AetherOS impressions

---
title: "AetherOS impressions"
subtitle: "I'm astounded that it actually works"
date: "2026-03-27"
categories: [atproto]
description: "AetherOS is an in-browser computer on the AT Protocol. I look forward to it working someday."
---

This is a collection of loose impressions I'm having while playing with aetheros.computer. I'm typing them on AetherOS itself--in AetherOS Textpad, specifically--partly for the novelty value and partly for the ludicrously satisfactory aesthetic.

I cannot overstate how much fun this aesthetic is. If you like the idea of "cyberpunk terminal computer", you're the target audience, probably. If that doesn't sound like a pitch you're unlikely to be it. It's very much a "because they could" exercise in aesthetics.

It's simultaneously shockingly full-featured, and an aggressively unusable curiosity. The number of things that can be done on this virtual OS is ridiculous. Currently they can't be done well yet, or at least nothing I've tried can be done well yet. I'm doing it anyway.

I'm thinking of it as a Chromebook inside my MacBook, currently. It's a little browser computer that can do a handful of little computer things. Someday soon, I hope, it will be able to do them well.

What it is

It's a computer, on your browser, on the AT Protocol.

"What is the deal with things being hosted on AT Protocol," I said, "what does that even mean. What do you mean you can have a computer on it."

The AT Protocol

What I knew about the AT Protocol, strictly speaking, before last week: that it was the underlying technology for Bluesky; that there were people who seemed to care quite a lot about it, which presumably meant it had something novel to offer them; that things could be built "on" it other than Bluesky, in a way I didn't entirely understand.

Updated understanding: accounts on the AT Protocol, like your bsky account, consist of a repository of arbitrary information tied to a unique identifier (the big long DID string). That repository mostly contains Bluesky posts for most people, but it doesn't have to. It can totally just... contain text files, and records in computer games, and anything someone got set up to have the credentials to write.

The AetherOS computer

AetherOS is an in-browser computer system that uses the ATProto PDS (that repository) as its filesystem.

Let's get this out of the way a second time: it's visually delightful. It's specifically visually delightful in a ridiculous cyberpunk way. The whole thing is monospaced. The icons are blocky stereotypes. The default background is falling Matrix digits. AetherOS knows whose bullshit it's on and it is on it.

There are apps for a handful of things: a coding app I haven't tried, a tasks app I'm trying keeping blog posts ideas in, the text editor I'm writing this post in, a Bluesky client. There's a lot of games on here, which I haven't played with but people seem to enjoy. There's a system for custom AI assistants, which I'll probably play with when I have a local one deployed again.

It's surprisingly feature-complete for an in-browser gimmick. It also uses a tiling window manager framework I'm fond of -- I'm inclined to use it just to have more access to a tiling desktop on platforms other than Arch.

What it's not

This is not, at all, a serious computer. I don't mean as in "you can't do work on it" -- you can't, it's a goofy little Chromebook-style thought experiment where the gimmick is that the filesystem is your ATProto account.

I mean it's not very good at doing the things that it's trying to do. The apps are there but when you actually try to use them they're not particularly usable yet.

The user interface appears to be designed for very large screens (my MacBook Air is suffering of this somewhat) but doesn't let text in the editor wrap further than what looks like a stereotypical eighty-character line. Which in some ways might be good because I'm not sure how legible this text size would be at a longer wrap, but it feels like further proof that this was just... thrown together to make it exist.

I find that weirdly admirable? In the context of trying to get myself to absorb "good enough" as a target, they're presenting themselves as a serious project, they got all sorts of traction for the novelty, and they are hopefully going to actually make it usable in a way that matters sooner rather than later.

I cannot in good conscience recommend using it for anything, but I'm having a good time doing that.

Assorted things it can't do

Here are a variety of things I look forward to them figuring out enough to actually a) design for, b) communicate having designed for, and/or c) implement:

• Deckard, the AetherOS client for Bluesky, being actually usable as opposed to a novelty: as-is it doesn't show more than 30% of most posts, alt-texted images have the alt text replicated twice and the image somewhat illegible, clicking through to QTs only somewhat works. It's a shame, because the TweetDeck inspired setup is one I haven't seen for Bluesky before and I would totally migrate my casual feed-reading to it if I could.
• I'm using the Textpad app for the love of the game but it's -- if you're seeing a pattern -- deeply janky. Saving files sometimes jumps you to an unrelated file, the controls scroll out of the screen instead of sticking, typing in backticks and then hitting backspace turns text into a solid white block for some reason?
• The Substrate system, by which you hook it up to a larger and more adult computer in order to have terminal access, as far as I can tell just... doesn't work? It refers to a substrate npx package that doesn't appear to exist, the best contender for what they might mean doesn't have the capabilities it needs, and just. Nothing happens. When you try to use it. They're posting like using it is an option and I have no idea where they're coming from.

I mean this as a representative sample; their bug report template, bless them, is comprehensive enough that I don't have the wherewithal to report every bug I find, because of how many of them boil down to "...Okay but did you actually use this before you shipped it?"

And yet.

Playing on the computer

I cannot overstate how much this is not a seriously usable computing endeavor. I have to scroll up to hit save, manually, as I'm typing this: not just as in "there's no autosave" but as in the user interface for the text editor scrolls out of the window.

There's also no autosave, or caching; I discovered this the hard way by switching windows and coming back to find that I'd drafted half a post apparently without saving, or with the only saving I'd done being a nervous tic of keyboard shortcuts that wasn't honored by the interface--I'm really not sure which.

This is the second version of my "I'm going to liveblog trying AetherOS" post, which colors how much I'm emphasizing the jank aspect. Because I opened the task manager and lost my previous draft.

It's a really impressive achievement in--I don't know how to say this without it being negging--shipping something ambitious and nominally feature-complete without actually finishing it. I find it genuinely admirable that this toy computer exists, in my browser, and was made to exist in a timely manner relative to how much work they have left to do ironing out the kinks.

And yet... Am I going to use it?

You know, probably.

It made it click like nothing else had that I'd enjoy hosting my own PDS (I probably could have seen this coming, I like... hosting things). I look at this and I want to use it for things, despite the fact that it's objectively not very good at the things I am using it for.

I typed almost seven hundred words before I got distracted and did something else instead for the first time, for the enjoyment factor of working in this format. I'm planning to draft other blog posts on here, even though it makes for a multi-hop export process with no upside other than the simple kicks of "the cyberpunk computer is fun and cyberpunk". Why not?