So I have been processing what many of you have said plus doing my own continued research in my spare time these past few months.
I believe advances in LLMs are totally destroying the moats around big tech such as search (Google) and OS ecosystems who historically relied on large catalogs of Apps to remain dominant (Windows, macOS, iOS, Linux, Android etc.) meaning small companies or the open source community can meaningfully compete.
Apps are about to become irrelevant as they are replaced with "agentic AI" or "smart widgets."
This is our opportunity. An OS for AI agents and digital sovereignty. Here's what I would propose.
Goals
- Provide a “next level” consumer OS experience that also promotes digital sovereignty
- Meaningfully improve core OS functionality across server, embedded, and AI inference use cases
- Showcase the Swift language and push it forward
Provide a next level consumer OS experience providing digital sovereignty
- next level: it should be an “Agentic AI first” UX, favoring composable, “agentic,” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9mylj0ogCFY widgets the LLM can arrange on the fly
- this means composable agents and widgets instead of isolated apps
- no need for traditional apps or app libraries or ecyosystems, just agents talking to APIs
- an entirely new kind of widget driven UI library and window compositor
- One way to think about this is ChromeOS -> it was just the browser with web apps but that kept it simple and lightweight. We can do the same for AI Agents.
- To build this we want something like Ollama https://ollama.com, Llama Stack GitHub - meta-llama/llama-stack: Composable building blocks to build Llama Apps, and Max https://www.modular.com integrated into the system
- consumer OS: should run on phones, tablets, pcs, as well as XR devices
- digital sovereignty: it should embrace decentralized networking tech as appropriate.
- The OS filesystem should be built around AnyType objects Any Association · GitHub
- Core apps:
- a Matrix https://matrix.org based Chat AI widget
- a Nostr https://nostr.org based social AI widget
- Command bar should behave like Raycast https://www.raycast.com and terminal like Warp https://www.warp.dev
- the default IDE should be like Zed https://zed.dev
- Browser: Orion Orion Browser by Kagi or LadyBird https://ladybird.org
- File browser and word processor all in one with AnyType https://anytype.io
Meaningfully improve core OS functionality across server, embedded, and AI inference use cases
- Server applications should run better on SwiftOS than they do Linux
- Embedded devices and AI inference should run better on SwiftOS than they do Linux (either with Swift or Mojo)
- it should be an ideal platform for robotics
- it should be an open source alternative to the Nvidia Jetson ecosystem Jetson Modules, Support, Ecosystem, and Lineup | NVIDIA Developer
Showcase the swift language and push it forward
- showcase: Swift can thrive outside Apple’s ecosystem; it doesn’t mean we’re afraid of C or Mojo though.
- LLM inference should be noticeably faster with either Swift or Mojo Differentiable Swift
- push it forward: help improve the languge with lessons learned from the OS development
- bring SwiftUI to other platforms, expanding this work Swift.org - Writing GNOME Apps with Swift
Where do Apple and other companies fit in all this?
Apple is a luxury brand built on exceptional services and ease of use, both hardware and software. I do not think SwiftOS will change that, nor the value they provide. I do not intend to compete with them.
I do intend however, to compete with free, junky, android devices, complicated linux distros, and unreliable windows systems. Hopefuly we can have a symbiotic relationship with Apple, FreeBSD, Redox, and the Linux community.
As far as Google and Microsoft are concerned, it may be more competitive. As an aside, it would be compelling if we could include Valve’s gaming efforts on Linux with SteamOS to also be available on this hypothetical new SwiftOS.