Every couple of weeks I look at ShrekOS, look at the amount of work involved in building an actual Linux distribution, and have basically the same reaction.
Somehow that turned into an immutable Debian system with isolated workloads, capability grants, controlled egress, verified updates, a desktop policy layer, an installer, and enough architecture documents to make me question every decision that led me here.
And the annoying part is that every time I do, I eventually end up back at the same problem.
I already wrote the technical version of this question in Why I'm Building ShrekOS When Containers Already Exist.
The Bench system in ShrekOS literally runs on rootless container technology. I did not invent a magical new isolation primitive because AI showed up.
The place where I can run several autonomous things on my machine and understand, at a glance, what each one is allowed to do.
I want my computer to understand that these are three different actors with three different scopes.
I wanted better permission prompts for AI agents, so apparently I am building a Linux distribution.
A general-purpose desktop environment where autonomous agents are treated as first-class untrusted actors, and where their filesystem access, network access, tools, credentials, persistence, and escalation are coherent parts of the computer's operating model.
Using a collection of infrastructure tools that were not designed around this interaction.
I do not want to spend the next ten years launching increasingly powerful agents with increasingly elaborate shell commands.
Something should remember that this project gets this directory, this network scope, these tools, and no credentials unless I explicitly grant one.
I need a computer that composes those things around agentic workflows as a normal part of using the machine.
It is a developer operating system where agents can be extremely capable without capability automatically becoming authority over the whole machine.
Maybe I finish enough of this architecture to understand the problem properly and discover that almost all of it can be extracted into a runtime that installs cleanly on Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, whatever.
Maybe ShrekOS becomes the reference implementation where every assumption is controlled, while the useful pieces escape into normal Linux.
Because right now I do not know where the boundary between "this should be an application" and "this actually needs operating system support" is.
There are pieces I already suspect could live perfectly well on another distribution.