Spitball with Claude

One of my favorite things to do these days is to take half‑formed thoughts/ideas to Claude1 (my LLM of choice) and use its responses to gain better understanding about whatever. If you've been following me online for awhile, you know that I am OBSESSED with the modular Jonathan Computer2, a concept from Apple created in the 1980s that was never officially released. It was definitely ahead of its time. It could run Mac and DOS software!! Anyhoo, it's currently 2025 and I believe there's a wide open market for such a thing.

Amongst tech‑minded folks the general consensus around computing seems to be:

Windows is terrible and Microsoft is intent on making it worse

macOS is buggy enough to be a problem and boy, it sure would be great if we had a Snow Leopard‑esque release (no new features, just bug fixes)

Linux lacks suitable replacements for what I do on Windows/macOS

You know what I'm suggesting (applicable XKCD here3): let's make a new thing!

But before that, let's get into Desktop Neo4, the OS interface I'm also obsessed with. The concept was made by Lennart Ziburski in 2016 under the CC Attribution 4.0 license. If you've seen my homepage, it's clearly been inspired by it. The tiles in Desktop Neo are application/system windows and the entire UI scrolls horizontally. I think that's pretty cool. The only issue I see with it is…how do I code within this new paradigm? I currently just tab switch between my text editor, terminal, and browser so I guess my tabbing would just scroll the UI? Or maybe it'd be like using Spaces5 on macOS. I currently keep my mail app in fullscreen to the left space, my social apps to the right space, and everything else in the center (main space). I guess I answered my question.

Anyhoo! I asked my AI buddy to meld the two concepts of hardware and software into something I'd pay stupid amounts of money for. The name Claude gave it? Neo Jonathan. Not bad, but I prefer system¹ (I registered system1.computer as well because why not?). I won't bore you with the 3000 words of our convo thus far, have some highlights instead.

Creating an operating system from scratch is a monumental task, even for people who have decades of experience writing low‑level code. Instead, it's better to build upon what already exists, like Linux. With that in mind, a customized Linux distro with a minimal kernel config should be the base upon which the desktop interface (written in Tauri) would launch. The boot process overview is thus:

Initial Boot: Fast Linux kernel boot (optimized to <3 seconds)

Minimal Init: Loads only essential services

Display Server: Lightweight Wayland compositor starts

Application Launch: Your Tauri application launches automatically

Complete Environment: User sees and interacts with the Neo interface

The trick is making this process invisible to the user and this should be doable via extensive tweaking of the boot process. Alpine6, Void7, and Debian Minimal are the Linux distros Claude recommended for testing.

As for hardware, my only requirement is that the OS is able to run on the most capable Raspberry Pi 58. It supports PCI express (which means you can attach super‑fast SSDs to it) and the best configuration comes with 16GB RAM. Good enough, I think? I grew up with less in the early 2000s!

So cool, you can run this on a RasPi. As I sit in front of a Mac Studio and Apple Display, I cannot help but imagine this Neo Jonathan sitting on my desk. A few NAS drives, two or three operating systems to swap between, a cellular modem? Floppy/MiniDisc drives? Idk, what else would you snap into your deck? Your own LLM, perhaps?

Framework Computer9 proves that having an open platform is not only possible, it's profitable. System7610 sells hardware and maintains Pop!_OS11. In a world of services and apparent obsession with "customer sat" (hi, Tim Apple), the actual quality of what we're given is hella lacking.

I'd love to end this "Spitball with Claude" with an announcment like, "Good news! This idea has been funded by Sequoia, Paradigm, and angel investors who believe in a better computing future, blah blah." Sorry to disappoint you, I didn't graduate from Stanford, I know no one in Y Combinator, and I don't play golf or whatever tech CEOs do these days.

I am powered by delulu and a tireless LLM that validates my wild ideas.

🕸️

2025.04.17 EDIT: Someone DM'd me about an issue the Vivaldi browser has with my homepage and ended it with a request to not use our convo within an LLM, based on my enthusiasm in this blog post and I gotta ask…WTF do y'all be on? I understand the inherent distrust around the training of LLMs but why would I use my online communications VERBATIM as training fodder? I need y'all to relax and take off the tinfoil hat to let your brain breathe. Good grief.