For the incremental development the author describes, you can do that atop any GNU/Linux host platform on which your CL implementation runs.
To play with a bootable user experience, before you've replaced the host kernel and device support, you can strip down something like Debian Live. I previously did this for a Racket-based living room appliance project. A simpler example, without Racketisms, that uses only 2 shell scripts (you only need 1; the other is to play partition table tricks), is my earlier Debian Live variant: https://www.neilvandyke.org/lildeb/
I'm also a fan of a variation on the author's approach: have your better/different language get a foothold on a working GNU/Linux system, alongside traditional apps, in a system the user could use as their daily driver, and incrementally replace all of userland. This was my plan for PostmarketOS (though I've suspended my open source work on "non-employable" things): https://www.neilvandyke.org/postmarketos/
The author's approach also seems valid, and worth playing with.
> I'm also a fan of a variation on the author's approach: have your better/different language get a foothold on a working GNU/Linux system, alongside traditional apps, in a system the user could use as their daily driver, and incrementally replace all of userland.
That's incidentally what Emacs is to many of its users (myself included).
I used to do this with Emacs, too (VM, Gnus, w3m, and more besides all the programming tools), and some of my Emacs packages are in support of that: https://www.neilvandyke.org/emacs/
For a (mostly) single host process, without preemptive multitasking/threading, Emacs as an operating system works surprisingly well.
To play with a bootable user experience, before you've replaced the host kernel and device support, you can strip down something like Debian Live. I previously did this for a Racket-based living room appliance project. A simpler example, without Racketisms, that uses only 2 shell scripts (you only need 1; the other is to play partition table tricks), is my earlier Debian Live variant: https://www.neilvandyke.org/lildeb/
I'm also a fan of a variation on the author's approach: have your better/different language get a foothold on a working GNU/Linux system, alongside traditional apps, in a system the user could use as their daily driver, and incrementally replace all of userland. This was my plan for PostmarketOS (though I've suspended my open source work on "non-employable" things): https://www.neilvandyke.org/postmarketos/
The author's approach also seems valid, and worth playing with.