:15): Makes sense. Does it from frameworks perspective? Or are they just going, do you know what IKEA is so successful as selling furniture? Because people have to swear when they’re trying to put it all together. Then when they finally build that bed or whatever, it’s there. I built this, I built this. So they like it better. It’s literally called the IKEA effect and it’s a well-documented psychological, I was about to say trick, but I don’t think that’s true, effect, phenomenon. If you put something together yourself, you’re going to like it more because you were part of it. And I like that Framework more, in part because I was part of it. Anyway, that’s really a long story for saying I bought that and first ran Windows on it, then I should tried Linux, installed Linux on it, found out Linux ran better and it was about, I don’t know, 15% faster than some of these tests I usually run. I’m like, oh, okay, interesting. And then I just fell head over heels in love with Linux.

Kimberly (17:11): Let me ask you this, because last time we talked about 37signals and our computer usage. We were an all Apple shop, then we were more of an Apples, Wwindows. Let’s open up what we’re using because that’s what our customers are using. Where are you thinking we’re headed now?

David (17:31): Multi platform. So, we should absolutely be on Apple. We have a bunch of roles and designers and iOS developers who have to be on Apple to use the software that they need to use or publish in the way. So that’s not going anywhere. We have tons of customers there too. Windows, we’re getting some people to use Windows in important enough, or not important in functions where they have the eye for, is it right, is it not? Right? Talking to Brian about switching to Windows, who’s our main product strategy and product manager because we need to have someone there. And then we’re switching to Linux as the default for new developers and new operators, system operators. So that’s going to give us all three platforms at once. And there’s thankfully some economies of scale here. If we set things up very nicely for Linux, it’ll work on Windows as well through that WSL layer for development.

(18:23): So there’s a bunch of things that we can share and we can end up in a place where we have some people on Linux, a few people on Windows and a bunch of people on Mac as well. And it’s not actually as daunting as it first appeared. We had to find a little bit of different software for how we manage some of these machines. We use something called Kandji to manage machines. If we lose them or whatever, we can reset. We’ve got to find a piece of software for Windows and Linux to do that. It does exist. We just have to settle on something and then we structure ourselves away into the development domain around a simpler set of tools that kind of going to work the same. Docker, this thing where you can run containers off some of that and other things, software rather. But we’re going to end up with all of it. That’s really the answer.

Kimberly (19:06): Is anyone already on Linux other than you?

David (19:09): Yeah, we have a few early adopters here. Jeremy and Kevin. Two of the programmers that I’ve worked with, two of the senior programmers here, they’re on Linux now helping to set this up. What do we need to do to pave the way for others who come after us to set everything up? Because I mean, let’s be fair here. A lot of the jokes about Linux are true. Linux has more things, more unpolished edges, more things you can snag yourself on, more just things that can go wrong. They support all sorts of hardware under the sun. They are not run by a trillion dollar company. It’s open source. It comes with the territory. But we can go through that territory first, bring our machete, cut a path through there, and then anyone who follows us after that will have a much easier way. And this is actually one of the projects I’m really excited about.

(20:02): I’ve started building something, basically taking the two months I’ve spent on Linux, finding all the cool configurations, all the cool tools, all the cool setups, all the getting it just right, not just right, getting it better. I’m at the place now. I’m obviously biased. I’m IKEA effect to the wazoo at this point, right? Two months of inquiry into it. I really like the Linux environment that I’ve ended up with, more so than the Mac one I spent 20 plus years being really happy with too, right? Sometimes you don’t know how much more you can like something until you give it a try. But I did. And now I like it a lot, but I want everyone to have the experience I have after spending two months learning all the little crooks and nannies and setups and tweaks and whatever, and I just want them to have that out of the box.

(20:48): Linux can be amazing, but it usually requires a bucket of tweaking and understanding to get there. What if it was just that amazing out of the box? Again, very subjective. One person’s amazing Linux is another person’s whatever flaw set up. But I’m making something for me as we always do, whether we make products or anything else, just make something that’s really nice for me that if I saw this, if I didn’t even have the beef with Apple and someone just gave me a Linux machine and ran this setup, I think I would actually go like, oh, that’s pretty cool. I could swing that. I could give it a try. And if I did, I might just, well fall in love with it as much as I have now, even with that beef in mind. So it’s called Omakub and it’s kind of a contraction of Omakase.

(21:37): That means the chef selection and Ubuntu, this main operating system or main distribution for Linux that is kind of the most common prevalent one. A bunch of hardware makers will ship you in Ubuntu Box straight out. Dell does that, for example. So we’re building on top of that. Even though there’s a bunch of Linux, I’m about to call them nerds, I would never call someone… It’s always a term of endearment. I love the Linux because it’s full of nerds who care about all these things. They’ve gone like, oh, you should run distribution, you should run, you can do this other, cool, cool, cool. I’m not trying to convince you, you’re already on Linux. Great, I love it. But if we’re going to get someone who has a Mac and have the sense of like, yeah, I like computers, but I don’t want to do all the tinkering.

(22:21): I don’t want to spend 20 hours setting everything just up straight. We’ve got to give them something else and I hope that this could be it. So I’m putting this together. We’re hopefully going to push it out not just for the folks at 37signals who want to try it, but for anyone who wants to give Linux a chance. My recommendation then is you should get a Framework laptop. You should get the UI version, the do it yourself version. You should build it yourself and then you should install Ubuntu and then give this Omakub thing a try and then see if you don’t like it. I think you just might. This is the year of Linux on the desktop for me. I hope for a bunch of other people. And if it isn’t for you this year, maybe in 2025, it’s going to be for you. I think we’re going to see the upswing. I think Apple has never been in a worse position with a huge segment of developers, don’t really like what’s going on over there, but feel like they’re trapped by Apple’s comfort. And I think if we can show them a different way that has better comfort in some regards, maybe worse in some regards too, but then at least we’ll give them a hell of a ride and hopefully convert a few.

Kimberly (24:11): Well, I’m sure we’ll have a lot of questions for you about Linux. If you have a question for David about his Linux setup or how you can get involved in Linux, leave us a voicemail at 7 0 8 6 2 8 7 8 5 0. You can also send us an email to rework@37signals.com, and we just might answer it on an upcoming show. Rework is a production of 37signals. You can find show notes and transcripts on our website at 37signals.com/podcast. Full video episodes are on YouTube and Twitter.