omnideck weekly update: July 20-26, 2026

15 PRs this week across omnideck, cli, site, and homebrew-tap. Fewer PRs than the last two weeks, but the work behind them was heavier: most of it went into making omnideck easier to actually get running, on Windows, macOS, and now as a standalone desktop app.

The desktop app has an alpha

We shipped an early alpha of the omnideck desktop app (#224). It installs its own dependencies and runs as a self-contained app instead of something you set up by hand. Right now it's limited to a single deck install. That's on purpose. This alpha exists to work out the install and recovery process before we open it up to multiple decks, not to be feature-complete on day one.

Alongside it, the Electron runtime image is now pinned by digest instead of a floating tag (#223), so the desktop app builds on something that can't shift under you between releases.

Please note that this is VERY experimental, probably will break, and we will almost certainly refactor/rebuild it. BUT - its very cool and we are looking for good feedback.

Silliness

And sorry folks - the little "Agent Dash" game in the setup screen is not sticking around. Sometimes Larry likes to do silly things... like use the powerful new Apps feature to make a tamagotchi environment. If you'd like to try that out, ask him on Slack.

Container setup is a lot more forgiving

If you've tried to get omnideck running in a container and hit a wall, this week's work was aimed at you. Windows runtime setup no longer gets stuck retrying against a stale selection (#20). The same class of retry bug got fixed on macOS (#23). Stale Podman credential settings are handled properly now instead of failing silently (#25), and a failed container engine gives you a real error to act on instead of a dead end (#24). The setup guidance itself is clearer too (#21).

None of this is new features. It's the difference between omnideck working the first time you try it and giving up on the second retry.

Removing an instance is even cleaner now

Earlier, when removing a deck instance, there were cases where some things might need a manual removal. Instance management got a proper safe-removal workflow (#22), so tearing down a deck instance no longer risks leaving orphaned state behind.

Release and repo security got hardened

The CLI release process and repository went through a security hardening pass (#17), and omnideck v0.1.0-alpha.3 shipped with bounded logs (#221). Container log growth is capped now too (#26). A long-running instance won't quietly fill a disk anymore.

Smaller fixes

Chat scrolling has more reliable controls, and dev sync was hardened along with it (#222). On the distribution side, the Homebrew formula moved up to omnideck 0.9.0 (#5), and formula verification runs faster (#6). The site also picked up last week's update post (#65).

Come tell us how the desktop alpha installs on your machine in Slack. That feedback is exactly what this alpha is for.