Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

DaedalOS – Desktop environment in the browser

dustinbrett.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 141 posts

Re: DaedalOS – Desktop environment in the browser

#121

Post by kragen »

jitl wrote: post #12
mofosyne wrote: post #6

I do wonder what it would be like if we have a linux distro, where you can work seamlessly between a desktop PC and a laptop or a random cafe, because the desktop is essentally a web browser like this example. Of course you could just say IPKVM or VNC, but I would say it's a bit different if you can run most of the logic client side (via webassembly etc...). So this would require the app to be rewritten to have a cle…

Sandstorm really had this kind of feeling. Not that it presented as a desktop environment visually - but it offered a much more integrated “computer” of documents versus silod web site apps where you need to open each site to see the files in the app. https://sandstorm.io/ On the other side of things, you can just run an SSH + X11 server for remoting; and have fairly good integration between windows controlled by a r…

> Plan 9 really runs with this idea - you can mount the processors of another system to use them on yours

as i understand it, it's more that you mount your window on a cpu server so your computation-intensive process can draw into it; there isn't a filesystem interface to the processor itself

Re: DaedalOS – Desktop environment in the browser

#122

Post by andrewaylett »

wolletd wrote: post #42
vbezhenar wrote: post #36

I'm really thinking that's the feature. Compile Linux kernel to wasm. So it can run inside a browser with a very nice performance. Write FS drivers to enable seamless caching and remote data storage, so you can shutdown your system on PC and boot from laptop. Or even some kind of hibernate mode, so you can just continue from where you left off. Write graphics drivers using WebGPU and other technologies, enabling very…

I'm looking forward to the day when I can run a browser in my browser.

Boot to Gecko? Gaia was a UI written in HTML that itself contained a browser component capable of browsing the wider Internet.

Or even plain ChomeOS -- especially if you then run Firefox for Android.

Re: DaedalOS – Desktop environment in the browser

#123

Post by kragen »

Etheryte wrote: post #11
mofosyne wrote: post #6

I do wonder what it would be like if we have a linux distro, where you can work seamlessly between a desktop PC and a laptop or a random cafe, because the desktop is essentally a web browser like this example. Of course you could just say IPKVM or VNC, but I would say it's a bit different if you can run most of the logic client side (via webassembly etc...). So this would require the app to be rewritten to have a cle…

So something like X11?

DonHopkins's [flagged] [dead] reply here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38830583 is very interesting reading, though unsurprisingly pretty rude; if you have showdead turned off, you might want to turn it on (creating an account if necessary) in order to read it

Re: DaedalOS – Desktop environment in the browser

#126

Post by rchaud »

yonisto wrote: post #19

That is so cool! Interesting note, Chrome now shows me how much memory each tab consumes. No matter what I did it is always stay on 50mb (which sounds like a bug in chrome), while a page from SO consumes 87mb and HN takes about 30mb.

The site is smooth, but it causes the fans on my laptop to start spinning. I closed the tab and the fans stopped. I'm on a 2014 MBP w/8GB RAM running Firefox, but it is still plenty fast for other React websites.

I wonder if it's the animated wallpaper that's causing the fans to fire up.

Re: DaedalOS – Desktop environment in the browser

#129

Post by joloooo »

o-o- wrote: post #112

Impressive and smooth, however I can't help thinking it's an effort in an opposite direction. We should be striving away from the desktop metaphor, into something built for abstracting tens of thousands of files and folder, something that relieves working memory, that adheres to our brains' spatial recognition patterns rather than offering logical views into file systems.

I agree, and am eager to see what comes with the next wave of OS. I think this was just nostalgic fun.

Re: DaedalOS – Desktop environment in the browser

#130

Post by rchaud »

The_Colonel wrote: post #61
DonHopkins wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yet another step backwards. Current desktop user interfaces are terrible, and we need the flexibility of a web browser to innovate and implement better ones, since Wayland is simply not up to it, because it's not extensible at runtime in JavaScript or any other language. (No, recompiling or dynamically linking in DLLs doesn't count -- that's just ActiveX.)

Web browsers are a terrible place to do innovations, a major problem being the absolute backwards compatibility they need to maintain. Web standards are massive complexity beasts which are constantly growing and basically none of that can be dropped. The dynamicity of JavaScript is actually a major problem for performance (difficult to optimize beyond a certain point), that's a major motivating factor for WASM, but t…

> Web browsers are a terrible place to do innovations, a major problem being the absolute backwards compatibility they need to maintain.

How so? The biggest innovations in the browser in recent years have been shadow-DOM type stuff like React/Vue, plus WASM and WebGL. None of these are backwards compatible with older browsers.

Post reply on HN