I'm not sure how much sense a Linux port to webasm would make. Maybe you could get UML to work in some way but the binary loading and lots of other stuff would

I'm not sure how much sense a Linux port to webasm would make. Maybe you could get UML to work in some way but the binary loading and lots of other stuff would look very different. What you could port is the GNU userspace (which is probably closer to what you're thinking.) One of the issues with porting software like that though is it expects complete control over its own process (and will put eg long running loops in it) which isn't how browsers expect software to run. Maybe you could do something fancy with continuations in the C runtime (emscripten probably already does) but it wouldn't be so strait forward. I'm not sure what advantage having a shell in the browser would have over just running the individual apps as webasm ports. There's less to worry about then. >retro gaming and opening legacy files I don't think a webasm OS port makes as much sense for these use cases as a webasm VM. There are plenty of those: jslinux.org gives you a full Linux VM with an optional paid file sync service and internet access. Archive.org automatically opens com/exe files in the emscripten dosbox port, you can even run Windows 3.1: https://archive.org/details/msdos_win3_1 https://archive.org/details/msdos_win3_1 It would be kind of neat if more open source software had online "try me" pages that let you run the app in eg jslinux or dosbox before downloading and installing it.