This smells heavily of astroturfing. Particularly because Headroom is a paid product, and that fact is not mentioned here or in the GitHub README.
Here was my experience…
I download and run the Mac application, which starts installing a bunch of things. Then the following happens without advance notice:
- Adds background item(s) from "Idiosyncratocracy BV"
- Downloads over 2 GB of files
- Pollutes home with ~/.headroom directory
- Adds hook(s) to ~/.claude/hooks/
- Modifies your ~/.claude/settings.json to add above hook(s)
… and then I see something in the settings that talks about creating an account. That's when I realized that this is a paid product, after all of the above has happened.
Headroom seems to use https://github.com/rtk-ai/rtk under the hood. What does Headroom offer over the actually-free RTK? Who knows.
At this point I have had it with this subterfuge — I immediately trash the app and every related file and folder I can find, of which there are many. Hopefully I got them all, but who knows. There should have been an easy way to uninstall this mess, but of course there isn't.
The lack of transparency here is really concerning.
What I said is an utterly factual statement: I found the experience to be user-hostile. You might have a different experience, and I will not deny you your experience even in the face of your clearly-stated intention to deny me mine.
Moreover, I already conveyed my understanding of and appreciation for the work open-source maintainers do, and I outright said above that I intend no disrespect.
On the subject of installing Ollama, I found it to be a frustrating and user-hostile experience. I instead recommend the much more user-friendly LLM[0] by Simon Willison.
* Ollama spawns at least four processes, some persistently in the background: 1 x Ollama application, 1 x `ollama` server component, 2 x Ollama Helper
* Ollama provides no information at install time about what directories will be created or where models will be downloaded.
* Ollama prompts users to install the `ollama` CLI tool, with admin access required, with no way to cancel, and with no way to even quit the application at that point. Ollama provides no clarity that about what is actually happening during this step: all it is doing is symlinking `/Applications/Ollama.app/Contents/Resources/ollama` to `/usr/local/bin/`
The worst part is that not only is none of this explained at install time, but the project README doesn’t tell you any of this information either. Potential users deserve to know what will happen on first launch, but when a PR arrived to at least provide that clarification in the README, Ollama maintainers summarily closed that PR and still have not rectified the aforementioned UX problems.
As an open source maintainer myself, I understand and appreciate that Ollama developers volunteer their time and energy into the project, and they can run it as they see fit. So I intend no disrespect. But these problems, and a seeming unwillingness to prioritize their resolution, caused me to delete Ollama from my system entirely.
As I said above, I think LLM[0] by Simon Willison is an excellent and user-friendly alternative.
Here was my experience…
I download and run the Mac application, which starts installing a bunch of things. Then the following happens without advance notice:
- Adds background item(s) from "Idiosyncratocracy BV"
- Downloads over 2 GB of files
- Pollutes home with ~/.headroom directory
- Adds hook(s) to ~/.claude/hooks/
- Modifies your ~/.claude/settings.json to add above hook(s)
… and then I see something in the settings that talks about creating an account. That's when I realized that this is a paid product, after all of the above has happened.
Headroom seems to use https://github.com/rtk-ai/rtk under the hood. What does Headroom offer over the actually-free RTK? Who knows.
At this point I have had it with this subterfuge — I immediately trash the app and every related file and folder I can find, of which there are many. Hopefully I got them all, but who knows. There should have been an easy way to uninstall this mess, but of course there isn't.
The lack of transparency here is really concerning.