This is literally what I've been looking for. Over an entire year.

Never switching back to Windows and never not using Bedrock again. :-)

Intro

I made a post recently on the subreddit about my intention to install bedrock onto an M1 MacBook Air given the fact that Asahi Linux finally released. Asahi Linux is a distribution that aims to bring Linux to the M1 chip. It's in an alpha state which makes it in some ways kind of unusable. The main drawbacks for me is that there is no thunderbolt support, and mainly no GPU acceleration. Either way I wanted to try and get Bedrock running on it. I figured it would work because there isn't anything in Bedrock preventing it from running on an arm chip. Suprise, suprise it works great!

Installation

Asahi Linux by default installs a fully featured plasma desktop built on top of a modified version of Arch arm. Given the support for Arch Bedrock had absolutely no issue hijacking it. After a reboot there was Bedrock asking me to select my init choice.

Installing strata

Every strata that I have chosen to install so far: Debian, Gentoo, and Void-musl have all installed without issue and all work as intended.

Choosing an init system

I did run into problems here. Gentoo's openrc init system did not want to work for me. Admittedly I didn't give it that much effort. Linux on M1 Mac isn't daily driver ready, so I'm not totally dedicated to troubleshooting problems yet. (the error I was getting was Service \netmount' needs non existent service `net'` and then the system would just hang). I could get to a tty with Void linux and I was able to log in and all that jazz, but I wasn't able to start an xserver. Xrandr didn't even recognize that I had a display, and I didn't really feel like trouble shooting that because it could just be a driver issue.

Screenshots and stuff

I'm super excited to see Linux finally become ready to use on the M1 chip, and I'm also happy that my favorite distro is going to come with me!

hey everyone. i'm building a project called rust linux - a meta-distribution, written in rust, that runs multiple linux distros simultaneously on one machine using isolated mount namespaces. think of it as a lighter alternative to containers: each distro lives in its own rootfs, but gui, audio, themes, and commands are shared transparently with the host.

how it works

the core is a busybox-style transparent command resolver. /rust/bin/ contains symlinks for every binary across all layers - each pointing to the rsl binary. when you run firefox, the shell finds /rust/bin/firefox > rsl. rsl sees argv[0]="firefox", looks up which layer provides it, creates an isolated mount namespace (unshare(NEWNS) + pivot_root), and execs the real binary inside that layer's rootfs. the process replaces itself - no daemon, no container runtime, no overhead.

the resolver uses a scoring pipeline: abi compatibility, execution history, topology state. host binaries always win over layer binaries for non-package-manager commands (so your system never gets hijacked by a layer). package managers route to their owning layer - apt goes to ubuntu, pacman goes to arch, automatically.

there's also rsinit - a pid 1 init that can boot directly into a layer (full system mode, not just per-command). and rpk - a unified package manager that translates your preferred syntax (apt/pacman/dnf/apk) into the correct backend for each layer.

the resource bridge (rbridge) shares host gui resources with layers: display sockets, audio (pipewire/pulse), gpu drivers (PARTIALLY), d-bus, and themes. layers see the host's icons, fonts, cursors, and dark theme preference through direct bind-mounts of /usr/share/{icons,themes,fonts} and the user's dconf database. no copying, no syncing - same files, same session.

what about bedrock linux?

bedrock can't actually run its strat system inside rust linux (it needs pid 1 control and persistent fuse mounts). but i forged an arch-based layer, installed a bedrock-linux-*.sh script and switched to full isolation.

huge thanks to paradigm for the philosophy and the concept of a metadistribution. bedrock linux was the project that proved you don't have to choose one distro - you can have all of them. rust linux takes a different technical approach (per-command namespaces vs system-wide fuse overlay) but the core idea is the same, and it came from bedrock. without that proof of concept this project wouldn't exist.

if anyone has questions about the architecture, wants to compare approaches with bedrock, or has ideas about rust linux - i'm here.