I am looking for options and being able to sideload is attractive, but if the experience is no different than a homemade Linux HTPC, I can save the cash.

So I built Clor, a CLI that lets your coding agent create "claws", which are background agents that automate anything on a schedule and run on your laptop, Mac mini, or a VM.

https://clor.com

A claw can be defined and shared as a single CLAW.md file, which contains a bit of metadata (name, schedule, personality, etc.) and one or more ordered tasks. Each task is a real agent run with full tool use, or a plain bash step. Anything you can ask your agent to do once, a claw can do repeatedly. One of my claws tidies my inbox every few minutes, labeling obvious spam, rescuing legit email that got mislabeled, and starring threads I owe a reply to, etc. It's way smarter than Gmail's filters because it actually reads my mail instead of just matching rules.

So also working on CLAW.md https://clor.com/blog/claws-md-open-format-for-agentic-cron-...

Installing is the usual command on Linux/macOS in the terminal: curl -fsSL https://clor.com/install.sh | bash. That will set up the CLI, a small scheduling daemon, and a skill that you can run from your agent, /claws in Claude Code or $claws in Codex.

https://linuxvox.com/blog/linux-os-that-looks-like-windows/

https://fosspost.org/make-linux-look-like-windows/

https://www.howtogeek.com/how-to-make-linux-look-like-window...

https://www.xda-developers.com/4-ways-to-make-any-linux-dist...

WASM(32) is a hybrid 32/64 bit architecture. The address range (and thus pointer size) is 32 bits, but it has native 64-bit integers. E.g. it's similar to the Linux x32 ABI.

There is also a 'true' 64-bit wasm, but that's still to recent to be used in real-world code:

https://caniuse.com/wf-wasm-memory64

(but wasm64 doesn't really make sense unless you really need an address space greater than 32 bits, because the downside is slower performance)

https://medium.com/p/f237d575e861

When C++ people say they think there should be C++ in Linux, their proposal usually begins by proposing that it "should" be possible to just compile Linux as C++ software. This doesn't work because C isn't just "C++ but old", and they rapidly lose interest.

Which of course also feeds into Linus' semi-fair claim that not allowing C++ keeps out the low effort wannabes who would plague such a project. This makes C++ developers very angry, but part of the reason why is that it's true, C++ does attract these people.

The Rust for Linux people wrote a lot of code, a lot of documentation, they did Q&As, they worked very hard to actually deliver the idea to the kernel community, it's a totally different approach, it's a lot more work but some people thought it was worth the work.

I know it's off topic. I accept my downvotes.

Running on Linux Firefox.

Linux from scratch seems to still be doing fine at: https://www.linuxfromscratch.org. It's going on 27 years now.

> yeah, I know, proper C code needs to be scattered with return value checks and sensible reports of errno. I’ve left these out for clarity.

Somewhere, a LLM is trained on this code as we speak :)

But anyway, it's great that people are still interested in learning this stuff for fun.

Do you remember any details that would let me search for it? Because that does sound cool, and even maybe useful; the thought has certainly crossed my mind that a router or VPN box doesn't really get a lot of use out of userspace... Although maybe it's worth keeping for control/configuration/debugging.

> To print some text or run a simple program, I belive DOS without a memory manager would be even faster.

Or just make your code boot directly. It's not hard to make a .efi, or use https://github.com/jart/cosmopolitan to make a binary that runs in many places including bare metal.

I think it's also a big sign that the linux kernel adopted rust and not c++. (only for small parts but still)

For example: Just a few minutes ago, in a directory with lots of PDFs, I did:

- wdired to rename pdfs to a consistent convention. Did this with the awesome multiple-cursors package, then interactively spell-checked and corrected my renamed pdfs. All within writeable dired :-)

- delete several non-pdf files

- mark several possible duplicate files and dired-do-shell-command with sha512sum

- move several pdfs to another directory (split window and open target dir, mark files to move, one-button move using dired-dwim-target.

- mark several pdfs and open with reader app

Obviously that's all do-able with a shell or traditional file manager GUI, but dired was a total win here.

Multiply that win by a hundred times per week, and that's a quality of life enhancement.

If it's just a PoC, then:

1) I remember seeing a linux firewall/gateway set up to run with just the kernel, without any userspace at all. Completely unhackable.

2) To print some text or run a simple program, I belive DOS without a memory manager would be even faster.

3) It takes 1s to boot linux, but an ordinary PC takes 10s to get to that linux. Even U-boot on ARM takes some seconds to load a kernel.

BTW, if anyone knows any current platform that can XiP a linux kernel, please share.

So in my template, I have created the VMs with two disks: first one is for NixOS and is built from an image, and it is read-only. The second is mounted to /var and is used for all system configuration as well as application state. If I have multiple VMs, they can all share the same base image (thin provisioned). That's the mode that I want for my deployments of services, immutable and as stateless as possible. For agent use, its different, you actually want a mutable NixOS root so that the agent can do what it wants.

I built three modes: immutable, semi-mutable, and mutable. mutable removes the read-only lock on the root, and just lets you manage the VM as a pet. semi-mutable adds an ephemeral overlayfs that gets wiped the next time you upgrade the base image. So that gives you kind of the best of both worlds: an immutable read-only base image and the ability to "nix profile add" whatever you (or your agent) wants, but with the contract that these imperatively installed things will disappear the next time you upgrade. Are you planning on adding a LICENSE to your machine0-nixos repo?

[1] https://github.com/EnigmaCurry/nixos-vm-template

Other things you may want to experiment with is gen_init_cpio.c from linux kernel tree. It makes creating initramfs file structure easier from scripts.

And finally if sys/isolinux is also fun to use for minimal boot images.