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Os.js – open-source JavaScript web desktop platform with a window manager

284 points by auraham 3y ago

ale42 3y ago
For "some" reason Tetris feels less reactive than an old Windows 3.1 Tetris running on a 386 at 20 MHz...
jongjong 3y ago
Reminds me of Buddy Pond https://buddypond.com/ https://buddypond.com/
nXqd 3y ago
this is super impressive
robertwt7 3y ago
FYI, last code update on the repo was Sept 22, 2022. seems inactive already
- gjvc 3y ago
  what's wrong with you that you can't say something positive about it?
- DustinBrett 3y ago
  Indeed there hasn't been much movement on that project in a while. My project was inspired by OS.js and a few others like Windows 93. It's been actively maintained since I started it nearly 3 years ago. I hope to work on it for a long time to come. If interested in checking out the repo it's on GitHub as daedalOS. My personal website is the demo: https://dustinbrett.com/ https://dustinbrett.com/
  - 4RealFreedom 3y ago
    That's really great! Good job.
    - DustinBrett 3y ago
      Thanks very much!
    - colecut 3y ago
      Yeah, the thoroughness of this is very impressive.. Also nice how well it renders on a small phone screen, for a desktop OS simulation.. I just enjoyed a round of DX-Ball, that took me back a lot of years
      - DustinBrett 3y ago
        Thanks for noticing. I have tried to be quite thorough and I enjoy trying to get every little detail. I did indeed try and keep things as responsive as possible. Usually it works out but some of the apps are not as good as others when it comes to resizing and inputs. I had some great memories from DX-Ball and was quite happy to find a random Russian JavaScript port that I was able to integrate into my site.
  - mdwalters 3y ago
    Link, please. Or were you referring to the organization name?
    - DustinBrett 3y ago
      Here is the GitHub link to the source code: https://github.com/DustinBrett/daedalOS https://github.com/DustinBrett/daedalOS
  - Lerc 3y ago
    I like this one. It's nice to see it utilizing a lot of browser enhancements that didn't exist when I had a go at making one. How much server side infrastructure does yours use? I used just a tiny shim to do login, serve static files, and establish a websocket for a FileIO. It provided a socket on the server side that processes could connect to and run things on the browser side, much like X11 processes connect to the X server. Every now and then I do a couple of tweaks to update mine. The first few things I tried out with ChatGPT were things that I wanted to make for my desktop environment (an IndexedDB filesystem and a transmit API through a messagePort system) It may seem like wasted time, but you never know how things turn out. In the last week I extracted a lot of the little paint program I made for my desktop and turned it into a ComfyUI plugin.
    - DustinBrett 3y ago
      Thanks! I did indeed try and use a lot of modern browser features when possible. It's a fully client-side app which only has static files. It would be cool to connect to X server and perhaps one day I will move into that area with a back-end, but it's been a goal of mine to keep it a fully front-end app.
  - tommica 3y ago
    Oh, I remember seeing that one some months ago and being super impressed! It inspired me to to make my own version of it, that even though I got bored with was a nice challenge to have. When you start making your own version, it gives some insight of how much work it really takes to build something like that, and it really is just wow. At some point I humored the idea of using that type of a setup for our online system, but doubt the end-users are ready for that kind of a web ui just yet.
    - DustinBrett 3y ago
      That's great to hear it inspired you! It is indeed a fun challenge but can be time consuming and it requires passion to keep going. I have become a bit obsessed with it over the last few years. A few people have forked my project and are attempting to make things from it. I think it's cool they are doing that but I am happy to keep it as my side project.
  - Grimburger 3y ago
    I really like your build videos for DaedalOS, great insight into all the components. Topnotch stuff.
    - DustinBrett 3y ago
      Thanks so much, I am happy to hear you checked them out and liked them. I still work on it nearly daily in my nights so I am thinking of restarting my weekend live streams as I did them every week in 2021.
      - Grimburger 3y ago
        I don't think you planned it as such but it's basically become a full advanced course into what you can actually do with react. Know you don't get many views but it's a tremendous resource and still holds up well.
  - supermatt 3y ago
    Im usually quite dismissive of these browser based "desktops", but wow. I am amazed just how much detail and functionality you have put in to that. I'd recommend people have a look at the intro video, as theres a LOT more than meets the eye: https://youtu.be/CkvKPspIPLs https://youtu.be/CkvKPspIPLs
    - DustinBrett 3y ago
      Thanks so much, It's great to hear that! I have spent many hours working on this project for people to have the feeling of functionality and detail. My goal is to recreate everything an OS can do as much as is possible within a browser, and to the same pixel level detail as seen in Windows 10. It's a never ending project that I really enjoy working on. Thanks for checking out my video also, I plan to make another one shortly as that is a year old and I have added quite a bit of new stuff since then.
- mdwalters 3y ago
  This project seems very well made; someone should fork it to make a more active revival project.
- userbinator 3y ago
  I'm not sure if your comment was meant to be satirical, but thinking a project less than a year old is "inactive" is so stereotypical of the JS world.
- lolinder 3y ago
  The copyright on the site is from 2009, so "inactive already" seems a bit unfair—even if that were the last commit ever, that's a 13-year run, which is a lot longer than I've ever maintained a side project!
- seabrookmx 3y ago
  It's a 10 year old project. Less than a year of inactivity isn't a big deal for something that's basically "finished".
tambourine_man 3y ago
I went looking for a terminal in the Apps menu
- elcaro 3y ago
  I went looking for a web browser!
- DustinBrett 3y ago
  I swear they used to have a Terminal and a few other features that seem missing from the existing demo. I saw videos of it from nearly a decade ago where it had a lot more stuff.
johnwheeler 3y ago
Serious question, not trying to be a jerk. Why do people keep making these? Because they’re fun? I don’t think I’ve ever seen one of these gain traction.
- sharts 3y ago
  Probably to practice JS.
- yen223 3y ago
  "It is fun" is a perfectly valid reason to do this.
- DustinBrett 3y ago
  As someone who has been working on one for nearly 3 years, it is indeed a lot of fun to make. I also learn a lot from doing it and I enjoy making the app as I use it for my personal website. It's my side/passion project and I hope to get to work on it for a long time to come.
- ChrisArchitect 3y ago
  heh, they don't. This is from like 2011 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3252199 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3252199
- pipeline_peak 3y ago
  They clearly have talent, I don't understand why they don't make products like Draw.IO or at least something more meaningful and original than a 2000's era desktop environment. Based on the docs https://manual.os-js.org/ https://manual.os-js.org/, they clearly have some serious intention. This is what happens when the Wozniak's of the World don't have a Steve to guide them. They do what they want without a clear vision to practicality.
  - devjab 3y ago
    This is going to be a bit unrelated to what you said, but I recommend looking into Mermaid diagrams in your MD files as a replacement for draw.io. It saved us a bunch of time and has given us documentation diagrams that developers actually want to update because they don’t have to spend 9 years aligning lines.
travisgriggs 3y ago
I couldn’t play Tetris on my phone because I needed to press space bar to start. On one hand, I think these things are cool. Why did they do this? Because they could. On the other hand, I still wonder why they do it.
- qup 3y ago
  When someone adds virtual keyboard support so they can play Tetris in there on their phone, you will at least be able to eliminate any rational reasons.
toastal 3y ago
The inclusion of a XMPP client is cute
jancsika 3y ago
Looks like the Tetris pieces aren't aligned to the canvas pixel grid, causing unnecessary antialiasing. This causes the piece borders to look eternally blurry. To fix it, you should add a "cleaning cloth" app that the user can drag and drop onto the Tetris canvas that moves the pieces horizontally by 0.5 pixels. Or even better, only move the pieces that intersected with the cleaning cloth. :)
- zamadatix 3y ago
  CSS should have a way to handle all offset properly at some point https://www.w3.org/TR/css-values-4/#round-func https://www.w3.org/TR/css-values-4/#round-func but until then you can use JavaScript to automatically get the correct offset.
SeanAnderson 3y ago
I would've guessed the entire thing rendered in canvas, but no, it uses HTML and just uses a canvas for stuff like the paint program.
- erikpukinskis 3y ago
  People underrate how much good stuff CSS gives you for building UIs. If you did everything in canvas you’d just have to reimplement something like flexbox to center, align, stretch, and animate all your icons text, boxes, buttons, etc. Why not just stay in HTML and use a layout engine that’s already implemented, and highly optimized for literally every platform.?
  - toastal 3y ago
    Most folks seem adverse to learning CSS. In contemporary times they’ll go as far as to add 44 cryptic utility class names to element to avoid writing a line of the stuff.
    - tomelders 3y ago
      It boggles my mind. CSS isn’t hard anymore.
      - zith 3y ago
        What is the best way of learning modern css?
        0wis 3y ago
        Interested too. I did several full courses and exercises on it (Freecodecamp, W3, Mdn, Codepip…) and I still struggle a lot to create clear UI and have each HTML element where I want them. I am looking at CSS frameworks (BEM, Tailwind) but I would like to master « vanilla » CSS.
        3y ago
arunc 3y ago
Wonder why people choose gitter over something functional like zulip chat.
- IshKebab 3y ago
  I think it's older.
- notpushkin 3y ago
  Gitter is now a Matrix.org instance, so pretty functional if you ask me.
- patmorgan23 3y ago
  Zuilp is pretty new
ensocode 3y ago
Games collection is awesome - Tetris and Wolfenstein 3D
kbrannigan 3y ago
We built a OS (compiler) on top of our OS(windows) on top of our OS(web broswer) on top of our OS.js
thefoolisidiot 3y ago
Transform this to OS for DIY NAS and you'll have great success !
qalmakka 3y ago
These kinds of things have been a recurring trend since the mid '00s, I do remember people writing Windows-lookalikes in JS even back then. Every time a new one pops up I get this very nostalgic feeling for an era of computing that, sadly, I think is dying real fast.
- trumbitta2 3y ago
  I have seen them in the late '90s, but in Flash
- DustinBrett 3y ago
  At least for me I have been making one for nearly 3 years and hope to be able to work on it for another 30 years. I use it as my personal website so perhaps this is an additional incentive for me.
rausr 3y ago
All the text in the Desktop is in French for me. Is that because I'm in the German-speaking part of Switzerland, and it's somehow geo-locating incorrectly?
- riedel 3y ago
  For me only the advertisement in the webpage was geolocalized: in Germany everything was in English except the ad was in German
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
naillo 3y ago
It's funny how this is faster and more responsive than my actual windows desktop window manager experience (speed of opening apps etc).
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- t0mas88 3y ago
  It's crazy how slow Windows 11 is on modern hardware. Even on a modern CPU, with 16gb ram, it takes serious time to load things. Very sluggish compared to a Macbook Air of a similar price point. I can't imagine that big a difference is due to hardware differences. The M2 is fast, but Intel 12th gen isn't much slower just more power hungry. That means it's a software issue. Which is sad considering how good the NT lineage of kernels was, they have been making a worse and worse OS around it. They have themselves to blame for dropping from nearly 100% desktop marketshare to around 60% now. Only time until they're going the AOL or Yahoo way...
- XCSme 3y ago
  I tried to test your remark and drag my Brave browser around, my whole PC froze for 2 seconds. On a 12c/24t 5900x...
notpushkin 3y ago
Tangential, but https://windows93.net/ https://windows93.net/ is by far my favourite take on the “web desktop” concept.
- ale42 3y ago
  Lol, that one is really funny! Especially for those who used Windows 95...
- easton 3y ago
  In a similar vein, my favorite is Windows RG (really good edition): https://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/27549 https://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/27549
  - DustinBrett 3y ago
    Haha ya that one is a great parody. Flash actually had tons of these, but RG was the best. I have the file (/Users/Public/Documents/Flash Files/Windows RG Build 207.swf) on my website and run it via Ruffle.
  - dividuum 3y ago
    You might enjoy Kitboga using that to mess with tech support scammers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F0peLpovDB8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F0peLpovDB8 and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XxWFdFhHd9U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XxWFdFhHd9U
- rollcat 3y ago
  I find it ironic that the "boot log" displays the text "Safari is teh new Internet Explorer", while it's one of the two final holdouts against Chrome's complete and undivided domination, as Google is trying to force WEI down our throats. The open web is dying, and it's those messages that are killing it.
  - jchw 3y ago
    I hate this logic. Neither Safari nor Chrome are good for the open web, Google being worse than Apple does not make Apple some kind of hero. As far as WEI goes, I certainly do not expect Apple to save us considering they've already been happy to implement remote attestation in their platforms and of course, in Safari, in the form of PATs. Meanwhile, Safari lags on web standards that are actually good, (while still implementing remote attestation in their browsers,) forcing you to test all of your stuff on Safari. I never have to test my stuff on Chrome, because well, Chrome implements every standard I care about that Firefox implements. But with Safari, I never know. I'm the resident troubleshooting guy for a bunch of people, and it's difficult to express the confusion and anger I get when I have to explain to people that yes, Safari on iOS really, truly still doesn't support WebM or Opus fully. Some people (insanely, imo) believe WebM is somehow evil, but I would love to hear why Opus is evil. What Google and Chrome are today is vastly different and far worse (IMO) than what Microsoft and Internet Explorer were for the web and internet. Microsoft was also bad for the open web, but they couldn't dream of something as devious as WEI; the technology wasn't even there yet. Meanwhile, Safari is basically hated for the same reasons as IE: You have to test with it to make sure things work (and of course that includes needing to own Apple products to even have the privilege of doing so...)
syx 3y ago
I recently wrote a blog post [1] about the comeback in popularity of these web desktops, especially after seeing a lot of these being posted on HN recently. OS.js was one of the early projects I started tracking years ago, and it's really well designed and documented. The interface always reminded me of those mid 2000's distros with GNOME 2, which is a nice thing since most nostalgic web desktops tend to have Windows 9x themes. [1] https://system31.simone.computer/blog/desktops-zip https://system31.simone.computer/blog/desktops-zip
- deaddodo 3y ago
  EyeOS was doing this around the turn of the millenium: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EyeOS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EyeOS The initial release of OS.js was around 2015, over a decade later.
  - mid-kid 3y ago
    I used to play around with and use this, but I could never find a good use for it. It felt really counter productive to open up a desktop within my desktop when it was a laptop, so I had it anywhere already
    - Towaway69 3y ago
      But can I open a browser in desktop within the browser on my desktop? Exactly my problem too, what's the main use case for a desktop in browser?
      - injidup 3y ago
        What's the use of a desktop. I never see mine. Window at full screen always hide it. The taskbar is where it's at or hotkeys
        jeremyjh 3y ago
        The taskbar is typically managed as part of the desktop environment. This term doesn’t refer only to the folder represented as empty space behind the windows.
gumballindie 3y ago
What I dont understand is why is everyone so obsessed with anime. I opened this app and sure enough there was an anime wallpaper lurking in there somewhere.
- Dalewyn 3y ago
  Japanese entertainment is one of the last remaining forms of sincere entertainment devoid of political correctness and driving narratives.
  - voidfunc 3y ago
    > driving narratives lolwut. Japanese anime almost always reinforces traditional Japanese social and cultural norms. It's practically a teaching tool for kids there on how to behave in Japanese society.
    - neoromantique 3y ago
      See, it's not <insert some bad take about left>!
    - augusto-moura 3y ago
      Anime is just a medium, not a genre. There are good and bad anime, just like there are good and bad movies, books, and TV shows. I don't think it's fair to judge an entire medium based on a few bad examples. I'm not a huge anime fan, but I've seen some good ones.
      - pessimizer 3y ago
        > I don't think it's fair to judge an entire medium based on a few bad examples. Nobody said that Japanese cartoons that teach Japanese values were bad until you just did.
    - anthk 3y ago
      No. Even Evangelion it's a satire on the Japanese nerd obsessed with making women sexual objects. On Dragon Ball Vegeta (an obvious depiction of the old fart Japanese nationalist, Saiyans are like a samurais/ronin in space, same armor as the samurais et all) always loses against the open-minded and naive "ninja mountain-born singleton hick" Goku from Osaka/Kansai, which is the "progressive", "cheerful/open minded" and careless city/region from Japan. Technology and modernisation from the US saved Japan and that's symbolized by Bulma.
davb 3y ago
Meta, but I love the simplistic design of the landing page. That textured background is so much less brutal than a solid colour. I thought about using a background like that in my terminal (to give it a very subtle paper like quality) but was surprised to find nothing online about other people doing the same (I had hoped for screenshots and texture packs).
- chris37879 3y ago
  Its curious you couldn't find anything, tons of terminal emulators out there support this, I'm not sure what platform you're on, but on macOS, iTerm2 supports image backgrounds, on Linux, kitty is my goto customizeable terminal emulator, and I think even the new Windows Terminal supports them! Also, I think gnome's terminal emulator has an effect like this on it by default (or at least it did in some distro's default setup I've used)
  - davb 3y ago
    It wasn’t that I couldn’t find a terminal supporting background images (indeed, this is very well supported). It was that I couldn’t find anyone referencing using subtly textured (slightly noisy) images to avoid a very solid background.
    - chris37879 3y ago
      Most of the ones I’ve seen that support backgrounds have the usual options to tile/stretch the background, what’s stopping you from finding a pattern you like and making it a tiling background? There used to be a (now defunct) site out there called subtle patterns that had a massive CC0 library of these kinds of textures, toss it in an image editor, apply a color you like, tile it and call it done!
- JNRowe 3y ago
  Eterm used to have a support pack with some nice backgrounds for tiling, which sadly appears to be more difficult to find than it would've been a decade ago. I did find a mirror¹, but that is purely because I remembered the filename for some strange reason. Some of the textures in tile/ are still quite nice, but not all of them work so well with our modern higher resolution displays from a quick play. ¹ https://distfiles.macports.org/Eterm/Eterm-bg-0.9.6.tar.gz https://distfiles.macports.org/Eterm/Eterm-bg-0.9.6.tar.gz
mysterydip 3y ago
I feel strangely compelled to build/use one of these, and yet at the same time I can't think of an actual use case.
- gspencley 3y ago
  The use case is a return to "dumb terminals." Many "Enterprises" already go as far as they can with remote desktop and VPNs but lots of enterprises would love to issue an employee a device that runs the entire OS remotely so that the device effectively becomes just a terminal and 100% of employee generated data stays within the origination's servers and networks. I'm not saying that this makes for a good employee experience, but it's a use case.
  - jeremyjh 3y ago
    So does this sync all the machine state to the cloud? I thought they mostly used local storage.
    - gspencley 3y ago
      I don't know about Os.js, specifically, but yes if you were going to implement a browser based OS for the purpose I described then local state would be relatively transient and state would be persisted on the enterprise side. There's no reason you need to use something like localStorage or indexedDb for anything, really. The only thing that buys you are performance and offline capabilities. But if security / keeping data "in the enterprise" is the priority then you can minimize what gets persisted locally.
      - jeremyjh 3y ago
        My point was simply that no one is doing that. That isn't what these are for, and an enterprise that wants to provide a thin client desktop can't use anything that doesn't run the applications the business already uses, so they are going to be deploying an actual windows desktop hosted in the cloud using any of the many solutions available from tier 1 cloud provides or others to do that.
shireboy 3y ago
What a great way to make things that aren’t mobile responsive. Maybe this one is better, but I’ve worked with a large enterprise web app that uses a similar approach and it’s horrible. Everything opens in a “window” and there is weird state being passed around windows (ie drag a item from list window to the form window to view details). Not fun on a desktop and zero chance of it working on a tablet or phone.
- DustinBrett 3y ago
  I've spent a lot of time on my desktop environment to make it mobile responsive. I kind of went in with the idea of making something that could fit into any viewport. Most of the time it works, as much as is possible to transfer the desktop metaphor into mobile. But because my apps often rely on third party libraries, sometimes responsiveness is less than ideal.
daltont 3y ago
I find these web desktop idea interesting but a solution looking for a problem. Part of me wants to post the Batman slapping Robin meme with Robin saying "Maybe I should develop a web desktop that runs in the browser"
- pohuing 3y ago
  I know a couple people who have made their own versions with just that reason.
- DustinBrett 3y ago
  At least for me as someone who made one, the inspiration was seeing really well done ones like OS.js or Windows 96 that got me thinking it was "possible" to make something realistic. But the core idea was less about making a desktop environment and more about my personal website being like someone RDP'd into my machine and could see all my stuff.
gspencley 3y ago
I'm disappointed that it doesn't have a web browser so that I can run os.js inside of os.js inside of os.js inside of os.js inside of os.js...
- DustinBrett 3y ago
  If you want some Browserception, my desktop environment (https://dustinbrett.com/ https://dustinbrett.com/) can indeed do this. But after a few levels in Chromium you need to add a random query string (/?a=1) to the URL otherwise it stops working.
chrisweekly 3y ago
Should the title say (2021)? The last release (or even git tag) is from July 2021.
sebastianconcpt 3y ago
It's a remarkable tech achievement, but what's the applicability?
austin-cheney 3y ago
I wrote a similar concept around private internet access to your file system. It’s at https://github.com/prettydiff/share-file-systems https://github.com/prettydiff/share-file-systems The window and state management can be demoed on my personal site at https://prettydiff.com https://prettydiff.com
e12e 3y ago
Somewhat related, the Lively Kernel project - Smalltalk like system on web technologies: https://github.com/LivelyKernel/lively4-core https://github.com/LivelyKernel/lively4-core
petabytes 3y ago
Once I tried a Linux-based livecd distro with the UI being entirely in JS, ran through CEF or electron. It was an abomination, and awfully slow. There's just something so evil and funky about building an OS with web tech...
aziis98 3y ago
I've recently been trying to make something similar, mostly for fun, but I hope something cool comes out of it as it borrows many ideas from SmallTalk The backend is written in Go and can run locally or on a remote server; Go is just the only language I've used recently that has nice http frameworks and can be compiled to a statically linked binary, which means that running the program is as easy as downloading a single binary, and that a running instance of it can possibly upload itself via ssh on another linux machine the user wants to access. For now the frontend is web-based, written in Preact, and talks with the backend via some JSON endpoints, although I'm planning to add websockets sooner or later, for instance for double binding text input values. The motivation behind this project is to try and build an alternative to terminal with tmux+ssh for accessing multiple different linux machines at the same time, while being able to easily monitor and manage them.
nektro 3y ago
"Your Scientists Were So Preoccupied With Whether Or Not They Could, They Didn’t Stop To Think If They Should" but "Any application that can be written in JavaScript, will eventually be written in JavaScript" continues to deliver

284 points by auraham 3y ago

ale42 3y ago

For "some" reason Tetris feels less reactive than an old Windows 3.1 Tetris running on a 386 at 20 MHz...

jongjong 3y ago

Reminds me of Buddy Pond https://buddypond.com/ https://buddypond.com/

nXqd 3y ago

this is super impressive

robertwt7 3y ago

FYI, last code update on the repo was Sept 22, 2022. seems inactive already

gjvc 3y ago
what's wrong with you that you can't say something positive about it?
DustinBrett 3y ago
Indeed there hasn't been much movement on that project in a while. My project was inspired by OS.js and a few others like Windows 93. It's been actively maintained since I started it nearly 3 years ago. I hope to work on it for a long time to come. If interested in checking out the repo it's on GitHub as daedalOS. My personal website is the demo: https://dustinbrett.com/ https://dustinbrett.com/
- 4RealFreedom 3y ago
  That's really great! Good job.
  - DustinBrett 3y ago
    Thanks very much!
  - colecut 3y ago
    Yeah, the thoroughness of this is very impressive.. Also nice how well it renders on a small phone screen, for a desktop OS simulation.. I just enjoyed a round of DX-Ball, that took me back a lot of years
    - DustinBrett 3y ago
      Thanks for noticing. I have tried to be quite thorough and I enjoy trying to get every little detail. I did indeed try and keep things as responsive as possible. Usually it works out but some of the apps are not as good as others when it comes to resizing and inputs. I had some great memories from DX-Ball and was quite happy to find a random Russian JavaScript port that I was able to integrate into my site.
- mdwalters 3y ago
  Link, please. Or were you referring to the organization name?
  - DustinBrett 3y ago
    Here is the GitHub link to the source code: https://github.com/DustinBrett/daedalOS https://github.com/DustinBrett/daedalOS
- Lerc 3y ago
  I like this one. It's nice to see it utilizing a lot of browser enhancements that didn't exist when I had a go at making one. How much server side infrastructure does yours use? I used just a tiny shim to do login, serve static files, and establish a websocket for a FileIO. It provided a socket on the server side that processes could connect to and run things on the browser side, much like X11 processes connect to the X server. Every now and then I do a couple of tweaks to update mine. The first few things I tried out with ChatGPT were things that I wanted to make for my desktop environment (an IndexedDB filesystem and a transmit API through a messagePort system) It may seem like wasted time, but you never know how things turn out. In the last week I extracted a lot of the little paint program I made for my desktop and turned it into a ComfyUI plugin.
  - DustinBrett 3y ago
    Thanks! I did indeed try and use a lot of modern browser features when possible. It's a fully client-side app which only has static files. It would be cool to connect to X server and perhaps one day I will move into that area with a back-end, but it's been a goal of mine to keep it a fully front-end app.
- tommica 3y ago
  Oh, I remember seeing that one some months ago and being super impressed! It inspired me to to make my own version of it, that even though I got bored with was a nice challenge to have. When you start making your own version, it gives some insight of how much work it really takes to build something like that, and it really is just wow. At some point I humored the idea of using that type of a setup for our online system, but doubt the end-users are ready for that kind of a web ui just yet.
  - DustinBrett 3y ago
    That's great to hear it inspired you! It is indeed a fun challenge but can be time consuming and it requires passion to keep going. I have become a bit obsessed with it over the last few years. A few people have forked my project and are attempting to make things from it. I think it's cool they are doing that but I am happy to keep it as my side project.
- Grimburger 3y ago
  I really like your build videos for DaedalOS, great insight into all the components. Topnotch stuff.
  - DustinBrett 3y ago
    Thanks so much, I am happy to hear you checked them out and liked them. I still work on it nearly daily in my nights so I am thinking of restarting my weekend live streams as I did them every week in 2021.
    - Grimburger 3y ago
      I don't think you planned it as such but it's basically become a full advanced course into what you can actually do with react. Know you don't get many views but it's a tremendous resource and still holds up well.
- supermatt 3y ago
  Im usually quite dismissive of these browser based "desktops", but wow. I am amazed just how much detail and functionality you have put in to that. I'd recommend people have a look at the intro video, as theres a LOT more than meets the eye: https://youtu.be/CkvKPspIPLs https://youtu.be/CkvKPspIPLs
  - DustinBrett 3y ago
    Thanks so much, It's great to hear that! I have spent many hours working on this project for people to have the feeling of functionality and detail. My goal is to recreate everything an OS can do as much as is possible within a browser, and to the same pixel level detail as seen in Windows 10. It's a never ending project that I really enjoy working on. Thanks for checking out my video also, I plan to make another one shortly as that is a year old and I have added quite a bit of new stuff since then.
mdwalters 3y ago
This project seems very well made; someone should fork it to make a more active revival project.
userbinator 3y ago
I'm not sure if your comment was meant to be satirical, but thinking a project less than a year old is "inactive" is so stereotypical of the JS world.
lolinder 3y ago
The copyright on the site is from 2009, so "inactive already" seems a bit unfair—even if that were the last commit ever, that's a 13-year run, which is a lot longer than I've ever maintained a side project!
seabrookmx 3y ago
It's a 10 year old project. Less than a year of inactivity isn't a big deal for something that's basically "finished".

tambourine_man 3y ago

I went looking for a terminal in the Apps menu

elcaro 3y ago
I went looking for a web browser!
DustinBrett 3y ago
I swear they used to have a Terminal and a few other features that seem missing from the existing demo. I saw videos of it from nearly a decade ago where it had a lot more stuff.

johnwheeler 3y ago

Serious question, not trying to be a jerk. Why do people keep making these? Because they’re fun? I don’t think I’ve ever seen one of these gain traction.

sharts 3y ago
Probably to practice JS.
yen223 3y ago
"It is fun" is a perfectly valid reason to do this.
DustinBrett 3y ago
As someone who has been working on one for nearly 3 years, it is indeed a lot of fun to make. I also learn a lot from doing it and I enjoy making the app as I use it for my personal website. It's my side/passion project and I hope to get to work on it for a long time to come.
ChrisArchitect 3y ago
heh, they don't. This is from like 2011 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3252199 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3252199
pipeline_peak 3y ago
They clearly have talent, I don't understand why they don't make products like Draw.IO or at least something more meaningful and original than a 2000's era desktop environment. Based on the docs https://manual.os-js.org/ https://manual.os-js.org/, they clearly have some serious intention. This is what happens when the Wozniak's of the World don't have a Steve to guide them. They do what they want without a clear vision to practicality.
- devjab 3y ago
  This is going to be a bit unrelated to what you said, but I recommend looking into Mermaid diagrams in your MD files as a replacement for draw.io. It saved us a bunch of time and has given us documentation diagrams that developers actually want to update because they don’t have to spend 9 years aligning lines.

travisgriggs 3y ago

I couldn’t play Tetris on my phone because I needed to press space bar to start. On one hand, I think these things are cool. Why did they do this? Because they could. On the other hand, I still wonder why they do it.

qup 3y ago
When someone adds virtual keyboard support so they can play Tetris in there on their phone, you will at least be able to eliminate any rational reasons.

toastal 3y ago

The inclusion of a XMPP client is cute

jancsika 3y ago

Looks like the Tetris pieces aren't aligned to the canvas pixel grid, causing unnecessary antialiasing. This causes the piece borders to look eternally blurry. To fix it, you should add a "cleaning cloth" app that the user can drag and drop onto the Tetris canvas that moves the pieces horizontally by 0.5 pixels. Or even better, only move the pieces that intersected with the cleaning cloth. :)

zamadatix 3y ago
CSS should have a way to handle all offset properly at some point https://www.w3.org/TR/css-values-4/#round-func https://www.w3.org/TR/css-values-4/#round-func but until then you can use JavaScript to automatically get the correct offset.

SeanAnderson 3y ago

I would've guessed the entire thing rendered in canvas, but no, it uses HTML and just uses a canvas for stuff like the paint program.

erikpukinskis 3y ago
People underrate how much good stuff CSS gives you for building UIs. If you did everything in canvas you’d just have to reimplement something like flexbox to center, align, stretch, and animate all your icons text, boxes, buttons, etc. Why not just stay in HTML and use a layout engine that’s already implemented, and highly optimized for literally every platform.?
- toastal 3y ago
  Most folks seem adverse to learning CSS. In contemporary times they’ll go as far as to add 44 cryptic utility class names to element to avoid writing a line of the stuff.
  - tomelders 3y ago
    It boggles my mind. CSS isn’t hard anymore.
    - zith 3y ago
      What is the best way of learning modern css?
      - 0wis 3y ago
        Interested too. I did several full courses and exercises on it (Freecodecamp, W3, Mdn, Codepip…) and I still struggle a lot to create clear UI and have each HTML element where I want them. I am looking at CSS frameworks (BEM, Tailwind) but I would like to master « vanilla » CSS.
        3y ago

arunc 3y ago

Wonder why people choose gitter over something functional like zulip chat.

IshKebab 3y ago
I think it's older.
notpushkin 3y ago
Gitter is now a Matrix.org instance, so pretty functional if you ask me.
patmorgan23 3y ago
Zuilp is pretty new

ensocode 3y ago

Games collection is awesome - Tetris and Wolfenstein 3D

kbrannigan 3y ago

We built a OS (compiler) on top of our OS(windows) on top of our OS(web broswer) on top of our OS.js

thefoolisidiot 3y ago

Transform this to OS for DIY NAS and you'll have great success !

qalmakka 3y ago

These kinds of things have been a recurring trend since the mid '00s, I do remember people writing Windows-lookalikes in JS even back then. Every time a new one pops up I get this very nostalgic feeling for an era of computing that, sadly, I think is dying real fast.

trumbitta2 3y ago
I have seen them in the late '90s, but in Flash
DustinBrett 3y ago
At least for me I have been making one for nearly 3 years and hope to be able to work on it for another 30 years. I use it as my personal website so perhaps this is an additional incentive for me.

rausr 3y ago

All the text in the Desktop is in French for me. Is that because I'm in the German-speaking part of Switzerland, and it's somehow geo-locating incorrectly?

riedel 3y ago
For me only the advertisement in the webpage was geolocalized: in Germany everything was in English except the ad was in German

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naillo 3y ago

It's funny how this is faster and more responsive than my actual windows desktop window manager experience (speed of opening apps etc).

deleted 3y ago
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t0mas88 3y ago
It's crazy how slow Windows 11 is on modern hardware. Even on a modern CPU, with 16gb ram, it takes serious time to load things. Very sluggish compared to a Macbook Air of a similar price point. I can't imagine that big a difference is due to hardware differences. The M2 is fast, but Intel 12th gen isn't much slower just more power hungry. That means it's a software issue. Which is sad considering how good the NT lineage of kernels was, they have been making a worse and worse OS around it. They have themselves to blame for dropping from nearly 100% desktop marketshare to around 60% now. Only time until they're going the AOL or Yahoo way...
XCSme 3y ago
I tried to test your remark and drag my Brave browser around, my whole PC froze for 2 seconds. On a 12c/24t 5900x...

notpushkin 3y ago

Tangential, but https://windows93.net/ https://windows93.net/ is by far my favourite take on the “web desktop” concept.

ale42 3y ago
Lol, that one is really funny! Especially for those who used Windows 95...
easton 3y ago
In a similar vein, my favorite is Windows RG (really good edition): https://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/27549 https://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/27549
- DustinBrett 3y ago
  Haha ya that one is a great parody. Flash actually had tons of these, but RG was the best. I have the file (/Users/Public/Documents/Flash Files/Windows RG Build 207.swf) on my website and run it via Ruffle.
- dividuum 3y ago
  You might enjoy Kitboga using that to mess with tech support scammers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F0peLpovDB8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F0peLpovDB8 and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XxWFdFhHd9U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XxWFdFhHd9U
rollcat 3y ago
I find it ironic that the "boot log" displays the text "Safari is teh new Internet Explorer", while it's one of the two final holdouts against Chrome's complete and undivided domination, as Google is trying to force WEI down our throats. The open web is dying, and it's those messages that are killing it.
- jchw 3y ago
  I hate this logic. Neither Safari nor Chrome are good for the open web, Google being worse than Apple does not make Apple some kind of hero. As far as WEI goes, I certainly do not expect Apple to save us considering they've already been happy to implement remote attestation in their platforms and of course, in Safari, in the form of PATs. Meanwhile, Safari lags on web standards that are actually good, (while still implementing remote attestation in their browsers,) forcing you to test all of your stuff on Safari. I never have to test my stuff on Chrome, because well, Chrome implements every standard I care about that Firefox implements. But with Safari, I never know. I'm the resident troubleshooting guy for a bunch of people, and it's difficult to express the confusion and anger I get when I have to explain to people that yes, Safari on iOS really, truly still doesn't support WebM or Opus fully. Some people (insanely, imo) believe WebM is somehow evil, but I would love to hear why Opus is evil. What Google and Chrome are today is vastly different and far worse (IMO) than what Microsoft and Internet Explorer were for the web and internet. Microsoft was also bad for the open web, but they couldn't dream of something as devious as WEI; the technology wasn't even there yet. Meanwhile, Safari is basically hated for the same reasons as IE: You have to test with it to make sure things work (and of course that includes needing to own Apple products to even have the privilege of doing so...)

syx 3y ago

I recently wrote a blog post [1] about the comeback in popularity of these web desktops, especially after seeing a lot of these being posted on HN recently. OS.js was one of the early projects I started tracking years ago, and it's really well designed and documented. The interface always reminded me of those mid 2000's distros with GNOME 2, which is a nice thing since most nostalgic web desktops tend to have Windows 9x themes. [1] https://system31.simone.computer/blog/desktops-zip https://system31.simone.computer/blog/desktops-zip

deaddodo 3y ago
EyeOS was doing this around the turn of the millenium: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EyeOS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EyeOS The initial release of OS.js was around 2015, over a decade later.
- mid-kid 3y ago
  I used to play around with and use this, but I could never find a good use for it. It felt really counter productive to open up a desktop within my desktop when it was a laptop, so I had it anywhere already
  - Towaway69 3y ago
    But can I open a browser in desktop within the browser on my desktop? Exactly my problem too, what's the main use case for a desktop in browser?
    - injidup 3y ago
      What's the use of a desktop. I never see mine. Window at full screen always hide it. The taskbar is where it's at or hotkeys
      - jeremyjh 3y ago
        The taskbar is typically managed as part of the desktop environment. This term doesn’t refer only to the folder represented as empty space behind the windows.

gumballindie 3y ago

What I dont understand is why is everyone so obsessed with anime. I opened this app and sure enough there was an anime wallpaper lurking in there somewhere.

Dalewyn 3y ago
Japanese entertainment is one of the last remaining forms of sincere entertainment devoid of political correctness and driving narratives.
- voidfunc 3y ago
  > driving narratives lolwut. Japanese anime almost always reinforces traditional Japanese social and cultural norms. It's practically a teaching tool for kids there on how to behave in Japanese society.
  - neoromantique 3y ago
    See, it's not <insert some bad take about left>!
  - augusto-moura 3y ago
    Anime is just a medium, not a genre. There are good and bad anime, just like there are good and bad movies, books, and TV shows. I don't think it's fair to judge an entire medium based on a few bad examples. I'm not a huge anime fan, but I've seen some good ones.
    - pessimizer 3y ago
      > I don't think it's fair to judge an entire medium based on a few bad examples. Nobody said that Japanese cartoons that teach Japanese values were bad until you just did.
  - anthk 3y ago
    No. Even Evangelion it's a satire on the Japanese nerd obsessed with making women sexual objects. On Dragon Ball Vegeta (an obvious depiction of the old fart Japanese nationalist, Saiyans are like a samurais/ronin in space, same armor as the samurais et all) always loses against the open-minded and naive "ninja mountain-born singleton hick" Goku from Osaka/Kansai, which is the "progressive", "cheerful/open minded" and careless city/region from Japan. Technology and modernisation from the US saved Japan and that's symbolized by Bulma.

davb 3y ago

Meta, but I love the simplistic design of the landing page. That textured background is so much less brutal than a solid colour. I thought about using a background like that in my terminal (to give it a very subtle paper like quality) but was surprised to find nothing online about other people doing the same (I had hoped for screenshots and texture packs).

chris37879 3y ago
Its curious you couldn't find anything, tons of terminal emulators out there support this, I'm not sure what platform you're on, but on macOS, iTerm2 supports image backgrounds, on Linux, kitty is my goto customizeable terminal emulator, and I think even the new Windows Terminal supports them! Also, I think gnome's terminal emulator has an effect like this on it by default (or at least it did in some distro's default setup I've used)
- davb 3y ago
  It wasn’t that I couldn’t find a terminal supporting background images (indeed, this is very well supported). It was that I couldn’t find anyone referencing using subtly textured (slightly noisy) images to avoid a very solid background.
  - chris37879 3y ago
    Most of the ones I’ve seen that support backgrounds have the usual options to tile/stretch the background, what’s stopping you from finding a pattern you like and making it a tiling background? There used to be a (now defunct) site out there called subtle patterns that had a massive CC0 library of these kinds of textures, toss it in an image editor, apply a color you like, tile it and call it done!
JNRowe 3y ago
Eterm used to have a support pack with some nice backgrounds for tiling, which sadly appears to be more difficult to find than it would've been a decade ago. I did find a mirror¹, but that is purely because I remembered the filename for some strange reason. Some of the textures in tile/ are still quite nice, but not all of them work so well with our modern higher resolution displays from a quick play. ¹ https://distfiles.macports.org/Eterm/Eterm-bg-0.9.6.tar.gz https://distfiles.macports.org/Eterm/Eterm-bg-0.9.6.tar.gz

mysterydip 3y ago

I feel strangely compelled to build/use one of these, and yet at the same time I can't think of an actual use case.

gspencley 3y ago
The use case is a return to "dumb terminals." Many "Enterprises" already go as far as they can with remote desktop and VPNs but lots of enterprises would love to issue an employee a device that runs the entire OS remotely so that the device effectively becomes just a terminal and 100% of employee generated data stays within the origination's servers and networks. I'm not saying that this makes for a good employee experience, but it's a use case.
- jeremyjh 3y ago
  So does this sync all the machine state to the cloud? I thought they mostly used local storage.
  - gspencley 3y ago
    I don't know about Os.js, specifically, but yes if you were going to implement a browser based OS for the purpose I described then local state would be relatively transient and state would be persisted on the enterprise side. There's no reason you need to use something like localStorage or indexedDb for anything, really. The only thing that buys you are performance and offline capabilities. But if security / keeping data "in the enterprise" is the priority then you can minimize what gets persisted locally.
    - jeremyjh 3y ago
      My point was simply that no one is doing that. That isn't what these are for, and an enterprise that wants to provide a thin client desktop can't use anything that doesn't run the applications the business already uses, so they are going to be deploying an actual windows desktop hosted in the cloud using any of the many solutions available from tier 1 cloud provides or others to do that.

shireboy 3y ago

What a great way to make things that aren’t mobile responsive. Maybe this one is better, but I’ve worked with a large enterprise web app that uses a similar approach and it’s horrible. Everything opens in a “window” and there is weird state being passed around windows (ie drag a item from list window to the form window to view details). Not fun on a desktop and zero chance of it working on a tablet or phone.

DustinBrett 3y ago
I've spent a lot of time on my desktop environment to make it mobile responsive. I kind of went in with the idea of making something that could fit into any viewport. Most of the time it works, as much as is possible to transfer the desktop metaphor into mobile. But because my apps often rely on third party libraries, sometimes responsiveness is less than ideal.

daltont 3y ago

I find these web desktop idea interesting but a solution looking for a problem. Part of me wants to post the Batman slapping Robin meme with Robin saying "Maybe I should develop a web desktop that runs in the browser"

pohuing 3y ago
I know a couple people who have made their own versions with just that reason.
DustinBrett 3y ago
At least for me as someone who made one, the inspiration was seeing really well done ones like OS.js or Windows 96 that got me thinking it was "possible" to make something realistic. But the core idea was less about making a desktop environment and more about my personal website being like someone RDP'd into my machine and could see all my stuff.

gspencley 3y ago

I'm disappointed that it doesn't have a web browser so that I can run os.js inside of os.js inside of os.js inside of os.js inside of os.js...

DustinBrett 3y ago
If you want some Browserception, my desktop environment (https://dustinbrett.com/ https://dustinbrett.com/) can indeed do this. But after a few levels in Chromium you need to add a random query string (/?a=1) to the URL otherwise it stops working.

chrisweekly 3y ago

Should the title say (2021)? The last release (or even git tag) is from July 2021.

sebastianconcpt 3y ago

It's a remarkable tech achievement, but what's the applicability?

austin-cheney 3y ago

I wrote a similar concept around private internet access to your file system. It’s at https://github.com/prettydiff/share-file-systems https://github.com/prettydiff/share-file-systems The window and state management can be demoed on my personal site at https://prettydiff.com https://prettydiff.com

e12e 3y ago

Somewhat related, the Lively Kernel project - Smalltalk like system on web technologies: https://github.com/LivelyKernel/lively4-core https://github.com/LivelyKernel/lively4-core

petabytes 3y ago

Once I tried a Linux-based livecd distro with the UI being entirely in JS, ran through CEF or electron. It was an abomination, and awfully slow. There's just something so evil and funky about building an OS with web tech...

aziis98 3y ago

I've recently been trying to make something similar, mostly for fun, but I hope something cool comes out of it as it borrows many ideas from SmallTalk The backend is written in Go and can run locally or on a remote server; Go is just the only language I've used recently that has nice http frameworks and can be compiled to a statically linked binary, which means that running the program is as easy as downloading a single binary, and that a running instance of it can possibly upload itself via ssh on another linux machine the user wants to access. For now the frontend is web-based, written in Preact, and talks with the backend via some JSON endpoints, although I'm planning to add websockets sooner or later, for instance for double binding text input values. The motivation behind this project is to try and build an alternative to terminal with tmux+ssh for accessing multiple different linux machines at the same time, while being able to easily monitor and manage them.

nektro 3y ago

"Your Scientists Were So Preoccupied With Whether Or Not They Could, They Didn’t Stop To Think If They Should" but "Any application that can be written in JavaScript, will eventually be written in JavaScript" continues to deliver