Spaces OS dispatch #1

STATUS: Early adopters only.

Hello,

We're building a new OS!

As the digital world is re-shuffling itself dues to LLMs, it's a good opportunity to build something that suits us. Return technology to be in service of humans, that frees us from our daily chores. That is used for free exploration and hacking. Self-hosted and 100% open source.

When we look at the OS of the future, we believe it should have a few additional properties:

  1. Configuration should be declarative: if we allow agents to configure our machines, we should be able to inspect it.
  2. Critical components need to be formally verified: as attacks become more automated due to LLMs, the software stack itself will need to be hardened. (see https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2026/05/18/fv.html)
  3. All software should be sandboxed: aka QubesOS was right. It's no longer acceptable to run npm install in the same environment where all credentials are stored.
  4. Integrate with the Window Manager: provide dictation and translation to all applications out of the box. To make the experience truly native.
  5. Ship with a curated set of models: keep up so the user doesn't have to skim Twitter and HuggingFaces for the latest models.

Today we are starting with NixOS as the base OS, which gives us (1) out of the box, and allows (2). And working with the QubesOS team for (3).

This project is still early, and is not something we can do alone. We need your help!

A big thanks to Vitalik for sponsoring the initial development and helping launch this effort.

Best, Jonas

Week 3 - May 17 2026

Agentic Desktop

Super+A to chat:

The current agentic desktop has become the team's daily driver and works well for common tasks. It's currently based on top of the Noctalia Shell, which you can use with various wayland compositors. The default compositor is a tiling window manager called Niri.

On the screenshot you can see the local agent running in a popup and proposing a few skills. It's also ingesting the system notification to have more context about the user's requests.

Our current focus is on making the agent capable enough that we will naturally reach for it during our daily tasks. Add more skills, more polish.

Super+S to speak: This week we also added an experimental voice input. Type Super+S and talk to the computer, it gets sent as text to the highlighted window.

As we keep exploring, we expect the desktop to change. Today applications are first class citizens, and the agent runs in a popup. Most likely this posture will reverse in the future.

Agentic harness

The current harness is based on top of pi and runs gemma4:e4b. It's a small model that runs on modern laptops. Good enough for small queries but still not for complex tasks or programming. With the current trend of OSS models improvements, we expect to reach that level of capabilities in 6 months.

The current harness is still relativelty barebones. Our current focus is to make the model usable for daily tasks to permit dogfooding.

This week the system also gained the capability for voice inputs thanks to voxtype. There is still more work to do in terms of integration here but this opens the road to talking directly to your OS.

Standing this up is not something we cannot do alone, and we are actively talking to various labs to get this inputs.

Next up is sandboxing. Create a closed environment for the agents, where they only have access to the data and services they need.

Agentic Server

Our current focus is on the desktop.

Once the harness gains enough sandboxing capabilities, we will be expanding it to also work on the server. The goal will be to be able to offload tasks, run things in the background on the go.

OS Distribution

Our current OS is based on top of NixOS. To make this OS ready for the future we expect to swap out many parts of the OS with more secure ones. This is why we're looking at kernels such as Genode OS, working with the Qubes OS team and talking to teams specialized in FV.

Our current focus is standing up the build infrastructure needed to continuously build and release new versions of the operating system.

In the meantime, we released our first ISO for installation which you can get from https://github.com/generational-infrastructure/distro/releases/tag/distro-0001 . There is an installation workflow you can go trough.

Community

Building a new OS is a big challenge and not something we can do on our own. Next step is to standup a place to speak and discuss.

AIOS is still a placeholder name. Let's find a good name!

It's still early days so let us know if you encounter any issues!