Spaces OS dispatch #15

Week 18 - Sep 04

The focus this week was the install experience

Spaces OS now has a conversational installer: you talk to an agent and it installs the system.

What it does

• Boots to a terminal, probes the hardware, asks questions
• Hostname, user, locale, keymap, timezone, disk, filesystem, encryption, swap, all in conversation
• Answers can come in any order, or several at once; it applies what it can immediately and remembers it for the installed system.
• Partitions with disko, a declarative and reproducible disk partitioning tool
• Roughly 10 to 20 minutes end to end depending on hardware

Where it gets interesting: this isn't just an installer. Under the hood it's a full coding agent with an install skill on top, so it can modify any aspect of your system. There are no guardrails and there is no fixed list of supported features. The question isn't what it supports - it's what you want to do.

Also this week

Compositor

The default compositor setup switched to cosmic-comp to flatten the learning curve.

System Control

The agent can now modify the NixOS config after install.

Performance

Faster installs, smaller initial closure sizes.

Next up

• Improvements to the installer experience
• Flatten the transition from installer to installed system