I’ve posted here in the past about building your own agent harness and self hosting your own LLM models. Fun stuff, but why not your own operating system - with AI?
The reality of a fully clean-slate OS build might not be realistic (yet..), even with the best models we have, but using your own harness (you built one right? It’s fine you can use any of them) and your own self hosted AI models (or cheap hosted ones, no one is judging) , you too can build your own fully custom Linux distro!
Why would you want to do this? Isn’t this a terrible idea? Because you can, and probably. If you still want to do it (I believe in you!), the best way to start is point your agent at pengyos/SPEC.md at main · patw/pengyos · GitHub and get it to explain how this distro was built, and what components it has, then discuss your own needs, the desktop environments you like, the build tools you prefer, even fun stuff like desktop backgrounds and theme options. Even fully custom apps you’d want to add to the OS that are for just you. Get the agent to set up a project space for it, and start iterating. Within 1 night you can probably have a bootable USB stick with your own (lightly) customized OS. Realistically, you’re probably in for about a month or two of back and forth, iteration and actual hardware testing. Once you’re done, post back here, because I want to see what you built and how you built it. The new world of open source is open ideas and sharing. Code is easy, agents pump all day long, but ideas and taste still matter a lot here. Show me what you got! (here’s mine: https://pengyos.catbee.ca )
If you want details (technically spoilers) read on:
- First think about your base. For PengyOS I went with buildroot for this one because the idea of an A/B boot like SteamOS/Bazzite/Android seemed cool. Big disadvantages in update sizes and lack of package management, but we’ll get there in a bit. Alternatives are things like Yocto or basing off an existing distro, or even trash can distro where you just yeet things (partion, format, grub, kernel, systemd, userland, etc) onto a drive and it’s a one of a kind setup. Making a custom arch or debian is always on the table if everything else like security updates sounds scary.
- Think about what versions you want. Did you want to focus on a sever thing? Just build it with all the stuff you use, and maybe make a web control panel for it. Desktop? Pick a DE and run with it. COSMIC was my choice, but KDE/Gnome are fine. nvidia drivers are a little tricky, but the full image systems actually make that simpler.
- Do you hate rust userland? You’re objectively wrong but use the regular gnu coreutils. Do you want old sysvinit instead of systemd? Systemd haters are not allowed, but sure go for it.
- Packaging: Image based distros can use Flatpak, podman/docker, and distrobox. Or make your own! If you have a limited set of packages even systemd extensions are probably ok. If you derive from an existing distro you have less things to worry about but also… if you want the newest stuff you might need to make your own package repo (Still easy, do it!)
- Updates: This is where it gets more interesting, I suggest building the observer/act loop in your agent to evaluate when core components are updated upstream, or CVEs are issued so it can download, patch and push. This part took the longest for me, it’s a lot of decisions.
- Extra apps/features: If you’re doing desktop, all the DEs come with lots of built in, useful apps and lots of 3rd party stuff. Add whatever you want to the base, and then get your agent to build stuff that just doesn’t exist. I built printer and gamepad management, and disk management utils that I couldn’t find in Cosmic. They look great!
- Theming: Do it. AI generated slop images. Stop letting reddit tell you AI is bad. This is YOUR house, you play by YOUR rules. Slop it up.
- Image hosting/web pages/gitub: This is really up to personal preference, but there’s a STRONG theme of self hosting in this forum, so go ask those guys how to run that server in your closet… which could be running your own distros server edition! If all that scares you, lots places online to host.
- Testing: Your agent can test and catch about 90% of the issues. The last 10% is you booting up images to see if your nvidia box is going to puke on load. Give your agent full root on the test machines and qemu vms so it can find and fix everything in real time, and then go back and update your build repo.
- Models: You can get most of the way there with just Ornith 1.5 35b, further with Qwen 3.8 Flash Next and for the truly tricky stuff, some frontier will help save time. My project was probably 7 billion tokens or so, local AI will save you money. Do that or abuse the hell out of Claude Code or Codex limits.
- Spreading Ideas: Tell your friends they can do this too. And your techie co-workers. There’s no rules anymore, anyone can build anything. Make a logo for your distro, get some t-shits and stickers printed. Wear it proudly.