The psychology of OpinionatedArch

Ivan Montilla

September 8, 2026

Post licensed under CC BY 4.0

Tags:

• OpinionatedArch
• Psychology

The psychology of OpinionatedArch

I have severe ADHD and other mental disorders, which leads me to get distracted while I work, especially on Twitter and YouTube.

The seat session as a barrier

Trying to regulate that, my clinical psychologist suggested setting physical barriers that prevent me from entering these sites while I’m working.

That is one of the reasons I’m creating OpinionatedArch. The idea: while I’m working, I cannot switch to Twitter, because my company work-contexts don’t have the Twitter account logged in. Switching to the personal work-context means changing the seat session, and that is friction, because changing the seat session means dropping devices and waiting a few seconds.

AI changed that objective

An agent takes time to do its work, sometimes more than an hour, and that leads me to the focus problem. The way to go is parallelizing agents, so while one agent works I can instruct another one, sometimes in a different work-context of OpinionatedArch. That means I need to switch between work-contexts fast, so I can no longer afford to change the seat session.

The solution I’m working on is running the compositor as a logical user like desktop, instead of one compositor instance per user, and handling work-context switching internally, running each application with the uid of the work-context user.

That invalidates the distraction-fix, because switching work-contexts is now fast. But if I hadn’t gone in that direction, the distraction would show up anyway: while I wait for an agent to finish, I go to Twitter on my phone.

OpinionatedArch supports both models

I wrote before that OpinionatedArch is opinionated about the operating model, but not about how you interact with the machine day to day. This is the first real test of that claim.

The two models I’ve described don’t just differ in taste. The first one needs switching work-contexts to be expensive, and gets that from the seat session. The second one needs it to be free, and gets that from a single compositor that never releases the seat.

Both models could be expressed entirely as dotfiles: one package that adds friction to switching work-contexts, and another one that manages the compositor without switching sessions.