Spaces OS dispatch #16

Week 19 - Sep 11

Focus on the installation experience

Experiment: Using tiny models to drive the OS installer

Last week we built an agentic OS installer, a live ISO/USB image with an agent that guides the user through the installation of SpacesOS on a new machine.

We liked the approach and wondered whether we could scale the hardware requirements down far enough to run it on an average laptop without a GPU. Recently there has been a lot of development on tiny open weights LLM models, so we gave it a shot.

We tried three tiers of tiny models: 1B, 2B, and 3B parameter models. Here are the results:

1B model (MiniCPM5 1B)

Released: May 2026

Underwhelming. The model could not follow the installation skill and kept asking what we wanted to do, even after we had told it three times that we wanted to install the OS.

2B model (MiniCPM5 2B)

Released: September 7, 2026

Our hopes were higher here. It had just been released and claims to beat other models of similar or slightly larger size:

Significantly better than the 1B, but still not satisfying. It was somewhat able to follow the installation skill's procedure, but would not use simple tools like the ask tool, and asked some questions twice for no good reason. It gets confused easily.

3B model (Nanbeige4.2 3B)

Released: July 22, 2026

This model was finally able to drive the installation in a satisfying way and used the right tools for the right job.

The remaining problem is performance. Even on a DDR5 unified memory laptop with a reasonable iGPU, it only managed 15 to 20 tok/s. That is too slow to be enjoyable.

The point of the agentic installer is that you can deviate from the plan and do something else while the system installs. If the model thinks too slowly, it does not invite you to go off the rails. At that speed we would rather click through a GUI.

Conclusion

For now, the tiny model class still struggles to do real work, and struggles more to do it on mid-tier consumer hardware at a speed that is actually pleasant to use.

The good news is that there is an intelligence explosion happening in the open weights community right now. We may well have to re-run this experiment before long.

Preview: seamless installation

So far, the installer has been a single full screen agentic terminal, with no way to play with the OS while waiting for the installation to finish.

That is about to change. We are making the installer system a full clone of the system it installs, and going one step further. The goal is to play the game, while it is installing, and keep playing it without losing progress once it is installed. More on that, next week.

Here is a quick preview on what the installer looks like:

Unconference

We also spent last weekend in Lisbon at Sovereign Stacks, a small unconference we hosted on the future of personal computing: privacy, data sovereignty, local AI inference, operating systems, and control of the agents that work on our behalf. Both the OS and the installer were demoed live.