Show HN: DaedalOS – Desktop Environment in the Browser

I made one of these years ago, much less polished but broadly similar.

From that perspective you have done well to avoid discouragement. Most of the feedback I received was negative. Worse was that the negative feedback was not related to my implementation but arguing that I should not try at all.

If you do keep working on this project for the rest of your life, I commend you.

I kind of got split between making a client only version (all data client side), a file storage server where all brains are client side but persistent data is on a server, or a direct Linux login (open real shell on browser. Linux executables can connect to a socket to open windows on the browser and provide a UI similar to how X11 does, only with a much smarter UI host)

In recent years I have been doing a few experiments working on the areas that were difficult. So many things have been added to browsers since I started, I can't recall exactly how long ago that was but I remember boot2gecko adding features that I needed.

Recently I have been experimenting with launching web workers which asks for an API and is given a MessagePort with code to construct functions that translate to messages. That way all of the desktop features can be provided as permissions with some auditing theoretically(but unimplemented) available.

Reminds me a bit of Sun's network computer (JavaStation) back in the day. Based on JavaOS. It was an idea to get Java on the map but it had very obvious issues.

The main thing I remember about that... s...l...o...w... :P The other thing I remember: Shit cool hardware. As expected from Sun. They were the cool kids before Apple were cool, along with SGI.

But of course computers are not what they used to be these days.

This is amazing - well done, and indeed runs oh-so smooth - even on mobile!

I see that the browser is somewhat limited as most sites try to prevent 'embedding'. However, we have a solution where we can proxy any web content in such a way to still allow you to embed it: https://www.webfuse.com/use-case/embed-unembeddable-content

Lmk if you would like to try this out and I can help you set this up.

I had a conversation on an irc room I created called #globaltetrahedron using two browser windows on my $40 cracked screen phone.

Worked flawlessly and is a fantastic experience. I hope Microsoft is scared of the efficiency of your experience.

This is really impressive and surprisingly visually close to Explorer, especially the font rendering and the button hover effects. I also started poking around to see how the animated wallpaper was done and the custom devtools were a nice surprise too. I don't know how much Microsoft cares about people ripping Windows icons, but directly using icons from Facebook Messenger, VLC, VSCode, Chromium, etc might be more of a concern if it starts to get more attention.

This looks awesome. As soon as I saw Synology's DSM I realized the browser would be a fantastic place for a desktop environment, but they only built half of it - then left it mostly untouched anyway.

Just magical! It's so realistic that I had to remind myself that it was a website and not a VM!

The nuances you've captured across so many different interfaces must've taken you a long time!

Much deeper and works better than anything like it, at least from what I’ve seen around the web. And that’s only from my phone. Very well done

I even got quake to run, haven’t tried connecting a keyboard yet.

The accuracy and attention to detail in the UI is amazing. You even got the little window borders right. Nice work!

This is something that was clearly done just by the love of the craft and congratulations but also feel this could have a huge potential in real world applications.

First crazy idea that came to mind was a multi user desktop environment for an intranet where everyone has their own desktop but could also request access to other desktops entering and leaving them as they are working together through the day.

This is insanely cool! I really want to know how programmes like Vim are running under the hood, is this emulation? Either way, massive congrats on an awesome fun project.

I saw this a few years ago, and it’s still at the top of my “cool shit” bookmarks!!

I still look at it when I want to remember how fun, cool and silly programming can be. I seriously love this project.

Wow, this is an incredibly full featured Win10-like OS using plain HTML, with apps like Quake3 and Tic80 built in.

Besides having something you can continuously work on, what's the current concrete end goal for it for users?

I don't know why, but just the animated background causes 100% cpu consumption for me. Debian 12, Chromium 136, i5-3450, 20gb ram, nVidia 3080, 4k screen though.

Amazing work, well done. Just spent a good chunk of time playing Quake

amazingly well done. i like it that my browser has a browser so i opened the website in the website until there was no room left on the screen and it was smooth as silk

Impressive. Running smooth on an old 4-core Kaby Lake, in FF, while that is playing some music via YT in some other tab. Kaby Lake clocks up from 800Mhz to 900, peaking 1.1G sometimes. Music doesn't stutter, not even while your video plays.

Though I'd have preferred the option to switch to a light theme.

Does it run Doom?

/ducks

Very nice! I only managed to nest two browsers, the third one didn't seem to be responding - although that might be the hug of death.

Swish.

One thing I found as a minor distraction was that when you go to browse a folder the tab title of tab changes to the folder.

Related: https://stackoverflow.com/q/79454372/7758804