It just occurred to me that a container-based desktop is an over engineered statically linked userspace :)
People that know me know I'm not fond of the design of containers on Linux. But that's just because I've been stuck having to make things actually work on them. Transparent IDE support, making profilers, resolving ELFs from radically different mount namespaces, PTY API giving completely undocumented results, ...
But that said, we're stuck with them so might as well make it as pleasant as possible.
Prompt will probably be my next terminal emulator. That inspector looks interesting. Have you seen Ghostty’s recent demo²?
1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WVWrllJQJ_s&t=6155s
2: https://mitchellh.com/writing/ghostty-devlog-005#terminal-in...
We built Flatpak and Builder in concert from the beginning to foster this exact outcome.
But as for language? I already hack on GTK/GDK/GSK internals in C, a mix of C++ and C to contribute to VTE, and Builder is 250k of C with another 200k in associated libraries. I'm just better at it and language bindings are never an issue.
Are you aware that there is already a terminal for iOS with the same name? https://panic.com/prompt/
It was Linux folks that decided it was also a means to ship developer machines into production, and now we're stuck with the revised meaning what containers are supposed to be used for.